I've seen the heart in question. I was thinking people worked to keep it preserved. Not that it would take that much, mummies don't decay either, and I imagine it's pretty much like jerky.
Me, a stream-winner? You think? Hehe. I guess that means I get to chop wood and carry water now...
You could potentially, with the right technology, reproduce your mind without understanding it. You could come up with a complete description of the color red, understanding it on all levels. You could give a colorblind person that complete description. Would they then have the same experience of red that you do? Understanding the workings of mind will not necessarily give us insight into the phenomenon of qualia. It's really an open question, and still hotly debated.
Well put. Although the metaphysical information question is an open one, in my book. If the Universe works like a fractal, it may be possible to make larger leaps of inference than would be locally possible otherwise. One could discern information about non local conditions through local information. But that's speculation, which I'm trying to avoid in this discussion even though I love it.
Ego is in no way separate from the universe. How could it be. Please explain a mechanism that let's something interact in two directions (getting information and sending motivation) while being separate. It strains the definition of separate to the breaking point.
Your view seems to be medieval in that it assumes that a soup of the individual atoms that make up the body is somehow the same as the body itself (and it wasn't, much to the surprise of the experimenter, even stirring didn't help.) Eh? Where do I imply that? Well, never mind, that's not what I mean, in fact, It's about opposite. As for the internal state of the brain, are you saying information can be created or destroyed? Because it sounds like you are saying that information that exists in the universe magically disappears when we die. It isn't lost, it's just transformed.
There's a difference between a Buddha and a Bodhisattva. A Buddha achieves perfect enlightenment for himself, a Bodhisattva achieves enlightenment but holds back until all other sentient beings get there (or so the vow goes.)
But that's not really what you are talking about. We're not using the word desire the same way. People can act without desire, in the sense of longing or craving, but obviously not in the sense of motivation. Buddhists can be highly motivated. Buddhists don't suffer for their desires, they don't pine for things they don't have.
Oh, and suffering is not pain, either. You can do away with suffering, you can't do away with pain. But without suffereing, pain is merely intense bodily sensation. Most animals don't suffer, even when they are in pain. It takes a human's highly developed neo-cortex to suffer.
I don't think any other creature on the planet fears death, because that has no evolutionary advantage. They fear particular things leading up to death, and that is very different. They don't fear ceasing to be.
Actually, nature is cooperative as much as selfish because genes are trans personal. They don't care about you as an individual, they care about getting as large a percentage of themselves passed on as they can, whether that happens through you or a close relative who shares many of your genes.
Cooperation is also a valid strategy when resources are mostly plentiful with local scarcities of some things. Thus we have symbionts and not just parasites. You scratch my back, I scratch yours works enough that genes frequently code for that kind of behavior. Cooperation is a useful brag even when an offer is not reciprocated and you end up losing. It's like a peacock's tail, it says, "Look at me, I can give away every advantage and still survive, my genes are so l33t!" So it gets coded in, it works.
Buddhism, and none of what I write is about not caring about existence. That's just another attachment, "OOh, look at me, I'm free from all worldly cares and I can go about my blissful existence without acknowledging suffering or joy, tra-la-la!" That the predominant thinking in India before Buddha, and he was not having it. They call it the middle path for a reason.
I try not to insult people's beliefs. It's against my beliefs. I was raised agnostic and curious, so I've experienced many different religions, and many different religious and spiritual people. People who have a calling and follow it, in my experience pretty much worldwide and regardless of the particular faith, are among the most honorable and decent members of our species. You are the guys we're going to show off when some advanced alien race lands here.
I've studied Christianity and went through a Christian phase myself. Honestly asked for Christ's forgiveness and accepted him as my savior, all that. It just never felt right for me, and I never really felt anything I could call God's love, or the holy spirit, or anything.
Jesus says we are forgiven for our sins. Or so the Bible says. I think the point he was trying to get across was, there are no sins to be forgiven for, because we are all One with the Father. Not even Satan himself is separate from an omniscient, omnipotent being. How can anything that we do make God sad? I don't think it's like that, I don't think God gets sad when we sin, do you?
