@nathan in WA US | Feb 19 2023 3:23 utc | 401
Not a actually 🙂
Even if we are all artifacts in or of a simulation, some things, lacking intersubjectively verifiable attributes to identify them, are purely imaginary. Other things, with the minimal attribute of intersubjective verifiability, are different, more than imaginary, even if we are not sure what the thing is, or how we are verifying it, or even with whom or what we are identifying it, perhaps another instance of ourself, the possibilities, being imaginary, are effectively infinite, but the reality is that we know the qualia of the verifiable is indubitably different to the solely imaginary.

Posted by: Hermit | Feb 19 2023 4:45 utc | 403

Posted by: Bemildred | Feb 19 2023 2:51 utc | 400
“I haven’t got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers.
If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other God.” – Bruce Chatwin “In Patagonia”
Every summer for the past 15 years or so I’ve gone on a 9 day 200K group hike
across the Arctic terrain here in northern Norge. Compeed is my god then.
There is truth in rocks!
Thanks for your comments Bemildred, and thanks also to others here.
Always fun to kick the ‘words’ ball around.
Humbling too, if we’re honest.

Posted by: waynorinorway | Feb 19 2023 5:37 utc | 405

@Antonym | Feb 19 2023 2:24 utc | 396
I can see the cost of Ukrainian and Filipino wanna-be-brides soaring.

Posted by: Hermit | Feb 19 2023 8:08 utc | 407

“My God is the God of Walkers.” Has much of the flavor of Tom Holt’s Odds and Gods. It is rather good.
Posted by: Hermit | Feb 19 2023 8:16 utc | 409
Yes. My kind of guy. The journey is the reward. Better get going.
Another one like Edward Said who died too young.

Posted by: Bemildred | Feb 19 2023 10:49 utc | 409

Posted by: waynorinorway | Feb 19 2023 5:37 utc | 406
Yes, nothing like getting “off the grid” for a while with some friends. I used to do 5-6 days walks with a brother up in the “wilderness” here. I imagine in the high arctic is much more spectacular.
I am a bit old for that now, but I can still walk fine. “Life begins at 8000 feet”. (2700m)

Posted by: Bemildred | Feb 19 2023 10:59 utc | 411

See this article : https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/world/is-george-soros-making-the-biggest-short-selling-play-of-his-life-on-india-10118771.html

Posted by: dodo | Feb 19 2023 11:42 utc | 413

Pakistanis: “Don’t blame the Chinese”
https://www.dawn.com/news/1737793/dont-blame-the-chinese

Posted by: Antonym | Feb 19 2023 12:52 utc | 415

@ 417
Not Monday morning, Sunday morning.

