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tar

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Posts posted by tar

  1. 1 hour ago, Gees said:

    Tar;

    You make a good point, but must remember that this is consciousness, and consciousness is never ever a simple thing.

    The "self" seems to start with the individual, although I am not sure of that, but this core "self" immediately starts to bond with other selves and other ideas and things. This bonding creates larger selves much like the rings that occur when you drop a single drop of water into a lake, the surrounding circles that it makes are an indication that the drop happened, a continuation of the influence of that drop. Anything that you put the word "my" in front of can be an indication of a larger self. Examples:

    My family is a larger self. Law even recognizes this larger self and allows Self Defense as a reasonable cause when spouse or children are endangered.

    My school, college, alumni, team, hobby, occupation, place of work, sports interest, religion, church, neighborhood, society, town, state and country are examples of larger selves, although there can be many more. So although we are individuals, I am not so sure as to how individual we are.

    Even zoos have recognized that many species will become despondent and even die if deprived of others of their kind. Isolation is also dangerous for humans, so although we are individuals, I suspect that we are also part of all life and must maintain bonds with life in order to survive.

    Gee

     

    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. 

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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
     

  5. 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

  6. 3 hours ago, iNow said:

    Freud was most assuredly brilliant (though perhaps a bit too fond of cocaine). His ideas even offer an interesting framework for laymen to describe the mind.

    The problem I have is specifically with his three part model, his proposed psychic apparatus. Id, Ego, and Superego were interesting and clearly moved the discussion taking place way back in the 1800s forward, but we've learned a significant amount more about the brain since then and his ideas simply don't map on to anything actually happening in the human nervous system.

    You might even say that these ideas from Freud are akin to using astrology to describe our behavior. The explanatory power is equivalent and the parallels striking. You may as well replace "superego" with "Gemini" or "Virgo." The utility and benefit of your comment would be unchanged; the accuracy and usefulness of what you're saying unaffected. 

    Tar - I'm sure your dad helped a great many people. You should be proud of the work he did, and I'm sure many patients are/were thankful to have had him as a partner in their process of healing. I bet their families feel the same way.

    I suspect, though, that the benefit he provided his patients came from being a kind, neutral listener... came from providing a safe place for people to express their deepest thoughts and feelings without judgment or penalty... allowing them to explore difficult memories and emotions in the presence of a caring guide and helper. That experience is critical in driving mental health and wellbeing.

    It would IMO be a mistake, however, to suggest the benefits those patients reveived from their partnership with your dad had anything to do with Freud's interesting (but misguided) ideas that the human psyche is divided into the three part apparatus of Id, Ego, and Superego. Those concepts are theoretical constructs that offer a model, but that model does not in any way map on to reality... and we've known this for decades.

    Sadly, these same criticisms also apply to Jung, another brilliant man whose works I loved reading and deeply considering when studying them and their impact on the field (you should know that many of Jungs books still populate my bookshelf today; modern man in search of a soul being a personal favorite).

    Either way, we're far off topic and Gees seems to hate me and have a big enough hard on about me enough already (unsure if I'm a joker, a scab picker, a hybrid, or something else entirely in this exchange and TBH I frankly don't care), but please do recall that the map is not the territory.

    Freud offered a map. I'm discussing the territory, and recommend that you should be, too.

    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

    12 minutes ago, Tub said:

     

     

    I think if you equate Freud's model with the ingenious metaphor of the Christian crucifixion, you may see something surprising:

    superego --------- good thief

    id ---------------------- bad thief

    ego ------------------- christ

    Do you see what i think i see?

    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?

  7. 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

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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

     

     

    3 hours ago, dimreepr said:

    That's like saying 1+1=2, how many theories do you need?

    This is nonsense, dopamine is a fleeting reward system, it's never going to "achieve a life sustaining victory" it just says "you're happy now", that's why it's so addictive. 

    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

  11. 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

  12. 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.  

  13. 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

  14. 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

  15. 1 hour ago, Area54 said:

    I agree with you the two, intelligence and consciousness, are related. I am not certain that anyone has ever demonstrated there is a 1:1 relationship, perhaps because - despite their importance to us - we're still not very sure what either of them is.

    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

  16. 1 hour ago, Mike Smith Cosmos said:

    Well nobody has given any idea as to what God looks like . I think he/she/it is in every single Higgs boson across the entire Universe , in other words totally unrecognisable in any way we can think of it , other than the whole thing , the whole universe . 

