tar

iNow, It does not matter if our consciousness is a form of postdictive illusion. If our illusory consciousness allows us to run experiments on postdictive illusion, well then, there you go, we are not incapacitated by any mistakes brought into the situation by our propensity for postdictive illusions. And we all suffer from the same disease. So we have to go from there. I am not refuting any facts of yours, I am arguing interpretation, and implications. And am basically of the opinion that consciousness is not a disease, it is a rather impressive victory. Regards, TAR

iNow, I have my opinions about life and consciousness and I think the way we sense the world and remember it and plan and predict and manipulate the place is evidence that the model we build of the place, within the synapses and folds of our brains is actually quite representative of the place. It works. Like Gee says, you drop the hammer on your toe and it hurts. Don't like the idea that people call our way of sensing and remembering the world and the way we notice change and make analogies, and pattern match and complete patterns a bad way to go about internalizing the world. It is not an illusion. Thinking there is an Oasis on the dessert in the heat waves looking like water...that is an illusion. There is nothing wrong with how a crowd of us witnessed this We did not author those galaxies.

iNow, I have not, like you, listened to Dennett. And I have only read a little snippet here and there, so I don't know what he means by illusion, but I am of the thought that illusion is a bad term, because it has that "ill" in it, making it seem somehow substandard or defective. Like real knowledge of the place can be had by some other, inhuman, method. There is not a scientist I know about that does not use her eyes and ears and nose and tongue and fingertips to sense the world around her. All that outside stuff gets brought inside and a "true" representation of what was sensed is built internally. How can this be false? It is the actual world that is modeled. The model is not real, it is composed of neural correlates in the sense that a rose is not really in your skull, yet you have a "picture" of it, a model of it, a representation of it constructed in the distances between and the chemicals between the synapses and folds in your brain. TAR, here in NJ has a "feeling" of an entire universe around me, I see the Pine trees and shed outside the window in front of me, I hear my wife's cough from a cold, out on the deck, I watch the hurricane's damage on TV, I imagine you in the audience listening to Dennett speak. I have a whole universe built in the synapses and folds of my brain. I watched the whirlpool galaxy collision from the slopes of Mt. Rainer, on a crystal clear and chilly night a few weeks ago, through a 14 inch telescope set up by an expert couple and watched as two rangers took 10 or 12, 35 second exposers of the same, and then the crowd of us voted on adjusting brightness and contrast and color, and the images were then sent to my wife's email. There is nothing ill about my feeling, and understanding of the world around me. It corresponds exactly to the atoms, to the galaxy, to the world you sense around you. Regards, TAR

aiNow, I like the term "neural correlate" but I don't like the idea that anybody thinks there is a neural correlate to consciousness. Like some magic combination of a certain number of processors or memory chips wired together in a certain fashion, and poof there is consciousness. I think it is much more a holistic thing than that. Something you need a whole living organism, existing in an actual environment made of the same stuff, to achieve. I think Dr. Frankenstein would disagree, but I don't think there is a proper voltage, that turns a dead collection of stuff into a living collection of stuff. There does indeed have to be neural correlates to the various pieces of consciousness, and I think, to the thread title, one can trace the emergence of consciousness through the evolutionary trail, but I don't think we can "make" consciousness happen any more than we can create life. Regards, TAR

