What Is Mind?

Introducing people of all ages to mythology... in pre-college educational curricula, youth orgs, the media, etc. Share your knowledge, stories, unit and lesson plans, techniques, and more.

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nandu
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Post by nandu »

Andreas wrote:And science is one of the models. Lets see where that one takes us. :D
It will not take you anywhere as far as I am concerned, Andreas, because we've reached a dead end as far as that issue is concerned.

Dancing around in circles is not an activity which amuses me. :wink:

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Post by Andreas »

Fine. :)

But I do feel the urge to state that the observations science is making is not more true or real or valid than the observations you make through "spiritual models". It is just that the vocabulary is different.
“To live is enough.” ― Shunryu Suzuki

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Post by Clemsy »

Interesting sidebar:

My seniors are studying the Greek creation myth. Some had a problem wrapping their heads around the initial image of chaos surrounded by a vast body of water. I told them they aren't supposed to be able to wrap their heads around it. I compared the image with that of the universe before the Big Bang. An infinitesimally small point which wasn't really small because there is nothing else to compare it to. Then it exploded. And expanded. But not into anything. You can't even call it nothing.

Try to wrap your head around that one.

In terms of mind there is no difference between the two images. Both thoughts are transcendental.

In the beginning, science and myth were one and the same... :lol:
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

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Post by jonsjourney »

Yep I missed that one, though either Neo or JJ did point out 6 x 9 = 42 in base 13. -Rom
I saw that it involved math, so I shrieked and then ran away screaming in horror. Math. Ugh. :lol:

Fence sitters never like math, we just deal with it the best we can. Besides, and I know you know this already...but just in case others do not, "42" was chosen arbitrarily by Adams as "the answer". It was his way of criticizing, or perhaps poking fun of, much of our thinking, religions and ways of gathering knowledge as humans.

How we arrange and construct our worlds is a pretty fluid thing, in my view. The tendency to see one way as being superior to another just because one system resulted in iPhones and another did not is not necessarily a good indicator as to the quality of a system.

As far as mind goes, for me, one cannot separate mind from brain any more than one can separate the Earth from the rest of the Universe. The division can really be broken down to its simplest terms. No separation means some form of monism. No souls, no homunculus, no "ghost in the machine". Separation means duality. Souls and essences that exist as entities before we come to be and then move on in some way after the physiological shell dies. Of course, just because you cannot separate mind from brain does not necessarily mean that you can use reductionist methods to discover the complexity of brain processes involved in the simplest thought. I think if we are going to really understand what goes on with mind, we will probably go about it in a new, yet-to-be-realized method. Perhaps after a new scientific revolution, like the Copernican shift.

Speaking of our place in the Universe...did anyone see this? I had to laugh for some reason...and it was a kind of "Beavis and Butthead" laugh too...Sextillion...http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101202/ap_ ... y_night_12

I also chuckled as I thought about how Adam's described the size of space in Chapter 8 of the Hitchhiker...
"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen ..." and so on.

(After a while the style settles down a bit and it begins to tell you things you really need to know, like the fact that the fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin is now so worried about the cumulative erosion by ten billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete whilst on the planet is surgically removed from your bodyweight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory it is vitally important to get a receipt.)

To be fair though, when confronted by the sheer enormity of distances between the stars, better minds than the one responsible for the Guide's introduction have faltered. Some invite you to consider for a moment a peanut in reading and a small walnut in Johannesburg, and other such dizzying concepts.

The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination.
"He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot." -Douglas Adams

Andreas
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Post by Andreas »

In the beginning, science and myth were one and the same... - Clemsy
Yeap, and like I always say. What is it that turned this dance into a fight so we can throw it out of the equation.
“To live is enough.” ― Shunryu Suzuki

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Post by Neoplato »

Besides, and I know you know this already...but just in case others do not, "42" was chosen arbitrarily by Adams as "the answer"-JJ
(Another sidebar...sorry). :oops:

What amazes me is that Adams also chose the question to be "What is 6x9?" Which does yiled an answer of "42" in some other base than ten. Out of all the other combinations of numbers, why did he choose two numbers that "could" yield an answer?

Or is this an unconscious question on his part? :shock:
What is it that I don't see that will yield a result to an answer I don't understand?
:shock:

Or in other words, how do I go beyond my own knowledge to understand that 6x9=42?

Or as I've stated many times before "How is it possible that I am not a goat?" :wink:
Infinite moment, grants freedom of winter death, allows life to dawn.

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Post by romansh »

nandu wrote: It will not take you anywhere as far as I am concerned, Andreas, because we've reached a dead end as far as that issue is concerned.

Nandu.
hmmn ...

I think I need a pronounian intervention from Clemsy here.
;)
"That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

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Post by jonsjourney »

Just to clarify why I included the story on the new expansion of the estimated number of stars, this also seems to happen when scientists make claims about neurons and neural connections in the brain. Micro reflects the macro and the macro reflects the micro. The further we get from direct, momentary experience, the weirder the picture gets.

