Discussion: Philosophy an Art form rather than science

[write4u]

@citizenschallengev4

Lausten speaking of evolution, then you speak of years,
to me that indicates that the conception of all those generations unfolding
hasn’t really grabbed your imagination.

You make all these hasty judgements of people’s ability for "understanding " and ability of looking at things from different perspectives. See Roger Antonsen.

Math is the hidden secret to understanding the world | Roger Antonsen

Note that @ 8:30 the mathematics of 4/3s “unfolds” in a most elegant specific mathematical pattern.

You constantly use the term “unfolding reality”, but without any hint as to how exactly reality itself unfolds.

I have cited two scientific theories that use the term unfolding as an actual physical process instead of an abstract idea.

First; David Bohm’s entire theory of “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” is based on the concept that underneath reality lies an “enfolded” metaphysical order that forms Implications of what is to become expressed in “unfolded” Explicated reality.

Example:
a) “A mountain lake is electrical potential”
b) “A mountain lake has electrical potential”
Which of these two is correct?

b) is correct, but also poses an interesting perspective.
If we say the lake is potential energy, then that energy is a property of the lake.
OTOH, if we say the lake has potential, then that is an expression of a potentially emergent property.

David Bohm called this state “the Implicate Order” , whereas the actual production of energy becomes “the Explicate Order”.

and then CDT (Causal Dynamical Triangulation) proposes the fractal “unfolding” of the universal spacetime itself.

Excerpt: This means that it does not assume any pre-existing arena (dimensional space), but rather attempts to show how the spacetime fabric itself evolves.

Causal dynamical triangulation

Now you accuse me of not understanding the concept of an unfolding evolutionary reality?

Where does my understanding of an evolving universe lack imagination?

[citizenschallengev4]

Perhaps it’s the self-centered perspective

@citizenschallengev4

Lausten speaking of evolution, then (Lausten) speak of years,
to me that indicates that the conception of all those generations unfolding
hasn’t really grabbed your imagination.

To be clear, none of that quote was referencing you, (write).

But you sort of do it in your response.
First, your ego is hurt, how dare I imply something.
Then you over generalize on what I’m implying.

Your description is absolutely sterile, as though the actualized living things between your fascination with the tiniest, and associated conjectures many of which can never be proven one way or the other, are all that matters.

Does the land scape and biology really care if that lake “is” electrical potential or “has” electrical potential.
Heck even reducing the lake to a battery, I find slightly perverse and headgamie.

I’m a creature of the biological realm, it’s the creatures of life and the dynamic unfolding within the biological world that I find most fascinating, and that we’ve lost sight of somewhere along our path to converting into “Consumer Units”.

[citizenschallengev4]

@lausten

There, I recognized the pageant of 4 billion years.

Just no internalizing of it.

@lausten

Unless your philosophy is that we should end the human race, I don’t know how to avoid that.

Ah, but don’t you see, our traditional philosophical edifice is what’s justifying our actual continued, rather thoughtless destruction of this Earth’s biosphere, the thing that enabled our modern human society to develop. Not to mention man’s continued inhumanity to their fellow men and woman and children.

I’m not the one doing the destroying, though my existence does produce another burden upon the Earth’s systems, at least I’m willing to face the fact and strive to minimize it.

@lausten

It’s the survival instinct, which evolved, and depends on everything else.

Survival instinct depends on everything else.
Now that doesn’t make much sense.

Are you saying “survival instinct” is a thing?

Heck are you saying, single cells don’t have a survival instinct?

Seems to me survival instinct (for some mysterious reason) was there from, well from where? Probably it wasn’t there when White Smoker vents created the chemical electrical conditions to create the Kerbs Cycle out of the appropriate elemental atoms, which Nick Lane does a wonderful job of explaining. But certainly it was there by the time cell walls and internal structures developed, even before the fantastical Eukaryotic cells came around.

It’s impossible to image how such a complex metropolis of coordinated directed organelles and proteins and genes and all sorts of other housekeeping stuff could have been organized.

Of course, just like the sexual exchange of genetic material in increasingly complex creatures, the more layers of intricacies evolution could lay upon that originating framework, the more interesting and fun that sexual exchange gets.

