Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Discussion of the nature of Ultimate Reality and the path to Enlightenment.
encode_decode
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by encode_decode »

Space - this could be fun.

So in my universe of ones - totality is already there - the universe contains everything necessary to create a total of x amount of ones; x being a very large number. Now lets say it is not a universe of ones but instead a universe of any numbers. A certain amount of ones caused by totality then could be added together to create any number.

Taking the number five from the "ripeness" we can see that if you take away a one it is no longer a five. You have to have all the ones in place for the five to exist. What about nothingness. The thing I have not mentioned is that this constructed universe also contains y amount of zeros too; y also being a very large number. So where there is nothing, there is zeros and where there is something there are ones.

Using the zeros to contrast the numbers formed from the ones - it looks like we have ripe conditions for "whirlpools" of ones(again metaphorically speaking).

The question I ask myself here is that the zeros must share the same fundamentality as the ones and numbers. With an extension to z; yet another very large number; we could image a spatial universe(used to represent totality).

What of totality then? Well I think I will let you pull apart my examples first and then come back with potentially better examples.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by David Quinn »

Pam Seeback wrote:
David: The Buddhas do not shun samsara, as it is Nirvana. On manifesting themselves in the world, they seize dung-shovels to rid themselves of all such rubbish as books containing metaphysics and sophistry.

- Huang Po
1. If samsara is nirvana, there can be no relating the two. That's akin to asserting a dog is a cat or a boat is a fish or encode_decode is David.
It's more like how a beautiful woman is a smelly, farty, sweaty biological nightmare.

2. If samsara is nirvana, why would there be shunning of either?
Exactly. Nirvana can no more be shunned than it can be entered into

Samsara represents the experience of thirst, craving, attachment. Nirvana represents the end of thirst, craving, attachment. Therefore, they are not the same.
They are two different perspectives of the same reality.

One cannot help but be manifested in the world, one has no choice in the matter, attached or not.
And there is no such thing as attachment, in the end.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by David Quinn »

encode_decode wrote:Speaking of mathematical examples - I have used this example before elsewhere in life, when chatting with people on and off the internet - it is not necessarily causal the way I have written it but it could possibly be picked apart to make it causal in nature.

I imagine the number one - lots of ones actually. 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 . Each 1 is individual but by what virtue. They all share the same fundamentality. They inherit the same fundamentality. They are the inheritors. They are individual.

The ones have reflexive, symmetric and a transitive relations but what can we say of the fundamentality - is the fundamentality just an equivalence relation? And for the fundamentality - what has it inherited? if from nothing else then a definition from the ones maybe - this then would be Self-referential - an ouroboros. Cyclical in its nature - the one is the fundamentality - the fundamentality is the one. This would be indicative of projection in that the one projects itself back to it's source - This would also be indicative of the source projecting itself onto all of the ones. The source being the fundamentality.

I often confuse myself with my own analogies - so if this is misplaced it would not surprise me.
Well, you're veering off into academic territory here. Playing around with pure abstractions like this can be fun, but it is a side alley to the main game.

It is interesting to think about "oneness", though. It is an amazing concept. The fact that there can only be one Reality by definition, for example. Or the fact that history can never truly repeat.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by David Quinn »

encode_decode wrote:Space - this could be fun.

So in my universe of ones - totality is already there - the universe contains everything necessary to create a total of x amount of ones; x being a very large number. Now lets say it is not a universe of ones but instead a universe of any numbers. A certain amount of ones caused by totality then could be added together to create any number.

Taking the number five from the "ripeness" we can see that if you take away a one it is no longer a five. You have to have all the ones in place for the five to exist. What about nothingness. The thing I have not mentioned is that this constructed universe also contains y amount of zeros too; y also being a very large number. So where there is nothing, there is zeros and where there is something there are ones.

Using the zeros to contrast the numbers formed from the ones - it looks like we have ripe conditions for "whirlpools" of ones(again metaphorically speaking).

