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lightofdarkness

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Bruce, I think you a bit off with the fairies on this. Which is fine, enjoy, but to make assertions such as a rock having "consciousness" is about as bad as saying the study of neurons in other life forms is 'stupid' (recalling a comment of Matt's).

You obviously seek 'instant' gratification and so have surrendered to the easy path, it is all too hard, so lets have everything being conscious - and all of the issues go away. Science is not like that - you question until you get a answer that is testable, repeatable, empirically demonstrated - and then you keep testing to prove it WRONG and in so doing maintain a degree of 'rightness'.

As for rendering someone unconscious, just cut their RAS areas and they will never regain consciousness, but the autonomous nervous system will keep going as long as it gets food.

I find it amazing that with the XOR work etc all you guys can do is wander off into 'alternative' perspectives for which there is no evidence... what I see is confusion between the figurative and the literal and IMHO that needs to be sorted out.

Chris.
 

lightofdarkness

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BTW Bruce - consciousness demands awareness of some 'past' moment to the current and the more sophisticated the consciousness the more 24/7 it is - IOW it needs to be able to 'link the dots'. In humans there is a mental state labelled as 'cretanism' where these individuals cannot 'link the dots' - it is associated with LOW metabolic rates. A rock has no metabolic rate - its decay etc is determined by external forces and it has no memory capabilities (crystals can be POTENTIAL memory systems but need us to organise that)
 
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bruce

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Chris,

Yes, well, your outlook I find equally limited: your own immediate gratification. Not at all surprising you don't perceive a rock as having consciousness, even though you've thoroughly analyzed hexagram 52. Your world seems to place the human species in the center, and the universe revolves around that. I find that extremely limiting in scope and lacking breadth of understanding.
 
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bruce

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"consciousness demands awareness of some 'past' moment to the current.."

What? A dream conscious state may have no awareness of past moment to the current, yet consciousness is busy at work.
 

lightofdarkness

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Bruce, IMHO you are clearly confusing the figurative with the real (as demonstrated in your comments re 52!)

In the dynamics of consciousness ours IS the centre. ANY other consciousness will manifest the SAME adaptations etc as ours and so be communicatable with ours. If not then their adaptations would be outside of ours and not identifiable/knowable.

IMHO your focus is way too 'expressions-oriented', you are not focusing on what is behind those expressions and so are mixing the figurative with the literal (or just not recognising the distinctions)

As to your comments on 'dream conscious state' - I put 'past' in quotes to emphasise there need be no conscious awareness but there IS the distinction of X from Y from Z in the dream.
THAT distinction reflects XOR dynamics and so a serial linkage of events etc and so a 'past' from 'present'. The dynamics can be in milliseconds but still 'past' from 'present'. IMHO you really should make the attempt to check out the physiological dynamics going on 'behind' consciousness/dreams etc.

Chris.
 

lightofdarkness

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If you want to cover the full spectrum of consciousness states, we can do so by making analogy to the hexagrams in their binary ordering from 000000 to 111111.

the yin realm WILL have 'issues' in differentiating self from context in that it gets its identity THROUGH the context. The yang realm WILL have issues in integrating with others since its focus is on asserting the context.

The 'mountain' state covers BONDING - the sharing of internal space with fantisised future or some past real or imagined.

This sharing, due to the BOND can be hard to differentiate A from B due to the bond nature, not to the 'reality' of the state itself.

the main focus here is INTERNAL and so the 'stillness' is in external observation BUT this analogy/metaphor is rooted in human categories - and so an analogy/metaphor to a mountain, not the literal mapping and so projection of the rock etc necessarily having 'internal' states.

The historical element, and so the PAST focus, is on the suffering that comes with life and the use of any BONDS in that suffering for developing a sense of quality control and so guiding future developments of bonding relationships. (and so such hexagrams as 53, or the loyalty pair of 62 and 56 etc etc)

This suffering focus is strong in such spiritual areas as Buddhism where the focus is on internal dynamics, external look of 'stillness'.
 

lightofdarkness

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BTW - to focus on the actions of the unconscious ---

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/beinghuman/dn8732.html

'Sleeping on it' best for complex decisions

Gaia Vince

Complex decisions are best left to your unconscious mind to work out, according to a new study, and over-thinking a problem could lead to expensive mistakes.

