The human soul

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Theoretically, you can give a logical deterministic reasons why certain historical choices were taken by individuals. But 'free will' is without mechanism and without empirical support.

And, you're right. In a deterministic universe, there's no room to talk about morality.

So we are all part of this humanity machine which keeps grinding on and on, down through the ages, inevitably making progress towards accomplishing the design of it's maker, and that maker's maker, and so on.

Part of why early Kabbalists didn't share their findings very often except among themselves or only took married men over 40 was for how corrosive what they actually found at the bottom things to be - ie. a guy had to be fully civically formed to handle finding out that it's ultimately a nihilistic universe, with some interesting backdrop but nihilistic nonetheless. I sometimes can't help but wonder if there at least is some sort of conscious hierarchy to nature whether it isn't just as absurd/bizarre as our own evolutionary program stack of DNA and probably just as much beings who owe the shape of their existence to what early accidents they survived.

The universe may be rigged to determine every little thing that you will do in your life, but whether this is bizarre or nihilistic depends on how you have learned to look at things.

We like to think of ourselves as having these nebulous 'selves'. But a 'self' is not really a physical entity, it's just a conscious idea; just a bunch of relationships which we have subjectively detected in our experience of our environment. Today my self is one way, and tomorrow, my 'self' will change, with the acquisition of new experience. My 'self' of yesterday is different from my self today. Our idea of 'self' has no permanence. Also, the self has no physical location or mechanism. It is a will-o-the-wisp fantasy. And this fantasy is at fault for all of the strife between people.

What's real is DNA. DNA for all life on earth is related to the point where a human shares half his DNA with a banana. DNA is an environmental detection and adaption machine. And with the aid of the new science of epigenetics, we see that environmental experience alters DNA expression, and that this trait can be passed down for generations in the offspring. This becomes the sort of genetic memory, which can guide young elephants to the secret water hole used by their grandfathers, even though the young elephants have never been there.

So whence DNA? Is it a result of natural self organization, or is there some higher intelligence which programmed life in a molecular coding? Being an environmental adaption machine, this coding could be transported to all kinds of environments and adapt to them through experience, to effect a universal panspermia sort of life.

So was this intelligent design? Did some super consciousness build this DNA machine to accomplish some purpose; perhaps to enable a civilization to travel cosmic distances, by sending out a seed instead of a spaceship? Well maybe. But in that case, you have to take up the case of the super consciousness. What was it's origin? You have endless regression with no answers.

So could DNA have self organized? At the basis of DNA lie 3 billion base pairs (rungs of the latter). So how long did it take for all these molecules to arrange themselves just so? Well, how long did it take the natural universe to arrange itself into stars and planets and asteroids, and galaxies, and galaxy clusters? When you have an eternity of time to work with, miracles like the living earth can evolve.

So the meaning of life is for each of us to play his part in accomplishing the ultimate goal of the humanity machine. Each of us is intimately bound to this machine, which imparts experience to us and gets action out of us. Our experience is unique and our action is unique. Nobody undergoes the same set of experiences in the same order, so everyone has a unique capability to impart to the machine. So everyone has input into the ongoing development of the universe. Each of our actions affect the future development of the universe, through knock-on effects, down to the end of time. I just don't see that as being meaningless and nihilistic. I do see it as puzzling however, if I take the intelligent design route instead of the self organization route, due to the infinite regression of first movers.

There can’t be such an infinite regression. Not only that, but it’s logically possible for there to have been a single primary mover.

Experiments have shown amino acids to “self-organize,” so to speak. The problem is they’ve only done so under tightly controlled conditions. And not once has a life ever spontaneously sprung into being through these experiments. We know that the geological age of the earth is only so many billions of years. We know the earliest traces of life on earth are about the same age. For life to spontaneously appear given the extreme unlikelihood of it happening would have taken a lot more time than life seems to have had. Life wouldn’t have occurred precisely when the earth’s crust cooled, yet it seems to have flashed into being. The simplest explanation is that it had a little help, so I believe that intelligent design best explains the sudden appearance of life.

