My sensation of existence isn’t so relevant, that is my algorithm of perception, It is like seeing in different colors but still making sense of the world, accept it is not merely visual sensation. What is relevant is that people are compatible. Most can be more then one might expect, but some might not be able to, at least might not be able to be shown by say me, or maybe you, or anybody in this age…in which case…what can be done…but it is crucial i would think to try in so far as it does not cause worse harm to the whole. All we can do is stand by the cliff and tell people not to walk that way, we can try a lot of things, and we can arrive at a way of preventing most, but there will likely always be those who will keep going. Seeking perfection is valuable but expecting perfection is different.
This is exactly what religious practices are; the attempt to convey the sensation of existence of an algorithmic perception in full unto a multitude.
i call that organized religion. The bible does not do that for example, the people that read it do. I read it myself, and receive value from it myself. So then one might not call the bible or any of the texts in existence a religion (by your definition), just things that help people arrive at some algorithmic perception that is in a form that speaks to a large number of people, and lends to functionality in life. So what does one call that which is presented by such texts? Most in the past called them religions but their ideas the latched to the word religion were unclarifying… perhaps one might just call texts spiritual guidances. but mostly there goal is to lead us to good, to help, so one can call them “guidance to lead one along the path of righteousness” (literally meaning being right, good, valuable, virtuous, in a state that leads to ones goodness and/or goodness of the whole, peace,…whatever…) that is a rough quote from the Qur’an by the way…
Yes. That is what Religion is.
And no, an ontological dialogue (such as the Bible, Quran, or Pali Canon) is not a religion.
They are holy texts.
My analytical term for them when I am working on such things is, “ontological dialogue”.
Some are “ontological narratives”, others are strictly “ontological instructions”, many are a bit of both.
Most people don’t have too many problems with the ontological instructions (such as many agree with the morals of Jesus, or the practices of Buddha), but do have problems with the ontological narratives (such as many don’t believe Jesus was the son of god, or that Buddha did anything mystical).
Sorry I lost the thread of that, what’s the question again?
I agree that chi believers are perhaps even more abstinent than science, perhaps we need less belief involved to find the truth.
Oh, I though the signals were em and they derive of chemical switches in the neurons ~ or am I missing the boat entirely? 
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I was being a bit coy; remarking that China is where the tradition starts, so it would be nice to have their scientific perspective a little more actively on the matter considering Eastern scientific perspective is often radically different in the imaginative approach to an issue than the Western scientific perspective.
I’d rather believers keep on believing and not change.
Otherwise, the conditions will have changed from what they were prior and the study would be flawed.
I meant that EM is not all that consciousness is.
EM is just the means of contact between two rather finite points in our brain on a continuum.
But consciousness is not any one direct thing.
You can’t point to something in our brain specifically and state that it is consciousness, like you can point to a region of the brain and state that there is the amygdala.
Consciousness is like stating, lifespan.
You can’t point to me and state that there is my lifespan.
My lifespan is a conceptual interaction of a mass array of variables that take place over the course of several (at least) million networks of multiple types and over the course of time interdependently and independently while still relevant interdependently.
Likewise is consciousness.
Consciousness is an emergence from the massive network and specific interactive manner of our brain, not a specific article within the brain tucked away at some subatomic layer that is quantifiable by the constituents.
Actually, it is exactly like stating where life is; in regards to the biological definition.
You can’t point to any constituent part of a human body and state that this is what life is.
It takes the entire bundle in action to account for that.
Consciousness is like a car’s traveling; it is only with all parts together and functioning that this concept of traveling exists.
But you can’t point to any part of the car and state that this is what traveling is.
If you try to state that the car’s traveling is only made possible by the engine, then when you take away the rest of the car, you don’t have traveling.
You have a power housing that can provide the combustion that would offer the forces needed to travel, but you don’t have traveling.
You could further argue that the engine itself isn’t deep enough, so you could take apart the pistons and examine those and say that this is the traveling, but then you have done even more of the same thing and moved further into a component and not the traveling.
You could put the engine back, and then focus on the drive train and state that the drive train is really the precursor since it feeds information to the engine that the engine reacts to, so this must be the start of the traveling of the car (similar to discussing the extended central nervous system).
