What is Space?

So what's really going on?

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Nick_A
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Re: What is Space?

Post by Nick_A »

For her part, Simone Weil, in one of her last essays, wrote:

"Toujours le même infiniment petit, qui est infiniment plus que tout."

[Always the same infinitely small, which is infinitely more than all.]


How can the infinitely small be infinitely more than all with all it space?
Belinda
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Re: What is Space?

Post by Belinda »

Nick_A wrote: Thu Oct 26, 2017 5:27 am
For her part, Simone Weil, in one of her last essays, wrote:

"Toujours le même infiniment petit, qui est infiniment plus que tout."

[Always the same infinitely small, which is infinitely more than all.]


How can the infinitely small be infinitely more than all with all it space?
So size matters?
Justintruth
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Re: What is Space?

Post by Justintruth »

Dontaskme wrote: Tue Sep 12, 2017 12:54 pm Differences are purely conceptual, they have no existential reality in and of themselves. Differences are existential within the dream of separation, illusions appearing real as the dream is real, as the dreamer is real..
This is just wrong. Again, take a Japanese flag and a Swedish flag and lay them side by side. Now look at them. There is a difference. And the difference is real in the sense that if I give each a name and then show you one or the other you can say which you are seeing and if I do the same to a room full of people i will get virtually 100% agreement. Also, if I put one of those flags in the top drawer of my dresser and the other in the bottom and you ask for one or the other I know what drawer to go get it in.

You see the nature of what we experience is not arbitrary. It has remarkable similarities (symmetry, in the physical sense). If you put the Swedish flag in the top drawer, close it, and then re-open it then you would be very surprised, actually, no matter how much you say otherwise, to find a Japanese flag. And if you could find that happening over and over you could get a Nobel in science for we think that it can't happen given the nature of the material of the flags and the drawers and the space that we have studied over a very long history.

Now if you call that an unreal distinction then it says nothing about the distinction only about your words. A rose by any other name.... And if you refuse to acknowledge that kind of distinction you will be crippled. Just try living in a way that ignores those distinctions. You won't be able to do anything.

So why do you say "...have no existential reality...", "Differences are existential within the dream of separation", "illusions appearing real as the dream is real, as the dreamer is real"?

Let me outline what is happening:

There is an epistemic construction that occurs. Experiencing finds itself experiencing experiencing. In the beginning there is just that. We have remarkable ability to read faces and expressions. Look at a very young infant. Pass your hand before his face and you will see that his eyes do not track your hand. Or look out at a single star surrounded by black at night. Is the star something there in the empty space? Not from an experiential phenomenal point of view in a single state. If you have gained control over your brains ontological functions you can even stare at that star and try to see it first as a white hole in a black presence or as a white presents on a absent background (a star in space - that is why we think of space as the nothing in which the stars are) or you can loose yourself in the experiencing and the white and the black become the character of experiencing experiencing experiencing.

There is only experiencing experiencing experiencing then and it has character. When one is immersed in experiencing experiencing experiencing there is not even someone experiencing something. There is only the Oneness of experiencing. We use that term Oneness to indicate the collapsing of the subject-object distinction. It is not something just "thought" in the narrow sense of the word, rather it is a state one can be in. That "Oneness" we capitalize when we spell it.

And it is self validating. In other words one sees the truth, the truth that has been missed up until the moment of Satori. One may hear even a voice then, the so called Vox Dei, "Saul, Saul, why doest thou persecute me?" or some other sentence. Language itself takes place.

And one feels very good, that one has finally awoken, like from a dream.

Why? Within the human being is the desire for being. (It seems to me to be primarily mammalian) We are programmed to want being. And what is it of what we want that we want to be? Well it is not exactly "ourselves" but it is related to us. Basically we want to remain conscious but even that is wrong for consciousness is but one pole that dies in the experiencing. Conscious is deeply related to nothing and that is why we have trouble satisfying our urge to be through identification with it. Sartre was very right to identify nothingness as being "of consciousness" . Now that is a gross oversimplification but basically the experience that is the Oneness relieves all anxiety about being. Even that existential one. Precisely that existential one. One ceases the nihilation and experiences being as it appears phenomenally. It is the phenomenology of Being. Sartre was to disregard it - his conclusion was that being was trans phenomenal. Ok, in a sense. But in another sense no. It it can do this because consciousness cannot be except that it is. Experiencing is the pure plenum of being. Descartes saw the impossibility of doubt. And that certainty is at the heart of the Absolute. It is why it is Absolute.