The only realistic alternative is that amino acids and self-replicating proteins had already formed nearby in the solar system and seeded the earth. But this, I think, creates more problems than it solves. A protein-rich asteroid hit a planet EXACTLY within the solar habitable zone, happened in THIS solar system, at EXACTLY the right point in time the earth cooled enough to support life. Without any intelligent influence or intervention.

It’s like the old watchmaker argument. Logically POSSIBLE? Sure. Except it’s never happened. It’s not the kind of thing that DOES happen. It’s doubtful that it ever WILL happen. The simplest explanation is it a watch exists, there must also be a watchmaker. Likewise, energy can’t be created, yet the universe isn’t infinitely old. I can’t specify the mechanics of creation, but I can say a single, intelligent, creative agent must have set it into motion.

As to why I believe the way I do...Creation hypotheses have little to do with it. Experiences with the Divine are personal. It doesn’t quite cut the mustard with the scientific community, but there again is another problem—all scientific work falls within the realm of personal experience. If you don’t experience it, you don’t report it. Personal experience by extension might also involve a justified, true belief. Whether you “believe” or not is a matter of your own confirmation bias and wishful thinking. I’d be delusional if I ignored everything that happened to me. I don’t require another person to validate it, and I’d have to be insane to assume that I did. To put it a different way, I know that I’d die if I jumped from certain bridges. Just because everyone else does it doesn’t make me wrong!

At any rate...

An intelligent designer possessing what we know to be attributes of God by actually BEING God already knows all possible events in the universe, including all human choices. I don’t accept that as an assault on free will. We are free. God hasn’t determined those choices. WE have. WE do. God just happens to already know.

It is indeed possible for there to have been a single primary mover, who always was and who always will be. Once we know that by the faith imparted to us by our life experience, forget science and throw all your effort into determining and doing the will of this all powerful creator.

But, further on down here, you say that if you have a watch, it proves the existence of a watchmaker. So, if we have a god, why does that not prove the existence of a 'god maker'? You make me suspicious that you are providing reasons to support your beliefs, and not empirically derived, mpm-biased conclusions.



I agree that the Earth has not existed long enough for human DNA to have self organized. But it just seems to me that panspermia is a logical scientific theory, whereas intelligent design requires a leap of faith. I do not have the life experience which allows me to make that leap of faith, and you have. Why would a creator bias his revelation to include some but not others? And please don't give me 'because he wants to do it that way', or 'because some people act better than others', because I'm a hard determinist and feel that everyone is on morally equal ground, since everything that they are was foisted upon them via genetics and life experience.





My argument that our life experience creates our soul is not based on an intelligent designer knowing our every move.
It is based on the simple fact that neonates don't seem to have a soul at all, and that they develop one as a result of their life experiences after birth. So,if not by experience, why aren't new born babies as adept at making free choices as adults? My answer; experience has not yet built their souls. Your answer;?????

If humans have no souls then the only good thing about death is we no longer suffer pain.

But we don't experience the good things in life ever again. And some people have to die very slow and painful deaths or die leaving behind families they can no longer protect.

It's funny how different people see things differently. In Buddhism, the whole aim of life is to exit the cycle of life, death, and reincarnation. To reach nirvana is to escape reincarnation and to cease to exist. Because to exist is to have a 'self' and this self is the cause of all strife and suffering. Yet, here in the West, we hold life to be the best condition, and death to be the worst.

But if you stop and look at life, chances are you might say it's 50% good and 50% bad. If those percentages are close to right, it would seem that life has no advantage over death. But I'm strange. Life's great and I'll handle it to experience the good parts. But if there is ever a chance to upload my soul to a computer of something, I'd just as soon pass, and opt for the sweet oblivion of death. I like life as much as the next guy, but Eternal life?...No. I don't want to do that.

This self that I feel is an illusion anyway. In death, we lose nothing. But life is short and, apparently, we only go around this way once, so I want to experience it to the fullest. But after I do it once, I really don't want to do it again. Sorta like kissing a cow. So how about you @TW1ZTY. You want to hang around this all night doughnut shop forever?

Yes I do. Life has moments of sucking, but it also has really good moments. I don't think losing the good things in life is worth losing the bad things.

