cladking

Ultimately all theory and all science are based on observation and logic and if they can't make accurate predictions then they are worthless. If they make inaccurate predictions then they are wrong.

I believe the questions are irrelevant, immaterial, and illegitimate. They arise chiefly from a confusion of what it means to be an animal or a human caused by language. Life is a biological imperative and humans are a social animal. There aren't really any questions so long as we keep sight of definitions and conditions. Cultures have lost sight and formed gestalts that are not reflective of any reality. It leaves people groping for answers to questions that need no answers and aren't quite real. Each individual has distinct needs and perspectives but each individual is very much a product of his time and place making his perspective very much a part of the whole. We are animals who use a specific metaphysics to understand our place in nature and this metaphysics generates technology which few comprehend. Look at the question that made a run of message board a few years back about whether a plane could take off from a moving surface. This is a very simple concept and most got it wrong. Many otherwise intelligent people still can't understand and/ or accept the answers. Even fewer understand the metaphysics. Word meaning dances about and every statement can be deconstructed to mean almost anything. No matter how I phrase this people will each take their own meaning. It's little wonder we feel adrift and lost.

I'm in general agreement. The strawberry will die before its seeds because that is its nature. But the seeds continue to be alive until they are no longer viable. In view of the fact that a live strawberry can exist with no viable seeds then the strawberry dies in its entirety only when the seeds could no longer propogate even had they been viable. I'm simply arguing that nonviable seeds are alive until they undergo the changes that would kill a viable one. A eunich or a mule are just as alive a person or a horse.

There's even evidence bacteria are conscious. One will glow when a certain number exist in a given location. We're going to find out that consciousness isn't what we think it is and much of what we think is not real. I tried finding bacterium that glows and came up with this instead. I didn't watch it so I can reccommend it, but it's on subject. http://www.ted.com/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html There's quite a bit of research along these lines now and a quick google will keep you busy a while.

Excellent post. I once watched a yew tree desseminate its pollen. It was a very breezy day with unstable wind direction and speed. What struck me as being so remarkable is that the amount of pollen that blew off was not very well correlated with how violently it was being shaken by the wind. Large gusts could have little effect and tiny breezes might unleash a cloud. There appeared to be some consciouness driving this. Somehow the plant seemed to be communicating with its enviroment to achieve the greatest effect. If you watch nature it seems things such as this are quite commonplace. There is far more inexplicable than anything you can just google up. For instance the reason ants make piles of sand at their entrances probably came to me the other day. My guess is these grains of sand present an insurmountable hurdle to any mites that would come to live on or with them. The actions of chemicals and minerals in the earth is impossibly complex but it is made many orders of magnitude more complex by the actions of life. Life begets life. And life affects everything around it.

