S
smcder
Guest
What book(s) do you recommend on Tesla - is there a definitive biography?
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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What book(s) do you recommend on Tesla - is there a definitive biography?
S
smcder
Guest
All good points, added to others you've made in this discussion with Soupie. As I see it, the attempt to account for all significant changes in human perception and thought through the presumed 'agency' of psychoactive 'molecules' [whether exogenous or endogenous] is a reductive and ultimately mechanistic project that fails to understand the nature of perception itself as well as the nature of phenomenal appearances in general. Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception is an essential text for this inquiry, as indeed for the understanding of what consciousness is.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
I started with the mystery of UFO experiences accompanied by additional bizarre aspects like smoking, dog-headed men standing under a streetlight and buckwheat pancakes or cars stuck in rock formations. Sometimes described as trickster elements. And also the feeling that some people have that these strange experiences can teach us something. I wondered about the similarities these experiences had with ASC known to be induced by exogenous drugs.
Spontaneous, endogenously occurring ASC seemed to explain some of the observations. The fact that they may be an "adaptive" feature of the organisms retained in our DNA is just an interesting, informal idea.
I think @Burnt State said it well in one of his last posts in his episode thread that perhaps these bizarre experiences simply serve to stir the pot. Maybe the pot didnt need stirring, or maybe it did; maybe the result is horrid, or maybe its good. (I suppose for this capacity to be adaptive, it would need to be "good" 51% of the time, no?)
The other thing to consider is that perhaps this is a vestigial capacity. (Now im really making shit up, haha.) But seriously, we always want to understand things from the perspective of "now," but consider how these ASC may have worked on human culture 5,000-15,000 years ago.
Those are the horns of the dilemma that philosophy has struggled with for centuries out of our human limitations in comprehending the structures of/in 'nature' itself. I don't think we can currently justify the position that 'mind' originates and exists outside of nature. Nor does it appear that science can answer the question whether complexity has been "an inherent property of nature" since the Big Bang or has, instead, evolved in nature over time. Of course, not all scientists accept the BB theory, and another new paper has recently presented a theory rejecting it. I'll look for the link and post it.
Here's the link concerning the new paper calling the Big Bang theory into question (actually there are two related papers, both linked at this page):
No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning
No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
@Constance I have an armful of phenomenology books, having visited my father-in-laws home... Sartre... Hegel galore - happy days... lol
boomerang
Paranormal Adept
I wish I knew enough to answer your question. One particular work, which sticks in mind as placing an emphasis on the more mystical and esoteric aspects of Tesla, is "Man Out Of Time" by Margaret Cheney.
Tesla: Man Out of Time - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Are her claims and anecdotes valid? I don't know.
As recently as the 1980's (?) there was a Tesla Museum in Colorado Springs, staffed by colorful devotees to the great man and complete with a Tesla coil demonstration that fried the magnetic strip on our motel key card.
Sadly--the museum is long gone and I do not know if there is another within the U.S.
Do the books you have include Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind (Geist)? If not, the whole of that work is available online. This is the work that was most influential for Sartre and the modern phenomenologists. The following page helps in sorting out where the Phenomenology fits in Hegel's oeuvre:
Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit/Mind (overview)-hegel.net
You probably have a copy of Being and Nothingness. Sartre's introduction in that work is very helpful in clarifying that which follows. The best commentator on B&N is Hazel Barnes, who translated it into English in the 1950s. Her commentary on B&N is available in this book:
Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity is another key text re Sartrean phenomenological existentialism.