iNow, Nice clip. Although I don't feel I am as far from an empirical understanding of consciousness, as the clip suggests "we" are. I think Gee and Tub and you and I are getting closer and closer to a nice explanation. One of the roadblocks I think people have, to determining what consciousness is, is considering it as something private and special and generated in some magical way. I think perhaps this idea is seeded by the creation story where god made the heavens and the Earth and the other creatures, and then created Adam and Eve, in his image. Obviously for those that believe in evolution, there is nothing "special" about us. We are in and of the universe and are not separate from it but by the envelope of our skin cells. The "illusion" of the world that the philosophers talk about, is, in my estimation, no illusion at all, but an analog representation of what is outside, within the folds of our brain. A piece of fruit hanging on a tree, that we see , must have a correlate in our brain or we would not be aware of it. So this is simple. The human machine, senses the world and registers it in the brain, and compares it with previous sense input to recognize change, and is able to both remember and replay, experience again, combinations of sensory input, AND predict how combinations of things, behaving as they did before, might behave in new arrangements, by putting those mental correlates together internally for planning purposes. Special in the sense that we can do it and rocks can't, but not special in that every other fully functioning human can do it and dog's can bark at you, knowing you will then notice it's six o'clock and time for dinner. (so dogs can do it too). The other roadblock is that scientists have no way to prove that what they experience as consciousness is also going on in another human's head. Silly roadblock. It is functionally obvious when everybody in the theatre jumps and gasps at the same moment, when the killer appears suddenly, that we are all experiencing the same world in the same manner at the same moment. Regards, TAR

dimreepr, I think the official definition of consciousness, with all its varied components, is absolutely helpful...for a starting point. Then, in the manner Gee is attempting, you have to look at each aspect, and imagine a precursor of human not having each aspect. What is the order that certain aspects of consciousness had to arrive in, in the march from single cell to human. What did you need to dream? Does a single cell dream? If not, why not? Are there things that are like sleep that are precursors or relatives of sleep. Why do we dream? Would we need to dream if we were not conscious? Could we dream if we were not conscious? How does a lifeform go from being not conscious, in the human sense, devoid of most if not all of the aspects in the definition of consciousness, to having something like one or several of the aspects. That is how and where did consciousness emerge during our evolution? Since it is admittedly complex, it had to have evolved in stages, in amounts in increments, but it also has to be made up of components we can witness in relatives on the scale, and various aspects have to be present in their precursor form, in each of our ancestors. To this communication with the world is evidently central. As you say obvious, but not as you say irrelevant. To be conscious of your hunger so you eat and gain energy for another move is crucial. To be conscious of your prey or a piece of fruit in a tree, is crucial to survival. Communication is the transfer of information from one entity to another. The light reflected off the fruit reaches the eye of the mammal and these wavelengths are focused on the back of the eye and chemical and electrical signals are generated from each rod and cone to where an analog representation of the fruit, in shape and size and color is established in the connections and neurons and folds of the brain. A bond is thusly formed between the fruit and the mammal. Communication is a central part of consciousness. As Gee suggests. Regards, TAR

Gees, I think that idea of bonding with other ideas and things is somehow at the root of consciousness. Consider a baby somewhat analogous to an earlier lifeform on the evolutionary chart in terms of consciousness. My father tells me a baby when it is first born and opens its eyes sees upside down and backward, and with double vision, to boot. This is understandable, due to the way the eye"s lens focuses light on the back of the eye, and we have two eyes. But as the baby starts to put together what is happening around her, sensing the other "things" and relationship between the things...especially linking up the input from the inner ear in terms of what is up, and sees things fall, and touches and tastes things enough, the place comes into coherence. Mother's hum comes from the same thing that has that tasty milk and such. The outside world starts to "make sense". Perhaps one can somewhat trace consciousness's path through human evolution, by noting what a fetus is conscious of, at different stages of development, and then looking at a newborn and a one year old and a two and a three and a four, and see the development of the consciousness. My thinking that this might be possible, is based on the fact that the rTPJ, was determined by Rebecca Saxe and others to develop, at least the first functioning of being able to put yourself in other people's shoes, at the age of about 3 or 4 and continues to develop on into adulthood. Regards, TAR (I remember playing tag with my firstborn while she was in the womb...an elbow? would stick out here, and I would push on it lightly and something would pop out over on the other side of my wife's belly...so my little girl, in utero, was conscious of something touching her.) And my wife could tell when the fetus was awake and when it was sleeping. In fact someone told us it would work out better, in terms of momma's sleep once the baby was born, if you woke up the fetus when momma was awake.

