Fear of death.

If you really meant to repeat the same question then I really don't know what you mean!

one quasi-magical way to think around the brain-as-computer thing is to conceive of life as nothing more than the urge towards. the urge to move towards food, light, warmth, reproductive opportunity, love, god, whatever, etc. the life urge = the towards-ness urge.

if we break it down that way, then the little ameoba-animal doesn't have to be a soulless machine "gathering data about its environment", it can instead be a little guy who knows nothing but a desire to be towards the light. though he's got no language or even thought, really, it's like the light is a shining happy face and he's all set when he's pointed at it, in the slough when he's not.

that model makes conscious awareness inseparable from life, no matter how simple the life. life is happy when it's getting what it's supposed to be towards, unhappy when it isn't, and everything else is just elaboration on that. doesn't seem that much less reasonable than the gradually self-aware computer model.

i just mean i moved from "what's a matter with these people" to "what might they possibly know that i don't?"

it's kind of like that mark twain joke - i'm not sure how it happened, but somehow my father got much smarter when i moved from my 20s into my 30s

i'm still a die-hard atheist yo!

both of my parents are "scientists" and so are many of my grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, etc

i was raised in a deeply religious family, though there was never any sort of fundamentalism at play, and they adhere to a fantastically vague and pluralistic religion in the first place

i was always fascinated that they could be scientists and still entertain these very vague and "magical" notions, but as i've gotten older, it's seemed less superstitious and more self-evident

there's this article about an anthropologist asking otherwise rational evangelicals why they had a personal relationship with Jesus. It turned out it was because they were literally hearing his voice. so she figured out the reason.

LOL

xps: i've found it increasingly easy to square a perception of a sort of open-ended, non-doctrinal "magic" with my fundamentally materialist atheism as i've aged. the world is the world, and that parts of it that science covers are clearly highly scientific. the rest is or at least can be something else.

magic isn't the right word though, not for me. it's too heavily coded. "the whole of things" works better, as it puts its arms around both what can be nailed down and what can't.

weird part is that i still consider myself an atheist. i feel i'd be lying if i said i wasn't. it's important to me.

at the same time, if you ask me whether or not i believe in god, then i feel i have to say i do. even Jesus. yes.

i should find the doublethink troubling, but i don't. at all. but i don't hear anyone in my head. feel kind of ripped off, tbh.

i jokingly tell people im a "spiritual materialist"--in that i dont believe in any religion or God or benevolent spirit but i dont think any of this shit is real either.

lol

you have to practice to hear jesus.

here's article for more info:
http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=54818

you have to practice to hear jesus.

i heard that lady on NPR talking to Terry Gross. While I scoff at this 'talking to God' idea a bit, Terry Gross needs to expend a bit more effort in not making her scoffing so obvious on the air.

that's a really interesting article.

personally, i've found that it's remarkably easy to cultivate faith, to create and nurture seemingly productive relationships with spiritual entities (or forces or states or w/e). you just have to devote yourself to it and not hold back. being an atheist, i found myself standing half outside belief even as i poured energy into it, but that proved to be a much smaller barrier than i expected.

the big eventual obstacle for me was that my faith was a solitary practice, so it waned as my interests shifted to other things. still, useful lesson. you can make yourself believe stuff just by deciding to, and the stuff you've decided to believe in will eventually come to seem as real and powerful as you need it to be.

i think a lot of my belief in god comes from "holy rolling" ;-)

but seriously i feel ... something ... as strongly, and at least as often, as i feel my fear of death or my atheism.

now pardon as i reason from analogy

a lot of times it occurs to me that the universe is probably cyclical, and that when i die i'll just come back, and next time i'll experience ledge, and then maybe the next cycle i'll experience contenderizer, and then the time after that my dog, and then maybe a rock, or a plant, etc etc, which handily solves the solipsism problem. and i feel this w/ all the seriousness that i feel when i'm in my "i'm going to die!" phase.

other times i figure there's no reason to think the subjective experience of dying might not be much deeper than we experience. who's to say it's like falling asleep? what if it's like falling into a black hole? what if it's like the tibetan book of the dead? what if ledge and contenderizer and philip and i, we're all just like finger puppets that have forgetten we're part of the same hand maaaaan.

and other times i figure who's to say i'm not a recent epiphenomenon on a nearby layer of the 10-brane?

