Okay, Fracture, I've been tossing off stuff at work without really boring into the holes in your presentation, but if you refuse to heel, here goes:

First, I used the "square of opposition" because someone used the old "If A is B and all Bs are C etc." which is classical SOO, the first thing you learn in bonehead logic 101 courses.

Also, the guy I ride with is just finishing his PhD in evolutionary psychology at UCSB, one of the really good programs for that field, and we talk about that stuff all the time. There is nothing in that field that insists on a purely determininistic interpretation of human behavior, something you inferred in your last post.

But I think we need to look at some general terms just to see where you really are. Theere's the classic statement, "The map is not the territory." Do you agreee or disagree with this?

Next, give me an example of intelligent creation--or are you saying no such thing exists?

Next, what is the difference between the rational and evaluating mental processes we seen in biological life, and those found in artificial intelligence?

Are you trying to bring back the idea (that died with the Enlightment) that eveything can be rationally "known" providing we have sufficient data, and that if something is currently unknown, it's just a matter of data collection and evaluation to get it all squared away.

And who said I was supporting the idea of infinite regress?

However, if you're saying there is a starting point to time and space, you're left with an even greater riddle--remember what Whitehead said so many years ago--Nothing comes from nothing.

Sure. I reserve the right to reject nonsense applications of it, though. (Such as to the human brain and consciousness.)

I don't even want to get into that one. ;)

Fracture--

I'm at work so I can't really dig into this but are you suggesting that the "map," in terms of consciousness, is actually the territory itself?? If so, man do I have some questions for you to tackle. Really good ones drawn from everyday experience.

Also, are you one of those who believe that sould write off everything prior to the Big Bang as "meaningless" simply because we can't measure or quantify anything with our current tool kit?

What I (and many others) would say is that any explanation of consciousness based on some inexplicable, special, supernatural mind-stuff is not an explanation at all. The mind is distinct from the brain but only in the sense that the mind is hardware-independent. If you were to replace a single neuron in your head with a tiny machine that behaved in the precise same way, your mind would be unaffected.

(I don't know what that means, if anything, for your map/territory thing.)


I don't know much about the topic, although from what I understand some very tempting concepts like what happened "prior" to the Big Bang are self-contradictory (because space and time don't exist prior to the Big Bang).

But lacking more knowledge on the topic, my answer is just "I don't know".

I'm continually intrigued by how people will go to any lengths to convince themselves that they "know" the unknowable. Rather than be satisfied with the intellectually honest "I don't know" they will claim against all reason that what they believe is the way things are, and that they feel sorry for the poor people mired in humdrum reality.

I also find that it's common for these people to project this behaviour onto those they oppose, misrepresenting their argument as "if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist". Of course, in reality the argument is much different: if there is no evidence and no way of getting any, then it is utterly irrational to make any claim whatsoever, positive or negative. You may speculate all you like, as long as you realise that your preferred speculation is no more likely than any other.

What you are saying--with no questions asked, incidentally--is that the only "knowing" pertains to stuff that you can measure. Material things, in other words.

YOU are saying that anything else is unknowable--but how do you know that for a fact? You don't--of that we may be sure. To claim as much is to say that every person from ever wisdom tradition since the beginning of time has been deluded and mistaken--and that only those who can measure material really and truly know at all.

Silly rabbit... If you define knowing as purely materialistic, you might want to study epistomology, which has been an active topic for going on 4,000 years.

Lastly, who said there was no evidence of what I've been talking about? Here you are supposed to ask a question--not toss off a daft and uninformed piece of refutation based on your own experience.

Of course you may be one of those who's perspective is only open to material evidence, thereby locking yourself into a closed loop to which nothing else will be sought.

What do you think the fundamental nature of mind really is? Content??
Not at all.

Lastly, the study of mind as followed by many traditions is not belief based at all. You need no faith and no beliefs. It's all experiential.

JL

He wrote: "If I was pushed on whether I think that these "wisdom traditions" have been deluded and mistaken, I would have to lean towards "probably". I only have to look at all the weird and wonderful gobbledegook spewed by cults, new agers and various religions in existence today, often with enormous followings, and I realise that vast numbers of people can be wrong about all sorts of things."

Dude, are you kidding me? What are you doing chucking cults, new age fluff and all that trash (all the sketchy belief and faith based stuff) in with serious wisdom traditions? Do you understand how a legitimate wisdom tradition actually operates? Do you really believe that everyone who has ever spent the long years studying their mind is totally deluded? Probably? That's a remarkable statement that is really one for the ages--especially since many wisdom traditions use modern neuroscience (especially neurofeedback, qEEG and a ton of other tools)
as training tools. Modern wisdom traditions have no qualms against- material based tools--that's the starting point. We're in a body, after all, and there will always be a biological signature to all brain-based activity. But why stop there? Why stop with observable data?

And your "authority" crack is straight out of somatics/linguistics, whihc used to be my wheelhouse. It's a sly way to snub and dismiss (by those who rarely gointo what they are actually dismissing) everything that has gone before in an attempt to shift authority (usually in absolutist terms) to the sad sac wielding the retort.

To claim as much is to say that every person from ever wisdom tradition since the beginning of time has been deluded and mistaken

Ironic thing is that while wisdom traditions go about their practices in different ways (which best fit different personality types), all begin with observing "observable" data--namely, the content of our minds. It takes long years to get unhooked for this content and that's when mind itself becomes the subject of study. In it's nascent form, mind has no content, in the same sense that Zen has no content. You can't grasp and measure it, but the adventure continues nonetheless.

No viable wisdom tradition is in conflict with what your are saying and your perspective for one simple reason: at bottom, wisdom traditions have no inherent content, just like your mind, just like the space between your thoughts. The famed neuroscientist Les Fehmi was one of the first westerners to provide a technology how we can develop as intimate a relationship with the unobserved as the observed.