But what is not seen is how much our sexual natures infect this distinction. The chakras of the East culminate in this ultimate experience in the total integration of the Kundalini across the chakras and we experience a kind of Ecstasy that is related at a lower chakra to the love that encourages reproduction and the protection of our offspring. Even the cuteness of a puppy is activation of this system.

We have a history of not separating these experiences from objectivity - at least in intellectual circles, I suspect the politicians had no trouble throughout most of history. Prior to the Copernican revolution the scientific worldview did not exist separately from experiencing experiencing experiencing and there was, and still is in both sacred (religious) and secular (atheistic) fundamentalist misinterpretation of the issue. Many both theistic and atheistic people regard religious belief as a kind of scientific worldview and there is a plethora of examples about them arguing about the "existence" or "not existence" of "God" with complete misunderstanding of the issue on all sides including the moderators. Awareness of the mystical apprehension of experiencing experiencing experiencing in ecstasy is completely absent.

And when one achieves that standpoint of Awareness, from that vantage point one looks (usually back) upon what was before and sees the error of it. The "illusion" that was when one was caught up in the differentiation.

Further analysis, can even track the introduction of Nothingness into the plenum of being and we can see how our very perceptions, as opposed to just our conceptions are infected by this "error". The "error of things" if you want to call it that. Or the "illusion of things". Maya, Original sin, the forgetfulness of being.

But that is not all that is to be said. Basically that phenomenological approach misses the fact that Husserl's phenomenological epoche is a temporary setting aside of the issue of things. One simply decides not to consider it and to experience what the residual is. But we can then reapply it. By Sartre things are turned around and phenomenology is no longer seen as a technique or possibility but has itself become somewhat objectified. Look at the first line of the Pursuit of Being, the intro to Being and Nothingness. The epoche is no longer to be found.

It turns out that that re-application can re-differentiate being and we can, and do, re-experience ourselves as experience-ers experiencing the experienced. And that experiencing is based on the introduction of nothingness into being and our saying "No. It is not just my seeing it. In fact, it is independent of my experiencing. My experiencing is only how I find out about it."

Now that is a genuine intellectual possibility as much as is the Oneness. When this is done, oh one philosopher talked about splitting the chicken at the joints, and what it means is that the introduction of nothingness within our experience is not completely arbitrary. If you take the vase/profile illusion for example you can either have being assigned to the faces and there is a gap, a nothingness, introduced between them or you can see a vase and there is nothing around it. Don't make the mistake of thinking that that is how we think of it. I am talking about the experience one can have of either state. One can, it is true, by trying to think of it or see it the other way, switch it but the event of seeing it that way is a positive state that one can either be in or not and one can actually think of it as just a drawing or something while seeing it as a vase.

You see you can't say that the vase or the profile is a Japanese flag - nor is it a Swedish flag. No, rather there are certain ways of seeing that are not choose-able and other choices that are present. Try it. Don't just think of it. Try to sit with the vase profile illusion before you and switch back and forth from profile to vase. Now try to see it, don't just think about doing actually try it, try to see that illusion as a Swedish flag and see how far you get. There is something about "it" that determines our experiencing. We cannot decide the nature of our experiencing and further the nature that we do experience seems to be independent *in a sense* to the fact that we are experiencing it. Pass the illusion to a distant cousin or a stranger. They will have the same problem. Now you can say that is all the "illusion" or the "dream" and that they are all wrong but that is wrong because it doesn't capture the fact of it and describe it. It just misses the point.

It has to do with the constancy of them and the usual meaning of "dream" and "illusion".