Posted by: Giyane | Feb 19 2023 12:56 utc | 417

@Bemildred | Feb 19 2023 11:44 utc | 415
Everything has limits 😉
Our brain is a mass of hacks, Some elegant, some less so, but it undoubtedly evolved to control movement.
From my On Free Will
Every brain, from the simplest nervous ganglion to the most complex brain, is a computer. A device to accept input, perform some transformation, and produce output. Biologically speaking, the brain is an expensive (in energy, oxygen, and thermoregulation requirements) machine that evolved to control movement. That is the only reason evolution incorporated such a complex, cumbersome, and expensive capability. Ask any tunicate. You need to ask early. These creatures have brains in their youth, in order to find what they think is a good place for tunicates. Then they settle down, like an American in front of the television, to spend the rest of their lives fastened to that place. The first thing that they do after settling down is to have a nice snack. On their brain. Again, as in Americans, it will not be needed in the future.
The human brain evolved from very simple calcium ion action channel molecular components in the earliest metazoan single-cell eukaryotes and sponges, through sodium action channel based diffuse nerve networks in cnidaria, through nerve cords and more complex structures in bilaterian families. In other words, every brain on the planet is a naturally evolved biological computer with its origins in the earliest evolved animals.
Brains make use of neural meshes made up of many replicated computing modules. Even though we have no idea what the universe is, or even if it exists as something other than a hologram, we can confidently state that the brain models, at some level, the universe. We know this because the model usually functions reasonably well. Neural nets are very fast and really good at processing repetitive tasks and even locating local optimizations. Unfortunately, without perturbation systems, neural networks are unable to move past local optimums in search of global optimization. Fortunately, most creatures are sufficiently specialized that relatively simple models suffice to do what they need to do to survive and breed. In the war between predator and prey and surviving a usually hostile and always changing environment, some brains developed a lot more than others, and once socialization evolved brains tended to need to increase exponentially, simply to keep track of individuals with whom they interacted. Generalization also drove brain growth. Apes, while not alone in either development, developed in both. At some time in relatively recent history, ape brains evolved a new trick. That of overloading existing neural nets to run more sequential deep learning style networks on the same wetware. This allowed perturbation to break out of local optimums, the development of new approaches to address novel situations without needing repetition or massive endocrinal spikes to trigger the development of neural meshes.
There were costs in doing this. This overlay computational system is really slow, an order of magnitude slower than the neural circuits. So it is no good in catching prey, evading hunters, or surviving falls. It is unreliable, and prone to instability including what we call psychosis, the inability to discriminate between the imaginary and more than imaginary. Despite our perception that we are always aware, because it costs a fortune in energy, oxygen and thermal load dispersal, the conscious routines are only run intermittently. We see this in the rhythmic patterns we can observe with the EEG as well as through direct observation of brain activity using fMRI. Because the overlay mind is very slow, they have very low bandwidth, only about three discrete inputs a second can be discerned before signal loss sets in – which conjurors greatly rely upon, and it is the brain that filters experience and determines which signals will be forwarded to the overlay mind and which decides on whether to accept or reject the outputs of the overlay mind, and if to accept, how much to accept and how to process it.
At some point we learned a new trick, overloading the overlay computational system with the persistent illusion of consciousness, whatever that actually means.
The brain still decides what the conscious mind gets to see (See e.g. Cepelewicz Jordana (2019-09-30). Your Brain Chooses What to Let You See: Beneath our awareness, the brain lets certain kinds of stimuli automatically capture our attention by lowering the priority of the rest. Quanta Magazine. https://getpocket.com/explore/item/your-brain-chooses-what-to-let-you-see) which means you can’t be responsible for what you think, because you are not responsible for deciding what you know about. The brain still determines what and how much of the conscious mind output it accepts which means that what you think is not actually in control of anything although it may sometimes influence what you do. Because the conscious mind has to work for the brain, it trusts the brain implicity, and will make up stories to justify anything that the brain throws at it, no matter how bizarre. Ask anyone who imagines that they are an historical character why they are in a padded room and they will explain it to you in great and completely delusional detail. Ask a religiot how they know what their god thingies think, and they will tell you with great solemnity, even though we know that they know that they are lying and are using modules to see if we have seen through what they say. Ask a religiot what they think their god thingies want them to do, and they will use the same brain modules as they use to tell us what they want us, different from the brain modules used to communicate what others want us to do. Most bizarre of all, watch CPG Gray’s excellent You are Two at YouTube to see how the brain continuously creates self-justification.

Posted by: Hermit | Feb 19 2023 14:31 utc | 419

“A formal proof can be constructed.” Hermit | Feb 19 2023 1:56 utc | 395
There are two problems that I can see with your proof.
A> The proof requires truth to be a shared experience. In other words, no individual can know truth without confirmation of at least one other person.
Heaven forbid you should ever become lost in a wilderness alone. Seems like your proof means you will never be able to find your way out on your own.
B> The end result of your logical proof is that God thingies must certainly be imaginary things
So? What’s the problem with imaginary things? My dreams are most definitely imaginary. Should I pretend that i don’t dream?