But then you have tossed out the engine and are once again sitting at a dead standstill without any traveling accounted for.
So where is this traveling?
Where does it come from?
It comes from the total network of the car.
Consciousness is only observable holistically as a function of the various networks in the body together.
We can find parts of our brain that are really amazing, like mirror neurons, at making it possible to have our form of consciousness, but these are not consciousness itself.
Just as the pistons on a Dodge Viper allow it to have the type of travel that it can have as opposed to the pistons on a Geo Metro which provide a radically different amount of combustion power for a different type of traveling.
But the pistons of either do not equal the travel.
And like unto EM, the combustion in an engine is also not the traveling.
Or, another way of putting it.
The emotional image of a piece of art turned into a puzzle set is not defined by any one piece.
You cannot take the puzzle piece of a Mona Lisa puzzle and say that it is the reason for the ambiance of the piece when together.
Likewise I would think that the human body cannot provide thought without experiences, without air to breath, without food to eat, so even those things…all things seem to be a part of the car and the traveling.
Exactly.
The search for the physical singular thing that is consciousness is like looking for the boson that is of the field which creates mass; missing the point, and incredibly empty.
I might as well attempt to look for the physical thing that is singularly the wave in the water.
We can’t find the wave.
What we can find is all the things the wave passes through and past and observe what they are, how they behave, and what they are related to in the network that allows for the wave.
Indeed, so i would say that the best definition of the soul is everything that relates to aperson or connects as that person…perhaps it is simply everything, the “breath of God” or something…
The person as a whole is the same as saying the spirit, in the sense of 1.b. Incorporeal consciousness., or 12.the actual, though unstated, sense or significance of something[*].
Soul is a theological terminology.
You could say that this is the soul, but what people understand you to mean by that is going to be radically skewed as most think of it as The animating and vital principle in humans, credited with the faculties of thought, action, and emotion and often conceived as an immaterial entity.[*], which while that sounds like consciousness suffers a loss in that consciousness is not the animating principle in humans.
It is the defining difference in what makes a human uniquely human, but it is not the animating force.
That force is our biology raw itself while running.
Similar to the difference between traveling and force.
The car has a force within it that is what animates it, but that is not what traveling is.
It is what permits traveling.
So conceptually these are two different things, though by a hair.
Much less of a difference than say the neuron and consciousness, which is like an engine part and traveling.
This is a difference between a physical thing and a transitive action or state.
Here, now, we are talking about the difference between two transitive actions: force and motion; life and consciousness; soul and spirit.
Consciousness is the latter, what gives us life is the former.
Well it says in humans so one can say that a “human” is simply more than their body, they are all that compounds sas them or whatever…but then it does say “in” the human which excludes the whole of the human you would think… As such by that definition of soul I think i would have to conclude that the soul does not exist. But then who knows…I’m going to have to meditate on this…I think maybe there could be a finite thing or rather I want to question that further…maybe my intuition is resisting the notion of no finite interior soul all of the sudden…
except the force is not all that permits it to travel. for one “it” would not be “it” without anything else… but then I would think that without time there would be no traveling, without all the dimineions there might not be traveling, without tires maybe… so i would think maybe there can be no essential thing, rather it seems there are groups of essential things, and what are those things might could varry, then can one call that group the soul, or are still all the things needed …IDK
Maybe i was thinking wrong above, as I can see that the difference is like between that which is infinitely small and that which is infinitely big…
But to be mathy one can say that that which is infinitely small is zero, so the soul does not exist…IDK
It’s not so much a zero point issue like that surrounding the concept of the infinity small.
It’s more the difference between what is force?
It’s not really a thing itself.
Somewhat like pressure.
This is what breath appeared like in ancient texts; and by relation, ancient thought.
Now, I’m going to be a bit more bias than usual and just flat out take the stance that a “soul” doesn’t exist independent.
It’s an impression that we get from this situation, but it doesn’t actually exist independent.
No more than the statement that the force of a car exists without the car.
So on that note alone; it seems to me that an independent soul is rather unlikely.
However, to offer a bit more of a consideration on the matter than something that simple: I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but we have this comprehension of presence, even after a thing’s departure.