Tub, I think that is a good start. It deals with "the self" which I think is actually crucial to life. I am thinking of the first cell, like a bubble, creating an inside and an outside. An identity, that separates one small part of the universe from the rest. And then there is the existence in a human of a "memory" of all the things that touched it from when it started recording such things, or from perhaps the point when it became a separate identity from the rest of the place. I have this scar on my knee from when I fell in some grass and dirt in the school yard onto a shard of glass. You don't have this scar, nor the memory of falling and getting taken to a classmate's father (a dentist) to get the gash sewn up. It is part of MY identity. This particular consciousness, identified as TAR. Regards, TAR

Mike, I am watching the weather and Irma is skirting along the top of Cuba, weakening some (down to 125mph) cat 3, but will eventually turn North and go back over warm water and get itself back together. It is currently at a point where it would have to take greater than a 90 degree turn, to miss continental U.S. like I requested. So I think I am not as connected as I fantasized. This is why I did not want to try your test again, because I did not want to falsify our general theory that the universe is somehow listening. But in pure scientific honesty one must not try and validate ones theory, one must attempt to falsify the theory. So perhaps go out to the moor again, with a camera and a recorder, tell us what you are going to ask, ask it in the proper fashion delineating your areas for yes no and maybe and record the universes answer. If something notable happens, then you can show us, and we can together think of a more clever test to falsify the theory. Ask a question perhaps that someone here knows the answer to, that you do not. And go out and ask and record again. If the answer is always forthcoming, we can play 20 questions with the universe and arrive at the proper answer to even complication questions. I used to play a variation with the family on long car trips called a million questions. You could start with any thought, real or imagined, like for instance think of the soap scum stain on the tub at grandmas house in Westport...and somebody usually got the answer. I was pretty good at it, using the half rule. Divide the universe into two parts with your question and the thing is either in the one part or the other. Yes or no. Right or left. Then divide the identified part in half again and repeat. Eventually you identify the thing, what ever it is. On the other hand, if the universe doesn't want to play...well there you go, hierarchy falsified. Regards, TAR for instance you could ask "do you have peers?" "more than 50 peers?" Area54, Of you and Mike you are definitely the offenssive one. -1 for you. Regards, TAR

dimreepr, resistant, but perhaps not immune In "Critique of pure Reason" Kant thought out thought/reason in great detail and broke it down into the components of which it must be constructed. He did identify two a priori considerations that could not be broken down any further into different things. Two things that could not be synthesized from putting other things together. Those were time and space. He did not include consciousness in that. In fact, he was writing a work to say something about how our mind works, what it is logically capable of and what our judgements about the world were like. He identified 12 types of judgements we make and from this 12 categories of thought that completely covered what we can say about a thing in general. But thinking about your post I remembered that he used terms like analytic, and synthesis, but also used the word "understanding" to refer to the process going on. This word he used, and the fact he did not include consciousness as a thing you could not say something about, makes me think of the act of standing under something. That is taking a position to where you are in a position to make a judgment or two on the thing and say something about it, use it to construct larger considerations (synthesize) and break it down into subcomponents (analyze ) . One of his categories is relation, but the positional component implied in the term "understanding" makes me think that we can indeed say something about consciousness. Regards, TAR

Well Mike, the universe is not listening to me Irma made land fall on Cuba a little bit, and has apparently shifted its track west, rather then my requested right hand turn before Fla. So I guess I am no longer to be 2 for 2 in weather listening to me. Now I will be 2 for 3. But I am still hopeful that Irma will take my advice and turn before Florida and pass between the Bahamas and Florida and then go out to sea. Otherwise Florida and Georgia are in for a real beating. And I would much rather Irma spends itself on Cuba's mountains, turns North depreciated to cat 4 or 3 and pass, relatively as a non event past Florida and out to sea. I went out on the deck about 3 hours ago and asked her again to change course toward a less devastating path. Regards, TAR