Buddhism isn't antagonistic towards religion, it just says that there is a way out of suffering here and now, regardless of anything else, and it shows you how so you can see if it works for you or not.
Fuck that. You are obviously intelligent. Don't give up. I've been there, most smart people have. The world is fucked up and you can't come out of it unscathed. I've considered suicide at times, my wife has, plenty of our friends have, but thinking you'd be better off not being born is bullshit. You wouldn't even have the luxury to make that choice, now would you?
How much therapy have you tried? I've been in therapy for years on and off and I'm better off than I was. Your pain and anger are there for a reason, and therapy can help you find that reason, come to terms with it, and learn to express your feelings constructively. I wish I could say I can do it all the time now. I can't but it's more of the time anyway.
So it's not hopeless. I'm a lazy bastard and if I can learn to feel even a little better about myself, so can you.
Exactly. "I" am not separate from "Thinking." Thinking exists. A sense of self exists. But don't get confused by semantic levels, that leads to equivocation. Of course individuals exist on one level. The concept is a useful approximation on another, and meaningless on yet another.
This essay examining Rush lyrics in terms of mystic dissociative phenomenon is one of my all time favorites. Meditation can lead to the death of the dualistic mind. But it keeps coming back unless you do a lot of it for a long time. If you want a shortcut to immediate ego dissolution, you might try 5-MeO-DMT above threshold dose, if that is still legal in your country. With someone to look after you for the 15-20 minutes it takes. And you might want to meditate first. But again, it does keep coming back. I'm still thinking in dualism, driven by my desires and taking things personally most of the time. And I don't meditate enough, so I can almost never pull out the non-dualism when I really need it, e.g. when I'm bickering with my wife or arguing with some dolt on Slashdot.
Sorry for the wiki overload, but it is the quickest way to do a brain dump.
Qualia aren't open to scientific inquiry by their nature. They are a philosophical dodge, a way for the mind to hold on to dualism. You can't understand mind with mind any more than a knife can cut itself. Awareness is just a signal flow, constantly changing due to feedback loops and resonances. Self awareness is a type of signal arising when the feedback loops issue a query wanting to know to whom this information stream applies.
Your statement basically boils down to, "I want to believe in dualism and self-awareness because I believe in dualism and self awareness." Look, it's not like those concepts don't have a place, they are useful tools. But when mind starts thinking, "That's how the world is, that's how I am" instead of, "That's a useful way of looking at things for the moment," things rapidly go all wonky.
Surely desire has little to do with it. If you were trapped in a dark box with no means of escape for the rest of eternity, I can guarantee you would be unhappy, and desire to get out. There were Buddhist monks in Tibet, who, in time of famine, would starve and mummify themselves by eating only tree bark, sitting in the lotus position until they died, where many of them sit to this day. They did it to show that we are not slaves to our desires, that we do not need to become vioent animals in time of famine.
Other monks, held captive and tortured by the Chinese for years, said that the greatest danger they faced was that of losing compassion for their captors. Then there's the Vietnamese Buddhist who set himself on fire in protest of the war, They caught that on film. He did not move a muscle, even while being burned alive. Nothing was left of his body, except his heart, which hasn't decayed to this day. Don't underestimate the power of a person who is free from desire.
The questions you raise were the very ones that kept me from feeling comfortable with Buddhism for a long time. But Buddha taught that desire for asceticism was a form of attachment, too. Spiritual bragging, in a way. That's why Buddhism is called the middle path. Enjoy the pleasures of the moment fully while they are there, but do not pine for them when they are gone. Look at pain as experience. Just don't place value judgments on situations or feelings. That's my take on it, anyway.
"We" don't "exist." That is still dualistic thinking. I like what you say about the sense of self, though I tend to think of it as undifferentiated awareness. Not of something, by something. Awareness.
There is no real choice, because there is no stable point that is outside the system of feedback loops and can influence them without being influenced. There is only cause and effect.