---

Had a new thought last night - since today’s philosophical outlook remains trapped in a medieval self-centered mindset (humanity is all that matters, Earth is ours to consume as fast as we can manage it, God decreed it.), It worked great for a world with limitless frontiers and resources -
but though most are excellent at ignoring it, that time in human history is over - that’s fact based on a ton of physical evidence that’s available, but that most don’t like, still not liking it, isn’t enough to make it go away.

Humanity, like it or not (and I certainly don’t like it, but honesty and facts require I face them and accept them and understand it best I can), is entering the age of diminishing and before it’s over the survivors will see our billions whittled down by the billions.

That is the new reality that’s steadily entering center stage of the human drama - it’s going to require a new way of thinking,
hiding philosophy in its traditional world of metaphysical musing (always seeking “god”, even if it’s in math, or microtubule, or the notion ‘greed is good’), and our never ending fascination with the boundary waters between matter and background energy. All the while avoiding the basic lessons of our macroscopic world.

I wish I knew how to pretty it up.

[lausten]

@citizenschallengev4

Just no internalizing of it.

This could be a key point. How do you evaluate if me, or anyone has internalized it?

@citizenschallengev4

Ah, but don’t you see,

I do see that, which is why I look to philosophies that include all living things, like Robin Wall Kimmerer, David Sloan Wilson, or anyone who mentions AGW or saving the whales or whatever.

@citizenschallengev4

Are you saying “survival instinct” is a thing?

No. Survival is the thing. And survival of one species depends on the survival of many others. The more complex the species, the more interdependence.

@citizenschallengev4

Heck are you saying, single cells don’t have a survival instinct?

I don’t really where where “it” comes from, but you can start wherever you want, even with the thought that “nothing is an unstable condition”, so that created something, then hydrogen forming out of the early particles, why? who knows?

@citizenschallengev4

hiding philosophy in its traditional world of metaphysical musing

A lot to unpack there, and I have company coming, so, just quickly: sure, some people do that, but there is plenty of good philosophy that leads to reasons for not being racist, for us getting more comfortable with end-of-life issues, for saving the air and water for future generations, for treating all people better so population gets under control and all people can do better.

[write4u]

@citizenschallengev4

To be clear, none of that quote was referencing you, (write).

You wrote it in post #120, addressed to me.

@citizenschallengev4

Heck even reducing the lake to a battery, I find slightly perverse and headgamie.

Oh, you loud the wonders of natural folds within folds, but find the artificial conversion of gravitational (kinetic) force into energy perverse?

I call that insight.

[citizenschallengev4]

@lausten

This could be a key point. How do you evaluate if me, or anyone has internalized it?

By the way they tell their stories.

@lausten

A lot to unpack there, and I have company coming, so, just quickly: sure, some people do that, but there is plenty of good philosophy that leads to reasons for not being racist, for us getting more comfortable with end-of-life issues, for saving the air and water for future generations, for treating all people better so population gets under control and all people can do better.

Okay, as far as that goes. But my point is, that we need to adopt an entirely new relationship with this planet, the old mindset got up to the point we are at. Wonderful civilization, my life though humble is better than most pre-industrial kings had it. I’m not unaware, or ungrateful for modern blessing, but unlike most I’m also keenly aware of the flip side.

That doesn’t mean leaving humanity behind, but it does mean getting real about what happen and preparing for it intelligently. It does mean raising the profile (the importance of “Earth” and her biosphere and global heat and moisture distribution on an emotional, spiritual, even storytelling way.

Perhaps none of this makes sense, but what will people do after major water systems that millions depend on fail? etc., etc.,? How will our current self-centered - and as you point out necessarily self-serving or we’d have never arrived here - consumption driven philosophies deal with the new realities people will actually be dealing with?

[lausten]

@citizenschallengev4

By the way they tell their stories.

That’s too vague.

It makes sense that we need new story telling and new focus, but what I hear from you is, “they did, or are doing, it wrong”, and, something about deep time appreciation, etc. Sorry, I don’t have time to look up and grab grab some quotes from you.

Addendum:
In “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, she goes off and gets a biology degree, then rediscovers her Native roots. When she asks the elders why they pick some sweetgrass, but not all of it, they say the ancestors tell them what to pick, that it’s not all for them, some must be left for the Great Spirit, or something along those lines. Modern agriculture doesn’t care about those stories, but Robin knows there is wisdom in them.