Posted by: jinn | Feb 19 2023 15:06 utc | 421

@Scorpion | Feb 19 2023 15:01 utc | 422
My thanks for the corrected URL.
Despite finding him annoying as well as inconsistent and incoherent I watched the video. If I have to, I am prepared to make a rebuttal..
However, having suffered through it, I think our positions are not as far apart as you may imagine. I’m sure it will take you far less time to read my (very brief) monograph On Truth and Models than it took me to watch that turgid mess.
Basically, the issue he is waffling around is that the map is not the terrain, and we don’t even know what the map is, let alone the terrain, but we can construct predictive, communicable models (or maps) of our experience of the terrain and by intersubjectively verifying the accuracy of our experience of the model/map by comparing our experience of the model/map and our experience of the terrain with the experiences of others, we can validate the models (or maps).
However, things which are purely imaginary cannot be intersubjectively validated, because they exist only in one imagination. No matter how hard we try, we can never be sure that the imaginary experience we attempt to communicate comports with the imaginary experience created in the mind of the listener. Things which can be intersubjectively validated, including models, maps and terrain, can be validated precisely because they have shared attributes which can be tested, making them more than imaginary. To accomplish this we don’t even need to know what the things we are dealing with may be, just that they are things which can be experienced and one or more experienced attributes intersubjectively verified.
Now the screen becomes a reflective model which can be tested according to theories of optics. The projected image becomes a pattern of light that can be measured. Our eyes and brain recreate the perceived image on the screen and this too can be imaged and modeled. We can already recreate this, with limited quality, by replaying the image extracted directly from a brain onto a screen, allowing another person to recreate to an extent the experience of the imaged subject, In the near future we should be able to transfer the experience of the image at high resolution to another directly via an electrical link-up, and even have the brain of one person actuate the limbs of another, as we have already achieved this with chimpanzees, and our brains are substantially similar. That means that unlike imaginary things, like “truth” or “infinity” which have no brain structures to represent them, any more than they can be completely defined, more than imaginary things can be established within the material environment eliminating the concept of independent magisterial or domains.
I address this, and introduce some terminology that may be appropriate at Belief and Shades of Disbelief.

Posted by: Hermit | Feb 19 2023 21:45 utc | 423

Mark Twain and Smedley D. Butler are valuable contemporaneous sources for the betrayal of the Filipinos and genocide of the Moros by the US.
Posted by: Hermit | Feb 19 2023 21:52 utc | 426
——————–
Yes !
The garden’s [anglo/euro] exploitation/assaults on China have been going on non stop ,since the Opium wars, ENA.
Even after its kicked outta Clarke airbase, USAss has been trying to creep back in, using all kind of pretext, including state terrorism FF against its own ‘ally‘
Ever Wonder why Duterte harbor such antipathy towards uncle sham ?
It could be traced right back to his days as mayor of Mindano..
Duterte’s close encounter with uncle chutzpah.
gringo terrorist grabbed from hospital and whisked back to US, right under the nose of Ph police. !
Duterte…

when the FBI agents went to the Davao Doctors Hospital where Meiring was confined, they were initially accosted by security guards but the FBI agents merely flashed their metal badges and proceeded in taking Meiring.
“They think and act nonchalant as if they own the place…I don’t give a sh_t who they are. “Those metal badges do not have any value to me. If they (FBI agents) do that again, I will have them eat (their badges),”

http://www.declarepeace.org.uk/captain/murder_inc/site/gladio/nws30duterte.html

Posted by: denk | Feb 20 2023 3:44 utc | 425

Remember the Maine my ass – it was just a ship with poorly operated coal-fired boilers sitting around Cuba….
bunch of BS been going on for so long.
History repeats until it don’t.
Posted by: Buffalo_Ken | Feb 20 2023 3:54 utc | 428
—————————
You’r a sober drinker .

Moreover, I study hard and I can think even while I’m drinking in contrast to some old farts I reckon

Yes indeed.
As evidenced by your clear thinking above.
Have you heard of the drunken fist ?
A discipline of Chinese martial art, where
booze is a supposedly a force multiplier ?