You clearly don't understand what I'm saying, as I see no grand unification of souls and made it clear that souls are unimportant. I mentioned no supernatural powers except to say they were unimportant. I don't understand why you seem so hostile. Your statement on mortality is spot on, though.
There are three basic approaches to this existential dilemma. First, decide based on arbitrary experiences that one particular explanation is right. Second, decide that no particular explanation matters since you can't know which one is right for sure, and get on with your life. Third, go batshit insane.
Buddha was asked a number of questions by a wise philosopher of the time, such as "Is there a soul," "Is there a God" and "Is there life after death?" Buddha refused to answer because the answers aren't important. If they are important to you, there is a more basic question you should be asking first, which is, "Why is it important for me to believe that I know the answers?"
You will find the answer to this is always some variant of, "Because I'm afraid of dying and knowing the right things will help keep me from ceasing to exist." So the question becomes, why am I afraid of dying? And the answer is almost always something along the lines of, "Because I see myself as fundamentally separate from the Universe, and when I die, I'm gone."
This is based on the fact that mind has privileged access to some of it's own internal state. No one else seems to know our internal worlds, and so we fear that when we die, those worlds will be lost. Worse yet, as we believe we are the only ones who can put them in their proper context, when we die, they might be misinterpreted.
Well, buck up. You aren't separate from the universe. You are not a subject, observing the objects. You aren't a little man sitting in your head looking out through your eyes and hearing through your ears. The sense of self is just another sense, just another track in the recording. No one is listening because there aren't any such things as individuals to observe.
Is that confusing or upsetting? Then you are stuck in dualistic thinking, and will always be, in some sense, scared of death. If you can let go of dualism and realize that there is no subjective observer separate from the objects observed, but that observation still exists, then you will be free and it won't matter one bit whether we are living in a simulation, or even whether there is a God, a soul, or an afterlife.
You know what's worse than being a guy and sucking cocks? Using the word, "Fagtastic." If you don't like it, why comment? Just to make yourself seem better than others, even if it's just in your eyes. You try to belittle my motives, because you have no worthwhile motivations yourself.
From your post, it's clear that you live in an empty world, devoid of friends, human connection, and meaning. Your pain and anger are so great you lash out anonymously against anyone who seems to be positive, because we show what an empty lie you are living, and we must be faking, right? Sorry, no. We're actually happy, engaged, motivated, and feel no need to put others down undeservedly. We do things, we don't talk shit about others for no reason.
Certain very insecure dorks need to put down anything others think is cool, in order to try to look big and important, like they've seen it all and nothing can impress them. They only end up looking cool to other insecure dorks who will then put them down behind their backs. Adults don't give a rats ass what talkers say, we care about what doers do, and insecure jaded cynical children don't usually do much of anything.
You know what's cooler than jaded cynicism? Enthusiasm. We don't want to hear how you could have done it better. Show us. We don't need you to point out that it's "been done." Do it, or don't, but don't shit on our graham crackers and call it a s'more.
Okay, think commercial trucking then. They are licensed to ensure all of our safety, and quite frankly, I want private investigators to be licensed, too. And bonded. I don't want a bunch of fly-by-night yahoos creeping about my property taking pictures. Licensing protects clients and subjects from potentially dangerous, illegal, or dangerous operations.
The fact is, one party didn't play by the rules, and they should be shut down in court for not playing by the rules. I like the rules. If I break into your house to collect evidence, that's not valid. If I use an unlicensed investigator in a state that requires licensing, that's not valid either. You can't just overturn another group of people's decision as to how they want to run their state.
We didn't leave, exactly, but we did pull the majority of our forces out prematurely. I don't completely agree that we should have invaded, and I don't agree that we accomplished anything of value.
I've studied WWI, you're right, it is interesting. But the world has changed since then. It's too interconnected for any major player to risk a world war. The risk/benefit analysis for war is totally different now. And the minor players don't have the capacity to mount something like an invasion of the American mainland. Implying that the causes of WWI could replay in today's world is an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary proof. I know a fair amount about WWI, so I'd like to hear your theories as to how those conditions could exist today.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen the heart in question. I was thinking people worked to keep it preserved. Not that it would take that much, mummies don't decay either, and I imagine it's pretty much like jerky.