So, she gets a grant, after being shamed about it and pressing through, and after a few years she “proves” their methods yield more sweetgrass. You are playing all of these roles CC, the elder, the biologist, and the one who approves the grant money. We’ve wasted 500 years by not listening to each other, and we’re running out of time.

Braiding Sweetgrass

I’ve mentioned this book by Robin Kimmerer a couple times, but thought I’d start a thread here. It covers religion and science, so I put it in Humanism. She blends her knowledge of botany with her Native Potawatomi traditions, respecting both. She kinda lost me after explaining an epiphany she had while picking beans, then started talking about what I thought was a co-worker. When I re-read it, I realized she was describing herself in her plant scientist role. She tries to explain, to that self…

[citizenschallengev4]

@citizenschallengev4

@lausten

This could be a key point. How do you evaluate if me, or anyone has internalized it?

By the way they tell their stories.

@lausten

That’s too vague.

I was simply answering your question.
I keep exploring examples and writing about it and wish I had the time to finish various projects I’ve been inspired to start, but not the time to finish, . . . though I’m finally starting to feel good about the wood pile out back.

@lausten

and, something about deep time appreciation, etc

You forgetting about the “deep” in deep-time, it’s about appreciation not just the vast periods of time, but the vast pageant of evolving life and its myriad stages. Something that’s important because it provides a personal connection that doesn’t exist in today’s exclusively self-serving frame of mind (that that mindset is what made us so mighty is actually beside the point, since I’m not denying the mindset, or it’s “utility.” I just happen to have a rough time with the modern dead-end reality it’s created for us and our collective future.).

The missing part about actually being viscerally aware of being a evolved sensing creature. (With a few physical traits and skills that enabled us to subjugate the natural world with impunity - still biological Beings nonetheless.)

Why is something like that important? Well, one example, it exposes the folly of trying to understand consciousness via studying human sensing abilities and optical illusions. Those studies have a great deal to inform about the complex architecture of human brain and thought processing,
but consciousness itself is built upon a much much deeper core of our Being.
Which means we need to incorporate an understanding of developing consciousness via learning about how creatures evolved over the course of time unfolding one day at a time.

But it’s not talked about that way.

Or the thing about God being the product of our minds, if that actually were absorbed, why still continue all the debates about ancient teachings, along lines that side step that fundamental observation of what it is to be a human?

I believe we’d be much further along with reconciling our internal drives and struggles with our moral expectations had we focused a bit more on our biological similarities with animals, rather than looking for a god who serves us, yet who’s only in our imagination.

[lausten]

@citizenschallengev4

but consciousness itself is built upon a much much deeper core of our Being.

Here’s where you lose me. Deeper where? From waves to senses to neurons to what? What step should we be looking at? If it’s integrating we need, which disciplines?

[citizenschallengev4]

@lausten

Here’s where you lose me.
Deeper where?
From waves to senses to neurons to what?

Waves to sense, to neurons, to mirror neuron and so on. You’re asking about the process of consciousness in the here and now, if I followed that.

But from an evolutionary perspective, we need to start with grasping early homeostasis process and how it managed to get its body to adjust according its monitoring and commands - and how that system evolved as creatures got more complex bodies and neural networks, plus the more complex living bodies and circumstances they needed to learn to navigate.

But since you’re asking for a little more starch, I hope you don’t mind if I hand this off to Dr. Mark Solms, hopefully he won’t leave you as frustrated as I do.

The Source of Consciousness - with Mark Solms

January 2021
Understanding why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain seems like an impossible task. Mark explores the subjective experiences of hundreds of neurological patients, many of whom he treated. Their uncanny conversations help to expose the brain’s obscure reaches.

Mark Solms has spent his entire career investigating the mysteries of consciousness. Best known for identifying the brain mechanisms of dreaming and for bringing psychoanalytic insights into modern neuroscience, he is director of neuropsychology in the Neuroscience Institute of the University of Cape Town, honorary lecturer in neurosurgery at the Royal London Hospital School of Medicine, and an honorary fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists.

