I agree, but when it comes to survival, I don’t think anything has changed. The survival instinct is as powerful today as ever except that we have many more options at our disposal other than fight or flight.
It has been proven that in todays’ world flight does not offer safety and our fighting tools are infinitely more powerful that they were then.
It has been proven that “equality” is a noble but fragile moral tenet that must be “enforced”, the very opposite of “cooperate”.
Perhaps natural selection does not allow for equality. I am not so sure that the dynamic nature of reality allows for total symbiosis.
Existence itself is a competitive endeavor. It has been since the birth of the Universe.
As Hellstrom declared: “Life must take life in the interest of life”
I don’t know where else to go with this. Your responses remind me of a religious person telling me that if I read the Bible and still don’t believe in Jesus, then I need to go back, read it some more, and pray, then it will come to me. Then I will “arrive back in my skin and glory in the wonder”.
That’s not how experiments work, mind or otherwise. If you want to convince me the world is round, you can’t take me out in space, just like you can’t take me back 4 billion years. However, you can put some sticks in the ground and compare their shadows and calculate how the ground is curved. That’s what a review of evolutionary biology and human writing (which shows the thinking) does. Descartes is just one stick. Obviously it’s all “wrong”, misses the mark, and has been used to manipulate and fulfill human short-term desires.
Your issues with philosophy are circular. You have a problem with how people think when you are trying to figure out how people think.
I’m still working on the history of philosophy summary. Getting the last couple hundred years will be the most challenging.
Come on. That applies to every subject, if I don’t get your algebraic example time after time, it’s time for me to do my own homework and learn more about it myself. Nobody can do that for me.
Also:
Was an example of how I would have changed that talk to that audience - the specific that best demonstrated what concerns me.
It wasn’t intended as an insult to you.
I don’t see it that way.
I have a problem with the way people think because of what I hear unfold - too often it’s more about self-aggrandizement than real world thinking.
The way quantum weirdness, Schrödinger’s cat, and Wave Function Collapse have been hijacked into all sorts of intellectual entertainment philosophizing that’s grossly removed from the serious physics and math happening with the science, rather than a focus on grasping the hard facts we have acquired.
I even showed you specifically where Haidt went off the rails for me, A mention of evolution and then he moves on to the modern humans as though none of the other part of our human development story before those last milliseconds, matter.
Until people grasp how our bodies are bodies were created layer upon layer, and how we were formed by our environment and that when I use the term “we” that’s talking about the animal kingdom and not just our little human tribe. Haidt did none of that that, instead later he gets into his liberal bashing, which to me seems like it devolves into a circular mess. I heard him giving it before, so this wasn’t my first exposure. But then this talk was about “moral” and other apparent philosophical black hole.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending “liberals,” heck I don’t even know what they’ve turned into these days. What I’m complaining about here, is the free pass philosophers so often give to, what’s in reality, “deliberate based on strategic lies and brainwashing techniques” propaganda campaigns used by the various political anti-science interests for short term personal gain and the deliberate stupefaction of the public about critically important physical matters. Matters that are well understood and have concrete facts and answers to all good faith skeptical challenges.
That seeming mass acceptance and normalization of the strategic lies dominating critically important public discussions of life and death matters that require sober education/learning and consideration, if constructive outcomes were to be hoped for.
The google algorithm fed me another excellent timely and informative explication by Sabina Hossenfelder and real physicist
Intro 00:34 Wigner and his friends 03:39 Enter von Neumann 05:51 Problems with the Wigner-vNeumann interpretation 07:37 Consciousness-induced wave-function collapse 09:38 Consciousness-influenced wave-function collapse 14:27 Penrose and Hamaroff 15:25 Summary 16:02 Check out my Quantum Mechanics Course
Hossenfelder 9:00 … (9:33): “It’s really cheese that causes wave function collapse, prove me wrong.” I love it. Cutting through the mind-games crap, that’s why Sabine is so interesting to watch.
The circular part is, the propaganda is the question Haidt was dealing with. Do you seriously think he should stop and have everyone in that hall just meditate on monkeys? What would that accomplish? We don’t know how that monkey part of our brain is still influencing us when we get up and decide where to set the thermostat. You just keep stating it, without providing much insight, so I’m saying you don’t know either. We’re all in that boat.
