You’re picking better sources. That’s good. Not sure about how you’re processing it though. He’s taking about the origin of life, which no one knows. So tough to be “reliable”.
Well I cite him because the guy from the link mentioned how the teleonomic matter this guy talks about suggests subjectivity without identity. Though when I checked the podcast I found nothing suggesting that, at least to me. When I googled it that podcast was the only course for the term. So I’m kinda iffy on all that. Even the ai blurb at the top just ripped the line from the podcast.
The same guy also mentioned this to me when talking about the self:
“In the Buddhist view the you who wakes up inherits the causes & conditions from before sleep, but does not share any unchanging essence. This is the freedom we have, living it is Awakening. The Default Mode Network is about more than magnets. Grasping for self is grasping, opposing change & flow.”
The answer I linked where he said that references some Buddhist stuff but I’m not sure if he really understands that. He talked about nonduality being both and not having to choose when I told him that’s not what it means. From what I read and talked with Buddhists nonduality isn’t like anything. It’s not oneness or two ness or conceptual even. It’s an experience you have to have that cannot be named.
As usual, I can’t find your comment or anything you are talking about. I’m not going to keep looking for them. You’re telling me that you go to other sites and tell other people that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Not interested.
Fair enough, although I fault this author in not pointing the dynamic interdependence between brain and body.
Since it requires both, body and mind, together with time/interaction or produce mind and consciousness.
Well if one quantifies “more alive” with greater breath of experience and knowledge and mind, then there certainly is a big difference between a flea, and an elephant, and a human, etc.
Seems self evident to me.
I’d focus on better understanding the interaction of the two be more constructive?
Also recognizing from the start it’s a cumulative and relativity thing.
But then I’m looking at it from a street level humanitarian perspective, not this stratospheric intellectualizing.
I found when I really get into the weeds it’s good to pull back a little, zoom out, get one’s bearings back what we actually do know and build up. For instance:
Biology dictates body, dictates environment and spectrum of experiences and memories, dictates range of mind/intelligence, dictates place along the spectrum of
awareness > consciousness > introspection.
What an odd concept. Got me into little dog chasing tail thing.
So I looked it up,
Courtesy of Google AI
- Subjective identity
A person’s subjective identity is their conception of themselves, while their objective identity is how others might view them.
- Subjective identity concealability
This is the extent to which someone believes they can conceal their identity, and is based on their beliefs about how concealable their identity is and how good they are at concealing it.
- Identity disturbance
This is a deficiency or inability to maintain one or more major components of identity.Symptoms include:
Lack of a sense of “I/me/myself”
Feeling a lack of consistency in self
Defining oneself in terms of a single role
No sense of identity
A person without a sense of identity may feel disconnected from who they have been, or have no idea who they will become next. They may also feel like a different person from day to day.
I would be tough road.
An excellent post!
[quote=“inthedarkness, post:20, topic:11283”]
I do think we’ve been a little bit misled by an obsession with organic chemistry. And one thing to point out that helps us is I think we’ve built life so many times as non-chemical digital life. I think that if you write a little code on your computer, Sean, on it, it could be very simple form of life. But I think it qualifies and life is this weird thing just to use a physics concept, which things I…
First, Sean Carroll is a very respected scientist. When he speaks , people listen.
Second, I think one could make an argument that life is just another expression and form of biochemical “dynamics”.
Two things I kind of work on life and intelligence.
Life I consider intensive, whereas intelligence, I consider extensive. You are not more alive if you have a hundred cells in one [laughter] right?”
I agree, but a hundred cells allows for “data processing”.
“life = life”, but “intelligence = complexity”
A perfect example is the slime mold, a multi-nucleic single cell, that has no neural network or brain, but is a very complex single celled organism.
It can solve mazes, responds to timed intervals, creates markers of where it has been, and has memory, and can live in 2 distinctly different states.
This ability is due to an extensive cytological (microtubule) network, that allows the organism the ability to process data from its environment, a rudimentary form of intelligence.
It’s very complexity allows it to solve for certain “differential equations” at a cellular level.
To be fair I think some of his answers were a little evasive. He studies complexity science at the Sante Fe institute which is sorta like some kinda “monastery” for interdisciplinary research to approach subjects from different schools. he even wrote an article about it:
Though I kinda raise my eye at doubting materialism since so far what we call “mind” doesn’t seem to be much more than the brain. While I can get on board with looking at a problem from multiple dimensions I have to wonder at times if maybe that might be needlessly clouding the answers by insisting there is more to it. Like sure people might have questioned materialism but that doesn’t exactly make them right, nor him right either.
I also find his definition of life as goal oriented matter kinda wonky since that would be like trying to prove intent, which as anyone in court knows is pretty much next to impossible without overwhelming evidence.
I guess my concern is more with the idea of goal oriented matter and wondering if he is trying to reduce people and living things to just matter, which then makes me doubt what our emotions would mean, or ethics, or anything like that. OR what notions of identity might mean at that rate. From the podcast it doesn’t seem like that since he did reference the issue COVID created for society because we didn’t have a multifaceted view of the problem and just thought it was mere epidemiology and listen to the science when there were social and economic dimensions to it.
Maybe I’m just overthinking it but I just don’t like the idea of reducing people and living things with emotions and lives to just blocks of matter with goals. I can’t imagine that would benefit the world very much, and part of me worries it might lead to an invalidation of what we consider the human experience to be let alone what means to be human. That maybe in the end such things are just concepts and not reality or how we really are…
I guess I’m just scared of losing all that because then I wouldn’t know how to be or what to think at that point, let alone make sense of what is going on inside “me”.
Maybe I am overthinking it…
You didn’t respond at all to what I said about not finding your comment in the link
It’s the link to the stack exchange that’s a little bit up with the Craig guy.
To go with the original post though I checked out theory ladenness and it’s got me doubting science and myself now.
Because apparently how we interpret reality is based on what we study, how we’re taught, who we know, all that. And it affected what we see and how we interpret senses and even our memory.
https://web.cortland.edu/russellk/courses/300sci/hdouts/theolad.htm
“A little bit up”? Thanks (sarcasm)
This one.
That doesn’t sound anything like you