iNow, I don't know Jung as well as you do, nor do I know Freud as well as my dad. He has a shelf of blue books by Freud a yard long, that I have opened on occasion, but that he has read, thought about and understood. My dad was and is a thinker and a professor. He would not take Freud's work and distill it into the Id, Ego and SuperEgo, as I do. There had to be much more to it than that, or there would not be a yard of material Freud produced in the topic. As I understand it, Freud was a neurologist first, and therefore was familiar with the territory, before he drew the map. Interesting to me that he would propose an area of the mind that was engaged in following the societal rules and pleasing authority and then later Rebbeca would find the territory involved in the theory of mind, moral decisions, and conversing with unseen others. There is sometimes the reality that a figurative thing and a literal thing stand in the same place. Such as the close relationship between dopamine, and the word "good". To where walking the territory or looking at the map, reveals the same terrain. Regards, TAR Perhaps if you drop the thief and just say the superego is good (or god), the id is man (fallen from innocence through acquiring the knowledge of good and evil ) and Christ is the moderator between God and man. And even that actually does not work for me, because I am an atheist and don't believe in god and I associate good with dopamine which Gee associates with emotion which aligns more with the Id. So the breakdown is not clear as to what role our emotions play in the crucifixion. Is it good to be man? Or is being man a sin?

Gees, Thank you for that. It makes me feel better. (got a little dopamine.) But that is actually pertinent to the topic. Why do pickers pick and jokers joke? I think it is because they get a dopamine reward when they win, or feel they have won or won by avoiding defeat. I think that survival wise it was important that we match up our model of the world with the actual world. It was good to get it right, to get the joke, to solve the problem to be right in the theory of mind sense, about what the other guy or animal was thinking. Helped one decide when to fight and when to run and when to hide and when to attack. Such has much to do with politics and human relations. Many feel better by making others feel worse. Or by imagining the other is evil and they are good. Like Area54 enjoying being the self appointed literary critic. Gives him or her a boost of dopamine to "be right" about their critique. They are right when they imagine they have proved the other wrong. I need this a little, but it is usually done by me in a cooperative sense. That is I want my team to win, my company, my town's football team, my political party, my country, and so on. I have on this board protected religious folk against atheists, even though I am an atheist, because so many of my fellow humans, that are on many of the teams I am on, are religious, and I give them the benefit of the doubt. Science folk call everybody fact deniers so they can be right about their model of the world, more right, because the other is so wrong about some fact. But again I allow this, expect this, because it is a human characteristic, an evolutionarily set up deal, where you feel good when you are right, when you match your model with the place, or match the place with your model (create something real). Area54 needs me to say, "I'm sorry, you are right". I would do this for my wife or my sister or for you, or iNow, because I know that it is more important to be a husband or a brother or a friendly fellow poster, than to be right about some detail. Most fights between loved ones have to do with who is right. Who left the silly thing behind when the other was told to not leave it behind, or whatever. It is OK to be wrong, that is, it is not useful to be right, when being right is the wrong thing to do. It is sometimes worth more personal dopamine to have the other receive dopamine by being right (and you wrong.) I have noticed these things because I have been thinking in terms of dopamine flow in myself and the people around me, since I quit smoking and am currently working with my town and county alliances on the opioid crisis. One of the aspects of the rTPJ that is involved with dopamine, is that we in general empathize with other humans, especially close humans, and want to make them happy (get them dopamine.) This is a survival coup in the sense of community building and tribe security and happiness and such, because in general a band of humans is more successful in the survival sense than a lone happy human. And what it sets up, in a human is this need to please an unseen other. God, your wife, your dead grandma, Socrates, Einstein, some favorite author, your pastor, your boss, your mayor...someone. But its all good . Regards, TAR