You keep circling back to complaints about what humans do and the assumption that if we could get everyone to reflect on how we are related to all the other animals, that would somehow solve it. You may have gotten to where you are via that reflection, but billions of people have been shown the same things and they don’t get there. That’s the problem, not how social psychology is studied or presented.
Let me begin by saying that I really like Sabine Hossenfelder. She speaks in clear , understandable terms.
Interestingly, she begins her lecture with a demonstration of superposition that resolves into a “bing” or as Penrose proposes, a “thought”. i.e. a resolution of uncertainty that offers a moment of “clarity” (see 0:55)
Then later, (14:27) when she addresses ORCH OR, her only objection is that the brain’s warm, wet environment is not suitable for quantum, but which has already been proven to be perfectly suitable after all.
Then she asks a silly question where she dismisses the different processes to which microtubules are adaptable and which shows her overall ignorance of microtubule functions and processes.
Moreover, her question “why is the microtubule network in the body not conscious” seems to be in opposition to your mind/body model.
In any case she is completely ignoring the proposition that “consciousness” is an emergent property of certain complex neural processes such as in “level 3” of the brain , when levels 1 and 2 function subconsciously via purely electrochemical mechanics.
I can’t summarize your entire theme every time I refer to it. I think I hear what you’re saying, and I’m trying to show where you leave me hanging. The brain stem that Solms talks about is sometimes referred to as the lizard brain. It’s not an insult, it’s a reference to that stage of evolution. It’s an acknowledgment of that’s where we came from, it’s the very reflection on our evolution that you talk about.
I think claims and conclusion based single studies turn into over enthusiastic overreach.
"The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?" ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review. "This opens a potential Pandora’s Box, but our theory accommodates both these views,
suggesting consciousness derives from quantum vibrations in microtubules, protein polymers inside brain neurons, which both govern neuronal and synaptic function,
Okay, that fine and good so far as it goes, report on what you are observing.
But what do those words really mean? As physicists will point out, everything is quantum processes, light hitting upon a scene you are viewing, that’s a quantum process, it’s been found to be involved with mitochondria, & here, Photosynthesis, and here.
Seems to me that’s what happens when we get into the world of the extremely tiny and I only understand rough outlines, still when I see stuff like the following, it’s like getting gut punched:
and connect brain processes to self-organizing processes in the fine scale, ‘proto-conscious’ quantum structure of reality."
What is this?
There is no scientific grounding whatsoever for a cosmic origin to consciousness, none. But there’s all sorts of scientific evidence for a biological origin to consciousness as an inevitable by-product of individual creatures having to function in a living environment.
I’m no expert, you’re no expert, but I do know proposing cosmic consciousness, as the foundation for our consciousness is pure metaphysical showmanship, not serious science, even when it is mingled with real science.
Gotcha.
Admittedly I’d have given the same answer a half year ago, but you offer a great case in point. We were all thought that and believed it for decades, turns out another case of gross oversimplification and overstating of facts.
Well, that’s Solms and it’s why he was, perhaps not a salvation for me, pretty close.
I think some of it offends you too much, which is what leaves you hanging.
I believe the key to understanding one’s internal milieu revolves around a personal realistic appreciation for the deep-time evolution that was required to piece together the various systems and complexities, the layers upon layers of interwoven harmonic complexity flowing through all those generations, thousands and millions and probably billions of generations, back to when we couldn’t recognize ourselves.
It’s not just the past tens of thousands years, or hundreds of thousands of years, six million that made us. It took half billion years to accomplish us, and we’re so full of ourselves, we are utterly blind to it as your subconscious via words revealed to me.
I talk deep evolution and you think monkeys, but I’m thinking microbial mats (well at least the creatures that devoured those mats.)
My nitpicking offends you, so it makes no sense to you, so you conclude I’m involved in a circular argument, when I certainly am not, I can define specifically where I find the flaws. That it’ll probably offend and I should expect rejection, but that does not make my argument and perspective circular or shallow.
We as a people and pretty near all our social systems are totally focused on ourselves, the awareness for anything outside our immediate awareness gets reduced to postcards.
