Terry:
Are you a robot?
Our Consciousness
by IronGland 27 Replies latest jw friends
-
-
Undecided
What happens to our consciousness when we are asleep?
Ken P.
-
funkyderek
El blanko:
I am greater than the sum total of my parts.
Of course you are. You are an excellent example of emergent complexity. Despite being composed mostly of water and carbon, you have abilities that are not properties of these substances in isolation. In the same way, a car is far more than the hundreds of pieces of metal and plastic of which it is composed.
I refuse to believe that the I that I feel is that lump of grey matter in my head.
A lot of people do. They just flat out refuse to believe it, despite all the evidence. Personally, I find it's a bad idea to refuse to believe anything. Believe what the best available evidence compels you to believe, regardless of how unsettling it is for you.
To pin consciousness down merely to the physical, I find ridiculous.
And yet, there is undeniably a strong correlation between consciousness and the brain. Changing the levels of certain chemicals in your brain alters consciousness. Electrical activity can be measured in different parts of your brain depending on what you are using your mind for. Physical damage to the brain can alter the mind and the perception of self.
To me it seems ridiculous to postulate a supernatural component to consciousness simply because it has not yet been fully explained by naturalistic mechanisms. But then, I've never found god-of-the-gaps explanations very satisfying.
-
Narkissos
I refuse to believe that the I that I feel is that lump of grey matter in my head. To pin consciousness down merely to the physical, I find ridiculous.
Add one degree of reflexivity to this and you will find "yourself" refusing your former refusal and ridiculing your former ridicule. It is just one step away in the mirror play of imagination.
The "little man within" strikes again.
-
Terry
Terry: Are you a robot?
Does not compute.
T.
-
frankiespeakin
Funky,
Here a quote and link that may explain a little better where I'm comming from,,, from Rudolf Steiner on the the world of percepts:
http://www.rsarchive.org/Books/GA004/TPOF/pofc4.html?PHPSESSID=6d97acd670580d5e0e94c67e2e5c03c1
The naïve man regards his percepts, such as they appear to his immediate apprehension, as things having an existence wholly independent of him. When he sees a tree he believes in the first instance that it stands in the form which he sees, with the colors of its various parts, and so on, there on the spot towards which his gaze is directed. When the same man sees the sun in the morning appear as a disc on the horizon, and follows the course of this disc, he believes that all this actually exists and happens just as he observes it. To this belief he clings until he meets with further percepts which contradict his former ones. The child who as yet has no experience of distance grasps at the moon, and only corrects its picture of the reality, based on first impressions, when a second percept contradicts the first. Every extension of the circle of my percepts compels me to correct my picture of the world. We see this in everyday life, as well as in the spiritual development of mankind. The picture which the ancients made for themselves of the relation of the earth to the sun and other heavenly bodies had to be replaced by another when Copernicus found that it was not in accordance with some percepts, which in those early days were unknown. A man who had been born blind said, when operated on by Dr. Franz, that the picture of the size of objects which he had formed by his sense of touch before his operation, was a very different one. He had to correct his tactual percepts by his visual percepts.
How is it that we are compelled to make these continual corrections to our observations?
A simple reflection gives the answer to this question. When I stand at one end of an avenue, the trees at the other end, away from me, seem smaller and nearer together than those where I stand. My percept-picture changes when I change the place from which I am looking. Therefore the form in which it presents itself to me is dependent on a condition which is due not to the object but to me, the perceiver. It is all the same to the avenue wherever I stand. But the picture I have of it depends essentially on just this viewpoint. In the same way, it makes no difference to the sun and the planetary system that human beings happen to look at them from the earth; but the percept-picture of the heavens presented to them is determined by the fact that they inhabit the earth. This dependence of our percept-picture on our place of observation is the easiest one to understand. The matter becomes more difficult when we realize how our world of percepts is dependent on our bodily and spiritual organization. The physicist shows us that within the space in which we hear a sound there are vibrations of the air, and also that the body in which we seek the origin of the sound exhibits a vibrating movement of its parts. We perceive this movement as sound only if we have a normally constructed ear. Without this the world would be for ever silent for us. Physiology tells us that there are people who perceive nothing of the magnificent splendor of color which surrounds us. Their percept-picture has only degrees of light and dark. Others are blind only to one color, for example, red. Their world picture lacks this hue, and hence it is actually a different one from that of the average man. I should like to call the dependence of my percept-picture on my place of observation, "mathematical", and its dependence on my organization, "qualitative". The former determines the proportions of size and mutual distances of my percepts, the latter their quality. The fact that I see a red surface as red -- this qualitative determination -- depends on the organization of my eye.