There was something wrong with each of your declarations. I have tried to explain how each missed the mark. It is not important to me whether you characterize my posts correctly or incorrectly. It is important to me whether my posts are true or false, helpful or interesting, thought provoking or insightful. If none of the above apply and my posts do nothing for you, just don't read them. If I am using bad logic or incorrect facts please point those out. But if you have some personal critique to make, that is not about Gees topic, but about my writing style, please PM me. It is proper on this board to defend ideas not one's character or intelligence or writing prowess. Please stop making me defend my personality. Talk about the points brought up related to the thread title. "As a graduate student, Saxe demonstrated that a brain region known as the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) is specifically activated by ‘theory of mind’ tasks that require understanding the mental states of other people."? Specifically tell me whether or not you think my associating the TPJ with Freud's idea of the SuperEgo is appropriate.

Area54, Logically my posts can not be wrong, nonsense, not understandable and trivially true and not novel. I reflect back to a post of yours where you Cliff noted three points of mine, called the first wrong, and the next two trivially true. The points were connected and there to bolster each other yet you did not tell me why you thought the first one wrong, so I could defend the idea. Nor did you mention where my thinking was aligned with yours or where it deviated. My thoughts are not all standard thoughts with pat responses. Quite the opposite. If you have not run into the particular combination of ideas I present, which I think is accurate to assume, since you claim to not understand what my point is, then I can not simultaneously be presenting pat and not novel material. What I do do, is put together various true insights I have had, over my life into what I think is a true statement, that one would have a hard time arguing with because it is consistent with the facts that everyone accepts as facts. That is, the world is true, is correct, no matter what you or I say about it, or think about it. It is there doing what its doing whether you or I like it or not. When I talk just to true stuff, stuff I noticed, and figure you must have noticed to, or learned about, because its actual, I don't need your agreement on it, because its real and true. But an insight, is something personal. Bringing some pattern or actuality of the world, in. Not all insights you have had, have I had. Not all insights I have had, have you had. While it is unlikely that I have had any insights that nobody else has had, sharing an insight that I consider new, is not being either obtuse or not novel. Perhaps someone else never had the insight, or perhaps you got it the first time I mentioned it. ...oh yeah, when four trees of the same variety are planted in a straight line West to East, notice that the furthest west tree is the tallest and then the next east and the next and the most eastern one the shortest. Makes sense if you have the insight that the trees grow to get the morning sun. Is this trivially true, or did you never think of it before? Regards, TAR By the way my father, pictured below me in my profile picture is a Freudian psychologist and not a charlatan. He was the head of the psychology department of a small college in East Orange NJ. and was a Psychologist in private practice and an officer of an organization of such professionals in NJ. He has taught many, helped many and counseled many and never took advantage of a single soul I am aware of. He is loved and respected by many life long friends and students, definitely not a charlatan. I think what you have heard about Freudian psychology is incorrect.