i meant to say "much deeper than what we imagine"

a (very smart) religious friend told me once that doubt is a very important component of faith (it's meaningless without it). if you're just believing because you "decided to" i think that's actually something I'd want to distinguish from a spiritual or religious belief. in fact the whole "deciding to" gives certainty the lie, no?

in any case, what I liked about what he said is that it implies the converse: to be an atheist or a materialist implies that vacillation as well, that doubt. as Emerson says, “There is the incoming or the receding of God: that is all we can affirm; and we can show neither how nor why." (sorry im quoting all over the place lately)

]we're all just like finger puppets that have forgetten we're part of the same hand maaaaan.

love this one so much! you have to have a table handy so you can make the fingertips look all isolated before you go for the big reveal. ideally they would have little hats, too.

and just to add: that "double bind" of faith/doubt isn't pathological as far as I'm concerned, but kinda the productive power of religious or spiritual or mystical thinking.

oh wow i like that ryan!

one thing i always forget is that the physical science of mind is very new. it really makes you wonder what our beliefs will look like from the same distance in perspective that cern has on democritus, or caek on galileo.

if you're just believing because you "decided to" i think that's actually something I'd want to distinguish from a spiritual or religious belief. in fact the whole "deciding to" gives certainty the lie, no?

i don't know. all i know is that i found within myself, during a period of terrible despair, a willingness to sort of "talk to the universe". in talking to the universe, i chose - very consciously - a thing/person/god that i would talk to, a divinity that made sense to me and that i could relate to. it made me very happy to do this, though it didn't really change my fundamental sense of the nature of reality. it's not like i suddenly saw some burning truth in the center of the void. rather, i found value in extending myself into the void and being open to whatever might be in there willing to answer back. i knew that whatever i might imagine i "heard" (felt, really), could be me as easily as gee-oh-dee god, but i didn't care. it felt good to open up to something larger than myself.

over time, i've flexed this capacity or willingness in various ways. i believe totally in what i am doing and what i am communicating with, but that doesn't prevent me from not believing in anything (i still don't), and i remain certain that my belief is something that i am creating. it doesn't have anything to do with the world outside me. it hasn't just "happened to me", like a headache or love at first sight. it's more like an inernal fire that i can stoke if i want to. and while i definitely get something out of feeding it, i don't always need or want to. it's weird, really.

it's spiritual and in a sense even "religious" because i say it is, and who can tell me different?

that sounds like a very cool experience. the closest i've ever come to something like that is a certain belief that everything is gonna be "OK" -- even if the worst happens.

yeah that sounds like it would be reassuring in tough moments.

i was going to post something strikingly intelligent on this thread but then i watched the clip of dug and my brain melted onto the floor.

also you can imagine the capacity for religious imagination as an adaptive property. all other things being equal, it's probably a bit easier to procreate when you aren't consumed with existential despair.

magic isn't the right word though, not for me. it's too heavily coded. "the whole of things" works better, as it puts its arms around both what can be nailed down and what can't.

― contenderizer, Friday, July 13, 2012 6:08 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think 'magic' is a terrible word that connotes deception and fakery. The first compound that comes to mind is 'magic trick'. Plus i think alot of what is described as magic is simply logical, physical stuff that is just beyond the reach of modern science. Give it a few hundred more years. The rest of what is described as magic is the impenetrable layer of real abstraction that we mostly ignore on a day to day basis.

Show an iPhone to Benjamin Franklin and he'd be convinced you were allies of Satan.

a (very smart) religious friend told me once that doubt is a very important component of faith (it's meaningless without it). if you're just believing because you "decided to" i think that's actually something I'd want to distinguish from a spiritual or religious belief. in fact the whole "deciding to" gives certainty the lie, no?

If simply deciding something made it a lie then what of deciding to be an atheist?

Doubt's importance is likely overstated to give your atheist friends some evidence that you aren't a complete moron even though you believe in God.

For me the point of using the word 'magic' is to shock people (me included) out of complacency. Consciousness is wonderful, extraordinary, mysterious, and although it's not supernatural by any means, it's still beyond the common conception of 'natural' pushed by most materialists & scientists.

just because it's beyond full comprehension at present doesn't mean it's beyond "the common conception of 'natural.'" weather patterns were beyond comprehension a few centuries ago, as was the relationship of the sun, moon, and earth.

i mean it's kind of a truism in most cultures that what is beyond the current comprehension of science is subject to mystical speculation [insert joke about most people making much of what science does comprehend subject to mystical speculation]. but you're making the actual into the good, it seems.