Look what happened in the above exchange. You dismissed it with offense, apparently thinking that sticking the label “evolution” on it, is supposed to be enough. I disagree, I’ve become convinced it’s at the root of our self inflicted societal stupifaction of the past decades.
Evolution is reduced to processes and our immediate past,
totally ignoring that that makes up a fraction of a second of Earth’s 24 hours.
I say those earlier hours are critically important to learning about and understanding ourselves. And our place on this planet. You may disagree with my position, but it’s not circular.
No this was in response to the challenge which was found to be flawed to begin with and upon further testing the original findings proved to be well within acceptable limits. Hameroff explained this in his lecture
[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:149, topic:8988”]
There is no scientific grounding whatsoever for a cosmic origin to consciousness, none. But there’s all sorts of scientific evidence for a biological origin to consciousness as an inevitable by-product of individual creatures having to function in a living environment. > I’m no expert, you’re no expert, but I do know proposing cosmic consciousness, as the foundation for our consciousness is pure metaphysical showmanship, not serious science, even when it is mingled with real science.
I find it very interesting that Max Tegmark objected to the quantum aspect of ORCH OR, being that he proposes that consciousness is an emergent property of certain mathematically ordered dynamic patterns, regardless of the actual substrate that creates the pattern.
And looking at the advances in AI, such as GPT3 and 4, this perspective may prove that conscious intelligence may not necessarily have to be biological, but may well emerge from the quasi-intelligent nature of certain natural mathematically organized phenomena.
Penrose proposes that at quantum levels the resolution of quantum superposition itself is causal to an instant of quasi-intelligent clarity.
I am thinking that you can imagine the body possessing a form of quasi-intelligence and accompanies the brain in sentient awareness of the environment.
If microtubules are indeed able to form such complex networks that produce the emergence of conscious thought, remember that microtubules are just nano-scale polymers able to process and store an array of electro-chemical informational data. They are a dipolar coil consisting of a mesh from just 2 related tubulin proteins (a and b). It is impossible that these structure possess any kind of consciousness individually, but put a trillion together (with some other relater stuff) and conscious thought begins to emerge.
This can be proved beyond doubt merely by the fact that all Eukaryotic organisms that have a dynamic relationship with their environment, have microtubules as data processors in common, from plants to humans,
It’s hard to discuss if you get hooked on one word, something I did as a shorthand, to be succinct, but you decide I was being dismissive.
Any discussion of evolution implies our relationship to all life. The tree of life shows that. Now, OTOH, our frontal lobes developed fairly recently, and those are pretty important, so I don’t see the error in wanting to study those. Saying we ignore the rest is not really true.
Let’s get one thing straight. Evolution started with the beginning of the universe itself and the term is not exclusive to living biology. So any talk about the depth of evolution on earth is only half the story.
Formation and Evolution of the Universe
Our universe began with an explosion of space itself - the Big Bang. Starting from extremely high density and temperature, space expanded, the universe cooled, and the simplest elements formed. Gravity gradually drew matter together to form the first stars and the first galaxies. Galaxies collected into groups, clusters, and superclusters. Some stars died in supernova explosions, whose chemical remnants seeded new generations of stars and enabled the formation of rocky planets. On at least one such planet, life evolved to consciousness. And it wonders, “Where did I come from?”
It could be I’m not seeing your point of view, since I’m not standing where you are. I can see some similarities with what you’re saying to my own 12 year pursuit of understanding the Enlightenment Era. I started doing it because of the people claiming it didn’t accomplish what it claimed to. I never quite understood them, but now I think they were only partially right, not even half right.
Anyway, the difficulty in the study is finding well rounded views on the period in history. Mostly you get names, who argued with who, a slice of the points they discussed, some discoveries, some famous quotes, and then it ends with some new forms of government that are better but they don’t acknowledge the lingering problems, like colonialization and racism. I thought a pursuit of the history of the philosophy of religion might be better, and it did somewhat, but it’s a much broader scope. Also the advancement of science played a major role, but again, very few historians want to make claims about science is and what caused it to take over human activity somewhere in the 17th century.
The recent links to Carrier helped a lot, because that’s his thing, and he is independent, he can say what he wants. But, that doesn’t mean everyone else is wrong, it’s just that Carrier writes about things I’m interested in. Historians, philosophers, and people who write about religion tend to tell the story from their perspective and write the way those disciplines have always written. It’s hard to find the integration.