The question I ask myself here is that the zeros must share the same fundamentality as the ones and numbers. With an extension to z; yet another very large number; we could image a spatial universe(used to represent totality).
You're (arbitrarily) treating the zeros and ones as equal, if opposite, entities, which is a neat way to treat space and matter out in the real world as equals. I sometimes like to think of the physical objects around me as being forms of space. As physicists have demonstrated, even a solid object like a lead brick is 99.99% space. We are 99.99% space. The chairs we are sitting on are 99.99% space. We are 99.99% space and 100% reality.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by encode_decode »

David Quinn wrote:Existence is always dualistic in nature. Just as "up" can only exist in relation to "down", and "big" in relation to "small", so too an existing object can only exist in relation to what is not that object. In more formal language, "A" (which stands for any object or event in the Universe) is always dependent upon "not-A", and vice versa.
The first thing that popped into my mind when you mentioned mathematics was the last sentence of this paragraph.
David Quinn wrote:conceptual creation that we project onto a particular arrangement of components
this got me started on the space thing.
David Quinn wrote:We are essentially no different, of course. Our existence as an independent and substantial entity is also an illusion. We are nothing more than a conceptual construct which is projected onto a conglomeration of parts. We are like the fist that vanishes as soon as the hand is opened.
which is paradoxical to the concept of space that science talks about.

The 99.99% space thing you talk about is more like what I understand.

I could just be confused David. I think numbers are abstract but then again I think space suffers from the same problem.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by Pam Seeback »

Pam Seeback wrote:
Quote:
David: The Buddhas do not shun samsara, as it is Nirvana. On manifesting themselves in the world, they seize dung-shovels to rid themselves of all such rubbish as books containing metaphysics and sophistry.

- Huang Po

1. If samsara is nirvana, there can be no relating the two. That's akin to asserting a dog is a cat or a boat is a fish or encode_decode is David.
David: It's more like how a beautiful woman is a smelly, farty, sweaty biological nightmare.
The problem vis a vis enlightenment lies not in her biological smells, your body smells too, but in your interpretation of her body (or any body) as being beautiful. There may not be attachment in the end as you say, obviously you have not reached the end.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by David Quinn »

Pam Seeback wrote:
Pam Seeback wrote:
Quote:
David: The Buddhas do not shun samsara, as it is Nirvana. On manifesting themselves in the world, they seize dung-shovels to rid themselves of all such rubbish as books containing metaphysics and sophistry.

- Huang Po

1. If samsara is nirvana, there can be no relating the two. That's akin to asserting a dog is a cat or a boat is a fish or encode_decode is David.
David: It's more like how a beautiful woman is a smelly, farty, sweaty biological nightmare.
The problem vis a vis enlightenment lies not in her biological smells, your body smells too, but in your interpretation of her body (or any body) as being beautiful. There may not be attachment in the end as you say, obviously you have not reached the end.
That's right, both extremes need to be rejected. The beautiful woman is just as much an illusion as the biological nightmare.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by Glostik91 »

It’s fair enough to focus on cause and effect because it is fundamentally the method by which we come to an understanding of anything. However causality is not the whole enchilada here. While experiencing a thing, one doesn’t actually experience causality. Causality isn’t an experience; it is the fundamental essence of understanding. When it comes to a conscious experience, pure intuition rules. An experience is dominated by our intuitions of space and time. Just as causality is the lens by which our understanding is focused from pure reality, so too are space and time lenses which focus a conscious experience of pure reality.

Space and time can be understood in terms of causality, but strictly speaking within a conscious experience causality is not present. I am not consciously viewing a cause and effect occurring in my mind. I view space and time. I think in a conscious space inside my head. I have thoughts in a timely consecutive fashion in which it is not immediately obvious that they are products of causality. It appears that I am a free agent with free will in this world of space, time, and objects. This can be understood via causality as the pure intuitions of space and time focusing my conscious gaze of reality through these lenses.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by jufa »

Perhaps I have overlooked the main stream of this thread by not being able to comprehend how a human mind can speak on the wisdom of the infinite, when no one knows what that wisdom is for the simple reason no one can define infinite, nor speak of that which is beyond themselves authentically, nor authoritatively.

How can one speak on original causality when there is no logic, nor reason to fulfill the causality of why birth, death, and the arc of living between the two worlds cannot define why effects does not also cause the collective whole to gain the wisdom to escape into nirvana, or heaven, or the secret place within where all answers are given the moment the question is asked, being effect is the emanation of cause?