---

Mark Solms - Emotions are the Source of Consciousness

Mar 22, 2022

In today’s episode, I spoke with Prof. Mark Solms, a psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist from South Africa who is well known for his groundbreaking research on the brain mechanisms of dreaming. Today we spoke about the unique field of neuropsychoanalysis, some of his earlier research showing why Freud was right about dreaming, and about his new book The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. In his book, Mark brings forth a revolutionary theory of consciousness that returns emotions and feelings to the center of our mental lives.

---

Mark Solms: A New Approach to the Hard Problem of Consciousness

#Mark Solms: A New Approach to the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Jul 29, 2020
David Chalmers’s (1995) hard problem famously states: “It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises.” Thomas Nagel (1974) wrote something similar: “If we acknowledge that a physical theory of mind must account for the subjective character of experience, we must admit that no presently available conception gives us a clue about how this could be done.” This presentation will point the way towards the long-sought “good explanation” – or at least it will provide “a clue”. Prof Solms will make three points:

(1) It is unfortunate that cognitive science took vision as its model example when looking for a ‘neural correlate of consciousness’ because cortical vision (like most cognitive processes) is not intrinsically conscious. There is not necessarily ‘something it is like’ to see.

(2) Affective feeling, by contrast, is conscious by definition. You cannot feel something without feeling it. Moreover, affective feeling, generated in the upper brainstem, is the foundational form of consciousness: prerequisite for all the higher cognitive forms.

(3) The functional mechanism of feeling explains why and how it cannot go on ‘in the dark’, free of any inner feel. Affect enables the organism to monitor deviations from its expected self-states in uncertain situations and thereby frees homeostasis from the limitations of automatism. As Nagel says, “An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” Affect literally constitutes the sentient subject.

---

Mark Solms - UCT Online Course: “What is a Mind?” “Ask Mark” collection

Ask Mark 3.16 - Where does consciousness come from?

Ask Mark 3.16 - Where does consciousness come from?

Professor Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town (UCT) answers a question (see below) posed to him on UCT’s free online course “What is a Mind?”, hosted by FutureLearn. Enrol for the course here https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/w…

[citizenschallengev4]

@lausten

but what I hear from you is, “they did, or are doing, it wrong”,

@lausten

You are playing all of these roles CC, the elder, the biologist, and the one who approves the grant money.

Nah, I’m just a little freakster that’s been watching the show from the sidelines, thinking about what seemed to me obvious mistakes, on after another idiotically choice made, and consequences to absorb, since the early 1960s and watching the consequences pile up, while most of the rest of society does it’s best to pretend nothing is amiss.

You are offended, that I’m offended by the mentality and reasoning that justified those consequential errors, mistakes, royal screw ups of the first order, that dictated further dysfunctional behavior, have we ever learned anything, where did trump and Putin come from, or the sacred corporate fiduciary responsibility decree, that was/is basically a freeloaders license, if not a resounding reiteration of how totally derailed human thinking has been for centuries of the same dog chasing tail conflicts. Pointing it out may not make friends, but it’s real and honest, actual factual state of affairs.

And the stuff we have to be really proud of, has a dark underbelly we dare not examine. So why shouldn’t I harbor a bit of indignant bitterness?

@lausten

Addendum:
In “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, she goes off and gets a biology degree, then rediscovers her Native roots. When she asks the elders why they pick some sweetgrass, but not all of it, they say the ancestors tell them what to pick, that it’s not all for them, some must be left for the Great Spirit, or something along those lines. Modern agriculture doesn’t care about those stories, but Robin knows there is wisdom in them.

So, she gets a grant, after being shamed about it and pressing through, and after a few years she “proves” their methods yield more sweetgrass. … We’ve wasted 500 years by not listening to each other, and we’re running out of time.

Okay, though consider, her story can only be heard by folks who are receptive to it.

A good place to start is
Appreciating the different between our wonderful mental selves, with our amazing learning ability and imagination, that is the landscape of our thoughts and dreams and fears.

All those thoughts in our head - a unique realm onto itself.

Opposed to that is the fact that you are an evolved biological creature - and like all other creatures, you are an observation and exploration instrument.

Be you ameba, or fruit fly, flat worm, or octopus, raven, or human and all the billions in-between, that drive to live had to have be absolutely primal and handed down since the dawn of life, or the experiment would have died before it got going.