Area54 , What I am trying to add to the discussion is that the mechanisms humans have, to become aware of the world, to build an analog model of the world within the folds of the brain, to compare and contrast current sense input with former to register change, and to in general be aware that they are a self, existing in a greater space and time than here and now, did not come to us by accident but developed over the eons from earlier mechanisms. That is there is a reason for dopamine. It serves a purpose. A survival purpose. And it is one of the things that makes us different than a rock.u We have some mechanisms in the brain, that may have developed for a reason, and we usurped that mechanism to use in a tangential way. Like for instance we have a predictive motor simulator, that allows the brain to rehearse motor movement, aligning and ordering motor control signals into a package, before any signals are sent to the muscles. The result is coordinated motion, when the package is actually sent to the various muscles. This activity is analogous to planning a hunt, but the signals are extended to other humans (or wolves). Coordinating motion outside the body. Maybe something related to the predictive motor simulator is related to human consciousness, planning and problem solving. My thinking is that everything has a reason, a cause, a mechanism, that fits reality, that works, and there is no "ghost in the machine" of a human, but that the machine is the human. In this there is the reality that God did not breath life into us, but that life took the pattern from its parents that worked, and made it work again. The most workable arrangement, the most fitting patterns lived and reproduced. But there has to be the mechanisms that cause human consciousness, and these mechanisms did not just pop up out of nothing, but can be found, should be able to be found in there rudimentary form or sub components, in our close evolutionary relatives. Plus there should be some small adjustment to the plan, some particular variation to the plan, that caused us to dominate and outlive the Neanderthal. Regards, TARt iNow, Which parts of Freud's theories have you sufficiently debunked? I am taking the sensible ideas from Freud and Jung and Skinner and adding them to research from Saxe and iNow, to understand the human in a holistic way. There is both the mind and the brain to look at. One can look at them as one thing. Know that the body wants a cigarette, but not have one. The Id, Ego and SuperEgo is a device. A representation of an animal, emotional, sense based part of our makeup that is actual and real, exhibited by the hormones and neurotransmitters, and such. A representation of the societal rules embedded in our psyches as the superego. A representation of the moderator between the desire to smoke and the surgeon general's warning in the person of the ego. You can not debunk any of this. We have these mechanisms and chemicals, and they act in the manner Freud suggests in many ways. Regards, TAR Still, I say dopamine as shorthand for our pleasure/reward system, and use it meaning also our motivation and activation system, the whole serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine complex. Why we want, why we move, why we are content or not. Fleeting happiness indeed, but we seek it out, again...thus continue to live. Regards, TAR

Area54 and iNow, I don't mind you guys poking fun at me. I am sort of a self-deprecating humor type of guy. But it is interesting to me how you poke fun, but don't weigh in on the ideas being shared and debated on the thread, instead finding some way to suggest my input is garbage. I have expressed several theories about how consciousness and evolution are linked. I have an underlying theory about dopamine and its role in not only human survival, but in our every day life and happiness. It links in with Gees' understanding of emotion's relationship to consciousness. It explains "why" we like to live, through the dopamine reward we get for "getting it right". This is not only figuratively true, but literally true, where if you remember how to do something in the outside world, through having your model of the place correct, you both feel good at being right, and actually achieve a life sustaining victory. iNow, I mentioned this in relation to how Rebecca Saxe's junction was like our superego, and the part of brain stem base you identified was like our ego, both about facts you brought to the forum and my attention, and you did not weigh in on those ideas. Just called me a babblefish. Area54, I asked you to write a great essay on consciousness and evolution and instead you tell me I am no James Joyce. Well I would say neither are you the protagonist you seek to emulate, and you still have not said much interesting or thought provoking about consciousness and evolution, nor detailed your problems with my theories. Only do you comment on my inability to write concisely. Regards, TAR

Mike, I have a weird experiment to run. We have Irma painting a bulls eye on the Florida keys. Strongest Atlantic storm ever recorded. All the current projections from the U.S. and Europe run the storm right up Florida, with massive devastation almost a sure thing with the storm packing 175 mile and hour winds and projected 20 ft storm surge, which would bring the ocean right over much of flat Florida. I don't think the clouds can hear me, from N.J. but I am going out to my deck now, 12:04 AM Friday, New Jersey time and I am going to out loud, request that the storm come up between the Bahamas and Florida and turn East before it hits Georgia or the Carolinas. Should not be possible that all the tracks could be wrong. Should not be possible that a request from one guy in New Jersey could turn a Hurricane. Regards, TAR There. The request is in. I told the storm to turn North and go between the Bahamas and Florida and then turn East and miss all land, including Bermuda.