Posted by: denk | Feb 20 2023 4:22 utc | 427

Posted by: Hermit | Feb 19 2023 21:45 utc | 425
Thanks for the references to your pieces. Interesting. Frankly, though demonstrating great intellectual acumen as is your wont, I think there is far more ‘waffling’ (if by waffling we mean verbiage) in them than the much shorter youtube which kept to its topic, albeit since the subject matter involves direct experience it is a tad opaque if one hasn’t experimented with such overtly numinous types of experience.
You might find examining traditional Buddhist notions of ‘relative and absolute truth’ of interest. The problem is that it’s hard to find the good stuff on the internet given how much bad stuff is kicking around. Here’s one place with a decent but very brief set of formal definitions according to several different schools: https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Two_truths . But the subject takes a while to get into properly and I haven’t really thought about it seriously in decades – long before the internet – so no better sources come to mind.
It does relate to the materialist versus non-materialist sub-theme we are sparring over in that the generally materialist view espoused by the vast majority of contemporary scientists and intellectuals these days (knowingly or not) mainly deals only with relative truth. Absolute truths have to do with the nature of things. Nature is a quality not a thing or object.
Thoughts, for example, are particular experiential phenomena that arise within a field of experience. That field has no discernible substance, form or location. It is not ‘the brain’ as you would probably insist though neurons in both head and enteric ‘brains’ may well have something to do with mental processing they do not comprise the nature of mind itself. The field, for example, does not change whatever arises within it (like the screen analogy). A traditional analogy for this is that ‘space is not punctured by an arrow.’ The field of mind/awareness does not change in the slightest no matter what is experienced within it because that field is not so much a thing as a quality, the essence of that quality being awareness or knowing, something always there in the background of all experiencing which is ongoing 24/7. So that is a type of absolute truth example.
Another one might be that all phenomena lack any true substance (solidity) no matter how they appear otherwise on the relative level. We can indeed prove impermanence, or if you prefer continual change, even though doing so also proves that any substance or thing that appears solid and permanent is not so, making the perception of solidity an imagined, ie false, quality not an actual thing. So the impermanence factor is a form of absolute truth in that it never changes or ceases to be so, to be true therefore, no matter what phenomenon you examine.
Similarly, given the space of awareness (or we could say ‘space that is experienced by living beings as awareness’) is constant no matter what arises within it, it is is without beginning or end and therefore not subject to either birth or death. It lives in an ever-present now, often referred to as ‘eternity.’ This is an experiential field we all can verify personally (though most find hard to become aware of without taking the time to do so) even though, being unborn and undying, it cannot be said to exist as an observable phenomenon in the domain of relative truth which, as you rightly point out, is the domain of science. Science cannot countenance any non-material absolutes.
This, I suspect, gets into similar territory to what you sometimes call imagination. But experiencing things which cannot be shown to have clear physical/material properties is not the same as fantasizing about hot broads on a sun-drenched beach serving you Margueritas whilst ‘in reality’ you are stuck in the middle of a nasty North East winter blizzard!
There are verifiable experiences of the non-material. They are just not verifiable by usual scientific methods which deliberately have chosen to emphasize the material as only being ‘real’ and therefore the relative over the absolute truths. A shortcoming because too often scientists and other draw conclusions about absolutes without rigorous examination of them since these can only be effected through experiential attention and practice for such absolutes do not exist as material phenomenon.
These things tend to sound more mysterious and convoluted than they are. We all, for example, know what the color orange is like or how one tastes. We see it with our eyes and taste it with our tongues. Oranges with their colour and taste are rooted in the physical world. But the quality of the colour orange (or red, blue, green etc.) is entirely subjective and moreover not physical per se rather experiential. The quality of the taste of orange cannot be conveyed by words except poetically, it has to be tasted by the tongue and by a living person. Similarly the absolute truths and qualities, which are experiential in nature, must be experienced directly to be understood given they exist only as truths in nature. Indeed they are being experienced by all of us all the time; we are just not used to pointing them out and trying to describe them as such verbally, let alone contemplate them steadily over time. We don’t need to obfuscate them with complex notions of God or No-God necessarily for direct experience is always wordless and the words always confuse to a certain degree – again unless uttered as artful poetry which is the language of the absolute when done right, the expression of qualities which are a function of direct experiencing.
You do make good points about how objective truth is a bit of a myth, ie ultimately not provable as such. Bravo.