Amazon.com: The Ethics Of Ambiguity (9780806501604): Simone De Beauvoir: Books
Also by Hazel Barnes:
For anyone here who is not about to read Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, this is a good summary of the first three chapters of that work:
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
←
Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapters 1 to 3: “Shapes of Consciousness”
Summary
Hegel attempts to outline the fundamental nature and conditions of human knowledge in these first three chapters. He asserts that the mind does not immediately grasp the objects in the world, concurring with Kant, who said that knowledge is not knowledge of “things-in-themselves,” or of pure inputs from the senses. A long-standing debate raged in philosophy between those who believed that “matter” was the most important part of knowledge and those who privileged “mind.” Rationalists, such as Descartes (and before him, Plato), believed that we can only trust the truths that the mind arrives at on its own, while Empiricists, such as Locke, argued that all of our knowledge comes from our perceptions of actual objects, through our senses. Kant had sought to put this debate to rest by arguing that the meaning of objects derives from ideas, or “concepts,” that stand between mind and matter. The information entering the mind via the senses is always “mediated” by concepts. In the first part of the Phenomenology, Hegel demonstrates that though concepts do in fact mediate matter, as Kant maintains, Hegel’s own understanding of the way concepts come into being implies a certain instability or insecurity in knowledge, which Kant overlooks.
Whereas Kant seems to imply that an individual’s mind controls thought, Hegel argues that a collective component to knowledge also exists. In fact, according to Hegel, tension always exists between an individual’s unique knowledge of things and the need for universal concepts—two movements that represent the first and second of the three so-called modes of consciousness. The first mode of consciousness—meaning, or “sense certainty”—is the mind’s initial attempt to grasp the nature of a thing. This primary impulse runs up against the requirement that concepts have a “universal” quality, which means that different people must also be able to comprehend these concepts. This requirement leads to the second mode of consciousness, perception. With perception, consciousness, in its search for certainty, appeals to categories of thought worked out between individuals through some kind of communicative process at the level of common language. Expressed more simply, the ideas we have of the world around us are shaped by the language we speak, so that the names and meanings that other people have worked out before us (throughout the history of language) shape our perceptions.
Consciousness is always pulled in two different directions. Our senses give us a certain kind of evidence about the world, and the categories through which we make sense of the world, categories that we learned when we learned language, tell us what the input of our senses means. The fact that a difference exists between perceptions and the meanings we give to them gives rise to a feeling of uncertainty or skepticism that is built into the very mechanism by which minds come to know objects. That is, to the extent that consciousness can grasp categories of thought, it is at the same time aware of the inadequacy of these categories and thus moved to find new ground for sense certainty, generating new concepts that smooth over the contradictions. This striving is constantly frustrated, the categories of thought reveal their inner contradictions, and consciousness is moved to posit more adequate categories. Although sense certainty is in some ways always elusive, this process of moving from less satisfactory to more satisfactory categories entails a kind learning process. Hegel calls this process understanding, the third and highest mode of consciousness.
Analysis
For the unprepared lay reader, Phenomenology of Spirit, the earliest of Hegel’s major “mature” works, can be a frustrating introduction to his highly idiosyncratic and difficult philosophical style. The difficulty arises in part because Hegel, working within the tradition of German idealism, was attempting to grapple with dimensions of human experience that lie largely outside the scope of this tradition, which was established above all by Kant. While deeply indebted to Kant, Hegel did not find the language of idealism wholly adequate to explain what he felt needed explaining, and he had to invent his own philosophical terms, which at first seem unfamiliar and strange. The difficulty of Phenomenology also lies in the work’s extraordinary ambition. In one dizzying gesture, the twenty-seven-year-old Hegel attempts to outline and define all the diverse dimensions of human experience as he sees them: knowledge and perception, consciousness and subjectivity, social interaction, culture, history, morality, and religion. The result is chaotic, and his points are often difficult to grasp, but the work is ultimately highly rewarding for those with the right mix of patience and imagination required to “decode” Hegel.
“The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things” is the dramatic but fitting statement with which Hegel introduces Phenomenology of Spirit. Here he sets out his agenda for a systematic philosophy the subject of which is not simply the knowing and perceiving individual mind, as it was for his immediate philosophical heirs such as Kant, but social beings who are oriented to the world collectively through culture. The individual is not simply standing directly opposite objects but rather is forced to mediate between the subjective and the collective moments of understanding—that is, between his own immediate perceptions and the ideas about the world that he shares with the people around him. In these early sections of Phenomenology of Spirit, we get an early glimpse of this approach, the famous dialectic, the idea that knowledge is a process of striving to arrive at stable and truthful categories of thought. Knowledge-as-motion is a recurrent theme in Hegel’s writings and forms the core of his highly original approach to epistemology."