    As for your bevy of Angels , 

    this is what is listed under images Angels 

    t

    mike 

     

    I appreciate your thought about getting on with the research , that is what I have been doing for the last 25 years . I am not so sure I am going to find what I am looking for in a huge electronic dictionary . As that is the consensus of a majority of people who do not believe much in supernatural phenomenon . That's why I have tried to do the research myself on this very important subject , first hand . I admit like everybody else , turns to  Wikipedia for a lot of information . It was just on this one , at it is so important , I would go at it first hand . 

    Like  I stood on a rock in the middle of the abandoned moor , one wet day . Turned my head to the sky , and asked ?  

    IS THERE ANYBODY THERE ?  .?? 

    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

  17. 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.

    37 minutes ago, Mike Smith Cosmos said:

    Well nobody has given any idea as to what God looks like . I think he/she/it is in every single Higgs boson across the entire Universe , in other words totally unrecognisable in any way we can think of it , other than the whole thing , the whole universe . 

    As for your bevy of Angels , 

    this is what is listed under images Angels 

    t

    mike 

     

    I appreciate your thought about getting on with the research , that is what I have been doing for the last 25 years . I am not so sure I am going to find what I am looking for in a huge electronic dictionary . As that is the consensus of a majority of people who do not believe much in supernatural phenomenon . That's why I have tried to do the research myself on this very important subject , first hand . I admit like everybody else , turns to  Wikipedia for a lot of information . It was just on this one , at it is so important , I would go at it first hand . 

    Like  I stood on a rock in the middle of the abandoned moor , one wet day . Turned my head to the sky , and asked ?  

    IS THERE ANYBODY THERE ?  .?? 

    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

  18. 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

     

  19. 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

     

     

  20. DrP,

    I do realize this is a science forum.  I give everybody, layman or initiated, the benefit of the doubt, initially, and try their ideas against what I know to be true about the world.  I don't know everything, but neither does anyone know everything.  There are serendipitous events that have happened in my life and I am guessing yours.  Many folks have one or two stories about a religious experience, or a time someone came out of nowhere to save them and then moved on to where it would seem out of place that they should haveh rendered such assistance, or seen some UFO or felt there was karma or something going on, elves preparing some situation in a beneficial arrangement, or perhaps evidence that a lost loved one was sending a message or watching out for you, or have some evidence of ESP or somebody acting in a way that would suggest they had knowledge that was not gained in the normal scientific way of gaining knowledge.   Such is why I humor Mike.  Well not really humor, because I am not looking at it like he is a fool,  I am taking him with the same respect and understanding as I take any honest man or woman.   I humor people that speculate there are other civilizations in the Milky Way, based on probability, even though they have zero evidence, and the speed of light puts the lives of these others way out of our reach.

    I personally have memory of seeing a ghost, of seeing a UFO, of talking to the clouds and having rain soon follow, of seeing a mathematical message possibly sent my my departed mathematician mother, which allows me to "humor" people that have seen a ghost, or an unexplained visitor, or believes in garden fairies, or serendipity, or ESP, or reincarnation, or God or angels.   Most of the world believes in one or more of the previous types of things.  And regardless of what I believe is possible or real, and what I pretty much know is construct, I know for certain that the other 7 billion folks on the planet and the billions that lived previously are actual real components of objective reality, and no matter what they think or know or believe, they are humans on the planet Earth, in exactly the same situation as I am in, and though it is important for me to be right, about what is real and what is construct,  there is not a consensus on the things I know to be true and know to be false, so I would speculate that this same state of openness to other people being right or wrong, is a common trait.  A good trait, a human trait.   

    Such is why I ran the experiment with Mike, years ago that yielded that rock I pictured.  I did it to disprove the theory, and talked with Mike about the results, and did not jump to the conclusion that there were gods or angels, but allowed that the world was not separate from us, and we use it to think.  I was left with the thought that maybe there was an  area of reality orthogonal to this one.    I do not know what that means, but I am open to investigating what that might mean, if it does not devolve into a flight of fancy.

    Regards, TAR

     

  21. 3 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

    I propose that it's difficult because it's like imagining someone more pregnant than the duchess of Cornwall.