Nor can I discover how a mind can speak of space and time not being of themselves when they occupy the space and time within they minds, awareness, and everything which enters their thinking as a thought objectified by its cause, and subjective effect. When one thinks of space, time, mathematics, they are dealing with what is in their minds, and how it has had an effect on their mind's analysis, and interpretations of their conceptualized conclusions. That is deducting from illusion, or mirage which deals only with individual understanding of the experience from their senses. It has nothing to do with the wisdom of the infinite, only interpreted relativism of human ideas.

And if human intuition was of any real value, beyond guiding one through the arc of living, why has not human love radiations not impacted into religious traditional culture, or the worlds moral integrity?
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by encode_decode »

Physical Creation
David Quinn wrote:Consider the birth of a human being, for example.
David Quinn wrote:the parents would constitute the main "cause" of the child, while space would merely be a "background condition". The latter would be relegated to its lowly status because, although it is necessary for the child’s existence, it lacks the power to bring the child into being on its own. The trouble is, the same reasoning can equally be applied to the parents. The parents too lack the power to bring a child into existence on their own. Without the help of other things, such as food, air, molecules, atoms, genes, womb, time, and yes, space, the parents would not be able to create a thing. So they are no different to space in this regard. They too constitute nothing more than a "background condition" as far as the child is concerned. In the final analysis, the child is a product of countless background conditions, of which the parents only play a very small part.
And of space - causation it seems to me has been around forever.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by jufa »

encode_decode wrote:Physical Creation
David Quinn wrote:Consider the birth of a human being, for example.
David Quinn wrote:the parents would constitute the main "cause" of the child, while space would merely be a "background condition". The latter would be relegated to its lowly status because, although it is necessary for the child’s existence, it lacks the power to bring the child into being on its own. The trouble is, the same reasoning can equally be applied to the parents. The parents too lack the power to bring a child into existence on their own. Without the help of other things, such as food, air, molecules, atoms, genes, womb, time, and yes, space, the parents would not be able to create a thing. So they are no different to space in this regard. They too constitute nothing more than a "background condition" as far as the child is concerned. In the final analysis, the child is a product of countless background conditions, of which the parents only play a very small part.
And of space - causation it seems to me has been around forever.
How can one examine the wisdom of the infinite when all that is examined is the effect of an in-established cause. In considering the birth of a human being, parents do not constitute the main cause of children. They are a continuum of that which has no definition, or fingerprint, which initiated the reproduction system of human being. Human are effects, not causes, as space is not space when it is considered space if filled with all the ingredients of the known universe, inclusive of human being. As the parents and children lacked the power to reproduce on their own, then the power which gives the ability of reproduction in human life cannot be avoided in such a discussion. To do so is totally presenting conjecture and human interpretation of the effects potential of power, and as have been mentioned above, there is none.

Never give power to anything a person believes is their source of strength - jufa
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by Glostik91 »

jufa wrote:Perhaps I have overlooked the main stream of this thread by not being able to comprehend how a human mind can speak on the wisdom of the infinite, when no one knows what that wisdom is for the simple reason no one can define infinite, nor speak of that which is beyond themselves authentically, nor authoritatively.

How can one speak on original causality when there is no logic, nor reason to fulfill the causality of why birth, death, and the arc of living between the two worlds cannot define why effects does not also cause the collective whole to gain the wisdom to escape into nirvana, or heaven, or the secret place within where all answers are given the moment the question is asked, being effect is the emanation of cause?

Nor can I discover how a mind can speak of space and time not being of themselves when they occupy the space and time within they minds, awareness, and everything which enters their thinking as a thought objectified by its cause, and subjective effect. When one thinks of space, time, mathematics, they are dealing with what is in their minds, and how it has had an effect on their mind's analysis, and interpretations of their conceptualized conclusions. That is deducting from illusion, or mirage which deals only with individual understanding of the experience from their senses. It has nothing to do with the wisdom of the infinite, only interpreted relativism of human ideas.