Therefore, it appears to our psyche that the thing is still an active presence; if not directly in front of ourselves, elsewhere.
Over time, this fades as we lack interaction with the thing.
The presence feels less and less present.
There is a pretty likely neurological reason that many first descriptions of the afterlife by humans in history involve departures that take time for the deceased to travel from the physical realm to the spirit realm.
The farther from the physical realm, the less present in the physical realm their presence is felt.
Conveniently, this wraps up nicely to our psychological experience due to our neurology.
It also allows the humans to determine a time when the deceased has reached the other side safely; when you no longer feel them.
If you keep feeling them, then something - it was assumed - went wrong, and the individuals would typically have some process to follow to aid in helping the deceased reach the other side and find their way away from this physical realm.
Or, said in modern clinical terms: they would be given processes which aided in relieving the psyche of the sensations and emotions of grief and remembered presence of the deceased that were a magnitude greater than the average person would have.
That’s an odd thought as that suggests that people were inadvertently directing themselves to forget the feeling of a person, as if reducing the connection of love almost.
What was this presence that they felt, was it the same as what we call love or was it something else?
I find that I would rather hold on to what a person was, hold onto the love, but then I define love as a sort of recognition of the connection between that person as even when they are dead they are still effecting me, what they did is still effecting me. But the I don’t let the fact that they died and the discomfort from that detract from the love i have for them…at least i don’t think so… maybe then what love is is simply the recognition that they have, or are effecting you (maybe will effect you) combined with respect for that effect that connection, and what is degraded as a loss of feeling for grief is just a loss of the feeling of disconnection…So maybe one can lose the idea of disconnection, and see that the relationship has just changed maybe…
No, presence is not equal to emotions.
For instance, it is your sense of presence which the common magician abused to conduct their magic tricks.
You see them stand on the right and get into a box, a distraction of sorts appears while they get in and you file it away, while you pay attention to the new attraction, that they are on the right in the box, and finally you are surprised when they appear behind you through the audience entrance because your sense of presence last referred to them existing in the box on the right side of the stage.
Since nothing else had happened to the box yet, you hadn’t forced the idea to pay attention to their whereabouts yet.
Another example is the common workplace.
You go to work and there are coworkers there that you see.
You work throughout your day and you have a sense of presence that they are still there when they get up and go to the bathroom.
When someone dies, they don’t immediately leave many of our psyche’s impression of their existence.
Their presence, like the magician and the coworkers, still inductively feels persistent.
The longer you go without a direct reminder, the less present they feel.
Just as if we checked with you after the show - when all is removed from the stage, and the magician never came back from entering into the box, you would quite easily agree with your doubt that they are most likely not still in that box that was on the right of the stage.
You wondered about it during the show perhaps, but as time moved on, it felt less and less like the magician was still in that box.
Which happens occasionally in life.
Sometimes people are thought dead and people become accepting of the sensation of the deceased not being present, and then out of no where the actually quite alive person shows back up.
This is rather a bit of upset that is often extremely surreal to the people that had lost the alleged deceased.
It’s actually quite a bit like burn in on TV screens.
If you leave an old monitor on with the same persistent image over it for a long time, then it will remain after you shut the monitor off.
As time moves forward, the burned image will fade and eventually it will be mostly gone, or completely gone.
In similar fashion, people imprint upon our sense of their presence.
The more time they are in our consciousness, and the more vibrant they are, the greater their sense of presence will be that remains when they die, and the longer it will commonly take for that sense of their presence to pass and fade from our sense.
And just to be clear, this is related to the same sense of presence which allows you to do something behind you with an object.
Dancers and jugglers rely on it readily.
Indeed, and I get that, but what I don’t get is that it amounts to me/you the thinker, the experiencer, seer, feeler, knower. I also don’t get how it experiences colour when that doesn’t exist etc, etc.
I understand its holistic value that you pointed out well, but essentially it does things that neurons and brains cannot; those collections of ‘x’s which brains can do, don’t equate with some of the ‘y’s that consciousness can do. As far as I can tell there is no causal strain between the x’s and y’s!