When one says that it is a "dream" one implies that there is also the waking state. The nothingness based objectification is said to be the dream state and when one wakes one is in the waking state of true awareness. But there is something very different from an actual dream, like when you go to sleep, and when the word is used here. If I found that I dreamed last night that I was being attacked by someone and then I woke up, then I would realize that the dream had not reality. And I could ignore it. If however, I place my socks in my drawer that night and I wake up the next day, I can look into the drawer and my socks are still there. In that sense my socks and drawer are part of the reality I wake up to and are not a dream. In the same way an "illusion" implies a "lusion" if you will pardon my locution, a lucid state of knowing the magicians trick and catching him doing it. It implies another state that is what really is and stands opposed to what isn't. The trick is to get someone to believe one thing instead of the reality. Many atheists believe that the belief in God is just such an illusion. But the problem is that the emergence to and from mystical awareness and, let's call it scientific objectivity, (it's not but let's call it that for now) , is characterized by a return to the same state. The drawer is there in the morning.

OK, like Popper I will agree it might not be tomorrow, but only if you will give me how consistent it is there and has been for thousands of years of recorded human experience.

Imagine a dream that you have. A dream that certain things are happening but this dream occurs each and every night and is of the same things each night. Imagine a dream of "another reality". Now I am asking you to do that so that you see how the term dream, or illusion function. You cannot say of the reality of my sock drawer, or my car keys, that they are an illusion or a dream because I can find and show you them in the morning and you will not be able to expose the trick.

So both of these characterizations, "illusion" and "dream" are ill-used locutions.

So what this is the relationship? Well it comes down to seeing that the when a scientist says that for example we are on a planet orbiting a star once every year, that 1) he is referring to something about what he is experiencing. 2) He does not believe that it is just some of his experiencing - rather he believes it "really" is and that those "things" cause our experiencing through neurology. He sees experiencing as merely and unavoidable epistemic necessity and he will point out that is why he does experiments but he will not admit that the nature of the universe is just experiencing as he can describe milliseconds after the big bang when there was no consciousness. (Please spare me the measurement problem. I can resolve that but don't want to make it more complex here)

See, one must genuflect with care to modern physics. I am aware of the relativity of time, the indeterminacy etc of quantum mechanics etc. Modern physics is neither an objective nor material science in the naive sense. Still its claims (even the one that says that time is relative for example) are claims about the nature of experiencing, and there is a further claim that the nature of our experiencing is intentional and that our senses are used to "find out" about what is "really there" after the fact of it presence.

In other words, for example, the back of the moon right now may be presumed to have some rock some where. That rock does not depend on the existence of sentient creatures at all. It is there in its own right. Its being is "in-itself" which means that if I were to exterminate all conscious life there would still be a universe.

You cannot, nor should you dismiss this worldview as an illusion, or a dream, for as I have said it is distinct both from the experience we have of normal dreams and of the illusions created perhaps by a stage magician. And it capture reality that cannot be reduced to mystical awareness but rather are the product of examination by means of sensation.

Nor can you call it a mistake. A mistake might be that there are two moons of the same size orbiting the earth right now but not that there is only one.

These two views are not contradictory. Rather they are different ontological states. They do not disagree as much as like they are like skew lines, they do not speak of the same. In Mystical experience of the One (or even the experience of El Capitan in Yosemite valley, or a beach or something) we are experiencing a kind of meaning of, and start to be, experiencing experiencing experiencing. In science, on the other hand, we introduce nothingness into the plenum of that being and realize that *what* we are experiencing, by its nature, accidentally, just happens to be, a world of things, and perhaps right now I am sitting looking out at this fantastic ocean which is really made of water and contains minerals etc and has at this moment a wave right there of very specific dimensions and shape.

No, the thinks of the world are not an illusion, they are real aspects of the accidental nature of *what* we are experiencing and are not purely phenomenal, but rather, are the basis for our consciousness. Fire a gun into the head of a mystic at the moment he is in ecstasy and you will end his ecstatic experiencing. It is a fact based on empirical evidence. It is related to anesthesiology and what people report who are knocked unconscious. Likewise the presence of this natural world cannot be ascribed to itself, for it is incapable of being derived from itself. Rather it is the fact of existence, contingent being, which is not either consciousness, nor is it what is, but rather is "that what is is" that is responsible.