SparkNotes: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831): Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapters 1 to 3: “Shapes of Consciousness”
To continue, follow the arrow to the right:
→
Themes, Arguments, and Ideas
Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapter 4: “Self-consciousness” and further chapter.
Also, arrow left above [top of post] for a brief introduction to 'Hegel's Dialectic as the Fundamental Pattern of Thought'
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
←
Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapters 1 to 3: “Shapes of Consciousness”
Summary
Hegel attempts to outline the fundamental nature and conditions of human knowledge in these first three chapters. He asserts that the mind does not immediately grasp the objects in the world, concurring with Kant, who said that knowledge is not knowledge of “things-in-themselves,” or of pure inputs from the senses. A long-standing debate raged in philosophy between those who believed that “matter” was the most important part of knowledge and those who privileged “mind.” Rationalists, such as Descartes (and before him, Plato), believed that we can only trust the truths that the mind arrives at on its own, while Empiricists, such as Locke, argued that all of our knowledge comes from our perceptions of actual objects, through our senses. Kant had sought to put this debate to rest by arguing that the meaning of objects derives from ideas, or “concepts,” that stand between mind and matter. The information entering the mind via the senses is always “mediated” by concepts. In the first part of the Phenomenology, Hegel demonstrates that though concepts do in fact mediate matter, as Kant maintains, Hegel’s own understanding of the way concepts come into being implies a certain instability or insecurity in knowledge, which Kant overlooks.
Whereas Kant seems to imply that an individual’s mind controls thought, Hegel argues that a collective component to knowledge also exists. In fact, according to Hegel, tension always exists between an individual’s unique knowledge of things and the need for universal concepts—two movements that represent the first and second of the three so-called modes of consciousness. The first mode of consciousness—meaning, or “sense certainty”—is the mind’s initial attempt to grasp the nature of a thing. This primary impulse runs up against the requirement that concepts have a “universal” quality, which means that different people must also be able to comprehend these concepts. This requirement leads to the second mode of consciousness, perception. With perception, consciousness, in its search for certainty, appeals to categories of thought worked out between individuals through some kind of communicative process at the level of common language. Expressed more simply, the ideas we have of the world around us are shaped by the language we speak, so that the names and meanings that other people have worked out before us (throughout the history of language) shape our perceptions.
Consciousness is always pulled in two different directions. Our senses give us a certain kind of evidence about the world, and the categories through which we make sense of the world, categories that we learned when we learned language, tell us what the input of our senses means. The fact that a difference exists between perceptions and the meanings we give to them gives rise to a feeling of uncertainty or skepticism that is built into the very mechanism by which minds come to know objects. That is, to the extent that consciousness can grasp categories of thought, it is at the same time aware of the inadequacy of these categories and thus moved to find new ground for sense certainty, generating new concepts that smooth over the contradictions. This striving is constantly frustrated, the categories of thought reveal their inner contradictions, and consciousness is moved to posit more adequate categories. Although sense certainty is in some ways always elusive, this process of moving from less satisfactory to more satisfactory categories entails a kind learning process. Hegel calls this process understanding, the third and highest mode of consciousness.
Analysis
For the unprepared lay reader, Phenomenology of Spirit, the earliest of Hegel’s major “mature” works, can be a frustrating introduction to his highly idiosyncratic and difficult philosophical style. The difficulty arises in part because Hegel, working within the tradition of German idealism, was attempting to grapple with dimensions of human experience that lie largely outside the scope of this tradition, which was established above all by Kant. While deeply indebted to Kant, Hegel did not find the language of idealism wholly adequate to explain what he felt needed explaining, and he had to invent his own philosophical terms, which at first seem unfamiliar and strange. The difficulty of Phenomenology also lies in the work’s extraordinary ambition. In one dizzying gesture, the twenty-seven-year-old Hegel attempts to outline and define all the diverse dimensions of human experience as he sees them: knowledge and perception, consciousness and subjectivity, social interaction, culture, history, morality, and religion. The result is chaotic, and his points are often difficult to grasp, but the work is ultimately highly rewarding for those with the right mix of patience and imagination required to “decode” Hegel.