Area54, It missed the mark. My ramblings are purposeful. If you leave out any aspects then you don't get the whole picture. Attempting to provide a Cliff's notes version of a post of mine is already missing the mark. I meant to say, everything I said. Leaving any of it out, or rewording it to say something different than I meant is useless. If you think you can address the thread title, address it. I stand by my posts, and have no reason to change my style to suit you. I am 63 years old, attempting to share my insights, and gain some new ones from other posters. I don't need an essay writing lesson from you. If you can write a better one on consciousness and evolution , just write it. Regards, TAR

Area54, Yes I guess you don't get my style. In general I try to talk to all the points being considered in the thread. All arguments are not settled, so I attempt to speak in trivial terms, putting together accepted facts into the context of the thread. The suggestion was made that consciousness and intelligence were different things, and neither was easy to get a hold of. I attempted to make each an easy thing, and show how both were related to internalizing the external world. Other lifeforms do this (internalize the world), but not to the extent that we do, in terms of symbolization, analogies and language to communicate complex thoughts about the environment to others of the species and to rehearse actions before we take them. These abilities have survival value and fitting thusly makes us a better fit for the place. Survival of the fittest is the key rule of evolution. So the better you can sense the environment, remember the environment, manipulate your model of the environment in your mind, to "test" things out, before expending energy in moving yourself and parts of the place, the better off you are going to be in getting along with the place, surviving and passing on your pattern. Regards, TAR

Area54 and dimreepr, I am just seeing a relationship. In-tell-igence has a similarity to in-form-ation. That is, given a human being sensing the world and remembering it by forming analogous patterns in the synapses and connections of brain cells and structures, the act of bringing the form in, being aware of the outside, is a central point of consciousness. Self consciousness is an extension of bringing in and remembering the world, in that you are part of the world, and can look in a mirror or listen to other's experience of you, and you can feel your own heart beating and experience your own emotions and thoughts and actions. And my dad is a psychologist and gave me intelligence tests as a boy and young man. The particular test he used had different sections, but one was about information, like Homer or such, and I asked him what knowing certain information had to do with IQ. He said that IQ was a quotient that ranked you against others of your age, and what information you acquired and what you did with it and remembered of it, was part of the test. That means to me, now, in regards to this topic, and the relationship between consciousness and intelligence, that information is not finished when the wavelength hits the object. It is something else that differentiates the rock from the eyeball, and something else again that differentiates the eyeball of a fly from the eyeball of a cow, and something else again that differentiates the eyeball of an idiot, from the eyeball of da Vinci. Regards, TAR

Mike, Similar to my story about thinking about having a poster to ask god publically for something unlikely to happen so everyone could together see the request fulfilled...as I was shoveling six inches of snow off my driveway in Oct. I turned my head to the sky and said "funny guy. Funny" There is no reason to think whatever happen was not coincidence...or any reason to think that the universe was not proving a point to me. I do not have the courage to run another test. Not because I am afraid that people will think I am crazy, but because I am not prepared for another success. On that day we ran the test, after I saw the rock, I went down to the feed store for some dog food, and noticed for the first time, the street address was 90. On the way back up the mountain I glanced to my left on a small street, just once, up a driveway, and saw the street address 90 on a house I had never noticed before. Made me go back up to the woods and check out the site. That is when I saw two trees crossed in a 90 degree fashion near the site where I asked the question, and the rock was still there. I later studied pictures I had taken that showed the trees were crossed before I asked the question...but still the whole collection of happenings, were interestingly pertinent to 90 degrees, which was especially persuasive to me, that somehow the universe was answering my orthogonal question. So not running another test, is mostly because it is more satisfying to me, that I ran the test and got a positive response, and I would rather just remember that win, than to risk a loss. But in addition, I do not know what to think of another win. Sort of scary to consider the universe so responsive. Like the two times I accepted a penny to talk to the clouds on my way out and two times in a few days a long drought in the place I left got tremendous rain. I am satisfied to consider I earned my two cents, and since one time resulted in a hurricane and the other tremendous mud slides and floods, I decided since I could not control the results, I would stay out of the rain making business, and retire, two for two. In terms of the orthogonal question, I am satisfied to retire 1 for 1. Regards, TAR