This recognition of one’s biological self has lots of dividends, such as bringing one a little more in line with understanding dynamic animals and changing landscapes as a tapestry of sovereign intelligent creatures of every variety and that you are a part of all that.

[lausten]

@citizenschallengev4

You are offended, that I’m offended

That came totally out of left field.

[lausten]

@citizenschallengev4

that drive to live had to have be absolutely primal and handed down since the dawn of life, or the experiment would have died before it got going.

Yeah. I said that. But you questioned my use of “survival” as a basis for why we keep evolving. It gets frustrating when don’t recognize common ground.

[citizenschallengev4]

@write4u

Math is the hidden secret to understanding the world | Roger Antonsen

Note that @ 8:30 the mathematics of 4/3s “unfolds” in a most elegant specific mathematical pattern.

I listen to that video (again, incidentally). It’s a splendid celebration of math and the truth that “Math is the hidden secret to understanding the world”. I can totally get behind that description.
But the thing is Write, you claim more than that, when you get warmed up you make mathematics sound like a substitute for that God Thing that people find so difficult to shake.

@write4u

You make all these hasty judgements of people’s ability for "understanding " and ability of looking at things from different perspectives.

If you listen to my words, you’ll find it’s pretty much one particular neglected perspective I’m trying to champion.
Also I’m not dismissing any of that serious stuff (well, except for when folks try sneaking in the woo, which Roger Antonsen, did not do! It was a fascinating talk that surely explain why he was so passionate about math.

@write4u

@citizenschallengev4

Heck even reducing the lake to a battery, I find slightly perverse and headgamie.

Oh, you loud the wonders of natural folds within folds, but find the artificial conversion of gravitational (kinetic) force into energy perverse?

I call that insight.

I call that ignoring the context. I don’t deny any of the physics or the way physicists want to talk about it. But when I’m talking appreciating living consciousness in action and evolution, and you tell me that lake is a battery,
Well okay for specialists reducing that lake to formulas, it is what it is.

But I would hope you’d appreciate that in reality a lake is so much more than so much energy stored in one manner or another.

@citizenschallengev4

Does the land scape and biology really care if that lake “is” electrical potential or “has” electrical potential.
Heck even reducing the lake to a battery, I find slightly perverse and headgamie.

@write4u

You wrote it in post #120, addressed to me.

@citizenschallengev4

…
2nd half:
Lausten speaking of evolution, then you speak of years,
to me that indicates that the conception of all those generations unfolding
hasn’t really grabbed your imagination.

And if it’s never entered your imagination how can you have any affinity for the reality of it having unfolded?

And that’s one of things I’m trying to shine a spot light on.

[write4u]

[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:134, topic:8988”]
But when I’m talking appreciating living consciousness in action and evolution, and you tell me that lake is a battery,
Well okay for specialists reducing that lake to formulas, it is what it is.
But I would hope you’d appreciate that in reality a lake is so much more than so much energy stored in one manner or another.

Nooo, I was talking about “potential”, the enfolded promise that may become expressed in reality. Nature’s ability to create and use natural laws to convert matter to energy and energy to matter is not about the Energizer Bunny!

[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:122, topic:8988”]
Does the land scape and biology really care if that lake “is” electrical potential or “has” electrical potential.
Heck even reducing the lake to a battery, I find slightly perverse and headgamie.

There you go…

…katchingg…katchingg…kachingg

Did you know that, in spite of the uniformity of the oceans across the planet the diversity of ocean life still represents about 15% of life on land.

Why Are There So Many More Species on Land When the Sea Is Bigger?

Most of the Earth’s surface is ocean. Life began there. But marine life accounts for only 15 percent of the world’s species.

Why is that?

Half a billion years ago on Earth, after the Cambrian explosion had created an astonishing array of new species, there was still no life on land. No complex life anyway. No plants, no animals, certainly nothing that even compared to the great diversity of life in the sea, which teemed with trilobites, crustaceans, bristly worms, and soft squid-like creatures. Most major animals groups that exist today originated in the sea at this time.

