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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 11


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smcder said:
Do you have any more info on the artist?
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, no. The sculpture itself is located somewhere in Shorewood, a suburb of Milwaukee, WI, near where I grew up, and likely was made and displayed years after I moved elsewhere. This photograph of it is by John Underhill, a Milwaukee photographer who has captured many wonderful locations, buildings, scenes in that city for decades. I want to see it in person, of course, and will seek it out next time I am back in my home city.

I think this sculpture expresses the inherent limitations of our human written languages as we use them in an attempt to define and characterize, categorize, the exponential nature of 'reality' that we sense only partially in our being-here, wherever and whenever 'here' is. Nevertheless, we also know that 'here' is only a part, or particle, of the Being within which we and our 'world' exist.
 
continuing . . .

Here is an extract from the Dermot Moran lecture that Steve [@smcder] foregrounded in a post the other day:

"Phenomenology cannot be naturalized because it tells the story of the genesis and structure of the reality that we experience but in so doing reveals subjective stances and attitudes which themselves can never be wholly brought into view, cannot be objectified. Constituting subjectivity and intersubjectivity cannot be included within the domain of nature. Indeed, the very notion of ‘nature’ especially as that which is the object of the natural sciences is itself—as Husserl’s analyses in his Ideas II5 and in the Crisis of European Sciences6 makes clear –is itself the product of a particular distillation of scientific method."

Distillation is also reduction. And the nature of lived being is to be open to and available to ongoing experience and insight regarding the world that has produced us and other species of life, open to change and capable of awareness of it in the perpending of our own time, temporality, here, in a world also temporally changing. We always stand at the edge of this unfolding of what we understand only incrementally about this lived world within a World beyond the horizons of our accessibility -- whose vital integrations involve us and which we sense but cannot conceptualize. This is an ontological sense developed out of the phenomenological nature and structure of consciousness and mind with which nature has endowed our species. We will never comprehend the ontology of our be-ing as a finished product of the mind, whether postulated scientifically or philosophically. I think the sculpture in Shorewood, WI, expresses all this.
 
Constance said:
The knowledge of being, sense without sense of time."
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For me, this line describes big "C" consciousness. Like an infant staring up out of a crib at a moving mobile, unaware of all of the "movement i.e time" that is happening around them in this reality but perceiving the mobile's movement/time at a kind of innocent distance or perspective, present but not participating...I believe this same state of mind is also the key to observing the world for what it is but not necessarily reality. Reality does not seem occur until the child interacts with "matter" with intent, meaning not just floating down the river (a reference to my favorite poem) but paddling.

Something about "life is but a dream...."

TDSR
 
This paper, which I might have linked earlier in the thread, is a good companion piece to read with the above paper:

G. Franck and H. Atmanspacher, A Proposed Relation between Intensity of Presence and Duration of Nowness.

I will have to search out a link to the pdf of the paper since I copied the paper itself into my Word documents without recording the link.
 
Constance said:
Here is a challenging new paper from PhilSci:

How embodied is time?
Rakesh Sengupta
Center for Vision Research,
York University, Toronto, CA

I've read some of it but not all of it yet, will continue with it tonight, and would appreciate it if others here would read and respond to it as well.

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14747/1/embodiment_time_apa.pdf
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I will read when I have a moment. Right now I'm a little preoccupied with a new pack member.

IMG_4901.jpg
 
Constance said:
Here is the link to the Franck, Atmanspacher paper:

A Proposed Relation Between Intensity of... (PDF Download Available)
Click to expand...

Reading now...

This is an interesting looking link from the references...

Wackermann, J. and Ehm, W. (2006): The dual klepsydra model of internal time representation and time reproduction. Journal of Theoretical Biology 239, 482493.

Abstract
We present a model of the internal representation and reproduction of temporal durations, the 'dual klepsydra' model (DKM). Unlike most contemporary models operating on a 'pacemaker-counter' scheme, the DKM does not assume an oscillatory process as the internal time-base. It is based on irreversible, dissipative processes in inflow/outflow systems (leaky klepsydrae), whose states are continuously compared; if their states are equal, durations are subjectively perceived as equal. Model-based predictions fit experimental time reproduction data with good accuracy, and show qualitative features not accounted for by other models

The dual klepsydra model of internal time... (PDF Download Available). Available from: The dual klepsydra model of internal time... (PDF Download Available) [accessed Jun 09 2018].
 