I'm like a babe in the woods discussing consciousness. I do understand some of what you're saying but my perspective is very very different. My perspective comes from taking consciousness entirely for granted (and somewhat selfishly). My interest has always been the nature of thought rather than consciousness. I believe thought is the result of impulses (consciousness?) being processed by the brain. This processing is built from language and beliefs as well as bits and pieces of things like math, logic, unconscious, experiences etc etc... This structure I call "attention pockets" because our very awareness is defined from experience, knowledge, and belief. People are almost infinitely adaptable and do much of the wiring of their berains themselves. Once we view something one way or accept something as normal it becomes quite difficult to unseat out perspective. Beliefs have largely replaced instinct and our beliefs are shaped (and integrated) largely when we are young making us a product of our time and place. The better educated a person is the more he is a product of his time and place. This may not be relevant but I do believe that most things most people have ever been taught is wrong. Obviously there is a great deal going on in the mind (brain and body) of which we aren't aware. Indeed, I suspect even the ganglia and nervous system have a low level consciousness that is fully aware of us (the mind), but we are barely even dimly aware of them. It is these separate consciousnesses that are muscle memory. They are also critical to the functioning of the entire animal. You can't have your feet racing off in different directions in an emergency especially if the best strategy is to stand and fight. There are many layers to thought (consciouness?) and we can't be aware of them all simultaneously meaning a great deal of activity is beneath the level of consciousness, awareness, or thought. Much of the brain seems to be not directly even connected to thought so there are, no doubt, some very highly complicated interconnections. People can become anything but they do become their beliefs. If you believe that dreams are important then you will begin having memorable dreams and they can become important. I believe these are just memories of random nerve firings in our sleep and these firings are partially processed as thought. We can learn about how we think or what we believe from them. But many things occur of which we aren't aware and it's entirely within the realm of reason that some of these might be exposed to consciousness because of a dream. Let me try to get back to the point. We are what we eat but it's even more true that we are what we believe and any belief is possible. We are fed many of our beliefs as a child so become a product of the civilization in which we are born. Society generally does an exceedingly poor job of creating citizens allowed to excel in their strenghts and instead pidgeon holes almost everyone. Most of what you've been told about the Egyptians is false or, more likely, applies only to the Egyptians after 2000 BC. I do agree that emotion and consciousness are intimately related but I think of emotion as a sort of vector total of the mind/ body reaction to stimulus. This mind/ body reaction is far greater to stimuli related to things that are extremely important to us. The death of the neighbor's dog has far less impact on us than the death of our own. It's easy to get along with somebody else's troubles. Emotion is probably much more an amygdalan response governed by experience and the higher brain centers. You said; And then defended the statement. Since they knew almost nothing about almost everything it would seem to follow that they were superstitious. If they could lift 6 1/2 million tons of stone and we're too afraid to even apply the science to determinine how it was done it makes us the superstitious people. But more importantly and equally relevantly you also said; And defended this. There is a strong implication that you believe we pretty much have knowledge of radioactivity all zipped up; that we understand the nature of all radioactive decay and the emitted energy. Further there is the implication that we know how all radioactive things behave under all conditions and parameters. I deny that we know much of anything about the subject even though we can do a good job of measuring and predicting decay rates and specific emissions. There's simply no reason to believe our understanding is the only possible understanding and it's absurd to believe our knowledge is even close to being complete.

You are essentially suggesting that we now know everything and all possible observations related to radioactivity have been made and can be explained. You are further suggesting that the ancients had no knowledge at all about anything at all. Ancient people saw everything as being about gods and magic so there was no room for any knowledge at all. This is illogical in the extreme. If we already know everything we might as well shut down research and quit fretting about dark matter. Why study radiation at all if it's settled science? If the ancients were superstitious then they mustta used ramps and beavers mustta built their first dam by accident. If memory serves the ancients used some radioactive glow in the dark chemicals as pigments in paint or ceramics. I believe Pliny spoke of it. Be this as it may what logic is there in assuming a primitive understanding of something is equivalent to a lack of understanding? They did invent agriculture and cities so their knowledge mustta had some utility. At what point exactly did the human race pass from superstition to omniscience? Was it 1942? 1982? 1492? I, for one, still have questions.

So how did the pyramid builders study radioactivity? Surely, in the countless centuries before the Curie's at least a few people observed phenomena related to radioactivity. Is the fact that none studied it really indicative of the nature of the observers or the nature of radioactivity? Is the fact that we know so much about the relative sizes and energies of radioactivity proof that we know everything and that no anomylous observations can occur in the future? How can we be sure that when some new attribute is first observed that the observer will be able to duplicate and study it? How can something not exist simply because we don't observe or study it unless nature was far simpler before we began to learn about it 40,000 years ago? How can we even be sure that the first observer to see something new will even be knowledgeable of the state of the science and competent to know it is a new phenomenon he is witnessing?