Not really. It could be that God's purpose was to create a being with agency, something that could exist as an end unto itself.


Why is it necessary to assume ALL things require a creator? I think that all things that begin to exist have a cause. If God is said to be infinite, how can God be said to have ever begun to exist? That doesn't make sense. What's stopping God from being an end unto Himself, an uncaused Cause?


I'm not knowledgeable regarding panspermia to make that judgment, but it seems to me that it's logical. ID isn't really such a leap, though. Why can't something like, say, panspermia and ID BOTH exist together? Why couldn't a Creator use, say, panspermia as a means or method of creation? I wasn't there when the universe nor the earth were created, so I can't say with absolute certainty how God did it. For most purposes I don't need to know. But I fail to see why a design method can't work hand in hand with a Creator.

A Creator would be necessary even for that, assuming that to be true, because extraterrestrial protein-generating material and soap bubbles have to hit the earth at exactly the right time and place, the protein-generating material have to actually MAKE proteins and "just happen" to form inside soap bubbles, and there has to be an abundance of self-replicating proteins and soap bubbles to survive the conditions of a still-cooling earth. It's just not something that can occur at random--or, to be more precise, it's just not something that HAPPENS at random.


Why not? lol

Truth be told, I don't believe God HAS biased his revelation in any such way. I believe God has revealed himself plenty enough. It's unnecessary for God to shoulder the guilt of others for their rejection of said revelation. I can teach my child that it's a bad idea to become a murderous lunatic. But I cannot reasonably tell my child he cannot decide to become one. If he chooses that path, I cannot help him, nor can I be punished for the choices he makes. I've done my job as parent.

"But what about those who haven't heard the gospel?" Funny thing, the Bible actually covers that. It could be that an unreached people would not have accepted the gospel had they heard it. In fact, I've heard the story of a missionary who became an atheist precisely because of the particular belief system of an indigenous tribe he intended to convert. The views of this culture were, in short, if I can't see/hear/touch/taste/smell it, it doesn't exist. Once a person dies, that person is gone. And because of the aforementioned, their approach to dealing with death was almost like pretending the deceased had never even existed. The missionary was foolish for even trying. Imagine if you're one of the natives. You hold no special memory of the dead, yet here's this guy who wants me to believe HIS guy died on a cross? His God is DEAD for crying out loud. If he's dead, he's nothing. The Christian religion makes no logical sense, and never will, to people who maintain this view and have no need for what Jesus has to offer. The missionary in question was beleaguered that he couldn't possibly reach these people, and after a while their foolish logic seemed to make more sense. It's really the atheist missionary, who doesn't seem to have had much of a faith with any kind of substance to begin with, that's the idiot here. If an entire nation or people group isn't ready, don't freakin' push your faith on them! This isn't difficult. Making the gospel available to anyone who might ever seek it is a good thing. Trying to convert those who don't wish to be converted? Time to find something else to do.


If true, then I have no choice but to believe in a Creator.

But I don't even need to invoke Yahweh to make a case for objective morality. It's really simple. The natural order for life is to ensure its own survival. Animals are conscious of their world and the necessary resources for survival. For some, such as cicadas, this means fast mating and massive reproduction. Predators and disease wipe out a significant portion of cicadas until predators are physically unable to consume any more of them. The remainder of cicadas that survive are comparatively tiny, yet even that tiny number is still huge. Animals instinctively act to protect themselves. They will attack when threatened. They will eat enough to meet their needs. If an animal fails to protect itself, feed itself, and reproduce, it will die. Death is inevitable, of course, so with age and disease comes failure and the animal will die. Animals do not get to choose what they will or will not do in the meantime. They can only act in favor of their own benefit. They are, in effect, innocent and only capable of good. Evil has no meaning for animals.

Human beings, on the other hand, CAN choose whether to live or die. They can choose to act in their own interest or against their own interest. It often happens humans aren't even really sure what those interests are or should be. But nonetheless it can be reasonably inferred from nature that which sustains one's own life and well-being is good; that which brings about one's own destruction is evil.