As we attempt to explain what mind may be by way of scientific inquiry, we are rubbing up against the metaphysical in spite of the best efforts by the labs to remove the word metaphysical from even existing! :wink:
"He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot." -Douglas Adams

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Post by Clemsy »

I think I need a pronounian intervention from Clemsy here.
So many to choose from! But I assume, Rom, that you are not owning nandu's dead end. However, the use of the collective 'we' expresses his opinion that you, indeed, have reached a dead end, so now it's up to you to demonstrate otherwise!

Of course, circles don't have dead ends... :lol:
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

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Post by boringguy »

A planted rock doesn't grow. – Neoplato
Rom says a rock is alive according to his definition of life: even though one may not be able to strictly refute it, many will not be able to empathise with it. -nandu
Just repeating some others here I know, but maybe from a different angle.

I’m reminded of the old joke about; “the secret the old Native American shaman told me about the rain dance, ……… it’s timing”. And so is the rock to the acorn. The rock is made up of, the energy, the point particles, the atoms, the molecules, and after planting the rock and its decaying (dies), the tree ends up made out of the same ‘material’. Fitting that into our reference of time is the problem.

The interesting thing is that rom and Neo each arrive at their own definition of monism though.

Didn’t the potential of the plant exist in the rock all along? Take that same thought back as far as is known in one pole, say energy or point particles, and then as far as potential has reached in the other, say the human brain, and then extrapolate that to beyond known in either direction. And then I put it in this model; matter precedes life yet life ‘permeates’ it (sorry that’s the best word I can think of off hand but as in, moves though it, exists within it, is also a part of it, within it exists the potential of), life precedes mind yet mind permeates it, mind precedes soul yet soul permeates it, and soul precedes spirit yet spirit permeates it.

As nundu said the break down of categories is only relative to frame of reference.

I’m guessing that rom might not extend the model out beyond mind at this point, but he is willing should science take him there. The point is he has come to the same understanding through a scientific view as found earlier by Stoics, Alchemists, Indians, Native Americans, Aborigines, Christianity, and yes Plotinus, or……. Well you get the idea. A basis for monism. IMO it can be seen as one of the common threads in the big picture of all stories. Maybe all the stories together are the workings of a model that each gets to figure out for themselves, that really is the nature of humans, yet ending up with one model, and that really is the nature of myth, and science.

This brings me back to the heart of the question, I think. What can we know about that something that makes the plant become more complex than the rock? Perhaps one can trace that back as a casual chain to primordial soup, but as Campbell said the science of the day requires a bigger story, and I think bigger than that. Nature is made up of what ever survives the best in the conditions at the time, so far as we can tell. So I would go a little farther and suppose what we know of Nature is only the energy that ‘survives’ in the conditions in this time. What we don’t know for certain, IMO, is where the design, the beauty,and the potentials intrinsic to the game came from. Simply chance?, preexisting condition?, God?, Who knows, but go ahead and take a guess, they really are free and freeing :wink: . Our evidence is that Nature rewards change toward complexity with survival, so it seems reasonable to our nature as a human, to keep understanding and striving for those things as well. Mind is what leads us into the unknown, and a monistic understanding of that, seems very perennial.


bg
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Post by Neoplato »

What can we know about that something that makes the plant become more complex than the rock?-BG
And that, IMHO, is the "virgin birth". Life arising from non-life, the uncreated creating; the unmanifested, manifesting; the unconscious giving rise to consciousness.

Although, we may be "molded from clay" we also have breath. :D
Infinite moment, grants freedom of winter death, allows life to dawn.

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Post by romansh »

Clemsy wrote:So many to choose from! But I assume, Rom, that you are not owning nandu's dead end. However, the use of the collective 'we' expresses his opinion that you, indeed, have reached a dead end, so now it's up to you to demonstrate otherwise!
Surely my honorable moderator, my learned opponent should cite some evidence to defend the reaching of a dead end?

It's just that when I used an inclusive pronoun in citing a personal opinon I was very mildly reminded this may not be accurate by my learned moderator.

;)
"That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

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Post by romansh »

Andreas wrote:
All the world religions have made "spiritual models" (somewhat like scientists who make mathematical models of reality) to explain observed phenomena-but the difference here is, there is no one model which fits the observations. You are free to choose the model you want. - Nandu
And science is one of the models. Lets see where that one takes us. :D
Funnily enough for evolution was without numbers for a good number of years.

The use of game theory allowed some interesting predictions. Again I'll recommend Robert Wright's The Moral Animal Andreas.

rom
"That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

Clemsy
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Post by Clemsy »

Surely my honorable moderator, my learned opponent should cite some evidence to defend the reaching of a dead end?
He's entitled to his dead end opinion. You don't have to agree with him. If he thinks the thread has run its course as far as he's concerned, proving it has, as far as he's concerned, would be a contradiction. He's done. You want to convince him otherwise? That's up to you.
It's just that when I used an inclusive pronoun in citing a personal opinon I was very mildly reminded this may not be accurate by my learned moderator
.

You'll have to reference the situation. This one lacks significance.
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

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Post by nandu »

The "dead end" I mentioned was with respect to me and Andreas on that particular topic-the discussion was going around in circles.

Of course, nobody is at a dead end unless they themselves feel so. :)

Nandu.
Loka Samastha Sukhino Bhavanthu

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