The research suggests the conscious mind should be trusted only with simple decisions, such as selecting a brand of oven glove. Sleeping on a big decision, such as buying a car or house, is more likely to produce a result people remain happy with than consciously weighing up the pros and cons of the problem, the researchers say.

Thinking hard about a complex decision that rests on multiple factors appears to bamboozle the conscious mind so that people only consider a subset of information, which they weight inappropriately, resulting in an unsatisfactory choice. In contrast, the unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the information and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with

Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and colleagues recruited 80 people for a series of lab-based and ?real-world?
tests. The participants were provided with information and asked to make decisions about simple and complex purchases, ranging from shampoos to furniture to cars.
 
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bruce

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Chris, let's not make this a 'read all this and then we can discuss it' scenario, ok?

Let me ask you this simple question:

If the human species never existed, nor any self-realizing species like it, would consciousness exist?

And a second question:

Do you consider the "unconscious mind" as a state of consciousness, or of no-consciousness?
 

lightofdarkness

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Bruce

(1) no idea. We do exist so such a question is meaningless since to answer it we use consciousness, to speculate if there would be without us is to use our own self-referencing to determine its non-existence...

(2) There are degrees of consciousness expressed in binary representations from 11111 to 00001. (I Put 000000 as the representation of POTENTIALS) Go past that and we enter the realm of potentials and of instinct/habits behaviour and so parallel, organic, holistic, immediate dynamics. Due to the immediacy there is no 'consciousness' - just stimulus/response. What our consciousness does is allow for mediation to 'refine' our instincts - and then we sleep on it and out pops an intuition that is found to be 'valid' ;-) (like martial arts - practice practice practice until it is all 'instinctive')

The realm of our language, and the IC to a point, is SERIAL and so DELAYED. Behind/beneath all of that is a realm of the parallel and immediate. IT is out of our conscious awareness but when it expresses itself it does so in 'instincts/habits' forms and so can be 'vague' or 'childlike' until trained either formally or through experiences.

If you review the XOR material, the hexagrams are representations of 'genetic' patterns of behaviour with local context eliciting the 'phenotype'. That elicitation includes methodology as a 'program', an ideal.

IOW the 'stimulus/response' dynamic is very sophisticated and yet still 'instincts/habits' focused and so out of consciousness. These instincts/habits include expressions of 'intent' but not of conscious intent, of learnt intent as a response to a stimulus - and so we can catch ourselves doing something 'strange' in some new context where our consciousness has never had the experience in that context but our genetic history has.

This even allows for multiple consciousness in the one brain, or more so different expressions of the one consciousness depending on the pushing of the context. The past experiences can be so extreme that the context elicits a pattern of consciousness 'at odds' with what one considers as the 'self'; extremes in differentiating elicit fragmentation and formation of 'own little worlds' sensitive to local context setting them off.

The reality is that the spectrum of consciousness allows for each point to develop its own nature depending on the context. Our universals, YANG oriented, collectives dont like that - too much 'shape shifting'.

See my comments on this re categorisation of personas:

http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/price.html

Chris.
 
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bruce

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"no idea. We do exist so such a question is meaningless since to answer it we use consciousness, to speculate if there would be without us is to use our own self-referencing to determine its non-existence..."

LOL! Why is it meaningless just because it doesn't fit into your limited perspective? You are alive, are self-referencing and therefore you exist by your own definition. So, be creative and answer the question, please.

I think the bottom line here is that, you can not see past humanism. That's cool. Just call it what it is.
 
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bruce

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Anyway, Chris, I believe that is why your ideas have difficulty finding its way into those who feel instinctively that there is consciousness which exceeds human, scientific proof of consciousness and existence.

Fairies, ghosts, bodhisattvas, patron saints, angels, rocks with consciousness ? they?re for those who don?t need many explanations. Naive, dumb, ignorant, whatever; they may know what you?ll never be able to prove or disprove.