Try to hear the dismissive way you (and so many others) handle that term, it’s a “tell” about the all-pervading (Abrahamic) human-centric state of mind that infuses most of us with a disregard for all that doesn’t hold an immediate direct self-interest to our human good.
To me it feels like “short-hand” for thinking you’re at third base, when one hasn’t even touched first base. (Post card vs. throughly grasping, being-there).
To my way of thinking we can’t truly comprehend ourselves, until we’ve attained an explicit healthy appreciation for how much of who “I myself” was achieved/ developed before this most recent, human phase in evolution’s pageant. Adding the cherry on top of the consciousness/creation cherry.
Just have to look at the richness of mammalian life to viscerally appreciate how our amazing distinction is down to a few simple traits:
hands and feet, memory, learning, recall.
Seriously, think about it,
what else is there, what else do we possess that isn’t observed in other living creatures?
What all was created long before we showed up?
We can’t deeply understand ourselves until we’ve wrestled with that earlier reality and how it directly relates to us because we grew out of it.
The dismissiveness speaks for itself.
You’re doubling down.
You still haven’t been able to share an example of a philosopher who directly discusses how evolution enabled this human species. A lot of talk about evolutionary pressures, evolutionary game theory and who knows how many variations. The actual thing unfolding and the amazing pageant of creature’s developing different inventions and landscape changing and how that’s driven creature development, and much more, it’s reduced to foot note. Sure it’s there, but how many notice?
I know the information is out there! Otherwise, I would have the understand I’ve achieved! I’m way we spend way too much time on flash, while ignoring the fundamentals that will really explain a lot.
Damned straight! - Perhaps not in that particular lecture, then certainly in the lesson plans before they ever got into that lecture hall.
But it’s not. I’m told it is, but yet to see to truly demonstrated.
Beside the entire direction and undertone screams disregard for actual wet evolution in favor of ideas and debate. I think we need more musing on the evidence and that doesn’t matter.
I mean having the information catalogued away is perceived as being enough.
The sad thing is that will cause ‘dear readers’ to immediately assume that I’m dismissive of all we’ve achieved and know these days. I’m not, I’m just railing against our blindspot. Not in the edifice of factual understanding. It’s the human self-centered ego as god (mentality/personality) we’ve built up around ourselves that I’m railing against and trying to expose.
Well that and when science gets twisted into religious pursuits, such as postulating cosmic consciousness. When it’s outside the purview of serious scientific study.
Yes, I also reject philosophy and mathematical proofs for provocative philosophical conjectures.
How do you figure that?
Hmmm, to me the obvious lesson is that consciousness is a result of organizing stuff interacting with other organizing stuff! Quasi-intelligent seem like window dressing, where I don’t see that we need any window dressing.
Why drag in fancies such as universal consciousness is something that our biology must receive and focus, that’s philosophical dreaming and science crossing the line into religion. It’s totally unnecessary to a science respecting understanding of the consciousness spectrum as the result of sensing creature body’s interacting with their senses of their environmental condition.
On the other hand, we have the human perspective. I can fully appreciate how looking at evolution and biology especially the more we learn and the closer we see into the actual-factual physical complexities and harmonies buried within living creatures all those systems that need to be constantly interacting harmoniously. The folds within folds of cumulative harmonic complexity flowing down the cascade of time, being so thoroughly overwhelming it makes one dizzy.
Coming back into your skin, it’s easy to think how can there not be something behind all this. Like that CERN, it’s just too complicated, etc, etc, and so on and so forth, and like CERN, there must be a master behind it, thinks my bewildered mind. I even have my little stories about birth and death and the poetry of existence, that could be evolved into a religion. But all that is my own human story, grounding my human side, my intellectual mind is independent, and no conflict since I recognize the boundaries.
Now more than ever, going on three years of recognizing the very real difference between physical matter and my thoughts, the voices in my head (mind or more descriptively, mindscape), the rest of the layers to being a human-consciousness in action becoming clearer all the time.
It’s a cool thing and I can’t help there are some hopefully younger people, I’m hoping few tree huggers keep getting made and for them, I think all this will make some sense.