You know we can trace the workings of a car or em and chemical interactions which compose the ‘car of the brain’ - so to speak, and with such machines we then know what the whole is and does. We cannot trace the whole of the human machine and know what consciousness is and does.
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It would seem important not to work too hard to alleviate it, but at least i imagine alleviate the aspects of it that might keep a person from functioning, which is most effectively done by discussion I would think. Though I imagine having a clear understanding of it would allow for more ease of convincing one away from self degradation.
Don’t get hung up on the individual pieces like that.
You are saying what these things can and cannot do, when obviously they do them every nanosecond of your life.
Look at it another way; think of it somewhat like convection for a moment.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BIWhNh5V6Q[/youtube]
Sorry for the cheesy video, best one off the cuff quickly that has the concept of current modeled.
Now, take a moment and think about this on an atomic scale; keeping in mind the “laws” of motion of atoms and their constituents therein.
Now, take into account this concept: Rube Goldberg Machines
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w[/youtube]
But instead, pay attention to everything that is not the machine that the machine does (a.k.a.: plays guitar, throws paint, kicks ball); things which are not internal to the RGM.
Now think upon Theo Jansen’s Kenetic Sculptures:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcR7U2tuNoY[/youtube]
Specifically reflecting on the extended reflexive action of the individual connections.
Now, the point is that by pushing a force throughout a system, things it passes move in reaction.
Here’s a concept for you.
Collective consciousness is the rippling butterfly effect.
We are each unto the collective as the neuron is to ourselves.
In such respect, we are a tiny “brain” collectively with only 7 billion bases of algorithmic connections for forces to ripple through.
But as we expand, we will become a larger such collective.
And in here, we have a consciousness.
We call this the collective consciousness, and we recognize it as a sort of consciousness.
Similarly, but more directly active due to the complexity of reactions and the extreme high count of reactions (100 billion bases of algorithmic connections for forces to ripple through), we have a consciousness.
Consciousness isn’t a what: but a when and a why.
When did it happen?
Why did the force move that direction instead of another and cause these reactions along the way?
Quantifying the logic process behind an exponential, malleable, and adaptable algorithmic base per constituent in a 100 billion constituent network is beyond mathematics.
I think it would be easier to quantify the universe from point of origin to now and solve the mystery of gravity in one go than it would be to try to create the mathematical explanation that accounts for these systems.
That is…unless we start talking fractal mathematics.
Then things change and incredibly complicated and paradoxical conditions are more naturally possibly explained - but we’re still out on that idea.
Some tests look like that might be possible; but we’re really not too certain yet.
It depends what continues to happen as we toy around with synthetically created and self-sustaining biological life on the multicellular level; especially many current queries into how to achieve such with synthetically created and self-sustaining neurological networks.
I think gravity is a result of everything expanding at a rate that is equivalent throughout such as to make the expansion unnoticed, for example even the space in between the earth and the moon is expanding (not so much the space as that there is mass in all spaces). As a result two expanding objects appear to fall towards each other: Imagine two balls in space and you moving away from them at the same rate that they are expanding. they would appear to stay the same size but would eventually touch as they expanded and thus seems to be moving towards each other. The problem is that the mathematics to work out how these things work is quite odd. I suspect one evidential factor might be that no one has actually tested to see if the ocean is actually lower directly under the point of the moon (when the sun is not on the other side, rather we assume such from what I can tell). Rather I think that the tides would be due to pressure between the expanding bodies, the mass that is between them expanding itself, and thus that pressure on the water, pushes down raising the tides elsewhere… 
Ya I’ve seen all of derren browns stuff. Naturally you are right that the pieces of the brain do the stuff of thinking every nanosecond, the action that is. If I may use the vehicle analogy yet again, the way I see it is that consciousness treads on the levers and moves the gear-stick such that the car can move. Except with us its way more complicated because the car can also drive itself.
In a sense, being the user/experiencer couldn’t happen unless our vehicle can do everything the user wants to do, no? this is why I am not surprised when science does experiments and says; this part of the brain does this, that part does that - of course it does!