But why not write off all other human beings as a threat and kill everyone you dislike? Because murder is self-destructive. Any time you threaten the desire of another person to live, you give license to others to act reciprocally. If you are free to murder others, others are free to murder you. Your freedom to live is forfeit once you attack the freedom of others. Jesus addresses this directly with the Golden Rule. When you examine the context of Christian reciprocity, you cannot ignore that it's framed within selfishness. It recognizes that those who are self-seeking can even see the benefit of doing good for their own children since one's child is an extension of himself. It therefore follows that accomplishing one's own goals is best done in tandem with service to others. "Eye-for-an-eye" as described in the Old Testament, in exactly the same way, is a discipline within justice that calls for fair punishment. It makes no sense for someone who through negligence causes bodily injury to become permanently disabled when that person can remain a productive member of society AND take care of the injured person. This was especially pertinent in ancient Israel during the exodus when incarceration wasn't an option. But the ancient Hebrew justice system called simply for fair compensation, not literal reciprocation, and what is meant by it is carefully expressed in the OT laws. And what I meant earlier by "service to others" was not self-hating sacrifice and compromise. We're just talking about common interests. It's irrational and IMMORAL to behave murderously, not merely for the destruction of another person (why should I care about another person?), but most importantly because it ultimately results in the destruction of self.

Thus "good" and "evil" can be expressed in objective terms. While I mentioned Biblical examples, note that nowhere did I mention that God is the standard by which morality is judged. Whether one person may decide that God is that standard in terms of objective reality is going to depend on whether that person can conclude that natural order and, hence, objective morality, is a result of God's activity. In other words, one must ask, "Are God's moral laws written into the nature He created?" However, that question for the time being is superfluous. Are morals objective or not? Is there an objective basis for morality? Of course there is.


You're wrong. A soul/mind exists regardless of experience. All experience does is enable the soul/mind to relate to the outside world. It gives us a means of communication, of describing, encoding, and recalling useful information about that outside world. A baby knows when it's hungry. A baby knows when it's awake and doesn't want to be awake. Neonates aren't adept at making free choices because they simply lack the means of making those choices, not because they lack desire to make those choices. And this is even more apparent as they grow. They watch us and try to do what we do because they WANT to do grownup things. They have an understanding that adult independence is a good thing and the seek the same benefits we take for granted. But they can't because they haven't grown into those things yet, and sometimes allowing infants and small children to do things might result in injury to the young person. Babies have to go where parents take them because they can't walk yet. Their bodies have to grow. Their muscle mass has to increase. Their neurons have to respond to stimuli, and the infant mind must attain some level of control over motor neurons.

This isn't the birth of some magical "soul," however. This is just simple child development. A paralytic lacks control and experiences limited ability to make decisions. Does that mean paralytics do not possess a mind or a soul?

Your name is Hope. Bless you. But, I almost think that I'm fine with hopelessness. But you have good attitude. Suck the juice out of life while you can. It ain't a dress rehearsal, and we only go around this way once.

Probably more likely that awareness likes to coagulate into structures that it can do things with, otherwise it's in a pretty inert space.


Probably no need for such. Also I'd have to say endless regression is a philosophic speculation out into the dark. Whose to say there weren't many odd junctures and different kinds of causes leading to different end results rather than the same thing infinitely far back? I've found it best these days to keep my philosophizing closer to my experiences in ways that account for some of the higher novelty.

I don't know what you mean by awareness coagulating into structures. Are you, perhaps, referring to something like panpsychism? Do you think that consciousness, like time and space, just is, and that it has the ability to make choices as to where it will dwell? But consciousness is immaterial and does not need a spatial environment to exist in. Can you say anything else explanatory about your 'awareness coagulates'?






But endless regression is all around us in a deterministic world. Determinism makes the straight forward claim that there are reasons for things. So, of course, there are reasons for those reasons in an endless regression. If it were not that way, everyone would act in a random fashion, and any knowledge would be useless and inapplicable.

Yes, many different self organizing processes may have originated in many different places; this chunk of DNA here, and another chunk over there. Then these chunks could have merged. That is in keeping with a deterministic view though, unless the intelligent designer had an odd way of creating things from parts which he had previously created all around the universe. Of course, the intelligent designer could have worked that way. After all, who am I to tell God how to do his job?