You're speaking of repeatable observations and things that can be measured. Science and measurement simply doesn't apply to many things that are one of a kind or can't be duplicated. Obviously that something happens only once or is fleeting does not mean it exists outside of natural laws but many people see a pattern to some of these events and attribute them to deities, magic, or one of manty categories into which these events might fit. For instance, I one saw an asphalt surface broken up into a checker board pattern that had diamonds rather than squares. This was a quite regular failure but the pattern became more distorted and irregular away from the "center". This isn't extremely unusual but what was remarkable is that every other diamond was wet so it was colored similarly to a checker board. I could not deternmine a cause for this nor even form a reasonable hypothesis. I've seen similar patterns in nature such as moisture on the leaves of redbud trees after a rain. For some of these I have found a cause. While there is no group of people who believe road gravel plays chess when we aren't looking there are some people who believe unusual events taken in aggrevate suggest ghosts, or deities, or ESP. It seems to me that science can't answer very many practical questions so why should we be so quick to simply dismiss other attempts to organize knowledge? Mans' knowledge is exceedingly limited. This doesn't mean we should abandon the tools we use to achieve it but we need to recognize our limitations and few do. It is the fact that we have lost sight of how we came to know what we do that has allowed us to so grossly overestimate our knowledge and to dismiss other perspectives less firmly firmly rooted in our metaphysics. One might be better advised getting advice on "trivialities" like marriage or retirement from a priest or a tea leaf reader than a cosmologist. Science is a very poor tool for answers to practical questions. I'm sure there's some truth here. Reality exists outside society. Indeed, it is only experienced outside of society. The purpose for most people who study anything is to seek the reality. That this often become a niche or career choice is secondary to the belief in my opinion. How many atheist priests are likely to exist?

Part of the problem with this thread may be the title. Most scientific people have a knee-jerk reaction to the "supernatural". It's only a word but most of us have a mechanistic view of reality and believe that nothing can exist outside of the laws of nature. It's not even relevant that we hardly can begin to understand nature because the assumption is nothing exists outside of it. I once lived about eight minutes from a stoplight that separated me from my job. When I got about four minutes away I could see where it was in its ~1 1/2 minute cycle. Virtually every morning I'd get to the light just as it turned green (30 sec green). I rarely had the sense that I was adjusting my speed to catch the light though sometimes it was necessary to slow or speed slightly to get it. It was not on a clock. People attend to things that are important to them. They see what they expect and can't see what they don't expect. They believe what they want to believe and in time become those beliefs. Perhaps "inexplicable" or "not yet explained" would be a better word than "supernatural". "Superstitious" might be a more apt term to explain the way our brains are wired. Observations are probably usually correct but they can be warped by a poor or improper perspective. A small slice of reality might not look like reality at all especially if the perspective is off. A scientific perspective will sometimes be the wrong perspective toward trying to understand what we see though, obviously, explanations must always revolve around logic and facts iff they exist. This isn't to say religion, magic, etc are improper in any way, merely that they have historically proven ineffective at understanding nature.

...And where exactly do you think this religious hokum originated? I can tell you exactly but then this post would be split off into another thread in speculations so instead let me just say that the writers of the Bible obviously had at their disposal numerous very old books. It's a virtually foregone conclusion that these were adapted for use to tell a story and that most of them are gone and lost forever. No books survive from before 2000 BC other than fragments and unintelligible works but such ancient books and copies of them probably did survive in the days the "sacred works" of the Bible were compiled. We see "impossible" and highly implausible stories and rather than trying to interpret thenm in ways that make sense we simply dismiss the authors as sun added bumpkins. The bottom line superstition and religion never invented nor discovered anything (beyond religious philosophy) and it required as much skill and theory to invent agriculture and cities as it does for beavers to dam a creek; maybe even more. Human history before 2000 BC wasn't invented through superstition. It wasn't religion that led to the invention of writing. We assume the human race has always been confused and superstitious but there is no evidence to support it. There is only interpretation of pot shards and the reason bones were arranged in graves as they were. There is no such thing as a "subconscious" but there are numerous events occurring beneath consciousness. We wire our brains by our experiences, language, and beliefs and activity occurs at levels outside our consciousness. It's easy to train yourself to solve problems in your sleep and ideas can leep forth from mental activity that is not part of our consciousness. We can see the most subtle clues at times especially, as Gees suggests, when they involve people we care about. This isn't to say I necessarily believe in ESP but people who pay attention to such things will see inexplicaple or very difficult to explain phenomena. These can often sound even more implausible than a woman turning into a pillar of salt or Enoch living 365 years before going on a long tutorial with the Creator. There are more things on heaven and earth... ...Than anyone might imagine.