Another interesting thing to consider is the relationship of choice (mentioned earlier), impulses, and the witness state. The mechanistic and materialistic models totally break down in this investigation, leaving us--what?

At the bottom of all materialistic perspectives is a causal belief that matter creates mind, meaning that biology is the first or "efficient" cause of mind. It also means that this perspective is basically reductionism, leading some to believe that if were were to have a sufficiently accurate map, we could replicate mind. Wonder who is working on the program for choice

[---mysterianism dies hard...

MAYBE THIS WOULD ALL MAKE SENSE TO YOU IF YOU HAD TAKEN HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL BIOLOGY AND PAID ATTENTION!

Well, for starters, you seem to need the belief that the mind exists somehow independent of the brain...

There is really not much difference between a "mutation" and a pre-existing "genetic variable", since once DNA has been mutated, it becomes a pre-existing "genetic variable". DNA is just a long chain molecule, with the ordering of the chain representing the ordering of protein structures. Certain lucky combinations of codes transcribe, under the right cicumstances, to become functioning proteins within a given organism. Sometimes, a code will be knocked loose (by ionizing radiation, such as UV light from the sun, for instance) and result in a failure to produce the desired protein--this results in death if the change is significant. Rarely, the changed code will cause a very minor change in the protein/organism/cell/whatever, such that the organism is only slightly different from the other organisms.

One of the great myths of the rational mind is that if we can only get the map accurate enough, it will be synonomous with the territory--

JL

This reminds me of something the author Jim Harrison said- That writers believe they can solve the world's problems if they can just get the language right. (Or something to that effect)

Those are the answers I expected, but I didn’t expect the “I don’t know,” which makes it worth continuing the conversation. Let’s take a look at the last statement, that any kind of discussions about existence prior to the Big Bang are de facto “self contradictory.”

One of the illusions of this perspective is that it isn’t a perspective at all, rather it’s the plain and simple truth. But like most all arguments, it is based on a few basic suppositions. What are those?

First, that perspective is purely materialistic—

Most anyone can appreciate that the limitation with this perspective is the toolkit, not existence/reality itself. This perspective has defined reality one way, and anything that does not fit is “unreal,” false and so forth—but only to that perspective.

It’s worth someone trying to bridge that seemingly infinite gap between perspectives, someone who can understand that various wisdom traditions have been working on the imponderables for upwards of 4,000 years.

The next issue is the illusion that in terms of consciousness, the map is actually the territory—which suggests that if we only understood (could measure) the territory with enough precision, we could devise a perfect map that would include and to a large degree predict human behavior—meaning it is, at bottom, mechanistic and pretty damn determined.

A pattern interrupt involves doing the opposite of your own programming and impulses, or doing something randomly, or best of all, not doing anything at all. How then, is a person supposed to be entirely programmed and beholden to alogrhythms which include an alogrhythm to ignore, change, and vary the behavior determined by the alogrhythm itself?

Moreover, there is the agency of conscious choice, which can go entirely for, against, or outside what a person’s hardware and software (personality) are insisting (impulses, thoughts, feelings) to do. A mechanical choice function can only function with an end in mind, an outcome, by which it can determine through probability the odds of this of that choice making good on.

At the bottom of all materialistic perspectives is a causal belief that matter creates mind, meaning that biology is the first or "efficient" cause of mind. It also means that this perspective is basically reductionism, leading some to believe that if were were to have a sufficiently accurate map, we could replicate mind

Even a digital computer needs a program. Though I seriously doubt the human mind, even when it's working on mathematical or logical problems, functions anything like a programmed Turing machine. Of course I could be wrong.

Can a digital computer, operating from a human based program show creativity independent of any creativity already inherent in the program? This might be an interesting question, but I don't know the answer. I guess I would say, if I saw a digital computer that could select interrelated 'interesting' conjectures from an infinite range of possibilities, focus on proving the self selected 'interesting' conjectures, then in turn develop more advanced conjectures based on it's earlier work, and in this way evolve a (more or less) unified body of uniquely structured 'computer-interest' generated mathematics, then I would say that the computer had been creative. I not sure if this is just a matter of degree, but I doubt it.

Human mathematics is much more than theorem proving.

I recently read about a tribe in the Amazon that had a culture with absolutely no concept of number.

The researcher who lived with them tried for months to teach a small group to count to 20. He had no success. They just weren't interested. You see, I seriously doubt the brains of these tribesman are much different from mine. But their 'mind', that is their basic experience of the world, is to some extent fundamentally different from mine.

Nope. No cigar. There's nothing "apparently" random about a pattern intterup. Choice, as we know it, is largely determined by psychological and genetic factors and conditioning--till you take the time to move outside that closed loop. The deterministic alogrithm, in terms of behavior, are the mechanical thoughts and impulses that drive behavior. For instance, I somewhat understand how you have been programmed and how your personality type processes information, and so your answers are going to largely be predictable according to a certain mode of thought/perspective. But what happens when you consciously choose to go against your impulses and automatic conditioned answers and to look at things from another perspective? It's not a random choice.

Dude, ask any evolutionary psychoilogist and they'll tell you straight out that most ever human behavior has at it's base the intention of securing their survival--a very definate goal or "end."

Lastly, wisdom traditions are not "schools of thought." Thought is the stumbling block in the first place to ever rubbing elbows with infinate qualities, as are beliefs based on doctrine.

"I'd suggest you read up on psuedorandom number generators, which is what your computer uses to fake non-determinism."

Implied in this whopper is that all acts are wholly determined, though we can't say quite how because that would require a feedback system that was outside of "everything."

A greater question is: of all the functions and experiences of mind, which ones are not unprogrammable? Guess what a materialist will believe.