Imo, there?s plenty of space for both points of view. There doesn't have to be a right and wrong.
 

martin

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Yes, plenty of space, but Chris seems quite comfortable in his self constructed prison.
He doesn't want to be free.
 

jerryd

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Why would he wish to stop his free advitersing here in Clarity...You all are really missing the whole point..
 
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bruce

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I like Chris. I imagine if we were just hanging out together, I'd take 3 aspirin and have a great time together.

Think it needs be said that, focus on the ideas rather than personalities, makes better mates.
 
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bruce

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Would like to clarify that last post.

Best friends can banter, completely disagreeing in ways. They can mock and chide, and it never offends either of them. That?s usually the ?feeling? I get from Chris? comments about fairies and such: a friendly dig. Same way, I?ll post a caricature as a little dig, but he wasn?t offended by it. He actually played along, as a friend would.

Maybe it?s none of my business and I should just shut up, but I think it darkens a forum when personal insults are really meant to hurt someone else. I also think it?s pretty obvious, the difference between the two.

Ok, now I?ll shut up.
 

jte

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"Yes, plenty of space, but Chris seems quite comfortable in his self constructed prison.
He doesn't want to be free."

Worth pointing out, though, that from Chris' perspective, that's us, too.

What's missing, I think, is personal experience. We haven't had the experience of reading all the scientific and quasi-/pseudo-scientific literature Chris has. *Maybe* if we had, we'd be drawing the same conclusions he is (*maybe*).

To be fair, Chris probably has not had some of the experiences we have had to lead us to our particular conclusions. (And Chris, please don't take that the wrong way, I think that makes you *typical* of humanity, rather than somehow deficient. You are obviously very bright, etc...)

Just thought this was worth mentioning since it helps provide a basis for respectfully disagreeing with each others' opinions.

- Jeff
 

lightofdarkness

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> Posted by Bruce (Bruce) on Friday, February 17, 2006 - 5:13 pm:
>
> "no idea. We do exist so such a question is meaningless since to
> answer it we use consciousness, to speculate if there would be without
> us is to use our own self-referencing to determine its
> non-existence..."
>
> LOL! Why is it meaningless just because it doesn't fit into your
> limited perspective? You are alive, are self-referencing and therefore
> you exist by your own definition. So, be creative and answer the
> question, please.

At the end I added ... to emphasise that following that path can lead to a black hole! It is 'idle speculation' and its expression is of no real interest to me. That said, what I CAN offer is the IDM template, or ICPlus metaphor, to aid in your speculations BUT then that template comes out of neurology and so defines all you could possibly speculate and would not cover any 'externally' derived methodologies - the core structures of ALL POSSIBLE methodologies, and so all possible meanings, are determined IN GENERAL at the level of 'blend, bond, bound, bind' - aka wholes, statics, parts, dynamics.

To use your tool of consciousness - imagination - will be limited by the bounds of the methodology of all neuron-dependent life forms so what you come up with will 'fit' within the bounds of that methodology OR if it is extreme enough will oscillate across the set of possible categories, never settling one - as we find in dealing with sensory paradox (http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/paradox.html )

What the template indicates is that all that is needed to get to 'consciousness' is a level of self-referencing at the organic level to a complexity where emergence occurs. The set of possible expressions of that complexity is mapped to the self-referencing of the differentiating/integrating dichotomy. So if not our species than some other that will be 'like' our species at the general level with local context eliciting sensory systems that best fit that context.

>
> I think the bottom line here is that, you can not see past humanism.

I don?t need to go past Neurology where that covers all neuron-dependent life forms. The IDM focus is on the source of meaning and as such is focused on the prime methodology in deriving, categorising, and communicating that meaning. There is no need for me to go beyond that BUT note that we can trace the *seed* of IDM and consciousness to the beginnings of the universe - http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/symmetry.html - or more our model of it ;-)

Chris.
 

lightofdarkness

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Martin - freedom is local. My focus is on the universals and so the determinism. The IC is a book about determinism applied to local conditions where one has the choice to accept the situation or assert one's own or move on.

Through IDM in general, and ICPlus in the IC context, we can gain finer details on the properties and methods of those universals. The prime dynamic is between HEAVEN and EARTH - we, as a mutation, have come into the middle of all of that. We can be reactive and get pushed around or be proactive (to whatever degree our technology allows us to be) and push back.