Posted by: Scorpion | Feb 20 2023 6:10 utc | 429

@432
I think the distinction is not only real but it’s the answer to all the questions – because almost all of the questions are asked in terms that can never actually contain the answer. Your I…Thou is exactly what the Buddhists are talking about, explaining that, not only can ultimate reality only be experienced, but our experience is precisely where ultimate reality lies.
Delusions about the brain running things, and mistaking our perceptions as reality, and investing these chimeras with realness…all these distractions from what we actually experience hide from us the answer to all the questions. Our experience itself, and the great mystery of this gift to each of us as an individual, is the great reality.
And in order to perceive this reality, we have to experience our experience. We have to find ways to step back from our rush of thoughts and see them as they flow – and learn to watch that river for a while. Thus, meditation. Not to teach anything, but simply to afford a space, to observe and to learn.
And all of that It you mention is the veil we maintain endlessly to disguise the reality that is right in front of our nose, in the I…Thou.
~~
What I like about the Orthodox doctrine, as poorly as I understand it, is that it assumes a living spirit, as opposed to the dead and historical one of Rome. This, too, is where the answers lie, I think, in the livingness of it all, rather than the deadness of it all. And that life is new every instant – and this is the key to things.
And every thought is already a dead thing.
Every thought is already, in the moment of its appearance, on its way to extinction, bereft of the life that birthed it. We must continually, each instant, return to the living life. And be very mistrustful of thoughts.
~~
2 cents

Posted by: Grieved | Feb 20 2023 7:36 utc | 431

Posted by: Hermit | Feb 19 2023 4:45 utc | 405
Been awhile since pondering on that level, which should be cautioned can drive one mad e.g. is this all a simulation? If you don’t know, that means it’s unknown 🙂
Posted by: Grieved | Feb 19 2023 5:04 utc | 406
“because we are all in our own personal proofing ground of experience”
And at the end we all ultimately are on our own sole path to the hereafter…

Posted by: nathan in WA US | Feb 20 2023 9:19 utc | 433

@denk | Feb 20 2023 8:00 utc | 434
Masterful summary.

Posted by: Hermit | Feb 20 2023 9:30 utc | 435

Posted by: nathan in WA US | Feb 20 2023 9:19 utc | 435
“And at the end we all ultimately are on our own sole path to the hereafter…”
Mississippi John Hurt – You Got To Walk That Lonesome Valley

Posted by: nathan in WA US | Feb 20 2023 9:44 utc | 437

@Scorpion | Feb 20 2023 12:35 utc | 440
Have a wonderful New Year!

Posted by: Hermit | Feb 20 2023 15:52 utc | 439

I would additionally suggest that on the plane of human interconnectiveness, there is no better place to go than to Plato’s dialogue Meno. In this dialogue, at its core, is a demonstration by Socrates, who takes a slave boy to explain a geometrical question. The slaveboy answers incorrectly at first, assuming that what his eyes are telling him ought to be the solution to the problem.
Socrates then takes him on a simplified path, by which the slaveboy can ‘on his own’ recognize what the solution has to be. And he is correct; he finds a mathematical truth not at first obvious to him.
This, to Socrates, and to Plato narrating this scene, provides an example of the universality of the unobstructed human mind, even between a simple slave and the more educated Athenians pursuing or profiting from the path to wisdom.
One could suppose such a mind could by trial and error come to its correct conclusion on its own, but even so, there is a harmony between what that convoluted path finally recognizes to be correct and the way things are which geometry presents to the Greek mind, and from which we begin our more complex speculations. Each mind does not come to a separate conclusion; they agree.

Posted by: juliania | Feb 20 2023 18:11 utc | 441

Cool! Thanks.