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Constance said:
". . . Meanwhile, philosophers interested in questions about individuality have moved the target of analysis. What began as the question “what is an organism?” has shifted to “what is a biological individual?”, to “what is an evolutionary individual?”, and in some of the most recent work, “what is a Darwinian individual?” This shift helps make inquiry more tractable. It is much easier to construct a universal answer to a question if it is reframed in terms of a theory. Trying to answer “what is an organism?” might force one to analyze the incredibly messy world of life, a world that resists essentialist analyses. Trying to answer the question, “what is a Darwinian individual?” leads one to analyze abstract principles, which are constructed in a tidy theoretical framework. One is much more likely to find an answer that appears universal, that seems to get at the essentials, if one moves from the question “what is an organism?” to the question “what is a Darwinian individual?”

Take, for example, Peter Godfrey-Smith’s primary work on individuality (2009). Godfrey-Smith answers the question about Darwinian individuality by carrying out a careful examination of important elements of contemporary Darwinian theory. The details of his analysis do not matter for the purposes of this chapter and I will not examine them here. I am not interested in joining the lively debate about what it is to be a Darwinian individual.4 My interest is to advance a form of pragmatism by proposing that we shift attention away from seeking an analysis of individuality, as if it could be read off the best scientific theories, to seeking an understanding of individuation practices in science with respect to the purposes they serve in scientific inquiry. . . ."

The author of the above characterizes his approach as 'pragmatic'. What do y'all think?

"'Ask Not “What is an Individual?'"
C. Kenneth Waters
Department of Philosophy
University of Calgary

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14743/1/Waters_2018_Ask Not %22What is an individual_%22pdf.pdf
Click to expand...

Section 4 is absolutely fascinating, for example:

"According to Godfrey-Smith’s account, evolutionary processes themselves evolve—a point John Beatty made forcefully to challenge the received view of theories (Beatty 1982). Beatty argued that there are no necessary, that is, no non-contingent, laws of evolution. He used the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium from population genetics as an example. This principle depends on the individual alleles of a diploid pair being segregated in processes that give them equal probabilities of being transmitted to any given gamete. But, as Beatty argued, there are known exceptions to this kind of random segregation. In exceptional cases, some alleles have a greater than 50% chance of being transmitted. The Hardy-Weinberg principle, a central principle of the evolutionary theory called population genetics, does not apply to these alleles. Beatty argued that organisms could evolve such that the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium rarely applied to any of them. The processes underlying evolution are evolving and the so-called laws that describe today’s processes might not describe tomorrow’s. "
 
"With this in mind, readers might ask about philosophy of nature. What is the “real message” implied by this analysis about “our place in nature?” Godfrey-Smith never says.6 But, readers searching for its “real message” might wonder whether the three-dimensional cube of individuality could represent the Great Cube of Being with animals like us perched at the pinnacle, plants “not all the way there”, and creatures like sponges and slime molds having a long way to go. It is unclear where bacteria and archaea would fit in. Viewed as a philosophy of nature, the cube suggests a grand metaphysical view, and possibly, a seductive one. After all, it reinforces some traditional Western ideas about our place in nature. I suggest we resist such interpretations ..."

yep yep
 
@Tyger has started a new thread, built on parts of a former one of hers, entitled "Consciousness and Manifestation" which I think is relevant to what we've been discussing here. In her last post in that thread she quotes this from Buddha:

"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world." ~ Buddha

I've commented in response to that quotation and to the new thread in its development so far, and want to copy my post here for its potential relevance, in my view, to our efforts to discover a valid ontology concerning the nature and structure of our own being.

"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world." ~ Buddha

[my response] Have read this thread with interest now, @Tyger, and responding to this last quotation from the Buddha is good place to express how your thread's main direction is related to questions and issues we've explored in the 'Consciousness and Paranormal' thread. There our primary goal has been to follow developments in understanding what consciousness is and does that have been realized in the interdisciplinary field of Consciousness Studies still forging forward after thirty years. At many points in that thread we have focused on ontological questions, as we are doing again there at present. The core question in that discussion is: what can we learn about the nature of 'reality' as we experience it in our time and place that might reveal the meaning/significance of consciousness in the universe/cosmos as a whole -- that is, can we think our way to comprehending 'What-Is' in Being as an integrated Whole by understanding how 'what-is' in our world, the world of our own being, becomes experienced and known?