Chris.
 

lightofdarkness

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Bruce - re angels, ghosts etc see http://members.iinmetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/angels.html

You can get illusions from electrolyte imbalances and given genetic diversity there is nothing to stop those imbalances be inherited as 'normal' living.

Multiple sense of self are covered in:

"NeuroImage
Volume 20, Issue 4 , December 2003, Pages 2119-2125

Copyright ? 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Regular article

One brain, two selves

A. A. T. S. Reinders, , a, E. R. S. Nijenhuisb, A. M. J. Paansc, J. Korfa, A. T. M. Willemsenc and J. A. den Boera

a Department of Biological Psychiatry, Groningen University Hospital, The Netherlands
b Mental Health Care (Assen)/Cats-Polm Institute (Zeist), The Netherlands
c PET-center, Groningen University Hospital, The Netherlands

Received 12 May 2003; revised 6 July 2003; accepted 18 August 2003. ; Available online 14 November 2003.

Abstract
Having a sense of self is an explicit and high-level functional specialization of the human brain. The anatomical localization of self-awareness and the brain mechanisms involved in consciousness were investigated by functional neuroimaging different emotional mental states of core consciousness in patients with Multiple Personality Disorder (i.e., Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)). We demonstrate specific changes in localized brain activity consistent with their ability to generate at least two distinct mental states of self-awareness, each with its own access to autobiographical trauma-related memory. Our findings reveal the existence of different regional cerebral blood flow patterns for different senses of self. We present evidence for the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and the posterior associative cortices to have an integral role in conscious experience."

AND

"TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.7 No.10 October 2003


(A review)

In two minds: dual-process accounts of reasoning
Jonathan St. B.T. Evans
Centre for Thinking and Language, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, PL4 8AA, UK

Researchers in thinking and reasoning have proposed recently that there are two distinct cognitive systems underlying reasoning. System 1 is old in evolutionary terms and shared with other animals: it comprises a set
of autonomous subsystems that include both innate
input modules and domain-specific knowledge acquired by a domain-general learning mechanism.

System 2 is evolutionarily recent and distinctively human: it permits
abstract reasoning and hypothetical thinking, but is constrained by working memory capacity and correlated with measures of general intelligence. These theories essentially posit two minds in one brain with a range of experimental psychological evidence showing
that the two systems compete for control of our inferences and actions."

BUT ALSO NOTE (in the context of each element in a dichotomy 'oscillating' and the whole dichotomy links-up):

"International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2003) 7-18

WHEN TWO COUPLED PENDULUMS EQUAL ONE: A SYNCHRONIZATION MACHINE

H. J. T. SMITH
Department of Physics, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

JAMES A. BLACKBURN
Department of Physics and Computing, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

GREGORY L. BAKER
Division of Mathematics and Science, Bryn Athyn College of the New Church, Bryn Athyn, PA 19009, USA
We show that two coupled pendulums that are coupled and can synchronize, are mathematically equivalent to one "horizontal" parametrically driven pendulum. We have fabricated a horizontal pendulum and present data from this horizontal pendulum which we believe to be the first physical realization of such a mechanical "synchronization machine." A description of intermittent synchronization that can occur when two coupled pendulums are in a chaotic state is given in terms of the data from the horizontal pendulum. We discuss the relationship between the modes of the horizontal pendulum and the corresponding synchronization of the two coupled pendulums. Finally, we show that when a horizontal pendulum is driven by any random source, not necessarily chaotic, intermittent synchronization can occur.


Keywords: Pendulum; synchronization; chaos."

(IDM - Hemisphere interactions, recursion scales)

The ASYMMETRIC nature of the dichotomy of differentiate/integrate introduces us to a focus on the local vs the general and that dichotomy being 'hard coded' into our brains. With that in mind then consider:

"Brain Res Brain Res Rev 2002 Jun;39(1):1-28


The neurophysics of consciousness.

John ER.