We are, yes. But we are creatures not the creator, and we are "thrown" into a world in which all of these things around us are there and can be used to ensure we are able to experience.

There are twin dangers. One that Mysticism and its intellectual consequences are ignored (here the Mystical states are considered "illusory" and the objective one's real) and the other where the experience, the careful deliberate looking through experiment and the discovery of these patterns in our sensory experience that are not just patterns in experience but which drive via causal relationships, un-foundable except through the fact that they "just are", but "present" nonetheless and real, and of our awake world not of our dreams, is ignored and called an illusion, or a dream.

You make that second mistake.

The fact is that both ways of being are intellectual insight. The first allows intellectual insight into the eternal nature of being. The fact "that it is" is experienced as it is. The second, contingent awareness of the nature of the physical systems and causal structures of "what is". Both are true. Neither contradicts the other for the fact that something is can in now way contradict a statement about what it is anymore that any statement about what is can contradict a statement about the fact that it is. Unfortunately you have Quine's mistake and the philosophical worlds suspicion of metaphysics and its genuflection to science which, as Heidegger said "...does not think".

That desire is so linked to these is mostly not understood in our culture, and the ultimate fate of the criticisms of nihilism and boredom, the mocking that can occur will be decided long after we are dead. But your talking about illusion and dream in this context is incorrect in my opinion.
Belinda
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Re: What is Space?

Post by Belinda »

Justintruth, your essay was long and I need to label ideas more briefly than that. If I understand you are saying that both the perception from eternity and the perception from duration are modes of the one substance, nature/reality. And that neither mode is cause of the other but that both modes are equal in status of being.

And also that you objected to DontAskMe's idea that the perception form eternity is better than the perception from duration.

If so, I agree with you on both counts.
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Re: What is Space?

Post by attofishpi »

Dontaskme wrote: Sun Aug 27, 2017 5:12 pm What is Space?

:?:

Any ideas?
Sin waves at pace.
S_PACE
Justintruth
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Re: What is Space?

Post by Justintruth »

Belinda wrote: Sat Jun 09, 2018 7:44 am Justintruth, your essay was long and I need to label ideas more briefly than that. If I understand you are saying that both the perception from eternity and the perception from duration are modes of the one substance, nature/reality. And that neither mode is cause of the other but that both modes are equal in status of being.

And also that you objected to DontAskMe's idea that the perception form eternity is better than the perception from duration.

If so, I agree with you on both counts.
What I object to is saying that the natural (by that I mean relating to “what”) differences in experiencing are not real but rather are “illusion” or a “dream”. That idea, that the natural differences and identity are not real, comes from a misinterpretation of ontology (by that I mean relating to “that”). It’s basically a kind of reverse fundamentalism.

That is as short as I can say it. The length was to say why I think that.

Here is Derrida in space. Related and you might find him interesting on the subject of place which itself is related to space:

“What strikes me when the question you raise is centered around the question of place is a certain type of deconstructive thinking, at least the kind that has interested me personally more and more for some time now: that is, precisely, the question and the enigma of event as that which takes place [qui a lieu], the question of the enigma of place. And here we have to proceed very, very slowly and very, very cautiously when we ask ourselves what we really mean by place. Thinking about the question of place is a very difficult thing-as is thinking about event as something which takes place. It's finally a question of the topikos in the rhetorical sense, as a localizing of what comes to pass in the sense of event, of Ereignes. My reference to Heidegger is often a reference to those places in Heidegger’s thought where the question of place is very alive and very mysterious too. All this means that the question of place is absolutely essential, but all the more difficult to circumscribe and to isolate.”

It’s interesting that we speak of an event as something that “takes place” whiteout ever understanding what we mean by either “taking” or “place.

In my opinion this is an aspect of our ontological instinctive knowledge, a product of evolution which “means”.

