17 Aug 2019, 8:20 am
17 Aug 2019, 3:19 pm
Aspie1 wrote:
I was talking about marriage/husbands broadly, in a sense of settling down and living together. I want no part of it until I'm very old, while women ages 28 to 36 are most likely to seek out that out, including from me. Which makes me wonder: Why are they into me, and what do they expect down the road? Like marriage, or worse, a baby! So I play it safe by avoiding that demographic altogether, except for strictly platonic connections. It protects me; also her, from unmet expectations. I'll stop here before I get too politically incorrect.
I like that demographic, and having another baby would be fun.
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17 Aug 2019, 11:35 pm
techstepgenr8tion
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18 Aug 2019, 8:03 pm
19 Aug 2019, 3:29 am
techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Throwing this one back - I really found rdos and Mona Pereth's conversation about the presence (or lack) of biologically occult or electromagnetically occult activity in how people socialize (and an odd but interesting thread for that to show up in!).
Surely an odd context, and perhaps it should be placed in another thread.
techstepgenr8tion wrote:
My take on this from my own experiences would be that this bifurcates in two ways:
1) The subconscious and evolutionary biological level, where to some degree Aldus Huxley was right about there being a massive reducing valve on consciousness and the subconscious only giving the conscious mind the most low-resolution or high-level intimations of what's happening, largely over neurological bandwidth concerns. This tends to be part of why nonverbal communication is counted more important than verbal, ie. it's the world of emotional reactions, hunches, intuitions, and the rather sad part about this zone - it's either very difficult to socialize in the secular humanist sense and tends to prefer animal pragmatism to Greek philosophy or there's a deep sense in most people that they wouldn't want to transform this level of themselves even if they could, ie. a nagging sense that most of what our culture says it is to be human is mostly lies and if they socialize or intellectualize that level of themselves too much they'd be come.... well..... autistic.
2) As far as quantum or quantum-like behavior in consciousness, I'm uncomfortable with using that exact terminology because we don't know the exact mechanism for influence at a distance or downward causality from a larger disconnected structure to an individual but I think terms like dual-action monism or certain kinds of idealism aren't particularly bad for this. In this case the best way to describe what you're seeing - there are graphic models of what it looks like when a cell is dividing and certain proteins are carrying other proteins across telomeres, and the behavior of these proteins looks like it would need some type of programming to do what it's doing just that it doesn't seem to have enough 'stuff' in it to answer that with internal clockwork coding. That example may or may not turn out to ultimately be the case but I think it works well with intuition, ie. that a lot of protein activities in the body are likely 'remote controlled' lets say in a top-down manner. The human body actually seems to be loaded with example of bottom up emergence and communication and then top-down results and it's a constant cycling between the two that makes us up.
As a continuation of 2) it seems like when you have a new entity emerge out of a combination of smaller entities, like tissues out of cells, organs out of tissues, people or animals out of organs, you have something of a contextual rotation where communication between layers is very specific and narrow. I would make the argument that when people have occult experiences - whether it's massive wall of synchronicities hitting them over the course of a week, whether it's being well familiar with the rules of life as a sort of flat surface and all of a sudden for a short period of time a bizarre sort of acausal wave sweeps through and leaves them wondering what that was about, or even some sort of 'angelic', 'demonic', 'diefic', etc. contacts are at least partly explained by downward causation from a larger system. This is something in line with the sort of functionalist theory of consciousness that people like Hillary Putnam put forward, ie. that technically with these kinds of combinations it would make sense to have something like a 'China Brain', and little scraps of this based on local groups, organizations, something that gets written about a lot in French 18th and 19th century occult literature under the term 'egregore'.
1) The subconscious and evolutionary biological level, where to some degree Aldus Huxley was right about there being a massive reducing valve on consciousness and the subconscious only giving the conscious mind the most low-resolution or high-level intimations of what's happening, largely over neurological bandwidth concerns. This tends to be part of why nonverbal communication is counted more important than verbal, ie. it's the world of emotional reactions, hunches, intuitions, and the rather sad part about this zone - it's either very difficult to socialize in the secular humanist sense and tends to prefer animal pragmatism to Greek philosophy or there's a deep sense in most people that they wouldn't want to transform this level of themselves even if they could, ie. a nagging sense that most of what our culture says it is to be human is mostly lies and if they socialize or intellectualize that level of themselves too much they'd be come.... well..... autistic.
2) As far as quantum or quantum-like behavior in consciousness, I'm uncomfortable with using that exact terminology because we don't know the exact mechanism for influence at a distance or downward causality from a larger disconnected structure to an individual but I think terms like dual-action monism or certain kinds of idealism aren't particularly bad for this. In this case the best way to describe what you're seeing - there are graphic models of what it looks like when a cell is dividing and certain proteins are carrying other proteins across telomeres, and the behavior of these proteins looks like it would need some type of programming to do what it's doing just that it doesn't seem to have enough 'stuff' in it to answer that with internal clockwork coding. That example may or may not turn out to ultimately be the case but I think it works well with intuition, ie. that a lot of protein activities in the body are likely 'remote controlled' lets say in a top-down manner. The human body actually seems to be loaded with example of bottom up emergence and communication and then top-down results and it's a constant cycling between the two that makes us up.