Fast forward to the present, and it is now the land that has a dizzying array of species. In particular: flowering plants, fungi, and insects, so many damn insects. By one estimate, there are five times as many terrestrial species as marine species today. So how did biodiversity in the ocean—despite its head start, despite its larger share of the Earth’s surface area—come to fall so far behind biodiversity on land?

One reason May and others since have suggested is the physical layout of terrestrial habitats, which may be both more fragmented and more diverse. For example, as Charles Darwin famously documented in the Galapagos, islands are hotbeds for diversification. Over time, natural selection and even chance can turn two different populations of the same species on two islands into two species. The ocean is, in contrast, one big interconnected body of water, with fewer physical barriers to keep populations apart. It also doesn’t have as many temperature extremes that can drive diversification on land.

“The deep sea is basically a big fridge with the door closed for a long time.”

Why Are There so Many More Species on Land When the Sea Is Bigger?

Interesting is the fact that almost all land organisms still need water to flourish, whereas aquatic life does very well without land, which is probably the reason that during extinction events on dry land, the ocean creatures managed to survive.

All of it is the realization of the potential contained in the promise of interaction and pattern formation by relational values in a dynamic environment over large timespans and spaces from nano-scales to galaxies and in a universe teeming with life wherever this potential exists.

[lausten]

@citizenschallengev4

Nah, I’m just a little freakster that’s been watching the show from the sidelines, thinking about what seemed to me obvious mistakes, on after another idiotically choice made, and consequences to absorb, since the early 1960s and watching the consequences pile up, while most of the rest of society does it’s best to pretend nothing is amiss.

I didn’t mean for this to be negative in anyway, that you are speaking as an elder, a biologist (or whatever science you know), and as the one who thinks about funding and priorities. That’s exactly what I think we all need to do. We can’t all get jobs in those three disciplines, but we need to understand them. We can’t just let the elders run things, and I realize you and I are still fighting the previous the older generation while the younger generation is looking at us as dinosaurs!

Kimmerer has managed to keep a foot in her science education while gaining wisdom from her ancestors. She does it by talking to them, and by trying to learn their language. It has very different structures, like when they talk about a lake and its shoreline, those aren’t separate nouns in the way our real estate viewpoint would see them. it is “being” a shoreline, and that includes how it came to be, how it moves, and how it changes with the seasons. I have no idea how the Potawatomi language does that, but it’s going to change your worldview if you speak that way.

That seems to be what you’re trying to do, but I only get that by reflecting my understanding to you, then having you tell me I’m not getting it. I have to pick out the good stuff and then tell you again, something like that my viscera doesn’t do my thinking for me. I mean, I know what feelings are, and when I see someone affected by an AGW flood event, I feel it, because it happened to me. But I don’t like being judged for how my words come out. I don’t like being compared to a 16th-century philosopher. It doesn’t help me connect.

[citizenschallengev4]

@write4u

Nature’s ability to create and use natural laws to convert matter to energy and energy to matter is not about the Energizer Bunny!

I think that was my point.
You do get into the gotcha game.

@write4u

Did you know that, in spite of the uniformity of the oceans across the planet the diversity of ocean life still represents about 15% of life on land.

@write4u

Why is that?

@write4u

All of it is the realization of the potential contained in the promise of interaction and pattern formation by relational values in a dynamic environment over large timespans and spaces from nano-scales to galaxies and in a universe teeming with life wherever this potential exists.

Well yes I do know that. Totally blew me away in my twenties, it’s had a chance to soak in since then.

Do you know that the land provides way more challenges and varied ecological niche’s that life had to figure out how to exploit?

What’s the point? An excuse to trot out the poetry of “interaction and pattern formation by relational values” and “nano-scales to galaxies” stuff mathematicians and physicists may love, but that remains outside the ‘relatable’ range of most human beings.

@write4u

Interesting is the fact that almost all land organisms still need water to flourish, whereas aquatic life does very well without land, …

Right but the flip side of that is how landlocked bodies have managed to seal in part of the liquid ocean inside our bodies or we’d have never moved onto the land.

It’s fascinating to realize that every cell (“no cell is more than 50 micrometers away from a capillary”) in your body requires water to flourish via irrigating capillaries teaming with blood cells in a saline solution, along with the fluids of the lymphatic system that constantly bathes the inside of our body.