Brain Research Laboratories, NYU School of Medicine, 550 First Avenue, New York 10016, USA. roy@br14.med.nyu.edu

Consciousness combines information about attributes of the present multimodal sensory environment with relevant elements of the past. Information from each modality is continuously fractionated into distinct features, processed locally by different brain regions relatively specialized for extracting these disparate components and globally by interactions among these regions. Information is represented by levels of synchronization within neuronal populations and of coherence among multiple brain regions that deviate from random fluctuations. Significant deviations constitute local and global negative entropy, or information. Local field potentials reflect the degree of synchronization among the neurons of the local ensembles. Large-scale integration, or 'binding', is proposed to involve oscillations of local field potentials that play an important role in facilitating synchronization and coherence, assessed by neuronal coincidence detectors, and parsed into perceptual frames by cortico-thalamo-cortical loops. The most probable baseline levels of local synchrony, coherent interactions among brain regions, and frame durations have been quantitatively described in large studies of their age-appropriate normative distributions and are considered as an approximation to a conscious 'ground state'. The level of consciousness during anesthesia can be accurately predicted by the magnitude and direction of reversible multivariate deviations from this ground state. An invariant set of changes takes place during anesthesia, independent of the particular anesthetic agent. Evidence from a variety of neuroscience areas supporting these propositions, together with the invariant reversible electrophysiological changes observed with loss and return of consciousness, are used to provide a foundation for this theory of consciousness. This paper illustrates the increasingly recognized need to consider global as well as local processes in the search for better explanations of how the brain accomplishes the transformation from synchronous and distributed neuronal discharges to seamless global subjective awareness."

Out-of-Body experiences are linked to brain anomolies:

"Nature, 2002 Sep 19;419(6904):269-270

Neuropsychology: Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions.

Blanke O, Ortigue S, Landis T, Seeck M.

'Out-of-body' experiences (OBEs) are curious, usually brief sensations in which a person's consciousness seems to become detached from the body and take up a remote viewing position. Here we describe the repeated induction of this experience by focal electrical stimulation of the brain's right angular gyrus in a patient who was undergoing evaluation for epilepsy treatment. Stimulation at this site also elicited illusory transformations of the patient's arm and legs (complex somatosensory responses) and whole-body displacements (vestibular responses), indicating that out-of-body experiences may reflect a failure by the brain to integrate complex somatosensory and vestibular information."

There is no need to maintain 'alternative' perspectives given the data coming out of neurosciences - and this is ongoing work.

Chris
 
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bruce

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Jeff (and Chris),

Quoting Jeff,

"What's missing, I think, is personal experience. We haven't had the experience of reading all the scientific and quasi-/pseudo-scientific literature Chris has. *Maybe* if we had, we'd be drawing the same conclusions he is (*maybe*).

To be fair, Chris probably has not had some of the experiences we have had to lead us to our particular conclusions."

I thought this for awhile too. I still think it's about personal aptitudes and interests. People are who they are and are drawn toward their nature through what interests them innately. We get to know ourselves better by becoming closer with our deepest curiosities.

With Chris, that appears to be humanistic science, with its own filters to extract meaning which satisfies his own curiosity. Each of us has our own set of curiosities, and we move most eagerly toward possibilities which satisfy them.

Line 1 of both hexagrams 11 and 12 contain this line: Each according to his kind.

Line 1 is the foundation of our coming and going, illustrated in these hexagrams, and it appears entirely subjective.
 

martin

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"Best friends can banter, completely disagreeing in ways. They can mock and chide, and it never offends either of them. That?s usually the ?feeling? I get from Chris? comments about fairies and such: a friendly dig."

I get the same feeling from Chris, Bruce. It's like a game of chess between friends. Sharp play sometimes but no offense intended and I think we both know that.
One has to be careful with written words though. For instance, when I read back now what I wrote yesterday about Chris and his "prison" it sounds a bit harsh. Perhaps I should have added a smiley?
Fortunately Chris took it for what it was, I only won his queen. Of course Chris will deny it but that is also part of the game.
biggrin.gif
 
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bruce

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PS: It appears to be the nature of an 'artist' to embrace this sort of mystical uncertainty, but I guess the 'scientist' can allow no such illusive qualities in his equations. The alchemist can use both, however.
 