So do you think that my thoughts are not pragmatic? How do you keep your philosophizing closer to your experiences? Isn't all philosophizing rooted in experience?

This probably won't be a popular answer with a lot of people because it takes the subjective seriously but with the kinds of things I've done, experienced as a result, comparing those results to what people way more serious than I am (great example - Mark Stavish) come up with, and then also looking things like the Global Consciousness Project, Dean Radin's work, I'm at a point where I'd say that - to my own rigor and satisfaction - naive materialism as a dogmatic claim to what reality is either falls down or it takes some really convoluted conspiracies to glue it back together. Even the most uncharitable assumptions of people's integrity who believe in 'woo' don't cover what we have and most attempts to close gaps that way seem quite shrill after digging through and seeing what the evidence is to the contrary.

For panpsychism I'm really not sure. I think Michael Silberstein makes some good objections to panpsychism and in favor of neutral monism based on the observation that panpsychism is still strapped to a rather 18th/19th Newtonian contact mechanics idea of what matter is, ie. that fundamentally it's neither solid nor necessarily 'stuff', so panpsychism feels good to those who need the reassurance of the solidity of matter but I can see why people would reject that and go for either neutral monism or some kind of broad-based functionalism since fundamental particles even just seem like a phase of the stack rather than a final floor or bottom.

My intuitions from what I've read would be this - if you have the conditions for life, ie. right temperatures for the right chemicals to create information-laden structures, you likely don't have to wait for the impossible odds of certain randomly created molecules to come together to make something like DNA, in the way Stephen C Meyer suggested in Signature in the Cell. What you have is chemicals that on some level have a very low-level analog to 'feeling' and when chemical processes come together which are helpful for their host constituents they grow and proliferate. New combinations get tried all the time with various results. There's a lot of random chance involved sure but there's also a bit of preference at play.

That's likely not the only thing going on, it's just one layer or aspect if we want to talk about the physical world. The likelihood that there's far more 'stuff' in the way of consciousness and information that we don't see or isn't involved in Baryonic matter seems also likely because there's no reason for there not to be and a lot of indicators, whether dark matter or energy or (if it pans out) the vacuum energy constant offer some suggestion this way although I still have some doubts as to whether these in and of themselves are a suggestion against our concept of space, our concept of just Baryonic matter, to our concept of matter as dead, or some combination of all three.

One of the easiest things to set this path of understanding in motion is considering what willed observation does to REGs or RNGs in situations like the Global Consciousness Project, and the same things tend to happen if people take REGs to places like orchestras, baseball or basketball games, concerts, etc., high points of crowd engagement trigger results. That would suggest that we as human beings aren't as closed of systems as we would have thought and that there's a bit more involved in our external effects than just our words or the extension of our physical actions. That said it's not the wild west, it's not an 'anything goes' sort of thing, and we have centuries of observation and experience to show us that we have very little gainful agency for the most part past - as mentioned - our physical and verbal actions but still, a little bit of something rather than nothing gives strong suggestion that we're still living on a bit of an 18th century wives tale that we grabbed on to as a political opposition to religion. Now it seems like it's the politics first and foremost that stop us from thinking further about these things.


I meant that in a more simple sense than you may have read it. I mean we have no certainty of how old 'everything that's ever been' is, I just mean that we have no clue how many different factors or combination of factors have bumped whatever this is along its path. When we project philosophy outward we tend to like simplicity and say 'it was x all the way back' when there's no reason to believe it wasn't x, then y and x, then z and x, then a and b, etc.

So yes - there are causes for things and I was more or less just giving a cautionary note about interpreting them too naively. A great example of this as well - we love to interpret things in terms of time, and a lot of people ask what was 'before' the big bang. In that sense time may very well not have existed and the claim that it only exists in tandem with space may very well be true, but time (ie. what was 'before') is different from asking the question what was antecedent.


Yeah, I'm not a fan of intelligent design theories - just look at a giraffe's laryngeal nerve nerve or how many blood vessels in our eyes that we have to see around. Also turning on the TV sours that one, even worse if you check in on politics.