Why can't time be both immutable and transmutable?

And perhaps it only shows that a reality where nothing can arise from nothing can arise from nothing.

I've seen this before. It is superbly done.

We exist because we exist. You wouldn't ask such a question if you didn't exist. Time is, by definition, what stops two objects from being in the same place. Ancients called this "khepri". They observed sunspots on the sun at sunset and saw the same sunspots at sunrise so this became the phenomenon of pre-existence; nothing arose from nothing. Everything arose from something. You can seek cosmological, theological, or philosophical answers to how we came to exist but still each of us arose from what came before and will return to the vast soup from which all things arise. Our atoms will be used to constitute new life or to power it. New things, which still won't be in the same place at the same time, will spring from our having existed. Our ability to think allows us new ways to organize, understand, or see our place in nature but ultimately our only answers will remain speculative. Simple answers must be sufficient at least at this time and the foreseeable future. One might as well have fun and try to leave the world a better place for tomorrow we die and our children will be left.

Actually I find your ideas intruiging even where they aren't always convincing. It's quite apparent you've put a lot of thought into these things and I can't come along and dismiss them very readily. There's no reason to dismiss any idea that is founded in logic. I do disagree that Plato's division of the soul is in any way similar to Freud's or at least common interpretation of Freud. Plato was seeking to divide the mind theoretically and examine its parts where the common understanding of Freud's work is that there exist three warped caricatures of an individual beneath his consciousness which comprise him. This belief has led to a world where people aren't responsible for their outcomes or even their actions. In some strange perverted way though they are responsible for their beliefs and all beliefs are equally valid. So we had tens of millions of murders for convenience in the 20th century which started just about the same time that Freud published. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's_tripartite_theory_of_soul If there were actually such a thing as a subconscious we would still need to deny its existence. But, of course, one can't show it doesn't really exist any more than one can prove God doesn't exist. We experience both. We are a product of our time and place so people believe in a subconscious that drives and excuses their behavior and the behavior of those around them. We promote those who ruin companies and even hail them as "turn around specialists". We vote for politicians even though they have failed utterly in the past. Where beliefs should be irrelevant and outcomes the only thing of importance instead we are judged by intentions rather than what we do. So long as we are PC it doesn't matter what mayhem surrounds us. I like your water analogies and suspect they could be extended. I've seen similar phenomena in accelerations and believe it to be primarily coincidence but quite possibly it is related to something fundamental or structural since we are primarily water and there even seems to be a microbe at the root of the brain if not consciousness itself. Both ancient and modern languages have a tendency to flow like water and grammar imposes the same sort of restrictions as water finds in a container. Perhaps it's little beyond a linguistic coincidence but it's still extremely interesting. I'm sure I don't know why what you've observed exists. As a pragmatist i have a strong tendency to take consciousness as a given, perhaps the only given and see little reason not to assume it's widespread through nature. Supposing that termites invented cities through trial and error or that man made pyramids through trial and error is, to me, as absurd as supposing we invented our ability to go to the moon by trial and error. All advancement requires thought whether one is a man or a mouse. No advancement is possible until theory is established. They told me the same thing but it's not true. Indeed, most of what we were taught is either untrue or only partially true. We all have instincts but most of them have little value in day to day life. Even where they would be useful most individuals will wholly suppress them and proceed with learning and knowledge instead. Many individuals, especially women, can go almost a lifetime without exhibiting any instinctual behavior. Most humans spend most of their time in human situations where instincts would be inappropriate or less adaptive to their situations. We suppress them through upbringing and through learning, but they still exist.