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bruce

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Martin, I hear you, and I have the same problem sometimes: cringing at something I wrote which sounds ... well, 'cringable'. Too direct for public consumption, sometimes.
 

martin

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"Out-of-Body experiences are linked to brain anomolies"

Yes and no. There is a hidden assumption here and that is that we are in fact "in" this body or that we are this body. We assume that that is how things really are. So when something happens to the brain and we suddenly experience our body and our relationship to it in a different way we conclude that what we experience must be an illusion.

I think we can only say that we have learned to experience "I am in the body" or "I am the body" in our childhood. There is no garantuee that this is "how things really are".
What we perceive as objective reality is for the most part a construct, not a given. Current psychology acknowledges that, but we often don't realize how far this goes.
 

kevin

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I used to chuckle when folk talked of Astral Plain Travel ? Until I started having experiences of going to places in my sleep?

I used to quietly slip out of the room, to do something more useful, if someone began to talk of meeting Guardians and spirits. Until one day I saw some figure, standing behind the person I was talking to. Later regularly meeting and talking to these and other entities.

Do I Travel on the Astral Plain? ? I dunno, I go somewhere and its informative and interesting.

Do I dialogue with spirits and guides? ? I dunno but the conversations are stimulating and teach me much.

Perhaps I am just in dialogue with my deep inner psyche? Weeell, I don?t think so ? because the things I sometimes see come to happen in the real world. Also I sometimes find the person pre-figured in my spirit discussions is aware of me and when we meet, in the concrete world, they were expecting me.

Hey, I?ll call these anomalies if that makes folk happy. But no amount of cognitive argument will persuade me that when I get, out of the bath I am not really wet.

I love anomalies! I wish everyone would try having an anomaly ? just once.

--Kevin
 

jte

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Yes, Bruce, I think what you say about tendencies/interests makes sense. So some folks might not get into situations where they have these experiences, might not seek them out or value them if/when they do have them.

So, for example, if they experience some of the things that Kevin describes, instead of saying "wow, what was that" and exploring further, they assume it must be a hallucination or some other byproduct of minor brain malfunction and leave it at that (or run to a doctor for help).

If instead people start trying to draw alternative conclusions, then (I think that pretty quickly) they start getting at ideas/explanations that go beyond what can be easily measured by (current) scientific tools, like some of the idea Martin alludes to. And so when scientists study them, the scientists (understandably) start reaching prosaic scientific conclusions, as in some of the articles Chris referenced.

My personal view is as follows:

An experience, of whatever kind, will of necessity have a corresponding set of neural activations within the brain (a "brain state"). So, prosaic experiences like seeing a tree, hearing music, or being frustrated about politics all have corresponding brain states, as do less ordinary experiences, like "astral travel", etc.

With science, I think it becomes easy (and in the scientific paradigm, perhaps even *necessary* if one is to be *scientifically* responsible) to discount unusual experiences as simply aberrant brain states.

Just because trees and music have associated brain states doesn't suggest to anyone (aside from science fiction writers) that they might not exist. With more extraordinary spiritual/psychic experiences, the external phenomena (if any) is less visible and/or predictable and so the cause is less clear. In these cases, responsible scientists are more or less forced (by the principle of Occamism ? they must accept the simplest explanation) to posit that the *cause* is simply the brain state, rather than anything external. This is because they don?t have strong empirical evidence regarding an external cause.

It?s important to remember though, that the above is really not proof in any strong, scientific sense. It?s an absence of evidence of external causes. The fact that experiences of trees and music have associated brain states *doesn?t* prove that trees and music exist only in the brain (and are not real). The same thing holds for spiritual, ?psychic?, and other unusual experiences. The fact that there is an associated brain state does *not* mean there is no external cause or that the experience itself is only caused by brain malfunction.

Furthermore, just like prosaic trees and music cause brain states when we experience them, other less easy-to-study external (or perhaps physiological) causes *may* be behind some psychic or spiritual experiences.

In sum, it?s simply the difficulty with identifying visible, predictable, (and therefore scientifically verifiable) causes that leads scientists to their usual conclusion. As technology improves, that could all change ? it?s possible scientists might one day be *proving* the validity of some of the things that they discount today.