I didn't say that. I saw you throw out a spate of questions, sort of like food for thought, and not trying to answer them. I said what I did because I think people tend to get themselves in trouble mostly by taking thoughts that have no mooring and expanding them out into the macrocosm. For example just going to an a philosophy forum you see that a lot of people are competing to make a name for themselves, they know what's vogue and what's not vogue (so whatever they come up with has to be reductive native materialism compliant) and from there they end up just demonstrating to the other members their own naivety or just how many things they really haven't thought deeply about.

Philosophy in my mind, particularly when trying to expand beyond scientific findings into the broader natural world, is human ideas trying to probe a broader environment with hypotheses. We have no reason to believe that even what looks good is what things are, but at a minimum it gives a space for spinning up hypotheses that can be tested. The universe is strange but I think we quite often have problems with its strangeness from every side. It's not anthropocentric so there's no reason for reality to pay much attention to our culture wars or what believers in x ideology do to believers of y, nor the deleterious effects group b's beliefs have on their actions and on the progress of society in general. It doesn't care about us or what we think, maybe some interest that we think at all, and we're quite likely to find constant contradictions to our models. When I say contradictions to our models I don't mean historical ones that we've mapped out, for example Darwinian evolution is most likely correct in its overtures and we'll keep fleshing out more details but what we have in human knowledge is this huge structure sort of floating in space without may touchstones. That happens at the very small, ie. we can't say anything about the intrinsic properties of quarks or electrons, at the very large such as only having our best guesses as to what's outside our universe or what outside even means if it's not spatial/temporal, and then the subjective is something we still have no clue what to do with and tend to run from due to our common distrust of it. That's at least three frontiers that we need to keep probing which will likely continue to deeply surprise us for the foreseeable future.

OK. So your beliefs are stuck between naive materialism, and a subjectively undefined or ill-defined sense of a mental or spiritual world, but you are reluctant to call it panpsychism?

I believe that the mental/spiritual grows out of the material world. Maybe it's the result of ongoing self-organization or maybe it is the plan of the first mover; the un-caused cause. Anyway, during life we go from Skinner's blank slates to people who understand their environments and who can make predictions and plans. It is only experience that can effect such a change in us. Specifically, it is our ability to remember past experience and compare it to current experience. New experience is understood in terms of old experience, analogically. Even more specifically, the brain does pattern matching of the patterns of neuron firing on the various sensory cortices. Each body sensor in the skin, ears, eyes, taste buds, joints, muscles, and other sensory organs has a direct line via the spine to a single neuron on the sensory cortex. Each cortical neuron stimulated by a body sensor during an experience, fires an action potential to other neurons, creating a pattern of firing action potentials to other cortical neurons. The neurons which are in receipt of these action potentials compare the current firing pattern to past, remembered, firing patterns. That tells us how similar current experience is to past experience and selects the past experience that matches best (most similar set of remembered cortical neurons firing at the same time), and takes the same action that brought about the desired outcome last time, in the remembered episode (cortical firing pattern).

The most basic example that I can think of, of the mental growing out of the material is a collective noun like "dog".
When you think about it, dog is not a physical thing, but a mental idea created out of lots of similar things. Things are similar, when they activate similar patterns of neurons on the observer's sensory cortices. So we have a Beagle, a Wolfhound, and a Poodle. And we analogize the shapes and appearances of each of these specific animals and come up with areas of similarity (categories) in the patterns the firing neurons make on our cortex.

They might have similar body structures, similar sounds, or smells, or whatever physical characteristics we might realize. So the first step in the mental emanating from the physical is to tell what is different, and what remains similar. We do that via analogy based on category and Douglas Hofstadter has written a lot about how this happens. What I am saying here is my understanding of what Hofstadter has indicated, but has not expressed in neurological terms.

The second step is to embed analogy within analogy. By that I mean that a mental construct like 'dog' can be sucked up into a new collective noun like 'mammal' in the same manner that 'Poodle' was sucked up into 'dog'. Then 'mammal' can be accumulated into 'animal' and animal can be taken up in 'living things' and living things can be taken up into 'universe'. So when we say "Poodle", our consciousness understands it in terms of a universe of living things, animals, mammals, dogs, Poodles, this particular Poodle Fifi. When we consciously look at Fifi, we understand what we are seeing because our sub-conscious is feeding us all of the information applicable to each stage of the embedded analogy from memory.