My percept-pictures, then, are in the first instance subjective. The recognition of the subjective character of our percepts may easily lead us to doubt whether there is any objective basis for them at all. When we realize that a percept, for example that of a red color or of a certain tone, is not possible without a specific structure of our organism, we may easily be led to believe that it has no permanency apart from our subjective organization and that, were it not for our act of perceiving it as an object, it would not exist in any sense. The classical representative of this view is George Berkeley, who held that from the moment we realize the importance of the subject for perception, we are no longer able to believe in the existence of a world without a conscious Spirit.
Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, to wit, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that, consequently, so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit. (see fn 2)
On this view, when we take away the fact of its being perceived, nothing remains of the percept. There is no color when none is seen, no sound when none is heard. Extension, form, and motion exist as little as color and sound apart from the act of perception. Nowhere do we see bare extension or shape, but these are always bound up with color or some other quality unquestionably dependent upon our subjectivity. If these latter disappear when we cease to perceive them, then the former, being bound up with them, must disappear likewise.To the objection that there must be things that exist apart from consciousness and to which the conscious percept-pictures are similar, even though figure, color, sound, and so on, have no existence except within the act of perceiving, the above view would answer that a color can be similar only to a color, a figure only to a figure. Our percepts can be similar only to our percepts and to nothing else. Even what we call an object is nothing but a collection of percepts which are connected in a particular way. If I strip a table of its shape, extension, color, etc. -- in short, of all that is merely my percept -- then nothing remains over. This view, followed up logically, leads to the assertion that the objects of my perceptions exist only through me, and indeed only in as far as, and as long as, I perceive them; they disappear with my perceiving and have no meaning apart from it. Apart from my percepts, I know of no objects and cannot know of any.
No objection can be made to this assertion as long as I am merely referring to the general fact that the percept is partly determined by the organization of myself as subject. The matter would appear very different if we were in a position to say just what part is played by our perceiving in the bringing forth of a percept. We should then know what happens to a percept while it is being perceived, and we should also be able to determine what character it must already possess before it comes to be perceived.
-
BrendaCloutier
I'm not going to go much deeper into this subject tho it's stuff I enjoy on my own journey of enlightenment.... I have a headache today.
Terry, I like your analogy. I love annalogies. They help with concepts.
Just because someting is simple, does not make it easy. The most simple can be the most powerful.
2 cents spent
-
IronGland
After reading the foregoing, the Catholic teaching that God created within us an immortal soul is starting to make a lot more sense.
Ridiculous. It's obvious we are here to lead a life worthy enough that we may be selected for an afterlife serving the great all knowing green elephant and our purpose is to search the universe for the magical golden peanuts he is so fond of.
-
frankiespeakin
IronGland,
LOL,
I "think" consciousness takes many forms,,beyound our ability to know with the mind-body,,,my awareness,,of (not being able to know)ing) scares me at times, I wish I could just let go and stop grasping with the mind and its limiting thoughts.
I know my mind is limited and cannot be relied upon to give me a mental picture of the world as it really is or is a 100% Truth. If we can get away from concepts of the mind we might get a experience of "Truth" before the mind clutters it up with concepts. Since time is a "concept" the past which does not exist really except in your mind and its "concepts", the future is also non-existing except in our minds as concepts,,the only thing then is the present which is alway here and now. I think consciousness exist in and outside of time and it is in every dimension which is beyound the mind to conceptualize.
-
Terry
I know my mind is limited and cannot be relied upon to give me a mental picture of the world as it really is or is a 100% Truth
The world is a pizza much too large to eat although it is obviously delicious.
Consequently, we take bites and chew. Some of what we chew and swallow ends up being nutritious and some just ends up being unuseful (to ourselves) poop.
So too the universe.
It is too large to grasp and we must take bites.
Our rational mind takes these virtual bites through our senses. We cannot taste everything and we cannot use everything. But, we'll starve if we don't.
Without the biting and the chewing and the eating we are as good as dead.
T.