Yeah, according to his storyline.
Which incidentally is mostly buried within incompressible math, using terms that are best guesses attached to a great deal of storytelling and some, but limited, experimental backbone, and educated speculation based on a few pioneering studies of the most infinitesimal of physical objects.
What could go wrong?
That’s just a word salad tailored to impress.
Then macroscopic conclusions are reached, as if scaling matters doesn’t matter.
Heck, barely gets mentioned rather often.
Don’t get me wrong, I mean fine at the singular microtubule level, energy and matter interact, okay, so where the rubber meets the road, there’s a flash of “superposition.” Fantastic, wonderful to grasp and be aware of.
But back in my skin, I realize these superpositions are occurring a gazillions times, with a gazillion individual microtubules; every moment, after moment, after moment.
It’s an amazing conception of the reality at that level, to the best of our current knowledge.
What does that give us?
What’s the cosmic insight?
How will it usher in some new age consciousness?
What are we going to do with that knowledge? And why do you imply it is the master-answer to all things consciousness related?
From my perspective, I would suggest it’s the background hum of physical reality. (Where the rubber meets the road and it’s truly amazing that we can actually get measurements of it.)
Then my focus would turn in on those creature bodies and brains and how they utilized that background hum in an infinity of creative ways, via the most amazing of interwoven systems imaginable. To deal with each individuals’ challenges of navigating a physical world, then hopefully creating a mini-me, to carry on.
With the help of ~four billions years of evolution, {that is after the first ~half billion years being pretty much confined to Earth and geology establishing itself and setting the stage for the subsequent love-making of geology and biology and Earth’s ever changing stage. }.
Though it’s fair enough calling “our” evolution at 500 million years, since that’s near enough to when the microscopic realm evolved into the first macroscopic creatures, which is where the race to Earth’s unique cornucopia of life really began.
Incidentally, a biosphere that we, ultimately self-absorbed humans, are consuming and poisoning just as fast as our imaginations and gluttony can manage.
What made all that so okay for all of us?
And I’m speaking of the collective creative commons of today’s “intelligencia” and “ruling classes” and the propaganda masters who feed the masses their thoughts, which precious few seem to question.
Okay lets learn about some of those complex networks that connect those microtubules with other bodily components?
Well, we started this with you telling me everyone includes evolution in their discussions.
I’ve shown specifically where and how they are not discussing evolution and I liken it to reaching for third base without having mastered first base.
In the above, I’ve explained it in detail, where that deviation happened and why I find it significant, even if others find it irrelevant, if that loses you, and you wind up in a circular loop, I’m sorry, but let me try again. I’m being reasoned and explicit enough so you can work with my quotes.
I believe it might come down to you being offended that I speak of western intellectual culture and society being supremely self-centered, self-absorption and that this has polarized our mindset and infused our systems and culture in good, but also increasingly self-destructive ways, that we’ve learned to give a pass to, normalize, relax it’s not the end of the world. Even as outcomes, across the board, are getting worse and forecasts downright dire.
Furthermore I write that a deep understanding of oneself (including our pervasive personal struggles) requires and a deep personal appreciation for us being actual biological evolved sensing creatures. Not just since becoming masters of our worlds, but before when we were part of our world.
Moving forward actual survival will depend a better appreciation for Earth’s biosphere and complex system. It gotta come from somewhere.
I think you really should read my word with a less adversarial position.
I am clear about different stages of “evolution”.
Evolution is a word that defines CHANGE OVER TIME!
This doesn’t need to be a gotcha game, there are stages, quite literally setting the stage, for the next stage.
Of course, there’s nearly ten billion years of energy becoming matter and stars and whatnot, only to create yet more matter and stars and whatnot, then came EARTH.
I see any valid science acknowledging evolution and I’m not sure how much more they can do. That science recognizes the self centeredness, the good science anyway, and the consequences. I think I’m getting what you say as well as what you say is missing, but we disagree about what you are asking for. It would be great if more people felt the wonder of living here and acted accordingly, but I’m not so sure about how we get there.
Only in response to your accusatory position that no one knows the depth of the evolutionary process.
It was not so much adverserial as a confirmation of your position.
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