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Very interesting point, I think about this a lot. I would say that some things were think of as CC* are as you describe, historians may use such terms as ‘the forces of history’ for example. For these things are contained within the physical systems for sure, but I maintain that our consciousness and universal consciousness are involved but to one side of that. It is difficult to find either by looking at one side of things in particular, ancient hindu’s and other mystics considered the physical world to be an illusion, just as modern science [or perhaps slightly out of date science] sees the contrary to be so.
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Yes but go back to all those dominoes falling and acting like a mechanistic system, its not actually creating anything other than what is seen. What science is attempting to say is that something quite similar but billions of times more complex, is somehow creating consciousness. I would agree if consciousness was an effect rather than a thingness, but the two are infinities apart.
After reading the rest of your post; perhaps one day we’ll have the mathematics to show people like me their philosophies are flawed, which is fine, I’d be happy to move on in the light of truth. But when I consider how we think in such an organic, holistic and symbolic way, I really don’t think math is going to do it. …experimentation may do though if done rigorously enough, but I have been through some of them [e.g. my ‘6 seconds to exist’ thread] and they don’t stand up to much questioning.
fascinating stuff!
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I’m not familiar with Derren Brown’s works; the magician? (at least that’s who pops up in searching)
Anyways, you might find it interesting that we are now using lab grown neural networks to act as the processing network for robotics.
It’s very interesting stuff and in the future, it will probably challenge our ideals of what defines consciousness.
They aren’t considered conscious like us at this point, but they are considered to be conscious to a lesser degree since they are using neuron’s which are employed to cognitively assess and perform the heavy lifting of the robot’s deductive reasoning.
Here’s a quick blip on it pcworld.com/article/210073/g … walls.html
(I didn’t read this article closely, so I don’t know how detailed they get - I learned of this through a special coverage of the study in a documentary one late night.)
It’s not a car that drives itself fully like those imagined in Transformers, but it is using neurons to deductively drive itself around…literally.
Well, I’m still surprised, but I agree that we can’t be what we cannot do.
They are both correct, as the statement is incomplete and not the same comment.
The ancients were stating that the physical is an illusion because it is not the translation of the physical, and since the translation of the physical is what we house, this is the core of what is real because it is what we have; humans don’t have the actual physical.
The science of western society today says that our perception of a thing is the illusion because it is interested in solving the problem the ancients ran into of not being able to harness the physical without the perception being used. Since science is interested in the actual physical that is regardless of the perception it has to rename the subjects involved therein to match the focus.
One is focused on us, the other is focused on not-us.
When you face one direction, left is the right of the opposite facing direction.
Though you use the same terms to refer to the opposites of the other focuses, both are referring to the same direction of travel.
The reason why lies in understanding how the neuron even communicates at all.
This is the basic layer. Why does a neuron exist in the first place?
How does it exist? How does 4 neurons accomplish behaving differently than 2? Why?
How do neurons form into contained networks? How do groups of neural networks then also form? Why?
We do know one thing at this point in this regard: the neural connections disbursement of energy by active and open connectivity directly correlates to consciousness.
If you blast the brain with TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) while a person is asleep, an entirely far more limited dispersion of the energy occurs across the neural paths than when they same subject is awake.
The neuron’s essentially switch off connections during rest and thereby partially stop brain function and cognitive awareness.
It is turning out that sleep is quite literally a half breed of death as far as neural behavior (when discussing neural activity where maximum is awake, and nothing is dead).
You can read about it here decently:
scitopics.com/Brain_potentia … _data.html
We don’t know the exact answer as to why this is the case scientifically at this point, but we can see that it happens.
Ultimately, we need a better understanding of how a neuron accomplishes being uniformed and yet modular at the same exact time.
This is the ultimate multitool at the cellular level.
I don’t think math is where anything will be accomplished to that end.
It is what may help our reasoning, or provided pointers to head off towards, but math is like a compass - it tells you a direction that you can travel by a given bearing.
However, it is incapable of describing what your destination actually is once you get there.
I don’t think people are flawed.
I think we all refine our way of conception as we understand more direct means of articulating what it is that we experience and are attempting to understand more.
You take a route of a conceptual information layer - how information is pushed, and then subsequently read, by consequence of an object on one side of that layer moving toward an object on the other side of that layer.
Like carbon paper in a way, but far more complex.
Indeed.