[citizenschallengev4]

@lausten

something like that my viscera doesn’t do my thinking for me.

Do you really believe that?
I’m not implying your gut does all your thinking.

Is it rational to trust your gut feelings? A neuroscientist explains

However, this attitude is based on a myth of cognitive progress. Emotions are actually not dumb responses that always need to be ignored or even corrected by rational faculties. They are appraisals of what you have just experienced or thought of – in this sense, they are also a form of information processing.

Intuition or gut feelings are also the result of a lot of processing that happens in the brain. Research suggests that the brain is a large predictive machine, constantly comparing incoming sensory information and current experiences against stored knowledge and memories of previous experiences, and predicting what will come next. This is described in what scientists call the “predictive processing framework”.

Intuition

Most the good stuff seems behind paywall, plus I’m out of time.

@lausten

I don’t like being compared to a 16th-century philosopher.

I’m not comparing you to 16th century philosophers - but I am saying much of today’s philosophical outlook that I’ve been exposed to, turn out in essence to be simply recycling and regurgitation. Replacing Gods with quantum weirdness that crosses over the metaphysical musing line, way too often.

I was even able to write a detailed dissection of an example:

Case For Reality

Case For Reality

Because apparently someone needs to make one. Dissecting delusional thinking. For an introduction see, A Preview of Cc’s “Hoffman playing Basketball in zero-gravity” a critical review of his “Case Against Reality”.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Content

Cc’s Students’ Study Guide for The Case Against Reality.

(a non-scholar’s “scholarly” effort)

But, of course, it’s TLDR.

Don’t know what to say, it’s not like haven’t boiled it down to some simple straightforward fundamentals. But yes it’s offensive since I make the connection between the disastrous state of the world today with western self-serving and incredibly shallow philosophical handwringing, and blindspots.

I may be an a-hole, but it ain’t nothing compared to what we’ve collectively been to other creatures and this planet that’s in a very very real sense our Mother. Not to mention how we’ve deliberately destroyed our own children’s future.

[lausten]

@citizenschallengev4

Do you really believe that?

We’d have to have long discussion about “thinking” to really talk about this. But I’ve put up stuff by Jonathan Haidt, which is all about the mix of the intuitive and the rational, and you mostly ignore it. The recent one from Dan Fincke was waved off too.

I watched the Solms video, the one with the children who don’t a cortex, I think I watched it before, this time I tried to see it in the light of your “mindscape” thesis. I’m sure I’d have “read the book”, but even so, it’s an answer to Chalmers, it’s a neuroscience discussion about what consciousness is. Human beings built pyramids, aqueducts, invented steam power, and a whole lot of other stuff while still in that ancient mindset of us being ruled by gods. Things changed when empiricism started gaining traction against arbitrary authorities, but even before that, you can find people questioning just where the seat of “self” is, just what it is to be human. Philosophy grows with science, and Solm’s data is all pretty new. I think philosophy is already moving in that direction.

Jonathan Haidt - The Rationalist Delusion in Moral Psychology

[citizenschallengev4]

@lausten

while still in that ancient mindset of us being ruled by gods. Things changed when empiricism started gaining traction against arbitrary authorities

And I maintain our names for gods have changed, but that underlying need for an answer to everything that would make “it all right” remains. We’re still looking for the right answer, but we exist in a world without any central perspective, it’s a futile endeavor that simply blinds.

@lausten

but even before that, you can find people questioning just where the seat of “self” is, just what it is to be human.

Well, so at least I’m in good company.
Regarding “Jonathan Haidt’s - The Rationalist Delusion in Moral Psychology” I listened to it. It was interesting, a debate if you will. Haidt exposes the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of his intellectual opponents, the Rationalists with their sanctimonious
delusional objectivity. etc.

E.O.Wilson’s new synthesis is brought up at 3:15, (that’s certainly based on evolutionary biology.)

Reason as Master, Reason as Servant.

Haidt’s decision making model -

14:20ish "It’s all cognition it’s just their different kinds of cognitions, there’s reasoning cognition, intuitive cognition.

18:00: New Synthesis in Moral Psych

1. Intuitions come first, strategies reasoning second
2. There’s more to morality than harm and fairness
3. Morality binds and blinds

After “God” lost central footing, philosophers only found two anchors for imposing regulations on people.
Harm and Suffering, it’s wrong to hurt people.
Fairness and Justice, the ultimate virtue.

