[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:35, topic:9697, full:true”]
Nothing.
Beyond that all I know is that you seem unable to comprehend the conception of a relationship going between yourself and the knowledge you possess, or between yourself and the environment you are embedded within.
That makes no sense a all.
a) Your “relationship” with yourself is all there is.
b) “Knowledge” is the sum total of your relationship with your environment.
As Anil Seth posits; Your brain is making a best guess of the data it receives from the senses.
And you’ve stayed away from my queries about the different “me’s” that exist within yourself, beginning with your thoughts, vs. your body.
And you seem not unwilling to examine it for yourself, or to discuss it in any detail.
In the course of our conversations, I have told you many things about myself.
If you think I don’t examine myself, try to think of what I have told you about myself and my fundamental relationship with not only my immediate environment, but with the universe as a whole.
Can you explain Anil Seth’s thinking on his relationship between himself and the knowledge he’s acquired?
Calling it a hallucination and running from the discussion, isn’t much of an answer.
It isn’t running away from anything. It is a sober assessment of the brain’s relationship with the environment.
Then you come up with something silly like this and wonder why I’m not in more awe of your position.
[quote=“write4u, post:34, topic:9697”]
Even the three root Abrahamic religions have been engaged in mutual destruction for millennia. You’d think they would have Abraham in common.
Well they certain are and they certainly do. Don’t they?
You act as though the different religions have been warring each other for different reasons when in real life, all wars are pretty much the same old shit for the same old reasons, just with different hardware.
“My god tells me he’s better than your god, I’ll prove it by bashing in your infidel head,” Says the Christian, Jew and Muslim.
Since when haven’t we know of brothers from the same family know have come to hate and fight and kill each other?
But that is not peculiar to humans at all.
In nature “life must take life in the interest of life itself.” (Hellstrom)
Hellstrom’s Hive
Hellstrom’s Hive 
Hellstrom’s Hive is a 1973 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert. It is about a secret group of humans who model their lives upon social insects and the unsettling events that unfold after they are discovered by a deep undercover agency of the U.S. government.
Dr. Nils Hellstrom, an entomologist, is a successful film maker and influential scientific advisor with strong political ties. Living and working with a small staff on a farm in rural Oregon, he attracts the attention of an unnamed government organisation when documents are discovered that hint on cult-like activities and a secret weapon project.
An operative from the government is sent, but is quickly assassinated by Hellstrom’s operatives. Further operatives are sent and it is revealed that the farm is situated above a vast system of tunnels and caves, hosting a hive-like subterranean society of nearly 50,000 specialized hybrid human-insect workers. Hellstrom, thanks to advanced bioengineering, has been the appointed hive leader for more than 100 years. He is completely convinced of the superiority of the hive and its abandonment of conventional morals and ethics: sexuality or violence, indeed, any individual action, is rated strictly whether it strengthens or weakens the hive as a whole.
The government spies soon learn the hive has progressed to using female “stumps”, essentially disembodied human female sexual organs devoid of a torso, as a method of procreation and control over the workers. The hive have also developed a secret weapon that it will use to displace humans as the dominant intelligent species on the planet.
The story is told from various perspectives of members of both the nameless organisation investigating the farm and plotting against each other, as well as Hellstrom and several high-ranking hive members collectively dealing with the threat of being discovered and probably extinguished by “the wild ones”.[1] In the end, the hive’s weapon project is ready to protect the hive and the upcoming ‘swarming’ - the gradual displacement of individual-based humanity.
Herbert stated: “I said, ‘In terms of what we want now, as we think of our world now, what would be the most horrible kind of civilization you could imagine?’ And then I said, ‘Now I will make… [the members of that civilization] the heroes of the story, by taking negative elements of the surrounding society and treating them as the villain.’ That creates a very peculiar kind of tension.”[3]
I can’t even imagine what you are thinking, or why you’re so offended. Except that it plays right into my stereotypic impression of the Abrahamic Mindset:
All about “me” (collective as well as individual) , and the ease with which certitude is projected.
Yes, I think that after 83 years, I know my strengths and weaknesses (the self) pretty well.
Can’t you see you are just labeling what you think you see as a peculiar human trait.
But survival ( combatting entropy) is the fate of all physical objects, whether they be brained or not. Natural selection selects for “survival” and “endurance”.
Do you think ants have an Abrahamic mindset? In what way are humans different than ants? Is Putin’s army any different than an ant army?
The human brain is an anomaly in that it is not a result of gradually evolving complexity, but of a genetic mutation that gave us the “illusion” that on Earth we can divorce ourselves from the universal laws that govern everything, because we enjoy a special status as being made in the image of God.
This kind of Abrahamic mindset hubris is the cause for all religious wars.
Ants don’t have brains to speak of and their relationship with the environment is purely hardwired, Their wars are purely for survival of the hive, not from any lofty metaphysical concepts. The results are the same!
The fact that I am in complete agreement with Anil Seth speaks for itself. Frankly, I cannot quite understand why you reject Seth’s scientific conclusions, fashioned after intensive studies with dozens of other educated minds.
The brain is in a unique position in that it is not in direct contact with its environment but must rely on secondary information that is shaped by the sensory abilities of the individual.
Every individual brain has a unique once removed relationship with its environment and can only make a best guess of what the incoming information represents.
It is one of the few true analogies in the bible. Man’s unique brain has placed him outside the natural deterministic chronology of physics. But that had nothing to do with God. It has to do with man!
) tackles consciousness itself, it’s sobering, and illuminating and offers a number of chapters with an assortment of well enunciated fine points, that provide me with excellent opportunities. We’ll see, the book should arrive in a couple days.