I think I can prove that our consciousness cannot be just a part of our brain if by brain we mean a collection of particles behaving solely as defined by contemporary physics.

But I am already too long. Enjoy yourself.
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Re: What is Space?

Post by Belinda »

JustInTruth wrote:
I think I can prove that our consciousness cannot be just a part of our brain if by brain we mean a collection of particles behaving solely as defined by contemporary physics.
"---- if by brain we mean a collection of particles behaving solely as defined by contemporary physics" is an unfortunate connotation of 'brain' in this context of defining something which can be perceived according to Cartesian coordinates and also according to consciousness. Better to call it brain/mind, which it is. Our usual comprehension of brain/mind is comparable to our comprehension of the vase/profile or the duck/rabbit.

However I guess you will need to produce a variable of the subatomic physics sort if you aim to prove that consciousness is brain and brain is consciousness.
Justintruth
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Re: What is Space?

Post by Justintruth »

Belinda wrote: Mon Jun 11, 2018 8:12 am JustInTruth wrote:
I think I can prove that our consciousness cannot be just a part of our brain if by brain we mean a collection of particles behaving solely as defined by contemporary physics.
"---- if by brain we mean a collection of particles behaving solely as defined by contemporary physics" is an unfortunate connotation of 'brain' in this context of defining something which can be perceived according to Cartesian coordinates and also according to consciousness. Better to call it brain/mind, which it is. Our usual comprehension of brain/mind is comparable to our comprehension of the vase/profile or the duck/rabbit.

However I guess you will need to produce a variable of the subatomic physics sort if you aim to prove that consciousness is brain and brain is consciousness.
You cannot ever prove that the brain is consciousness. To see this consider the classical theory of gravity.

Is gravity "just" the particle that causes it? If by "the particle that causes it" we mean all of the properties of inertia, electric, etc, then no. An additional posit is needed because it is conceivable to have a zombie proton for example that does not exert gravity, or to have ghost gravity - a case where gravity exists without a particle of any kind.

The facts are we find no ghost gravity, nor zombie particles. This too, cannot be proven. But one repeatable (repeatability is at the heart of objective laws) counter example can disprove it and we experiment to find these "disproving" "counterexample" events. If you find a good one you can get a Nobel. The "fact" in, "the fact is...", must be established by experiment and cannot be derived like a mathematical proof. It is in a sense not proved at all, but rather discovered. We say a scientific theory is proven by experiment but that is not true. (Popper.) But after a while of over and over again the same thing we accept the theory as the truth without proof but now with plenty of evidence and no disproof.

So we have a choice. We can modify the notion of a particle so that it has the property of exerting a gravitational force or we can say that gravitational fields are independent entities that just happen to center around the particle.

We usually take the former, but it is a choice and cannot be proved. There is an "explanatory gap" between the gravitational effect of a proton, for example, and its inertial properties of a proton. It is overcome by the law of gravitation.

Same happens with consciousness. If you assume there are no ghosts or zombies, there is no way to derive from the current physics which assemblies will become conscious.

We do know something about it and anesthesiologists can stop it from occurring and start it in our brains but their knowledge is not sufficient to specify in a general way what assemblies will be conscious and what the content of their experiencing will be.

How many primary colors can be created?, for example is a question we can't answer.

No wonder of it. There are other such gaps. The "existence" of any of the laws is not explained, nor are the initial conditions.

Mystery is inevitable and how it occurs in us, how we experience the "just" in the phrase "It's just..." to a larger extent than most people realize, determines our success.

If we want to use the word "brain" we must define it. The problem is what arbitrary assemblies of matter are brains? What specifically about the arrangement causes consciousness?

In classical gravity it was the inertial mass that caused gravity and there was a relation between inertial mass and gravitational force specified that allowed one to know that gravity will be produced and what its properties would be given the inertial properties. That relation is the law of gravity.

We don't have that relation with consciousness yet but we know some things about it.

Now consciousness is a novel property requiring novel experimental technique. It is unlike any property we have yet posited for material systems.