Monism - if you can explain something with just one principle you win a prize.

This is all about Moral Philosophy.

This has all been about Moral Philosophy, something outside the realm of my thoughts, but it’s been interesting
But now we get to that subtle aspect I keep bitching about. You’re pointing out to me that of course Haidt incorporates evolutionary awareness. Here it is:

19:44 But in the history of psychology the philosophy has been if you can possibly explain something one principle, just do it. Because that’s better.

Well whoever designed human beings, namely evolution, but whoever designed human beings,

didn’t give a damn about parsimony, we are not parsimonious creatures.

Then he’s right back into scholastic battles.

Suddenly we are dealing with fully formed human, who are following evolutionary rules of the game.
That’s a long way from appreciating that you personally are an evolved biological sensing creature and perhaps it would be good to really think on that and absorb what it means.

Instead of this sort of glib disregard for an important detail, (perfectly typical post card understanding of evolution), in between jumping right back into the collective mindscape with its intellectual battles and tender egos.
That drives me up the wall and to the keyboard.

---

What was missing here?
In my estimation, a segue for the audience, is called for:
"Speaking of Evolution,
Who Are You?
Can you answer that?
(I’ll assume a familiarity with Earth’s evolutionary Timeline reduced to 24 hours and add a visual reference.)

'Have you thought much about the difference between your thoughts and your physical brain/body - you know, that physical vehicle that chauffeurs your mind around until death do you part?

"Seems to me, we’re always thinking about our minds, its emotions, its memories, impulses, restraints, inner struggles, how it processes problems, in fact everything you experience in life is all wrapped up in your mind.

"How much time have you given to thinking about your body and the epic journey its genetic code has taken, through hundreds of millions, even billions of years, in order to have achieved the ability to construct and maintain your ever changing body and brain?

Here’s a mind experiment, brush up on your “Timeline of Life’s Evolutionary journey,” then imagine the insides of your body, the fantastic physiological self-aware organism that you are. Realize you can trace your ancestors through a regression backward, as components of your body are incrementally lost, and you experience your body getting ever more primitive.

Playing the mind experiment forwards is more thrilling, since we better appreciate how the myriad of components and systems were constructed onto existing systems with each physical advance having impacts on cognition. Arriving back in your own skin, you’ll better glory in the wonder while gaining a more personal perspective on your actual kinship with other creatures and this biosphere that made you.

It’s a story that can be told and that carries psychological and emotional content, for those inclined.

Personally, intuitively appreciating that you are an evolved biological sensing creature, provides a sort of benchmark to better understand your own personal struggles between your flesh and body and between your ego and rationality, even about that assortment of voices that populated your mindscape, and more.

---

Haidt did really impressed with one point he made:

Haidt: 26:40ish … there’s no precedent for (use) on this planet, well there is precedent in the Hymenoptera and other ultra social animals but but not for creatures that are not kin.

Then bang we get Babylon, we get Tenochtitlan, I mean how did this happen and I believe a big part of the story is our ability to make things Sacred.
We, all around the world, people express their religious feelings in somewhat similar ways, …

In hindsight I can see I’ve been playing with that notion, thanks to Yuval Noah Harari “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” pointing out the importance of humans being able to believe fictions, so it wasn’t surprising so much an elegant and nailing it.

Well summarized and it’s a sticky thought.
This part was enjoyable but then around 30min it starts getting weird when he starts in on the liberal bashing, and does the same things he condemns others for.
He’s a smart guy and well spoke, but with plenty of his own blind spots.

A typical example of what I find disturbing, part fascinating solid information, part utter frustration.
Recently Write shared a video about math and how it’s all about enabling changing perspective views of things.

I could relate to it since I believe it’s precisely a few important perspective changes, that are being overlooked.

That’s probably a product of current events and the times, if you weren’t for growth and consumption and keeping up with jones, you were irrelevant. But times are changing, and old convictions are going to run out of fuel and water and folks will need something a bit deeper. People will be needing a little comfort in the face of death, when arguing about morals has become empty, “God is dead,” and quantum weirdness is all our thinker have to offer.