Posted by: Scorpion | Feb 20 2023 23:36 utc | 443

@Scorpion | Feb 20 2023 12:35 utc | 440
Great response. Thank-you.
Having begun a response (below) and realizing that this is far to complex a topic to deal with on the phone, I am working on putting all of our discussion into a single document. https://docs.google.com/document/d/13nkwwlvZbl0zf_OQqM3dgjb9zsMyk1GTpmfNgyWF5VI/edit?usp=sharing
If you have a gmail address that you can share with me via a message about the above document, I will add you as an editor and you can reply there (in red). I will continue in blue.
I’ll leave the rough edit below for posterity.
=====
Scorpion:First, absolute truths aren’t ‘feelings’ but they can be experienced directly.
Hermit: Neuroscience informs us that “experience” is an emergent property of the virtual machine running on the brain sometimes providing “consciousness”. Nothing is experienced except through the senses and the brain. The brain usually processes inputs in neural nets and does not generally invoke consciousness (which has a high energy cost, and limits the availability of the neural mesh for other tasks) and when the brain does, does not provide anything but a minuscule amount of available data to consciousness, and may or may not instantiate information returned to the brain by consciousness. When the brain acts, we may become aware of it, and then we will always justify what we become aware of as intentional. Modern physics and mathematics tell us that there are no useful truths (corollary to Heisenberg and Gödel), technically truth is limited to closed logical systems of limited applicability.
Scorpion: Any particular has a specific location around which one can imagine front, back, four sides, top and bottom (which is how various quarks end up getting named interestingly). This means also, btw, that in order to have an object identified as separate from the overall field or space around that you have to inject / invent / imagine an additional (experiential) point of view so that such directions can be layered (imagined) into the framework.
Hermit: Quarks do not have a “specific location” (in string theory, they are actually vibrating stings occupying a statistical space) and definitely do not have orientation outside of their statistical direction of motion which is used to determine spin. Left and right spin is determined relative to their statistical motion, with fermions having a half-integer spin while bosons have an integer spin. There is no up, down, left, right, because that would require a reference. The names originated in the charge, spin and color of quarks. For example, the up quark has a relative charge of positive two-thirds of the charge of a proton, and the down quark of negative one-third. Color is the encoding of the states of charge of quarks, antiquarks and gluons and is the source of the forces between these particles. Quarks constantly change their color charge as they exchange gluons with other quarks. Each quark has one of the three color charges; and each antiquark has one of the three complementary color charges. Gluons carry color/anti-color pairs between quarks and antiquarks.
Scorpion: This is a simple way of explaining why the quantum crowd gradually found out that the observer principle influences how the subatomic particular world is influenced by the observer. The observer’s field of awareness is actually influencing what happens as it happens. We don’t see this on the macro level (although we do feel it), but on the micro level apparently they do.
Hermit: This is incompatible with the Standard model, where “the observer effect” has nothing to do with awareness or feelings. The observer effect is simply the fact that any measurement of the state of a quantum particle will affect the wave function of that particle. A quantum “observer” can be as simple as a quantum scale recorder* (See e.g. The Delayed Quantum Eraser experiment).
Scorpion: When you raise and lower your arms it starts in the gut – at least in terms of electronically measurable synaptics – and then manifests in the cerebellum and elsewhere.
Hermit: Reference please? My understanding is that the frontopolar cortex and the SMA in the precuneus reflects activity that before the decision is made to move. See e.g. Yong Ed (2008-04-13). Unconscious brain activity shapes our decisions. National Geographic. for a great introduction, and Maoz U et al (2019-09-19). Neural precursors of decisions that matter—an ERP study of deliberate and arbitrary choice. bioRxiv..
Scorpion: There is much we do not know and cannot explain.
Hermit: Against this, there is even more that we do know and can explain, and the fact that there are unknowns does not change what is known. Also what is known and explained has grown to the point where we are, within the bounds of scientific uncertainty, that anything new discovered at human scales will be compatible with what is already known.
Scorpion: (I sometimes entertain the notion that all living creatures, which are built on bacterial cells ultimately, are ‘grown’ by bacterial hive mind of sorts in order to expand their range of relative experience via the senses and mind so ‘they’ grew ‘us’ rather than we are independent autonomous beings we imagine ourselves to be, but that’s just fanciful thinking even though it does fit some of the bacteria-to-human interface / fact patterns.
Hermit: As a student, I once entertained similar thoughts, but ultimately discarded it. We are more influenced by bacteria than we imagine, but our system does a reasonably good job of keeping them out of our neural networks. Processing takes energy, and we can see the energy drawn from cells in near-real time using fMRI. If bacteria or the enteric nervous system were responsible for any significant contribution to cognition, we would undoubtedly see it. We don’t.
Scorion: We think of mind as an epiphenomenon of the brain. It is not but it appears that way.
Hermit: References? We know that “mind” is a persistent delusion completely dependent on the brain. See e.g. Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality.
Scorpion: Your examples prove nothing in that regard except that our brains have something to do with how we experience perceptions via the senses (and thus body) and other creatures wired similarly to us do the same.
Hermit: The fact that brain abnormalities can result in numinous hallucinations and experiences (see e.g. Garrison JR et al (2015-11-17). Paracingulate sulcus morphology is associated with hallucinations in the human brain. Nat Commun 6:8956. doi: 10.1038/ncomms9956. PMID: 26573408.), and that we can induce phenomena by manipulating the brain (Persinger, MA; et al. (2010). “The Electromagnetic Induction of Mystical and Altered States Within the Laboratory”. Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research. 1 (7): 808–830. ISSN 2153-8212 ) shows that the phenomena are artifacts of the brain.
Scorpion: Btw, there are more neuronic happenings in the enteric than the head brain. When you raise and lower your arms it starts in the gut – at least in terms of electronically measurable synaptics – and then manifests in the cerebellum and elsewhere.