    You are seeking to qualify an absolute.

    However that may simply mean that your definition doesn't tally with mine (or that of medical science- which know about these things)

    John Cuthber,

    Evidently others also consider consciousness on a sliding scale.  See the argument about our consciousness not being at the pinnacle of consciousness.   If there is a better than or more or less conscious, then it is not an absolute, like being pregnant.   And considering it in terms of evolution, there is something about our human consciousness that allows for tool use and language, philosophy, religion and poetry, along with writing and math and theories and such which exist to small degrees in some other mammals, but there is something that "happened" in the evolutionary chain that gave us a "leg up" on the other species.  Maybe even something that humans had that Neanderthals did not.  Some brain part, some connection, some ability to make analogies, or use symbols or something,  that really does put us at the pinnacle (of Earth Based Lifeforms).   Proof being that we control the place, not the weather or earthquakes or meteors, or solar flares, but we "control the streets."

    Regards, TAR

  22. iNow,

     

    So I take your point that we don't know if whales or octopi or ravens are more, less or differently conscious than we are.  The scale has not been set, at least in this forum on this thread it has not been agreed upon.

    I remember reading once how whales communicate "areas" of the sea to each other and such.  Distinctions we are not usually conscious of as land animals.

    I am thinking that neurology is central to this discussion.  That is, brain structure, and brain chemistry plays an important role in consciousness, and animals, especially mammals,  close o us in evolutionary terms, are probably outfitted with similar equipment.  I would speculate that the mechanisms that make consciousness possible in humans are probably present in our close relatives in the animal kingdom.   My pet dopamine theory for instance, would say that we survive because we like to live, and we like to live because we get a pleasure reward for doing it right.  If this is true, then it would be consistent logic to expect that other animals that survive, do it because it feels good to do it, as well, and one might reasonably expect to find dopamine in the brains of happy dogs.

    Freud was a neurologist, and the id, ego and superego have their analogs in the brain, its structure and its chemistry.   The part of the brain you showed me that Rebecca Saxe studied, that was active when people made moral decisions, and conversed with unseen others, is rather like the superego, the rules, the societal judge, the conscience.   The dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine complex in our brains along with the various endorphins and hormones like adrenaline and the pheromones that establish the emotions that Gees talks about are analogous to the Id.  And the ego, the moderator between the id and the superego, is something perhaps like the brain stem base you mentioned that seems to "house" conscious awareness.

    If my thinking is accurate, other conscious lifeforms on the planet, especially our mammal relatives probably have similar mechanisms, for the same survival reasons.  We already know they have eyes and ears and other senses similar to ours.  

    And elephants cry.

    Regards, TAR

  23. Mike,

    I have not read past page 5 1/2 so I don't know about your crowding idea, so I can not yet comment.

    As for the hierarchy I am not feeling it, due to the inclusion of angels and  god.  I am of the opinion that angels and god are human constructs, and as such they could not be watching over us literally, only figuratively.

    As to us being fishes to a Mike of greater capability and reach, I am thinking that is possible, but not likely in the guardian way you are framing it.  I am thinking the place is way too big to get personal attention like that.   For instance, consider that there is a conscious entity on a dust particle on your printer. And you became aware of this entity through the use of some technology.  Its life would probably be shorter than ours and very quickly lived, to where you could not have a reasonable conversation about anything with the entity.  Your voice would probably shake him off his particle and you don't have the fine tools and control to actually do anything useful for him, being you are on such a different scale.  And the big issue is that there is dust in the basement and some entity on a particle down there, would not get your attention.

    I do enjoy conversing with you Mike, but I have not for a while, because when we get together someone like area54 comes along and tries to teach us how to think, and ridicules us and neg reps us, and it is just annoying.  Little do they know, we have been around, have half a brain, and have experienced a great deal, and enjoy sharing insights and enjoy ideas and the place for the sake of exploration and play and to gain further insights.

    Regards, TAR

     

  24. Area54,

    I am arguing your main point that Gees made an unwarranted claim that humans are at the pinnacle of consciousness.   One way I disagree is that you have no greater consciousness to point to, anywhere within human investigative space.  Second way is that it is human consciousness we are talking about, so we set the rules on what is up and down on the scale and we don't know any lifeforms that have more human consciousness than humans, so it is not an unwarranted claim.

    Regards, TAR

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