As a continuation of 2) it seems like when you have a new entity emerge out of a combination of smaller entities, like tissues out of cells, organs out of tissues, people or animals out of organs, you have something of a contextual rotation where communication between layers is very specific and narrow. I would make the argument that when people have occult experiences - whether it's massive wall of synchronicities hitting them over the course of a week, whether it's being well familiar with the rules of life as a sort of flat surface and all of a sudden for a short period of time a bizarre sort of acausal wave sweeps through and leaves them wondering what that was about, or even some sort of 'angelic', 'demonic', 'diefic', etc. contacts are at least partly explained by downward causation from a larger system. This is something in line with the sort of functionalist theory of consciousness that people like Hillary Putnam put forward, ie. that technically with these kinds of combinations it would make sense to have something like a 'China Brain', and little scraps of this based on local groups, organizations, something that gets written about a lot in French 18th and 19th century occult literature under the term 'egregore'.
I have many issues with consciousness and quantum stuff. I think much of quantum stuff is only relevant at the atomic level (if even there). I'm actually a non-believer when it comes to this, and I think it can be explained in intuitively more sane ways. As for much of the consciousness claims, I find them unreasonable, biased & useless. I actually find much of the spiritual & occult stuff strange and not very helpful either.
techstepgenr8tion wrote:
With all of that I don't think you'd have person to person psychism but might you have a larger sentient system trying to control certain social or dating outcomes? Sure. The downside here as well - there may be no guarantee that the whole is greater that the sum of its parts, ie. that egregores or even mass minds trying to pull the levers on people or groups may very well barely be conscious or may be quite animalistic in their simple goals of staying alive at any cost.
It's an empirical fact that NDs have more supernatural & spiritual beliefs, while at the same time tending to be more atheist. Organized religion is not so much about spirituals beliefs (other than using them to prove your religion is true), rather functions more as an additional level of authority in the social hierarchy that rulers have long used to control people. ND spirituality is very different, and might very well be based on the person to person "psychism" ties they can form. Other types of supernatural beliefs & abilities quite likely are just "flaws" in this trait. For instance, you could interpret the messages as being divine and then you could contribute to the tales of a religion. These messages can also be misinterpreted in many other ways.
I think spiritual & occult claims must be explainable in the physical word. That excludes things like mind-reading, things that break causality and things that can happen over infinite distances. I wouldn't exclude the possibility that mind-to-mind communication could use other physical mediums other than electromagnetic photons in the MHz band, but it seems to be the best medium available. I wouldn't want to use quantum effects since this would be too speculative and impossible to prove. Every scientific theory/hypothesis must be possible to evaluate, and I definitely think the electromagnetic version of mind-to-mind communication falls into that domain, while much of the supernatural, occult and religious claims don't.
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19 Aug 2019, 5:50 am
rdos wrote:
I have many issues with consciousness and quantum stuff. I think much of quantum stuff is only relevant at the atomic level (if even there). I'm actually a non-believer when it comes to this, and I think it can be explained in intuitively more sane ways. As for much of the consciousness claims, I find them unreasonable, biased & useless. I actually find much of the spiritual & occult stuff strange and not very helpful either.
My own problem with calling it 'quantum' is that while it might have a duck's bill, webbed feet, and even quack, it could just as easily be a platipus so there's not much point in saying it's more than an analogy for the quirkiness of something's behavior.
As for the rest - in our present culture there's really no reason to give the occult or mystical a second glance unless one has had enough truly unexplainable things happen to you that the pendulum of credulity or complexity of explanations needed shifts back the other way and I'd admit that I'm in that position where I've had to throw away reductive materialism as a total-reality framework albeit I tend to agree with John Gray a lot, both in terms of pessimism and in terms of the flimsiness I see in naive materialism.
rdos wrote:
I think spiritual & occult claims must be explainable in the physical word. That excludes things like mind-reading, things that break causality and things that can happen over infinite distances. I wouldn't exclude the possibility that mind-to-mind communication could use other physical mediums other than electromagnetic photons in the MHz band, but it seems to be the best medium available. I wouldn't want to use quantum effects since this would be too speculative and impossible to prove. Every scientific theory/hypothesis must be possible to evaluate, and I definitely think the electromagnetic version of mind-to-mind communication falls into that domain, while much of the supernatural, occult and religious claims don't.
I think this is part of why no one feels comfortable talking about these sorts of things even if they're pretty sure that there's something there - any useful explanation seems like its too far out and too far beyond anything we have proper tools to get insight into.
I might clarify though 'occult' in my mind would just mean hidden in the sense of things we don't presently see easily, things we either don't have the tools to examine or in some cases have just discarded not on evidence but rather sociological, political, or ideological battles (those really evidence themselves whenever you see a grown adult's level of discourse go from PhD, Masters, or whatever else down to grade school). Things like 20th century theosophy seem like good examples of simply being BS and and I'd separate the hidden and snake oil into separate categories. Also when people use words like 'supernatural' in my mind they'd be tantamount to 'not real' because nature as we currently view it subsumes everything, to that extent a supernatural model of the occult seems to fall into anachronism. That's not denying 'supernatural' experiences or even beings, it's just looking for their causes in nature rather than in religious texts (unless you're heavily reinterpreting those religious texts through a modern understanding such that words like 'angel' or 'demon' could refer to real things but not what the text would explain them to be).
I think one of the most interesting ideas I heard recently was the durability of the notion that space-time is projected from a 2D sheet of data, something like what becomes apparent at the event horizon of black holes (preservation of data) but extending out across all of space and time. I might have mentioned this earlier but if I were to peg consciousness to something, if panpsychism falls down because matter isn't really 'stuff' I might suspect that the fields themselves have something to do with conscious experience. The question I'd have to answer with that hypothesis is which is more primary, ie. is that 2D sheet of data composed of fields or are fields emergent from that 2D sheet of data? Whichever of the two is the base line would be more primary than what emerges from it. Either of those two would fit well though with neutral monism or dual-action monism which is the theory of consciousness that would make the most sense IMHO.
19 Aug 2019, 6:39 am
techstepgenr8tion
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