Arising;
Thank you for your condolences. Please consider my following thoughts, and respond when you can. You wrote a very long post, so I will probably split it up into two posts.
Arising_uk wrote:So we agree, dualism with respect to mind/body and reason/emotion is false?
Absolutely, but it is also true -- from a certain perspective. Is a sandwich dual? Of course, it is bread with something in between the slices. If it is peanut butter and jelly, then we could call it trio. But this is a very oversimplified almost childish description. The truth is that we can not have bread without grain, yeast, lard, salt, water, and often more, that it processed; then we need peanuts and butter, after the butter has been processed from milk and cream; then we need fruit, sugar, water, and something to gel it, and more processing, so there is nothing dual or trio about it.
People have energy and force, and we have body and mind. There are different types of energy, different types of force, different types of matter, and different aspects of mind, so I do not see how any thinking person can call us dual.
Arising_uk wrote:Got to be picky here. Aquinas et al were not scientists nor really philosophers as they've come to be understood, they were logicians and theologians and we owe them the debt of Aristotle (although we pretty much owe that to Islam ironically enough). It was Descartes who opened the door to the Natural Philosophers and hence scientists.
Got to be picky right back. What is a logician if not a scientist? What is a theologian if not a philosopher? A hammer is a hammer no matter what it is called. Descartes did a great deal, but he did not open that door; he bowed his way through it.
St. Augustine (400 AD) was a prolific writer and established much of the Church's early doctrine with his works like "Inner Illumination", "Original Sin", the "City of God", and "Confessions". His writings allowed for most of the misery of the Dark Ages by putting love of "God" above all else. He justified war which enabled the decimation of other peoples and cultures, he accepted testimony above evidence, and he made it clear that the Church and "God" were above thought -- especially Aristotle's thought.
Aquinas (1200 AD), as far as I know, is the next person to seriously affect Church doctrine with his "Summa" which incorporates Church doctrine with Aristotelian thought and logic. He convinced the Church that people were given minds by "God", and that those minds could be used for the greater glory of "God". Eventually reversing the Church's position that people need not think and only need to trust "God" and the Church as defined by St. Augustine. So Aquinas unlocked the door and started the hammering on it, but it still took centuries before Descartes (1600 AD) was born and able to be one of the first to walk through that door. If not for the work done by people before him, and his careful handling of the Church, Descartes could have gone the way of Galileo. This is why I called it a struggle by "many great scientists and philosophers".
What is really ironic is that St. Augustine's justification of religious war enabled the Crusaders to invade the "unbelievers" lands and rediscover Aristotle's work. Don't go around telling people that we owe Islam for Aristotle's work. The Middle East and Islam are supposed to be the "bad guys". Westerners can only deal with so much, so they do not want to know that the intelligent people of Islam understood the greatness of Aristotle's work and preserved and protected it from us -- the barbarians. Too much truth. (chuckle chuckle)
Arising_uk wrote:Gee wrote: Science and religion created the false dichotomy with regard to the reality of consciousness. All of the mental aspects are part of our consciousness, but all of the mental aspects are not treated equally by science and religion. Realizing this frustrated me for a very long time until I considered the reason for the division -- the source of consciousness. Everyone was looking for the source.
Hmm...Descartes went with Dualism and Christian religion was happy with that as they had the Soul and since Descartes was a true believer and 'science' was still in its infancy I'm not sure your idea holds. As at the time the 'mental' was not really explored as everyone thought they knew they were mental. Descartes did explore what it was to be and specifically what it was to have a mental thought, i.e. clear and distinct ideas and perceptions.
Yes, we all know that we are mental. (chuckle) In Descartes time, I think that there were a lot of philosophers working on the mental rational aspect of mind, but few were working on emotion, or an understanding of the sub/unconscious aspect of mind -- until Freud's time. This would suit the Church because the "soul" is more related to the self, emotion, and the unconscious aspect of mind. It looks like a natural progression to me, where we would first look to study the obvious, the conscious mind, then progress to the more elusive, the unconscious mind.
Arising_uk wrote:I'm dubious that religion was looking for a source as they have the source, a 'god' given 'soul', much like GE's 'beon' in fact.
When I say that they were looking for the source of consciousness, what I am talking about is the source of life. As far as we know, there is no consciousness without life. Religion looks to "God" for the source; science looks to matter or the physical for the source. I think that you are misunderstanding Greylorn's beon theory. Greylorn, like me, understands that some parts of religion's ideas are true and some parts of science's ideas are true, so we are both trying to figure out how these very different ideas work and interact to make consciousness.
Arising_uk wrote:I agree that 'science' has come down on the side of 'consciousness' being the product of being a body with senses in an external world but I think the 'brain' idea is up for grabs in this model, as it's becoming clearer that the CNS is not just the lump at the top and the other supporting systems play a large role as well. But I agree that the religious still want a 'soul' of some sort.
It remains true that science still sees consciousness as being internal, so the supernatural/paranormal is not possible. But it exists. Which makes science partly wrong.
Arising_uk wrote:With respect to reincarnation, I think this a concept too replete with problematics to be anything other than wishful thinking. Although a perfectly natural assumption given the time it was thought of, i.e. nature appears to go through the cycles of birth, death and rebirth so why not us?
You are not the first person to tell me that reincarnation is "problematic", but no one has told me why they see it that way. Could you please explain these problems that you see? I would really like to understand these issues.
Arising_uk wrote:Gee wrote:So I took the divisions as handed to me and study how the differences in the internal and external work individually and together, because I study all of consciousness.
I'm still not really sure what you mean when you say "consciousness"?