Me, a stream-winner? You think? Hehe. I guess that means I get to chop wood and carry water now...
You could potentially, with the right technology, reproduce your mind without understanding it. You could come up with a complete description of the color red, understanding it on all levels. You could give a colorblind person that complete description. Would they then have the same experience of red that you do? Understanding the workings of mind will not necessarily give us insight into the phenomenon of qualia. It's really an open question, and still hotly debated.
Fuck off with your "everyone else pay my way" gimmick. Externalities are real.
Well put. Although the metaphysical information question is an open one, in my book. If the Universe works like a fractal, it may be possible to make larger leaps of inference than would be locally possible otherwise. One could discern information about non local conditions through local information. But that's speculation, which I'm trying to avoid in this discussion even though I love it.
Ego is in no way separate from the universe. How could it be. Please explain a mechanism that let's something interact in two directions (getting information and sending motivation) while being separate. It strains the definition of separate to the breaking point.
There's a difference between a Buddha and a Bodhisattva. A Buddha achieves perfect enlightenment for himself, a Bodhisattva achieves enlightenment but holds back until all other sentient beings get there (or so the vow goes.)
But that's not really what you are talking about. We're not using the word desire the same way. People can act without desire, in the sense of longing or craving, but obviously not in the sense of motivation. Buddhists can be highly motivated. Buddhists don't suffer for their desires, they don't pine for things they don't have.
Oh, and suffering is not pain, either. You can do away with suffering, you can't do away with pain. But without suffereing, pain is merely intense bodily sensation. Most animals don't suffer, even when they are in pain. It takes a human's highly developed neo-cortex to suffer.
I don't think any other creature on the planet fears death, because that has no evolutionary advantage. They fear particular things leading up to death, and that is very different. They don't fear ceasing to be.
Actually, nature is cooperative as much as selfish because genes are trans personal. They don't care about you as an individual, they care about getting as large a percentage of themselves passed on as they can, whether that happens through you or a close relative who shares many of your genes.
Cooperation is also a valid strategy when resources are mostly plentiful with local scarcities of some things. Thus we have symbionts and not just parasites. You scratch my back, I scratch yours works enough that genes frequently code for that kind of behavior. Cooperation is a useful brag even when an offer is not reciprocated and you end up losing. It's like a peacock's tail, it says, "Look at me, I can give away every advantage and still survive, my genes are so l33t!" So it gets coded in, it works.
Buddhism, and none of what I write is about not caring about existence. That's just another attachment, "OOh, look at me, I'm free from all worldly cares and I can go about my blissful existence without acknowledging suffering or joy, tra-la-la!" That the predominant thinking in India before Buddha, and he was not having it. They call it the middle path for a reason.
Thank you. Now I just wish I could walk my talk more of the time.
I try not to insult people's beliefs. It's against my beliefs. I was raised agnostic and curious, so I've experienced many different religions, and many different religious and spiritual people. People who have a calling and follow it, in my experience pretty much worldwide and regardless of the particular faith, are among the most honorable and decent members of our species. You are the guys we're going to show off when some advanced alien race lands here.
I've studied Christianity and went through a Christian phase myself. Honestly asked for Christ's forgiveness and accepted him as my savior, all that. It just never felt right for me, and I never really felt anything I could call God's love, or the holy spirit, or anything.
Jesus says we are forgiven for our sins. Or so the Bible says. I think the point he was trying to get across was, there are no sins to be forgiven for, because we are all One with the Father. Not even Satan himself is separate from an omniscient, omnipotent being. How can anything that we do make God sad? I don't think it's like that, I don't think God gets sad when we sin, do you?
Buddhism isn't antagonistic towards religion, it just says that there is a way out of suffering here and now, regardless of anything else, and it shows you how so you can see if it works for you or not.