My two cents,

- Jeff
 

martin

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I agree, Jeff. I think it all comes down to what you said earlier about differences in personal experience. Scientists who are aware of more subtle realities in their own experience (and of course some are) will probably be more careful. They will not try to explain them away as merely brainstates so easily.

For me there is no doubt that nonphysical beings (guides, angels, and so on) indeed exist in an objective sense, independent of my "states". I drank tea with them many times, so to speak.
happy.gif
The evidence is overwhelming.

As a philosophical or meditative exercise I can try to doubt their existence, but then I can also try to doubt the existence of this table, this house, the trees outside and so on.
In the end it's all emptiness, of course. Yet life must go on, life wants to go on and what is life? Sense data!
The angel to my left is as much sense data for me as the dog to my right. The only difference is perhaps that the angel is more subtle and also lighter than the dog (who happens to be brown). But when I look inside the dog and around him there is really not so much difference. The dog is also angelic.
In any case, the angel and the dog both exist and so do I. I'm not so sure, though, about mr scientist behind us.
He just opened his mouth and told me in a loud voice that there is no angel to my left, that the dog has no wings and that I'm therefore completely .. nuts!
I cannot see mr scientist, he is behind my back, so he might very well be just one of my brainstates. I hope so.
happy.gif
 
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bruce

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What's Your IQ?
by Tamim Ansary

Although the term "IQ" is no longer much in vogue with IQ experts, you still hear it often enough on the street. Ask 20 people what it means, and most of them will likely say "intelligence." Press for a longer definition and you might hear, "It's your intelligence score."

That concept--intelligence score--is one that's worth deconstructing.

What's in a phrase?
In our quest for the meaning of IQ, let's leave aside the multiple-intelligences argument for now. That's the recent theory that says there are eight to ten--and maybe more--types of intelligence. And it makes the term "smart" even more ambiguous.

If the concept of "smart" is hard to nail down, "smarter" at least makes intuitive sense. No matter how you define intelligence, some people surely have more of it than others.

And if "smarter" makes sense, then it must be possible, at least theoretically, to measure "exactly how much smarter."

But when you start talking about "exactly how much smarter," you rely, I think, on a certain underlying image of intelligence and intelligence testing.

Is the brain like a bottle?
In this image, the brain is a container, and intelligence is a substance in it. An intelligence test, therefore, is like a dipstick. Shove it into the brain, pull it out, and what registers on the measuring stick is the amount of "smarts" in that brain.

But this image isn't accurate, is it? Interesting as poetry, maybe, but not really descriptive of what's happening.

After all, intelligence clearly isn't in the brain, it is the brain. It's less like the oil in the engine and more like the efficiency of the engine as a whole. Every aspect of the engine affects its efficiency, from how finely milled the surfaces are to the grade of oil in the block to the design of the engine.

So how can such a many-sided totality be measured?

Part II: Why it's tricky to measure intelligence
Suppose we limit our discussion to just one kind of intelligence. In fact, let's consider only logical-mathematical intelligence, the kind most of us are thinking of when we say, "What a brainiac!"

Measuring that kind of intelligence would seem pretty cut-and-dried.

You could just compile a series of problems, arranged in order of increasing difficulty, right? Then you'd have people solve as many as they could. The number of problems each person solved would measure how intelligent he or she is. You could represent intelligence as a number, then, and compare two people precisely.

Want to Learn More?
What exactly is intelligence, anyway? Is there more than one type? And what made Albert a regular Einstein?

There are a couple of problems with this, however. You'd have to devise problems that don't depend on any prior knowledge--otherwise you'd just be measuring how much math different people have studied. That could be tough to pull off. And to really make it work you'd have to calibrate "increasing difficulty" with precision. Is it really possible to set up a problem that is exactly one point "harder" than another? And then one that is two points harder? And so on?

This is starting to sound tricky.

Even if you manage all that, you run into another difficulty. If two people of identical intelligence tackle the same problem, is it conceivable that one will solve it and one won't?

Of course it's conceivable. It's even likely.

What does it mean to say that my IQ is 117 and yours is only 113? (Oh, all right--yours is 117 and mine is only 113.) What does it mean to say that one person is four points smarter than another?

Who came up with this notion of measuring intelligence, anyway?
 

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