“The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things” is the dramatic but fitting statement with which Hegel introduces Phenomenology of Spirit. Here he sets out his agenda for a systematic philosophy the subject of which is not simply the knowing and perceiving individual mind, as it was for his immediate philosophical heirs such as Kant, but social beings who are oriented to the world collectively through culture. The individual is not simply standing directly opposite objects but rather is forced to mediate between the subjective and the collective moments of understanding—that is, between his own immediate perceptions and the ideas about the world that he shares with the people around him. In these early sections of Phenomenology of Spirit, we get an early glimpse of this approach, the famous dialectic, the idea that knowledge is a process of striving to arrive at stable and truthful categories of thought. Knowledge-as-motion is a recurrent theme in Hegel’s writings and forms the core of his highly original approach to epistemology."
SparkNotes: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831): Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapters 1 to 3: “Shapes of Consciousness”
To continue, follow the arrow to the right:
→
Themes, Arguments, and Ideas
Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapter 4: “Self-consciousness” and further chapter.
Also, arrow left above [top of post] for a brief introduction to 'Hegel's Dialectic as the Fundamental Pattern of Thought'
Last edited:
S
smcder
Guest
I suppose for this capacity to be adaptive, it would need to be "good" 51% of the time, no?
You were doing prettty good recognizing that it's more complicated than that ... oracles are also said to stir the pot, to randomize the approach, in the absence of information ... so one person could be led by a vision to the north and survival and the other one hundred to the south and doom ... keeping in mind this occurs at different levels: individual, group, etc
it seems to me that sometimes it's better to think of selection, not adaptation ... the sun going supernovae at present selects against all traits, genes, qualities, behaviors, etc of earthbound life, but if it goes supernovae in the future, then some of the same traits may be selected for if they have gotten us off the planet ...
but basically, classically (without teleology) there is no deciding before hand what is fit, its what's left after selection ... @Pharoah the fat guy who didn't get run over by the bus - thats why the approach that ASC are adaptive isn't per se telling us anything ... it's not even very interesting if it's just a mechanism to stir the pot, because there are lots of pot stirrers out there, including our simply deciding we've had enough and need a change of pace.
Now, does that imply some neural mechanism that goes off at a certain boredom threshold, some mood oscillating circuit that underlay Melville's insight:
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
?
Or was it just Ishmael's conscious awareness and free decision? I think you can see there would be need of too many circuits, too many mechanisms to account for all of our behavior, as my little fable on the burnt state thread was intended to show - and as early failures in AI as "object oriented" philosphy also demonstrated. Free will and rationality are actually much simpler in this case than reduction. In fact, in so many cases reduction leads to enormous complexity ... and many loose ends.
AMelville can be read as an ode to the Greek gods, the ancient pantheons, "the merry May-day gods of old" - and thence to moods (stimmung - in the German and Heidegger) and so our oscillating moods, our old gods were nothing more than pot-stirrers. Revelation! All is revealed.
But wait, whence came the pot to be stirred in the first place? Love came from oxytocin ... or oxytocin came from the (physical) demands of love?
S
smcder
Guest
And the perennial and ever popular worth-another-post:
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya'
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
SOCRATES, HIMSELF, WAS PERMANENTLY PISSED...
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away;
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: "I drink, therefore I am"
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed!
(with no apologies to Monty Python)
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya'
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
SOCRATES, HIMSELF, WAS PERMANENTLY PISSED...
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away;
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: "I drink, therefore I am"
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed!
(with no apologies to Monty Python)
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
My understanding of natural selection is that as various traits arise within individuals of a species, they may or may not confer an advantage. If a trait does confer an advantage, individuals with the trait will generally be more successful at producing offspring. In this way, the trait will be selected and spread through the species. Those individuals with the trait could be considered more adapted to their environment. This doesnt mean however the individuals without the trait will die out.