Fuck that. You are obviously intelligent. Don't give up. I've been there, most smart people have. The world is fucked up and you can't come out of it unscathed. I've considered suicide at times, my wife has, plenty of our friends have, but thinking you'd be better off not being born is bullshit. You wouldn't even have the luxury to make that choice, now would you?
How much therapy have you tried? I've been in therapy for years on and off and I'm better off than I was. Your pain and anger are there for a reason, and therapy can help you find that reason, come to terms with it, and learn to express your feelings constructively. I wish I could say I can do it all the time now. I can't but it's more of the time anyway.
So it's not hopeless. I'm a lazy bastard and if I can learn to feel even a little better about myself, so can you.
Exactly. "I" am not separate from "Thinking." Thinking exists. A sense of self exists. But don't get confused by semantic levels, that leads to equivocation. Of course individuals exist on one level. The concept is a useful approximation on another, and meaningless on yet another.
Of course it matters! It matters exactly as much as you want it to matter because there's no more or less valid point than that. That's freedom.
The Tao Te Ching, Poetry by Rumi, anything written by Buddha, and Buddhism's purified, simplified face, Zen. Some things by Allister Crowley if you can get over the fact that he trolling you, and laughing at you. Permutation City by Greg Egan. Ubik or most anything else by Phillip K. Dick. Starmaker and Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. The fields of cybernetics and systems theory.
This essay examining Rush lyrics in terms of mystic dissociative phenomenon is one of my all time favorites. Meditation can lead to the death of the dualistic mind. But it keeps coming back unless you do a lot of it for a long time. If you want a shortcut to immediate ego dissolution, you might try 5-MeO-DMT above threshold dose, if that is still legal in your country. With someone to look after you for the 15-20 minutes it takes. And you might want to meditate first. But again, it does keep coming back. I'm still thinking in dualism, driven by my desires and taking things personally most of the time. And I don't meditate enough, so I can almost never pull out the non-dualism when I really need it, e.g. when I'm bickering with my wife or arguing with some dolt on Slashdot.
Sorry for the wiki overload, but it is the quickest way to do a brain dump.
What he did requires practice and dedication. Why can't you all leave Britney.. I mean Guitar Guy alone? Meh, I tried. Some people...
Qualia aren't open to scientific inquiry by their nature. They are a philosophical dodge, a way for the mind to hold on to dualism. You can't understand mind with mind any more than a knife can cut itself. Awareness is just a signal flow, constantly changing due to feedback loops and resonances. Self awareness is a type of signal arising when the feedback loops issue a query wanting to know to whom this information stream applies.
Your statement basically boils down to, "I want to believe in dualism and self-awareness because I believe in dualism and self awareness." Look, it's not like those concepts don't have a place, they are useful tools. But when mind starts thinking, "That's how the world is, that's how I am" instead of, "That's a useful way of looking at things for the moment," things rapidly go all wonky.
Other monks, held captive and tortured by the Chinese for years, said that the greatest danger they faced was that of losing compassion for their captors. Then there's the Vietnamese Buddhist who set himself on fire in protest of the war, They caught that on film. He did not move a muscle, even while being burned alive. Nothing was left of his body, except his heart, which hasn't decayed to this day. Don't underestimate the power of a person who is free from desire.
The questions you raise were the very ones that kept me from feeling comfortable with Buddhism for a long time. But Buddha taught that desire for asceticism was a form of attachment, too. Spiritual bragging, in a way. That's why Buddhism is called the middle path. Enjoy the pleasures of the moment fully while they are there, but do not pine for them when they are gone. Look at pain as experience. Just don't place value judgments on situations or feelings. That's my take on it, anyway.
"We" don't "exist." That is still dualistic thinking. I like what you say about the sense of self, though I tend to think of it as undifferentiated awareness. Not of something, by something. Awareness.
There is no real choice, because there is no stable point that is outside the system of feedback loops and can influence them without being influenced. There is only cause and effect.