And if human intuition was of any real value, beyond guiding one through the arc of living, why has not human love radiations not impacted into religious traditional culture, or the worlds moral integrity?
As much as I would like to decipher this enigma code of words you've written, I think I have better things to do. I won't, however, let this stop me from commenting. When has it ever?

How can a human mind speak on the wisdom of the infinite? Well, I will only speak for myself, and as for myself, I am not describing, defining, or creating any sort of delineation by which one may understand the infinite. On the contrary, (and this is very important) I am speaking concerning the limitations of a human mind in the form of understanding and consciousness. This is what is called wisdom concerning the infinite.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by David Quinn »

Glostik91 wrote:It’s fair enough to focus on cause and effect because it is fundamentally the method by which we come to an understanding of anything. However causality is not the whole enchilada here. While experiencing a thing, one doesn’t actually experience causality. Causality isn’t an experience; it is the fundamental essence of understanding. When it comes to a conscious experience, pure intuition rules. An experience is dominated by our intuitions of space and time. Just as causality is the lens by which our understanding is focused from pure reality, so too are space and time lenses which focus a conscious experience of pure reality.

Space and time can be understood in terms of causality, but strictly speaking within a conscious experience causality is not present. I am not consciously viewing a cause and effect occurring in my mind. I view space and time. I think in a conscious space inside my head. I have thoughts in a timely consecutive fashion in which it is not immediately obvious that they are products of causality. It appears that I am a free agent with free will in this world of space, time, and objects. This can be understood via causality as the pure intuitions of space and time focusing my conscious gaze of reality through these lenses.
What you say is true. When I experience the world in each moment, I am not experiencing pure abstract forms called "cause" and "effect". What I am experiencing are the normal physical objects that everyone else experiences. What meditating on cause and affect does is loosen the mind's grip on its experience of everything. One becomes more attuned to the formlessness and intangibility of everything. One begins to see more and more clearly that nothing really exists. This in turn leads to changes in the choices we make and the path our future will take.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by David Quinn »

Glostik91 wrote:How can a human mind speak on the wisdom of the infinite?
How can it not?
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by David Quinn »

encode_decode wrote:Physical Creation
David Quinn wrote:Consider the birth of a human being, for example.
David Quinn wrote:the parents would constitute the main "cause" of the child, while space would merely be a "background condition". The latter would be relegated to its lowly status because, although it is necessary for the child’s existence, it lacks the power to bring the child into being on its own. The trouble is, the same reasoning can equally be applied to the parents. The parents too lack the power to bring a child into existence on their own. Without the help of other things, such as food, air, molecules, atoms, genes, womb, time, and yes, space, the parents would not be able to create a thing. So they are no different to space in this regard. They too constitute nothing more than a "background condition" as far as the child is concerned. In the final analysis, the child is a product of countless background conditions, of which the parents only play a very small part.
And of space - causation it seems to me has been around forever.
Even forever is a creation of causation.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by Glostik91 »

David Quinn wrote: One becomes more attuned to the formlessness and intangibility of everything. One begins to see more and more clearly that nothing really exists.
Nothing really exists? Hm, not quite on the money but close. From where I’m sitting, I don’t experience an object as existing or not existing. I can experience an object here, a mouse say, its shape, size, color, sounds, etc all in a timely fashion, but what about the ‘mouse’ am I experiencing that exists and what about the mouse would make it not exist?

Existence or nonexistence of any things is not a conscious experience. The mouse on my desk 'exists' according to my understanding, not according to any conscious experience. Its existence or nonexistence is purely up to the understanding of the mind. Another mind such as a worm or a pig or a dark matter alien may also see or otherwise experience this object here on my desk, however whatever they may be experiencing, it may be something entirely different. It may be understood as something that doesn’t exist, for instance, it may be understood as a clever illusion, a mirage, or even a thought imagined (just as I am imagining things which supposedly don’t exist right now). As for the existence or nonexistence of the real object here, the noumenal mouse, the object as it truly is in itself, (whatever you want to say here) the view ‘outside’ of understanding and intuition is not known. There is no knowing. Existence/nonexistence is knowing. But concerning this, “nothing really exists” No, there is no knowing.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Glostik91 wrote:From where I’m sitting, I don’t experience an object as existing or not existing. I can experience an object here, a mouse say, its shape, size, color, sounds, etc all in a timely fashion
Then you are experiencing this quality or that quality. But they are all objects in their own right, that is, to a subject, no matter how shifty or timely you care to define or remember your experiences as.
but what about the ‘mouse’ am I experiencing that exists and what about the mouse would make it not exist?
Aren't you just shifting your "mouse" here towards a more loosely defined set of existing but shifting causes and effects?
Existence or nonexistence of any things is not a conscious experience.
So, what is?
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by jupiviv »