As the environments in which organisms live and evolve are constantly changing, so too will be the traits and individuals which are most adapted to the environment.
Imo it is accurate to say that organisms become adapted to their environments, but both the environment and organisms are in constant flux, so the advantage of a trait is always temporary.
As noted, Im not convinced random mutations and ns are the main mechanism driving the evolution of species. Im looking to epigenetics as potentially playing a bigger role than given in the current paradigm.
Ive come to think of these as different levels of description.
For example, we could theoretically describe the motion of the planets with quantum mechanics, but that would enormously, needlessly complex to do so, and classical physics works just fine.
We wouldnt say that a classical physics explanation nullifies a quantum explanation though.
In a way, the same could be said for quantum mechanics and free will; we could describe the movement of our arm using either level of description.
All these levels or models of description might capture some of the truth of the processes one is seeking to explain, but none of the seem to capture the whole truth.
S
smcder
Guest
Have a look at the Berkley page I linked you on selection occuring at various levels. I think you mentioned that an asteroid could de-select (a word I company I worked for actually used when they fired people) the entire Earth.
As long as you understand that you can't determine ahead of time what will be "selected". You seem to, based on the flux statement above.
In @Pharoah's example, he posited ahead of time that an individul was the fittest human on the planet ... and then he got hit by a bus. So ... he was de-selected. Maybe by "chance" (is there adaptation to chance?) or maybe he was too impulsive or deficient in peripheral vision or in estimating his own speed or whatever but after the bus, it was clear he wasn't the fittest. Now, if he had left his genes behind already and the bus was chance, he might "again" be the most fit ...
And yes, if you insist on complexing things ...
Lamarckism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In a way, the same could be said for quantum mechanics and free will; we could describe the movement of our arm using either level of description.
Can we? Could we? Go ahead ...
I've recommended EO Wilsons' Consillience before and now is a good time again. I also have a pre-articulated theory about how all levels of explanation do resolve one into another, somewhat like your last lines above, somewhat like Wilson ... but to include paranormal explanations and magical explanations and religious ones too ... that everything is true, but without reduction.
...
My current favorite example:
Oxytocin modulates love
But love modulated the evolution of oxytocin
No simple molecule, oxytocin and something like it is present in every vertebrate ... but it was not present even shortly after the Big Bang. We tend to look for a molecule, oxytocin or DMT as a cause but that leads to an infinite regress.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
Would like some thoughtful feedback on the following.
1. Is it understandable? 2. Am I wrong about Dennett and information? (there is nothing quite like going on the offensive—with regard information vs facts being a metaphysics/epistemology mismatch)
Even if all scientific knowledge were misguided, a realist can uphold the view that the world has a foundation that seems indubitably to cause effect and that this world does whatever it does, by whatever rule, at base, guarantees the whole is somehow united. From this unity one would say that each and every interaction is ‘directly’ informed in virtue of this rule. To be informed in this manner is not to possess, as is commonly thought, some universal property that can be taken, run with, and passed on, as if in relay like a ‘data-baton’ from one subject to another [footnote below], but rather, is a process of becoming a state that is itself informed by interaction for being begotten of that cause-effect rule. And consequently on this account, with ever-increasing interactions, there would be a corresponding increase in the complexity of states ‘informed’ in virtue of this equitable rule. These rule abiding processes might be thought to provide cause to reason that reaction is fundamentally a truthful expression that underpins what it is to be a physical interacting thing.
Footnote: By way of example, Dennett [1987, 1995] explains that a thermostat is a very simple informational device (information somehow being passed like a baton from environment to thermostat). He then proposes that if one were to increase a thermostat’s capability to interact with the environment incrementally, one would ultimately get a system indistinguishable from a human: for Dennett, there is merely a spectral greyscale of informational complexity. (Whilst the term complexity might seem to assume the additional status of organisational or representational complexity, this does not detract from the underlying conflation of the metaphysical/epistemological in the treatment of the concept of information).