Mike, And we have a spatial aspect to consider. That is there is usually just one queen of the hive. That is it takes a bunch of subcomponents to make one entity. And then a bunch of those entities make up the next higher entity . quarks, neutrons, nuclei, atoms, molecules, compounds, DNA, cellular components, cells, structures, organs, organisms, hives, ecosystems, planets, solar systems, galaxies, local group, local cluster, super clusters... it would seem unlikely that there would be a crowd of galaxies within your fish pond. That is, how many angels can you fit on the head of pin? It seems that only a certain number of entities on the next level up from here, could fit over the pond. Regards, TAR That is, of all the angels that there are, only a certain number would be local angels, if the pattern were to hold. Certain angels would be our angels and certain angels would be somebody else's. Mike, In 26 years in my former company, I only once had a long conversation with the president of the company, once in a airport waiting area. And that was just the president of the Americas division of the company. My usual dealings were with my section chief and his or her boss. I sometimes smoked with a vice president...but the point is I never had the ear of the president of the U.S. or the head of the World Bank. That is, how much personal attention do you expect from how many entities, how far up the hierarchy? Regards, TAR That is, our angel could be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a huge ocean. Mike, Similar to my story about thinking about having a poster to ask god publically for something unlikely to happen so everyone could together see the request fulfilled...as I was shoveling six inches of snow off my driveway in Oct. I turned my head to the sky and said "funny guy. Funny" There is no reason to think whatever happen was not coincidence...or any reason to think that the universe was not proving a point to me. I do not have the courage to run another test. Not because I am afraid that people will think I am crazy, but because I am not prepared for another success. On that day we ran the test, after I saw the rock, I went down to the feed store for some dog food, and noticed for the first time, the street address was 90. On the way back up the mountain I glanced to my left on a small street, just once, up a driveway, and saw the street address 90 on a house I had never noticed before. Made me go back up to the woods and check out the site. That is when I saw two trees crossed in a 90 degree fashion near the site where I asked the question, and the rock was still there. I later studied pictures I had taken that showed the trees were crossed before I asked the question...but still the whole collection of happenings, were interestingly pertinent to 90 degrees, which was especially persuasive to me, that somehow the universe was answering my orthogonal question. So not running another test, is mostly because it is more satisfying to me, that I ran the test and got a positive response, and I would rather just remember that win, than to risk a loss. But in addition, I do not know what to think of another win. Sort of scary to consider the universe so responsive. Like the two times I accepted a penny to talk to the clouds on my way out and two times in a few days a long drought in the place I left got tremendous rain. I am satisfied to consider I earned my two cents, and since one time resulted in a hurricane and the other tremendous mud slides and floods, I decided since I could not control the results, I would stay out of the rain making business, and retire, two for two. In terms of the orthogonal question, I am satisfied to retire 1 for 1. Regards, TAR

DrKrettin, Good point, hierarchy instead of heirachy. Mike, I have not yet, still, read the last 10 pages of the thread, so I may be questioning an inappropriate aspect of the thought, but two things come to mind. One, crowding as in ant colonies and the like, usually result in a new entity emerging. Like our governments or the internet, or universities, a bunch of fish get together and you have a school, or birds, a flock, and the V in the sky is not individual geese, but something else. In this, in terms of hierarchy there is a bigger and better and more advanced or complete entity formed during the crowding. Not supernatural. And secondly, if crowding is more prevalent as you go up the hierarchy why do you end up with God, in the singular? Wouldn't it be more likely that a bevy of Angels would occur? Regards, TAR

Area54, I apologize for using the term "someone like Area54" and implying you downvoted when you did not. My comment was still valid in the general sense, that I was trying to explain to mike why I have stayed off threads he is on. Not that I don't look at them, but that when I do respond, both Mike and I wind up getting down votes, and it is annoying. Like perhaps people get more defensive or something when the two of us get together on an idea. Better usually to stand apart, and not have each of our individual weaknesses lumped together and attacked as one. Regards, TAR