In the phenomenological approach I follow it is necessary to explore how consciousness arises in life, in lived being on the planet we inhabit, since what we can claim to 'know' about the local world and ourselves as present in it arises out of the grounds of our being-here. So, in phenomenology, ontology must address the primordial 'awareness' that evolves into protoconsciousness and consciousness in the evolution of species of life. And that awareness must be recognized to be 'bi-polar', consisting of both objective and subjective poles of the being of 'what-is' in the experience of lived being.

I am drawn to the insights of Buddhism that lead to profound respect for the boundaries that exist between the self and the other, lead to the gentleness of Buddhists felt and expressed toward the smallest of creatures. It is an impulse like that which Heidegger expressed in the phrase he focused on in his later writings: "Let Being Be," recognizing the vast disparity that exists between what we personally or culturally want our being and our world's being to be, what we want to bring about out of the vast but mute processes in Being that have brought about the circumstances within which we must live, within which we attempt to make our way justly, morally, in the physicality of 'what-is' here and now in our time and place.

Because I have not read enough of the Buddhist texts and teachings, I no doubt do not have a sufficient understanding of the concept of 'Maya', the notion that all that we see and sense in our existence is an illusion. But it seems to me that it is a leap in essential logic to believe that our lived experiences are illusions, that the local world in which we live in the present is 'unreal' and that somehow we are or should become capable of changing it by an act of the mind. For the suffering we experience and see others experiencing, as well as the satisfactions and joys we likewise experience in being-here and recognize others to experience, can't be swept away without denying the experiential grounds out of which our thinking itself arises. As I see it, the growth and development -- the evolution -- of awareness, consciousness, and mind in the history of our own species is evidence for me that life and its capabilities to sense and gradually understand the nature of being -- of our being and the being of the things that are in the world we exist in -- plainly signify that what we feel and what we think constitute, within a physical mileau, 'what-is' for us and for all aware beings, and what we must call 'reality'.

So I cannot agree that any of us, much less all of us, can and should pursue attempts to deny the complex reality in which we have our existence such as I sense in the ideas and methods propagated by the 'Abrahams' as expressed in the last video you linked. I can understand why many people would hope to persuade themselves that they can individually erase the reality that belongs to all of us, for better and for worse, by an act of personal, mental, will. But I don't think that doing so is productive for the work we humans are obliged to do {'appropriated by Being' to do, as Heidegger expressed it} in the worlds in which we must find ways to exist beneficently among and with one another, to do no harm to others. As Camus wrote, "the only mistake is to cause suffering."

No doubt consciousness as we experience it here and now requires a balancing act given all the inconsistencies, conflicts, and interpersonal outrages we see expressed in our current world and the incoherence that results for us in attempting to 'make sense' of the world and ourselves. We can't control most of what happens in our own lives, much less in the world at large, and so efforts to stabilize one's emotions and mind are necessary. But we can't change the world, reality as what-is in our experience, by a personally willed fiat. Our situation requires us "to be / in the difficulty of what it is to be," as Wallace Stevens expressed it.

continuing . . . So I think we are called upon to absorb all of it. And I think the resources we have for doing so and sustaining our balance in this existence are present in all of us at deep levels, in the personal subconscious and the collective unconscious, in what we know intrinsically at these deep levels and must strive to understand..

Apropos of which, these two prose statements from Wallace Stevens:

"All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence."

"What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality."
 
Coming back to the statement by Buddha, I began to wonder whether I'd misread it. Reading it again . . .

"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world."

"We are what we think" suggests a parallel with 'higher-order thinking' in one school of consciousness studies, but I think more is, must be, intended in the Buddha's statement since his teachings required that we go deeper into our minds through practices of meditation. Thus, what he intended to say with his following statement --

"With our thoughts we make the world."

needs to be understood at depths less accessible than the level of ordinary waking consciousness, in which we are always already enmeshed in the dominant ideas and practices of the particular world in which we find ourselves existing. I think Steve is the one here who can best help us to understand the Buddha's statements.
 
Thanks for sharing the link to this major development, Steve. I've tried to copy and paste a page or two from the beginning of the Velmans introduction but it's not yet available for non-encrypted reproduction. The text at the link is fully readable.
 
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