These low levels of feeling in material things are interesting and look like they are somehow might be mental, but they have physical causes. We can think that thermostat 'feels' the cold and turns on the heat. But it's a purely physical happening, as the metal on one side of the bi-metallic strip contracts, causing the entire strip to bend and complete the circuit which turns on the furnace. If you ping a tuning fork, and hold an undisturbed tuning fork up near to the pinged one, the still fork will take up the same vibration as the pinged fork. Did the still fork hear the pinged fork and imitate it? No, the sound wave energy expelled by the pinged fork travels to and impacts the still fork to impart a similar vibration to it. Then there's certain bacteria which seems to regulate its own population. Each bacterium releases chemicals into the environment as a result of its life processes. But when the other bacteria detect a certain level of these chemicals in the environment, they will stop dividing and reproducing. Do they have a shared mind, or is the regulation of their population just the result of a bunch of chemical interactions? You can look at it either way really. But I feel that we have a greater understanding of the natural physical world, so I prefer to keep myself within that perspective.



I am familiar with Princeton's global consciousness project, and the movement away from random which happens in random number generators, when lots of people are reacting to the same event. The project intimates that this happens because of a shared consciousness. This can be seen as arcane and mysterious if we think of people as totally independent life units. But no man is an island. People are in constant communication, and are constantly undergoing experiences which are in many ways similar. If fact, every time we communicate we are sharing consciousness. Hofstadter says that this amounts to sharing our souls with each other. I think the idea of a shared consciousness is all over the Bible. For instance, in marriage, the two become one according to the Bible. I don't see that as figurative writing, but literal. Here's the mechanism for it. As I've said before, our experience builds our soul and makes us who we are. If two people team up and spend 30 years undergoing the same experiences together, then it's just natural that their minds and souls would be arranged in a similar manner, based on the wealth of experiences shared. But this doesn't just happen with people who co-habitate. It happens to the population in general who share a single attention grabbing experience engages a lot of people at the same time.

How that affects random number generators is still a shadowy area for me. The only thought that comes to mind is that the combined electric field of a bunch of people attending to the same experience must somehow affect the electric field in the random number generator. That could be sort of similar to how the tuning fork idea works.





I guess that each person interprets causes in light of his own particular experiences. I think doing that builds an individual's own truth. We use our subjective truths to construct our unique life-view or perspective. We communicate to allow the perspective of another to be taken into account, in our decision making. Then their experience can become part of our experience and we have more information from which to draw our future decisions. I believe that global consciousness happens as a result of this type of communication.







Philosophy has its roots in the natural world. The human mind is a prediction machine which answers the question "What should I do next?" Prediction accuracy varies directly with the time span covered by the prediction; the closer in the future, the better our prediction. So naturally our hypotheses about the distant past or the distant future are going to accumulate a lot more error over the greater time span covered. But, when you consider that we can never know everything about a universe which is apparently infinite in time and space, the curious human mind can't be settled with that. We have to make guesses based on what we have experienced in the past. It's just what we do

I hesitate to put hard terms to it because it's as complex as it is evasive. I think just about anyone with common sense feels like Helen Keller trying to describe MC Escher.


We seem to sponge up data from other sources as well, if I said genetic memory earlier that may have been pushing it - the more common and accepted form is epigenetic memory and there are a host of articles on the occurrence of that in both animals and people.


Well, Genus Canis. I'm sure studies would confirm they have more in common with each other genetically than they would other animals. Platonic categories are great for things you can't get under by other means but eventually there's some more tangible quality to be applied to it whether chemical or emergent.


It's good to know what might eat you and what might befriend you.


Maybe that raises the question - a lot of people like to take a three prong approach and say that there's awareness, perception, and memory, thus missing any one of the three you don't have what would be classically considered conscious. The boundaries of that tend to do our intuition in because we can't say that way have experienced any states without those. Even a dunk in a sensory deprivation tank might significantly muffle sensation but wouldn't mute it. If you use distinction as a promotion of memory and processing, aren't you still a ways out in front of that?