Excellent. Water and light make rainbows; consciousness and light make ideas. Mebbe you can create a whole new math.

There are several things I intend to respond to but these are more immediate (and more fun). Perhaps you're right that anyone counting 317 senses must even be including things like a sense of humor. I tend to think of things directed more outward and away from human concerns like a "sense of time" or the ability estimate distances and spatial capacities. But, yes, the ability to "know" when a friend needs help or how to tell a joke right may also be included. The ability to do magic is a wondrous thing in itself because you have to be able to direct the audience's attention much like a comedian. I doubt most magicians even know how they do it and it's mostly learned behavior. If my understanding of ancient people is correct (it is by the by) they were very very down to earth. They were very much a part of nature and their language was the metaphysics of their understanding. Because of this they were very much "all on the same page". There was little variation in beliefs and a very great deal of introspection of the mental and physical body. They were a part of nature. People simply drifted to the tasks most suited to them. Each viewed the big picture which was humanity and was extremely productive. Even the skeletal remains of Egyptian nobles frequently have the telltale signs of hard work proving either the ability to advance or that hard work was a societal norm, probably both. Human language is far more complex than animal languages. Of course there is evidence of fairly complicated language from elephants, to whales, to crows but it seems improbable that any can express so wide an array of concepts as human language. Here's a pretty interesting one; http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/researcher-decodes-praire-dog-language-discovers-theyve-been-calling-people-fat.html I'd guess that all animal languages express metaphysics and this is why we don't understand them. To date it seems easier to teach animals human languages than for us to learn their's.

I have seen claims that the subconscious had been previously proposed. Obviously there are events in the mind/ brain that are beneath or outside of consciousness and these certainly would have been noted previously but I'm aware of no previous proposal that there was a coherent sub-mind or coherent parts of the mind.