You clearly don't understand what I'm saying, as I see no grand unification of souls and made it clear that souls are unimportant. I mentioned no supernatural powers except to say they were unimportant. I don't understand why you seem so hostile. Your statement on mortality is spot on, though.
There are three basic approaches to this existential dilemma. First, decide based on arbitrary experiences that one particular explanation is right. Second, decide that no particular explanation matters since you can't know which one is right for sure, and get on with your life. Third, go batshit insane.
Buddha was asked a number of questions by a wise philosopher of the time, such as "Is there a soul," "Is there a God" and "Is there life after death?" Buddha refused to answer because the answers aren't important. If they are important to you, there is a more basic question you should be asking first, which is, "Why is it important for me to believe that I know the answers?"
You will find the answer to this is always some variant of, "Because I'm afraid of dying and knowing the right things will help keep me from ceasing to exist." So the question becomes, why am I afraid of dying? And the answer is almost always something along the lines of, "Because I see myself as fundamentally separate from the Universe, and when I die, I'm gone."
This is based on the fact that mind has privileged access to some of it's own internal state. No one else seems to know our internal worlds, and so we fear that when we die, those worlds will be lost. Worse yet, as we believe we are the only ones who can put them in their proper context, when we die, they might be misinterpreted.
Well, buck up. You aren't separate from the universe. You are not a subject, observing the objects. You aren't a little man sitting in your head looking out through your eyes and hearing through your ears. The sense of self is just another sense, just another track in the recording. No one is listening because there aren't any such things as individuals to observe.
Is that confusing or upsetting? Then you are stuck in dualistic thinking, and will always be, in some sense, scared of death. If you can let go of dualism and realize that there is no subjective observer separate from the objects observed, but that observation still exists, then you will be free and it won't matter one bit whether we are living in a simulation, or even whether there is a God, a soul, or an afterlife.
You know what's worse than being a guy and sucking cocks? Using the word, "Fagtastic." If you don't like it, why comment? Just to make yourself seem better than others, even if it's just in your eyes. You try to belittle my motives, because you have no worthwhile motivations yourself.
From your post, it's clear that you live in an empty world, devoid of friends, human connection, and meaning. Your pain and anger are so great you lash out anonymously against anyone who seems to be positive, because we show what an empty lie you are living, and we must be faking, right? Sorry, no. We're actually happy, engaged, motivated, and feel no need to put others down undeservedly. We do things, we don't talk shit about others for no reason.
I pity you.
Certain very insecure dorks need to put down anything others think is cool, in order to try to look big and important, like they've seen it all and nothing can impress them. They only end up looking cool to other insecure dorks who will then put them down behind their backs. Adults don't give a rats ass what talkers say, we care about what doers do, and insecure jaded cynical children don't usually do much of anything.
You know what's cooler than jaded cynicism? Enthusiasm. We don't want to hear how you could have done it better. Show us. We don't need you to point out that it's "been done." Do it, or don't, but don't shit on our graham crackers and call it a s'more.
Okay, think commercial trucking then. They are licensed to ensure all of our safety, and quite frankly, I want private investigators to be licensed, too. And bonded. I don't want a bunch of fly-by-night yahoos creeping about my property taking pictures. Licensing protects clients and subjects from potentially dangerous, illegal, or dangerous operations.
The fact is, one party didn't play by the rules, and they should be shut down in court for not playing by the rules. I like the rules. If I break into your house to collect evidence, that's not valid. If I use an unlicensed investigator in a state that requires licensing, that's not valid either. You can't just overturn another group of people's decision as to how they want to run their state.
We didn't leave, exactly, but we did pull the majority of our forces out prematurely. I don't completely agree that we should have invaded, and I don't agree that we accomplished anything of value.
I've studied WWI, you're right, it is interesting. But the world has changed since then. It's too interconnected for any major player to risk a world war. The risk/benefit analysis for war is totally different now. And the minor players don't have the capacity to mount something like an invasion of the American mainland. Implying that the causes of WWI could replay in today's world is an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary proof. I know a fair amount about WWI, so I'd like to hear your theories as to how those conditions could exist today.