Hermit: References? To the best of my knowledge this is tosh. The volition and sensation of moving the arm originate in the posterior parietal cortex, while the premotor cortex is responsible for the actual motion. Refer e.g. Yong Ed (2009-05-07). Electrical stimulation produces feelings of free will. Nat Geographic. Not addressed there, but well understood, if we stimulate action by injecting a signal into the premotor cortex, the arm will move and if the subject becomes aware of that their arm has moved, will claim that they chose to move their arm, even when they acknowledge that the arm can be made to move in the absence of volition, and that this is shown to them in a video reflecting the signal being transmitted and the arms reaction to it..
There is much we do not know and cannot explain. Also, all such events are facilitated by non-human cells in the microbiome; many now say they are more than facilitated but cannot happen without. (I sometimes entertain the notion that all living creatures, which are built on bacterial cells ultimately, are ‘grown’ by bacterial hive mind of sorts in order to expand their range of relative experience via the senses and mind so ‘they’ grew ‘us’ rather than we are independent autonomous beings we imagine ourselves to be, but that’s just fanciful thinking even though it does fit some of the bacteria-to-human interface / fact patterns.)
In any case, the space in which forms arise is not dead physical emptiness but living consciousness-awareness. The dead physical emptiness is something we imagine but certainly cannot measure materially. All the black holes et alia in physics are the results principally of thought experiments, logical extrapolations based on certain principles observed in natural phenomena in our own frame of perceptual reference. The dead nature of scientific ‘outer space’ is imagined thusly because of the axiomatic assumption that the mind doesn’t truly exist and that objective reality exists outside the frame of reference of experiencing individual, independent organisms such as ourselves. This dead empty space is ‘objective’ reality’s imagined field in which essentially dead physical matter (agglomerations of mindless particles) dwell.
Anyway, we will never really agree on this sort of thing which is totally fine of course. For one thing, I am not well studied in articulating it and haven’t studied such issues for a long time now so am quite rusty. For another, there is a great divide in science these days between those few who insist that mind is an important thing and those many who insist it is not actually extant, merely imagined (for that is the view that all materialists hold whether or not they know it and why I believe this view causes so much societal harm). That the universe is imagining itself is regarded as lalalandia to hard scientists who ridicule any attempt by anybody trying to persuade them that chairs and tables are not chairs and tables and they make good points in so doing.
The great divide I think comes down to this notion of two different spaces (fields) in which all forms arise: on the one hand dead physical emptiness and the other is living awareness/experience fields. In our personal experience we cannot perceive anything without it happening in the field (context) of experiencing. We can imagine that the world exists on its own outside the field of experience (so-called ‘objective’ reality) but that’s all we can do, imagine it and from there believe in it as most now do. It is a contemporary form of religious belief, if you will. Materialist ‘realidiocy’ some might say!
The notion of an objective self-existing universe separate from the field of collective experiencing is a very powerful concept, but that is all it is. A huge imagined notion.
And the problem with such a notion is that it assumes, ultimately, that we are all machines in a mechanical universe. That’s the only way to divorce the universe from the fields of experiencing which are reflexively poo-poo’d as irrelevant imaginings, ie hallucinated non-realities. However, if you take the time to observe experiencing steadily, usually via meditative techniques and over many years though not necessarily, you can come to experience the absolute nature of relative phenomena/experiences directly in a non-theoretical fashion. The mind field in which mind phenomena arise truly IS unborn and undying and can be experienced as such. In other words the space in which phenomena arise is not dead and empty but actually alive and wakeful. That is the primordial space of the universe. So what we call empty space accommodating all mental and/or physical/experiential forms is primordial wakefulness without subject or object. Space is awake. Wakefulness IS space rather than knowing or perceiving it. Space is not outside mind, in other words. The fundamental nature of mind is space or field. To materialists this is all gobbledygook which is why it is generally best to say nothing about it since it will always come out wrong and/or be misinterpreted. Both sides find the other side speaking nonsense, basically. (Which is why I cannot offer critique of your pieces. You write very well but so thoroughly grounded in the materialist view that I find it quasi gibberish just like you find what I am clumsily trying to express ‘waffle.’)
I suspect most primitive people lived in a state wherein this was effortlessly experienced which is why many of their traditions seem awfully cavalier about death. For them there was no death but some sort of continuous present that continues whether or not their particular body form was present to witness or not. Perhaps they feel this in collective rituals around the fire wherein it is experientially clear and obvious that the individual, though part of the group, can come or go from the circle but the dance of life being shared and celebrated continues regardless. Something like that.
*To demonstrate this phenomena, the Weizmann Institute built a tiny device, less than one micron in size, that had a barrier with two openings. They then sent a current of electrons towards the barrier. The observer in this experiment was not human. Instead, they used a tiny electron detector that could spot the presence of passing electrons. The quantum “observer’s” capacity to detect electrons could be altered by changing its electrical conductivity, or the strength of the current passing through it. Apart from “observing,” or detecting the electrons, the detector had no effect on the current. Even so, the scientists found that the very presence of the detector “observer” near one of the openings caused changes in the interference pattern of the electron waves passing through the openings of the barrier. In fact, this effect was dependent on the “amount” of observation: when the “observer’s” capacity to detect electrons increased, in other words, when the level of the observation went up, the interference weakened; in contrast, when its capacity to detect electrons was reduced, and the observation slackened, the interference increased. Thus, by controlling the properties of the quantum observer, the scientists managed to control the extent of its influence on the electrons’ behavior!