I wonder if some people are so willfull that they can set things in motion before death and others are so sensitive that they percieve the mechanism for it. They percieve it as "ghosts". Any alien with the technology to visit earth would have the ability to remain hidden and avoid leaving evidence. Lack of solid evidence for aliens might mean they've never visited (long distance space travel is impossible at least so far) or it might mean that they don't want to be known. There is various evidence of aliens in history but none of it is convincing and there are those who would fake it to confound the issue. I think "consciousness" is misunderstood. Consciousness is simply an organism's perception of its existence. All multi-celled animals have consciousness and even single celled animals and plants can distinguish some things like air and water. It's an exceedingly low level of consciousness but they are not inert like a stone or a cloud. It is human conceit that holds human cities as evidence of intelligence and termite cities as mere happenstance or the result of trial and error. A beaver transforms its enviroment for its own purposes and for its offspring. Ancient people did know about germs and the like but the source of this knowledge and the means by which it was discovered was lost. People are too put off by how I've rediscovered many of these things but and the implications of this to support it, but suffice to say that they observed the cloud of droplettes expelled in a sneeze and noted that people who inhaled in this cloud became sick. Today we are so superstitious that we actually hold a hankerchief in front of our noses and disperse this cloud over an even greater space increasing the spread of contagion. Ancient man knew to blow their sneezes toward the ground so they'd quickly be harmless. When the means of acquiring and transmitting knowledge imploded religion, superstition, and dark ages ensued. We are so divorced from nature that most children don't even know that humans are animals! Many people can't accept the idea that animals are conscious and people don't understand that it isn't intelligence that distinguishes humans from animals but it is language. It is language and its advancements which have driven all human progress since even before the failure of the ancient language. It was writing that drove progress 5000 years ago and the printing press that ushered in the modern age. It was the telephone and radio that drove the changes of the 20th century and now the internet will change it again. Computer language will lead indirectly to machine intelligence. Humans haven't made these inventions and discoveries, individuals have. And each of these individuals stood on the shoulders of those who came before by means of complex language. None of this means humans are more "intelligent" or "conscious" than other species with which we have come to compete for control of resources and sapace. We are simply more successful due primarily to language which resulted from some chance mutation. We picked up some strange beliefs because we lost sight of nature and the nature of science and religion, etc, etc. We overestimate our knowledge and tend to underestimate the complexity of nature. If we lose sight of the fundamental definitions of science then we lose sight of the results of science which also allows us to mistake the comfort from technology as a sign of intelligence and omniscience. Meanwhile philosophy has fragmented and spends its time in circular arguments and semantics largely because even philosophical arguments can be deconstructed. So long as words aren't defined and their meanings are modified by surrounding words it becomes impossible to construct arguments that apply to everyone all the time. Philosophy and nature need to be almost synonyms. I believe they once were. Religion is an attempt to preserve the ancient metaphysics. The Bible was an attempt to preserve the most ancient writings which were crumbling. By the time the Bible was written very few understood the situation. The Bible is largely literally true but confounded by the confusion of language, misinterpretation, and mistranslation. There's a great deal of information in the Bible but much of it will never be able to be extracted. I don't know. I don't think so. Certainly there is some overlap between senses and sensations and anyone who believes he has hundreds of senses must not be using the term exactly as we are. But remember there are other "senses" in nature as well as abilities for which we don't know the mechanism. Some people rarely if ever get lost and will tell you that they "follow their nose". Some people seem to have an uncanny ability to "smell" garage sales or antique shops. There are blind people who can navigate by echo location. If someone is counting hundreds of senses then in all probability some things such as this must be getting included.

I don't believe that Philosophy's shooting itself in the foot (if it can even be shown there is a foot in the shoe) is the cause of the modern breaking down of society. This was caused by the intellectualization of Freud's dalience with his sister in law in 1899 eventually resulting in Token and Taboo which was misunderstood to posit a "subconscious" mind. This belief has proven exceedingly pernicious in its ability to undermine peoples' understanding of right and wrong, natural and unnatural. Since we no longer hold ourselves or others responsible for their actions (much less the results) then all behaviors become equal. Children can't know right from wrong and schools have stopped trying to teach them and in the process find they can't teach anything else either. Children aren't held accountable and don't learn as the school boards get big raises instead of being run out of town on a rail. The failure of philosophy has made ideas like a subconscious possible. But where the rubber meets the road as society it is the acceptance and confusion of Freud's ideas that has led to the rootlessness and lack of philosophical underpinning in society. We need far more emphasis on metaphysics and more individuals working on applied science (more work goes into inventing science fiction than applied science), and yes we need some sort of viable philosophy or at least the widespread ability to distinguish philosophy from claptrap.

I believe the ancients were far less superstitious than we modern people (I can show this but it puts people off). Frankly, I suspect they were much more sensitive to stimuli than we are and the concept that there were hundreds of senses were just a compilation of reports from numerous individuals. Since they tended to be less superstitious it's likely that at least some of these senses actually exist. This is a pretty perilous area to talk about if you want to be taken seriously (which I do) but there really appear to be some things that we are missing. For instance both secondary maxillary molars seems to be highly sensitive to water pressure and will provide a sense of drowning. Hands are sensitive to infrared radiation if it's strong. There are several others at least but I probably won't list them. I seriously doubt that the "supernatural" exists however nature is so complex that perhaps nothing at all can really be excluded. No, I'm not about to go out looking for ghosts or UFO's but there's no reason to believe that such things are totally impossible. These are things that are probably best suited to study when nature is much better understood or by someone other than myself. One thing about nature is that communication is extremely important. Communication can be exquisitely subtle. The cause of ideas to arise in the mind are often inexplicable. Usually when I investigate what appears to be transmission of thoughts I can find a simpler (more natural) explanation but investigations don't always turn up any sort of answer at all. Who knows? Until someone can consistently show results or invent a replicable experiment we're just left with questions and doubts.