But the idea has been around since the first caveman ducked a chucked rock. Why? because he knew what would happen to his consciousness if the rock hit his head. He could not have known that from current physical law at all.

This is why programs like Dan Dennet's will, like those of Lamark, fail and why the ideas of David Chalmers, like Darwin's will survive.
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Re: What is Space?

Post by Belinda »

Justintruth wrote:
If we want to use the word "brain" we must define it. The problem is what arbitrary assemblies of matter are brains? What specifically about the arrangement causes consciousness?
Brain is an organ made of specialised nerve tissue. Brain does not cause mind and mind does not cause brain. Mind and brain are the same inspected subjectively and objectively. There are correlations between the subjective and the objective not least correlations that are therapeutically useful in cases of brain injury such as stroke , and mental illness.
Justintruth
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Re: What is Space?

Post by Justintruth »

Belinda wrote: Thu Jun 14, 2018 8:06 am Brain is an organ made of specialised nerve tissue.
Ok. You mean an organic brain. But there may be other devices which don't have nerve tissue with which consciousness is associated. How do you know that all *possible* devices that experience have nerve tissue? If you want to reserve the word "brain" for an organ of specialized nerve tissue what do you want to call the set of possible devices with which consciousness is associated?
Brain does not cause mind and mind does not cause brain.
Ok, brain does not cause mind, then what do you make of an anesthesiologist causing consciousness to cease by putting a chemical into the brain slightly disrupting its function. Also, why do you think the sensory nerve pathways (e.g. optical nerve) lead to the brain and if severed interrupts sensory experiencing? What do you think happens to a mind in the case that the brain is destroyed by a bullet?

I think it is fairly clear that minds don't create brains in some sense, but we do have the notion that being is existence, meaning that being itself is personal. If that is the case, and if it is somehow not accidental but essential - not possibly otherwise - a function of the meaning of the term, then a mind created everything. Not saying I accept that but you have to parse it somehow. Given the intellectual content of ontology, how do you exclude the possibility that being itself, is not personal?

Also, what happens when you have a baby deliberately? Doesn't the act of sex cause a consciousness and isn't that act undertaken by a mind? What if we can create artificial consciousness? Would that also not be a mind creating a brain? Or would you rather say a brain creating another brain?
Mind and brain are the same inspected subjectively and objectively. There are correlations between the subjective and the objective not least correlations that are therapeutically useful in cases of brain injury such as stroke , and mental illness.
When you say "are the same" what exactly do you mean? The same thing? If so, how do you have a correlations which is a relation between different things?

As for correlations, I think that is exactly what we need. We have many. Certain areas of the brain we know process certain sensory signals from the eyes and ears for example. But first, we don't have those relations detailed. Second they are based on accidentally evolved brains not on arbitrary machine designs. Third the properties assigned are not predicted or explained by the standard models of current physics, so you either have to modify the physics or, which amounts to the same thing, you have to admit that neurology->biochemistry->chemistry->physics is not such that the properties of one layer supervenes on the other, that consciousness is an emergent ocurrence.
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Re: What is Space?

Post by AlexW »

@OP: What is space?

Ultimately: An idea, a concept.

In reality there is no space - no empty, unoccupied expanse of nothingness.
Reality is pure knowing/being - it does not extend from here to there. As such there is no distance and no space (between mind-made locations).

Space is the playground the mind has created to throw around its toys - bodies, objects, worlds...
It's not more real than the space a dream character occupies in a night time dream.
Belinda
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Re: What is Space?

Post by Belinda »

AlexW, do you mean that space, like time, is a (relative) dimension?

If so, I and most others would agree. I believe you have answered the question. The bigger question is "Is there anything besides this relative world?"

And also, intriguingly, "Is spooky action at a distance an encroachment into the relative world of a wholistic world?"
or "Can quantum mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?" i.e. the EPR paradox.
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Re: What is Space?