I see consciousness as a focused awareness that provides or exchanges information, so in essence, it is a communication. This communication is knowledge, thought, ideas, creativity, etc., which are acknowledged, stored in memory, or sometimes processed by a brain. The movement or activation of this awareness also seems to cause subjective feeling, which is the difference between a computer and a life form, as regards consciousness. If there is a great deal of information or it comes at a great speed, then it causes emotion. This is how I see feeling and emotion as being related to consciousness, until or unless I learn more and change my mind.
Arising_uk wrote:Gee wrote:Knowledge is not shared unless we choose to share it. Emotions are shared automatically, unless we hide them. This is the nature of things we know and things we feel.
But I get your gist. The thing is, you make a judgement here between sharing and hiding? When young, kids share their knowledge automatically until they learn to withhold it, why is this not the same process with emotions?
Young kids do not share their knowledge automatically. They first have to be taught language, then they share their knowledge unthinkingly. Without some agreed upon language knowledge is internal and private -- not shared. When grown, we learn to be more discreet, but emotion can still slip out in body language and in the Freudian slip.
Arising_uk wrote:But many think in language so its not just an external communication. I do understand what you are saying but I think the difference between us is that you wish a division between thought and emotion whereas I'm of the opinion that a 'thought' has to have the emotions in congruence to be a thought.
I did not say that language is limited to external communication; I said that external communication is limited without language. I don't wish a division between thought and emotion, I am just studying them to see how they naturally work. Remember that I spent most of my life living with a deaf person. Although she had sign language, most people did not know it, so her language communication was very limited. She wrote to her deaf friends, and she was the person who always remembered everyone's birthday and sent a card. But at her funeral service, people were shocked to learn that she lettered in volleyball and basketball at school, she was involved in clubs, and was a very good student. She still had all of her old school memorabilia, so it was important to her, but no one knew. We didn't really know her. Our thoughts are private, so without language, we are really very isolated.
I will admit that most of our thoughts and actions are motivated by emotion; on the other hand, does the thought 2 + 2 = 4 require emotion?
Arising_uk wrote:Personally I think panpsychism makes a mockery of the terms "mind', "consciousness", et al but don't really understand what you mean by this, "that knowledge and memory can be hidden within matter and not be known outside of that matter"?
If I understand the current definition of panpsychism correctly, it is more about knowledge than mind. It is a theory that says that everything has a mental aspect, but this does not mean that everything has awareness. Atoms seem to "know" how to relate to a molecule almost like they are running a program. But there is no awareness, no sharing of information, no reaction, no actual consciousness. So what matter "knows" is hidden even from itself. Does a book know the story that is within it? Does it know it's title? Yet the book contains knowledge.
I think that panpsychism is another interpretation of the root of knowledge, much like Plato's forms, or ideas about a holographic or digital universe, or maybe even the "all knowing God" idea. These concepts are all very comparable, and the concept of panpsychism is very old. Many of the great philosophers have considered some kind of panpsychism from before the Ancients to now. To be honest, I think the only type of theory regarding consciousness that does not in some ways conform with panpsychism is dualism -- and science's idea that it is within the body. Go to Wiki and look up Panpsychism, but read the whole thing, not just the intro, which is not very good.
Arising_uk wrote:You didn't really answer my question, "what feeling or emotion you can have that is not kinesthetic(tactile)?"
Maybe I don't really understand your question. Could you give me some examples of what you mean?
Arising_uk wrote:Hmm...nerves are the CNS, the sensors are the CNS. We have a lot of awareness within the body but I accept that we don't notice many things until the messages are loud and clear, although there may be an argument that we could if we had a language to interpret all the subconscious 'signals' (just guessing here but I have heard it said that people do say things like, 'I just don't feel right', long before a major diagnosis is made).
So if I said that I just did not "feel right" for three days, then my Mother had a car accident, would you accept that I had a premonition? I don't think so. Neither would I. As far as I know, awareness is external and not within the body, but as Greylorn pointed out, it can be directed to within the body. That is what those self-healing feed-back studies are all about, and some of them are successful.
After talking to a neurologist about the sub/unconscious aspect of mind, I am convinced that it would be a bad idea to have a language to interpret unconscious activities. There is so much going on that it would be like having Phantom of the Opera full blast in one ear; Eminem's rap from Eight Mile full blast in the other ear; while sitting in front of the speakers at a Heavy Metal Rock Concert. It would be impossible to think.
Arising_uk wrote:We do know 'where' the 'mind' is, its the being of a body with senses in an external world. What type of 'mind' appears to depend upon what type of body.
So if my legs are amputated, I will lose part of my mind?
Arising_uk wrote:Gee wrote:Hormones are very interesting. They are self balancing and work to keep the different internal systems in sync. But they are also very specifically linked to our most important instincts like sex drives, eating, sleeping, nurturing the young, and stages of life and death, so they help us to deal with the outside reality and work to keep us alive in the world. Recently I have begun to think that they also activate consciousness, so they are pretty important.
I agree they are important but only in the sense that they work within a system.
Pheromones work within an ecosystem. Does that mean that an ecosystem is a life form?
Arising_uk wrote:Gee wrote:Consider that hormones are communicators and every specie has some form of hormone/s. Every specie does not have a brain. So if one considers that all life is sentient, conscious in some way, then it is more likely that hormones, rather than a brain, is what activates consciousness in life. Also note that the brain is "saturated" in hormones.
Hmm...not sure 'communicators' is the right term, signals may be better or communication method. It may well be the case that hormones are involved in the development of consciousness but without a complicated CNS and the other systems they'll just be a sentient not a consciousness in my opinion.
I didn't pick the term "communicators", and although signals might seem better to you, it does not explain a hormone's ability to be somewhat self directing. This is what makes them fascinating. But I do agree that life forms require a brain to accomplish consciousness as we know it.
This is a response to a little over half of your post. Take your time reviewing it because it will probably take me a few days to respond to the rest. This has been interesting.
G