It's hardly your fault that I find this thread so frustrating; it's largely my inability to agree with your statements though I recognize a great deal of truth in them. These statements I'm in far closer agreement with which was what I was hoping by posting at all. Indeed, I'm in agreement with all this except I'd tend to use different words and in my experience "emotions" tend to be a vector sum total reaction to events. In my opinion people believe what they want to believe and then their actions become a vector sum of their beliefs, knowledge, and learning. As we age we tend to become our beliefs and our lives reflect those beliefs. It is critical that young people understand the importance of the beliefs they adopt. The knowledge gained by modern science is extremely important and should be learned to the extent an individual is able to learn it. Factual knowledge, logic, math, and science must underlie peoples' thinking but it's important to stop far short of "believing in science". In extreme cases this belief will close your eyes to what's going on around you. If you don't see a few astounding things and investigate something everyday then you might have a far too narrow focus. You might be missing the big picture. By the same token if you see everything in terms of religion or astrology then you are missing the bigger picture. I'm not suggesting that there's a right or wrong way to live but I believe our understanding of science has been divorced from reality and from nature. We distill natural processes in the lab to study them or to turn them into technology but we never seem to reintegrate the knowledge or to add it to the metaphysics (here defined as the means of learning about nature through modern science). People not only become divorced from nature but they can become two dimensional. It's no better to adopt purely religious beliefs; or any beliefs at all. We have barely scratched the surface of what there is to know so saying that anything at all is "supernatural" is highly superstitious. Who are we to write rules for nature and define the "supernatural". Some things are much more easily explained than others. The ancients appear to have believed people have hundreds of senses. Where are they now? How did they accomplish their great feats with superstition and surpernatural abilities. Nothing jives and I pin much of the problem on language. Wearing my finger to the bone rarely results in people understanding my point. It appears that it's the divorce from nature caused by language which is the cause of superstition and the belief in the supernatural or the belief in the impossibility of the supernatural. We use language for most thought and the structural grammar of language for most of the rest. Language can be deconstructed so meaning is usually lost. Most of us can think clearly enough because we've had 4000 years to repair the flaws and we would never have to ask ourselves something like "what do mean by "metaphysics"?". We don't trip over our own words or phraseology... ...we trip over everyone else's and pick up strange beliefs.

This thread is frustrating for me as well. I believe people are naturally superstitious and highly prone to adopting beliefs which prevent them from proper understanding and observation. The study of consciousness using language as the tool is not likely going to lead to much new knowledge. I don't believe we have any choice at this time but to consider it a given or a black box problem and to to accept that it is widespread in nature. Since we exist inside this black box there are certainly some insights to be gained directly. Nature is exceedingly complicated even if most of her aspects appear extremely simple to us. It is simple superstition to suggest nothing exists beyond our knowledge and this belief is, has been, and (apparently) will remain the greatest weakness of mankind. It's ironic that this superstition appears to have arisen from the ruins of babel.

What if each of us lives in a world that is unique with unique physical laws, history, and future? I'm not suggesting this is the actuality merely that it makes more sense than the absurd and inane theories flowing from every direction. Education merely leads people to a shared reality which is based on beliefs and the foundations which produced that reality. We experience surrealism when different realities come into conflict and must resolve. This would explain how we survived our childhoods and how we are each right. It would explain how we don't even seem to notice all the confusion. Injustice is shrugged off as inconsequential. The denial of the existence of others tends to lead to madness and the denial consciousness is a dead end. But it's obvious that few people are on the same page. Mebbe we're all reading from different books? God willing this won't be yet another new religion.