1. Is it understandable? 2. Am I wrong about Dennett and information? (there is nothing quite like going on the offensive—with regard information vs facts being a metaphysics/epistemology mismatch)
Even if all scientific knowledge were misguided, a realist can uphold the view that the world has a foundation that seems indubitably to cause effect and that this world does whatever it does, by whatever rule, at base, guarantees the whole is somehow united. From this unity one would say that each and every interaction is ‘directly’ informed in virtue of this rule. To be informed in this manner is not to possess, as is commonly thought, some universal property that can be taken, run with, and passed on, as if in relay like a ‘data-baton’ from one subject to another [footnote below], but rather, is a process of becoming a state that is itself informed by interaction for being begotten of that cause-effect rule. And consequently on this account, with ever-increasing interactions, there would be a corresponding increase in the complexity of states ‘informed’ in virtue of this equitable rule. These rule abiding processes might be thought to provide cause to reason that reaction is fundamentally a truthful expression that underpins what it is to be a physical interacting thing.
Footnote: By way of example, Dennett [1987, 1995] explains that a thermostat is a very simple informational device (information somehow being passed like a baton from environment to thermostat). He then proposes that if one were to increase a thermostat’s capability to interact with the environment incrementally, one would ultimately get a system indistinguishable from a human: for Dennett, there is merely a spectral greyscale of informational complexity. (Whilst the term complexity might seem to assume the additional status of organisational or representational complexity, this does not detract from the underlying conflation of the metaphysical/epistemological in the treatment of the concept of information).
S
smcder
Guest
@Soupie
Re: Strassman's DMT and the Soul of Prophecy
You can pull up some good interviews, text and audio for the price of a Google - the book itself should be in your local library or through ILL and I sent you some details on his conclusions, a brief summary here:
DMT replicates many of the features of the prophetic experience found in the Hebrew Bible.
Interactive-relational properties of the two states are similar and different from the unitive-mystical state
The informational content of the canonical prophets is more highly articulated, profound and and meaningful than that found in the clinical DMT experience.
Using the medieval Jewish philosophers' model of God, God's intermediaries, emanation and the rational and imaginative faculties of the human mind, I have proposed mechanisms by which to explain the similarities and differences between the DMT and prophetic states:
True prophecy - bestowal of divine emanation - is more likely to take place in someone who is qualified, one in whom exists the highest possible development of these two vital mental functions. (rational / imaginative)
Re: Strassman's DMT and the Soul of Prophecy
You can pull up some good interviews, text and audio for the price of a Google - the book itself should be in your local library or through ILL and I sent you some details on his conclusions, a brief summary here:
DMT replicates many of the features of the prophetic experience found in the Hebrew Bible.
Interactive-relational properties of the two states are similar and different from the unitive-mystical state
The informational content of the canonical prophets is more highly articulated, profound and and meaningful than that found in the clinical DMT experience.
Using the medieval Jewish philosophers' model of God, God's intermediaries, emanation and the rational and imaginative faculties of the human mind, I have proposed mechanisms by which to explain the similarities and differences between the DMT and prophetic states:
- The DMT experience predominantly reflects enhancement of the imaginative faculty
- the prophetic experience also includes the operation of a highly developed rational faculty as well as God's will to bestow the state
True prophecy - bestowal of divine emanation - is more likely to take place in someone who is qualified, one in whom exists the highest possible development of these two vital mental functions. (rational / imaginative)
S
smcder
Guest
I don't watch a lot of Sci-fi but I really liked District 9 - that director is bringing out a new movie I saw a preview for last night, Chippie I think - D9 was thoughtful and I hope Chippie will be a good take on AI. Frank and Robot with Frank Langella (you are Hollywood royalty when you get to keep your name as a character - see also Jack Nicholson) is also a very good take on AI.
On another non-C&P note, the recent film Monsters was also very good on alien invasion theme.
On another non-C&P note, the recent film Monsters was also very good on alien invasion theme.
S
smcder
Guest
you are here
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