But there is an underlying reality that makes a dog and all the different kinds of dogs. As a mystic I constantly have sweeping Platonist generalizations on offer to me and I increasingly find myself rejecting them because they don't lead to answers. Better to just have an open crag of unknowing and pick around the edges to see what I can properly nail down next as reliable knowledge rather than grow the generalizations which would throw me in the new age trap (ie. it's a feeling's-rich but progress-poor world).


I don't have a peer-reviewed basis for debating that point but I look at it this way - we're funny about consciousness because of religion. We put it into all kinds of tortured boxes and limits or delimitations largely for social reasons. It doesn't necessarily mean that someone who can see these things from my perspective would agree with me, just that I can't think of many people I've met who are there aside from, dare I say it, practicing magicians and occultists, largely because they have the worldview they have but don't have the allergy to reading scientific literature that seems to happen more often the other way around.


I think when people say 'feeling' they're sneaking in human social baggage. You're bringing up man-made devices as well and there's a good chance that we'd need to handle considerations for constructed materials or systems a bit differently than self-organizing systems which have a lot of complexity and self-reinforcing feedback loops banding them together.


Kind of like my car radio isn't singing a song of love to the station broadcasting tower? I think I follow.


We're colonies of trillions of cells. There's really no reason for them to make a cohesive unit either. I think one of the more plausible explanations for consciousness amalgamating out of many, whether it's multicellular animals or perhaps going out to more controversial territories an ant colony or self-regulating pool of bacterium, is functionalism. With functionalism you have an acceptance of multi-tiered organization of everything from tightly-joined to loosely joined systems. It seems like it almost implies that gelled feedback loops are, in and of themselves, the part that's conscious. Ned Block complained about this in his China Brain analogy. Occultists/esotericists have no problem with this one at all - for at least a couple hundred years (and popularly from the 19th century French revival onward) they've called these egregores. Mark Stavish has a great book on them and at least a few long-play interviews about it.



Ideally when people are truly happily married (maybe 0.5% of human beings in history) they're synched up in such a way that the feedback loops between them practically make it such and it's a constant flow of information with all kinds of thresholds and equilibrium points.


Humor me with this one - can you think of a reason for it to have a limitation of range if you're speaking of something that's just bio-electric? If not can you think of a reason as to why you'd reject that sort of circumscription, such as that field stopping at their skin, or at five yards, fifty yards, etc.. Similarly if this is something like an electrical effect is there any reason why we should notice anything readable with everything we have in the airwaves competing with that?


I like Jonathan Haidt's take on this (ie. author of The Righteous Mind and founder of Heterodox Academy) that constantly associating with people who agree with you not only makes you dumber, sloppier, and lazier, but when you get a group of people like that together and it gets big enough they fall into a kind of downward spiral of dogma and purity testing. You're really best off having different people with the best version of a view that they can muster - truly believing it on the merits as they've been able to establish them - because when they have high-quality disagreement they'll be good at grooming each other for lacunas. With most common assumptions in life (outside of rather nasty politics like race supremacy) there isn't really good ground to stand on most of the time to say 'That view is so wrong that it shouldn't exist' without some very hard evidence and we typically as a species don't find ourselves haggling or debating whether the sky is blue, clouds are white, or whether ice really forms at 32°F / 0°C.


I don't think many intelligent people out there (maybe a few who just haven't pitched their case to me yet) who believe that there's something truly outside the natural. People may argue as to what should be included in the word 'natural' but its come to close to being a synonym for 'real' vs unnatural/unreal.

Also, a side-topic but one that you brought up in your analogy, could you imagine what it might be like if space-time only exists within the purview of the big bang, ie. that the question 'what's outside our universe' isn't a matter of distance but quite literally one of escaping space-time fabric itself? I've heard some quite prominent egg-heads speak that way about it and it's a bit of a mind-bender to conceptualize. It's even more challenging when they say that it's flat and thus the analogy of being able to use a super-powerful telescope to see the back of your own head is a no-go.