Post by AlexW »

Belinda wrote: Tue Jun 19, 2018 8:33 am AlexW, do you mean that space, like time, is a (relative) dimension?
Yes, if relative means thought based.
Belinda wrote: Tue Jun 19, 2018 8:33 am The bigger question is "Is there anything besides this relative world?"
Yes, reality - which is not relative.
The "problem" with reality is that it is so "normal" - uneventful - that thought finds it "uninteresting".
We rather keep glued to our world of thought instead of remaining with what is real and as such miss reality.
Belinda wrote: Tue Jun 19, 2018 8:33 am "Is spooky action at a distance an encroachment into the relative world of a wholistic world?"
Well... its uncanny how science is more and more unearthing truth, but scientists are still caught up in old belief systems - declaring its "spooky" to suddenly find out that distance is really non-existent... Ramana or Nisargadatta or the Buddha or even Laozi could have told them this truth a long time ago...
Belinda wrote: Tue Jun 19, 2018 8:33 am "Can quantum mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?"
No description is ever complete.
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Re: What is Space?

Post by Belinda »

Justintruth wrote: Mon Jun 18, 2018 11:41 am
Belinda wrote: Thu Jun 14, 2018 8:06 am Brain is an organ made of specialised nerve tissue.
what do you want to call the set of possible devices with which consciousness is associated? Central nervous system.
Brain does not cause mind and mind does not cause brain.
Ok, brain does not cause mind, then what do you make of an anesthesiologist causing consciousness to cease by putting a chemical into the brain slightly disrupting its function.

(Belinda)Conscious awareness is not mind

Also, why do you think the sensory nerve pathways (e.g. optical nerve) lead to the brain and if severed interrupts sensory experiencing? What do you think happens to a mind in the case that the brain is destroyed by a bullet?

(Belinda)A brain mind might be destroyed by a bullet or disease. Nothing happens to a mind brain which is destroyed.

I think it is fairly clear that minds don't create brains in some sense, but we do have the notion that being is existence, meaning that being itself is personal. If that is the case, and if it is somehow not accidental but essential - not possibly otherwise - a function of the meaning of the term, then a mind created everything. Not saying I accept that but you have to parse it somehow. Given the intellectual content of ontology, how do you exclude the possibility that being itself, is not personal?

(Belinda)
a) Mind creates brain

b) Brain creates mind

c) Brain and mind are aspects of the same

Take your pick.


Also, what happens when you have a baby deliberately? Doesn't the act of sex cause a consciousness and isn't that act undertaken by a mind? What if we can create artificial consciousness? Would that also not be a mind creating a brain? Or would you rather say a brain creating another brain?

(Belinda)Conscious intentions accompanied by conceptualisations cannot exist in the absence of brain minds. Machines may perhaps have intentions programmed into them, I would not know.
The scientist who creates a thinking,intending machine is a brain mind plus body. I'd not say "a brain creating another brain" as that would rather ignore that mind is brain considered from the perspective of the subject.
Mind and brain are the same inspected subjectively and objectively. There are correlations between the subjective and the objective not least correlations that are therapeutically useful in cases of brain injury such as stroke , and mental illness.
When you say "are the same" what exactly do you mean? The same thing? If so, how do you have a correlations which is a relation between different things?

(Beinda)I mean that there is no such thing as a separate or separable mind and a separate or separable brain, and that 'mind' and 'brain' refer to the same entity perceived subjectively (mind) and objectively(brain).

As for correlations, I think that is exactly what we need. We have many. Certain areas of the brain we know process certain sensory signals from the eyes and ears for example. But first, we don't have those relations detailed. Second they are based on accidentally evolved brains not on arbitrary machine designs. Third the properties assigned are not predicted or explained by the standard models of current physics, so you either have to modify the physics or, which amounts to the same thing, you have to admit that neurology->biochemistry->chemistry->physics is not such that the properties of one layer supervenes on the other, that consciousness is an emergent ocurrence.


(Belinda)I don't understand what you are proposing.
Erk
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Joined: Tue Mar 27, 2018 10:29 pm

Re: What is Space?

Post by Erk »

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. – John Archibald Wheeler

Space is what prevents everything from happening in the same location. – Me
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