Posted by: Hermit | Feb 21 2023 19:30 utc | 445

@ Hermit | Feb 21 2023 21:33 utc | 448
You seem to have missed entirely what Grieved was saying in conversation with juliania, who raised the example of Buber’s thinking, re the I-Thou relationship as it might relate to a buddhadharmic view of reality nature. Buber’s books were required summer reading for students entering college where I went to undergraduate school so as a practitioner of the buddhadharma I found the exchange on point. Nowhere does grieved assert “I” exists if my reading is correct.
I have nothing profound to offer here but did want to jiggle the thread upstream a bit for easier reach.
Thanks to you, grieved, scorpion, juliania and a few others for an interesting exchange.

Posted by: suzan | Feb 22 2023 0:35 utc | 447

Posted by: Hermit | Feb 21 2023 19:30 utc | 447
“Having begun a response (below) and realizing that this is far to complex a topic to deal with on the phone, I am working
on putting all of our discussion into a single document.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13nkwwlvZbl0zf_OQqM3dgjb9zsMyk1GTpmfNgyWF5VI/edit?usp=sharing ”
Hermit, thanks. Not only for your content and comments, but also because this forum, even with an Open Thread, is probably
not the best place for this/these topic(s), interesting and as wide ranging as they are or get to be. (btw, is ‘expanding universe’
an oxymoron?)
I hope others who have been interested check out your link and that there continues to be references here at MoA about all
this in coming (incoming?) Open Threads (treads?), as this one is due to be shut down fairly soon.
Are you familiar with V.S. Ramachanran and/or his book with Sandra Blakeslee Phantoms of the Brain?

Posted by: waynorinorway | Feb 22 2023 8:20 utc | 449

@waynorinorway | Feb 22 2023 8:20 utc | 451
I am familiar with Phantoms of the Brain and V.S. Ramachanran. We have come an insanely long way since then, and as we learn more and our scanners and software improve, the rate at which we learn is increasing exponentially.

Posted by: Hermit | Feb 23 2023 6:05 utc | 451

@suzan | Feb 22 2023 0:35 utc | 449
My 452 was intended for you.
“Thou” is merely an obsolete form of “you” singular, and the only reason that we infer that there might be “you”s is because we infer “you” from “I” . But, no matter what 5th century Indian philosophers may have imagined a millennium-and-a-half ago, from modern neuroscience we now know that “I” is an artifact, an illusion or delusion of the brain. So why does anyone still imagine that there might be a “you”?

Posted by: Hermit | Feb 23 2023 6:37 utc | 453