I just don't see any way that science as we currently understand it could make the leap from its objective, extrinsic, public, impersonal view of reality, to consciousness' subjective, private, personal, intrinsic nature. I'm not saying it will forever be beyond comprehension but the current tactic of materialist science is just to pretend this is not a problem.

actually i think both science and philosophy have made inroads into understand how e.g. the mind constructs space. can it make a model or fulsome representation of subjective experience? no. but there's not much reason to think that this will forever be shrouded in an epistemic mist.

Not forever, hopefully, no. But honestly no-one currently has the slightest idea of how that gap could be crossed. This is a qualitatively different problem from e.g. explaning planetary motion

you don't need high tech tools to make surprising advances in what we know about the nature of subjective experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

"Nature of" is ambiguous. That video demonstrates something about the behaviour of (a particular facet of) subjective experience. What subjective experience *is*' how it is at all possible given an objective materialist description of the universe, is the problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

Comma not apostrophe after *is*

i think if we keep chopping away at the boundaries of what subjective experience actually is, we might find out it doesn't exist at all, at least not in the vexing way we think of it, solving the problem.

You people are in serious denial!

wait a second thats not a real gorilla

i am having a lot of trouble believing that 50 percent of people don't see the gorilla

I def didn't when I originally watched it

also you can imagine the capacity for religious imagination as an adaptive property. all other things being equal, it's probably a bit easier to procreate when you aren't consumed with existential despair.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Saturday, July 14, 2012 12:26 AM (16 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dunno about this dude, when this capacity "evolved" i think ppl were probably still too busy trying to stay alive for more than 5 minutes to be consumed with existential despair, which is a luxury. and by that logic wouldnt a capacity for scientific thought have evolved a lot sooner

i typed "fulsome" rather than "full" for some reason. weird.

anyway yeah the inattention blindness stuff is fascinating and relevant to what i do.

i dunno about this dude, when this capacity "evolved" i think ppl were probably still too busy trying to stay alive for more than 5 minutes to be consumed with existential despair, which is a luxury. and by that logic wouldnt a capacity for scientific thought have evolved a lot sooner

― funny-skrillex-bee_132455836669.gif (s1ocki), Saturday, July 14, 2012 3:52 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's probably true. it's more likely a filling-in-the-gaps tendency in our cognition that accounts for the initial sparks of religious imagination.

I just don't see any way that science as we currently understand it could make the leap from its objective, extrinsic, public, impersonal view of reality, to consciousness' subjective, private, personal, intrinsic nature. I'm not saying it will forever be beyond comprehension but the current tactic of materialist science is just to pretend this is not a problem.

― ledge, Saturday, July 14, 2012 11:24 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i suppose this type of conversation is doomed to loop forever, so i hope you all will forgive me when i say i still don't see the problem. i'm not denying it, i just don't perceive it. science describes a world of measurable things. though we're just now beginning to peer at the workings of the human mind, i don't see any reason to doubt that the tool of science is adequate to the task of describing cognition (including subjective awareness) in terms of the physical processes involved.

of course, the sense we have of what subjectivity "feels like" cannot be completely described scientifically, because science does not speak in feelings. it speaks in number and words. the best science could do would be to say something like "the sense of subjective awareness is generated in area x by process y."

if and when science is able to do this, a great many people will undoubtedly persist in asking "yes, but what is that sense, and where does it come from?" as though it were some mysterious substance descended from heaven. subjective awareness is not a substance. it's simply a kind of feeling and/or knowing - like feeling hungry or knowing that there is a mountain over there. we do not need to account for any special property, state or kind of matter to allow for sensation and information storage.

i'm not trying to rule out magic or religion or anything else in the origin of consciousness. i'm just saying that i don't see that there's any pressing need to introduce such concepts into the equation at this point.

science is a "kind of knowing"--by it's very nature it has to draw limits and boundaries between "scientific knowledge" and other kinds of knowledge. there's no possibility of closing that gap and it has nothing to do with "magic"--it's just the epistemology of complex communication systems.

"the map is not the territory" and that kinda thing.

The problem with jumping to conclusions with explaining the things that are uncertain in the universe (really big leaps that is), is that we get attached to and overly comfortable with those explanations culturally, and we reject sourced findings that finally shed light on those questions. Evolution is an example.