Glostik91 wrote:Existence or nonexistence of any things is not a conscious experience. The mouse on my desk 'exists' according to my understanding, not according to any conscious experience.
Why have you arbitrarily distinguished between "my understanding" and "any conscious experience"?
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by David Quinn »

Glostik91 wrote:
David Quinn wrote: One becomes more attuned to the formlessness and intangibility of everything. One begins to see more and more clearly that nothing really exists.
Nothing really exists? Hm, not quite on the money but close.
True, it does not describe the situation precisely. But it can rustle up a sense of how free the spiritual life is.

Glostik91 wrote:From where I’m sitting, I don’t experience an object as existing or not existing. I can experience an object here, a mouse say, its shape, size, color, sounds, etc all in a timely fashion, but what about the ‘mouse’ am I experiencing that exists and what about the mouse would make it not exist?

Existence or nonexistence of any things is not a conscious experience. The mouse on my desk 'exists' according to my understanding, not according to any conscious experience. Its existence or nonexistence is purely up to the understanding of the mind. Another mind such as a worm or a pig or a dark matter alien may also see or otherwise experience this object here on my desk, however whatever they may be experiencing, it may be something entirely different. It may be understood as something that doesn’t exist, for instance, it may be understood as a clever illusion, a mirage, or even a thought imagined (just as I am imagining things which supposedly don’t exist right now).
Yes, our brains, our neural pathways, our habits, our past experiences, our genetic make-up, etc - all of it shape how we experience the world in each moment. Every being experiences the world in its own unique way.

The mouse-in-itself is a meaningless concept. It's like a square circle or a married bachelor, an impossibility. Mouses appear when the circumstances are ripe and then they disappear again. What else is there?

Glostik91 wrote:As for the existence or nonexistence of the real object here, the noumenal mouse, the object as it truly is in itself, (whatever you want to say here) the view ‘outside’ of understanding and intuition is not known. There is no knowing. Existence/nonexistence is knowing. But concerning this, “nothing really exists” No, there is no knowing.
There is nothing to know.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by encode_decode »

Even forever is a creation of causation.
What causes forever?
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by David Quinn »

encode_decode wrote:What causes forever?
Memory, abstraction, a sense of time, the delusion that things can objectively existence, etc.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by Glostik91 »

jupiviv wrote:
Why have you arbitrarily distinguished between "my understanding" and "any conscious experience"?
Don’t let me spoil your own fun in discovery too much. When I view this black mouse, I not only see the black color, but I understand that the color is black. Intuition is the direct viewing of the color. Understanding is the concept ‘black’. Concepts are fundamentally webs of relation i.e. causality. Intuition is the immediate awareness or consciousness of an object, no concepts allowed.

Have you ever seen a tree?
On The Origin of Consciousness by Julian Jaynes wrote: Consciousness Not Necessary for Concepts

A further major confusion about consciousness is the belief that it is specifically and uniquely the place where concepts are formed. This is a very ancient idea: that we have various concrete conscious experiences and then put the similar ones together into a concept. This idea has even been the paradigm of a slew of experiments by psychologists who thought they were thus studying concept formation.

Max Müller, in one of his fascinating discussions in the last century, brought the problem to a point by asking, whoever saw a tree? “No one ever saw a tree, but only this or that fir tree, or oak tree, or apple tree . . . Tree, therefore, is a concept, and as such can never be seen or perceived by the senses.” 7 Particular trees alone were outside in the environment, and only in consciousness did the general concept of tree exist. Now the relation between concepts and consciousness could have an extensive discussion. But let it suffice here simply to show that there is no necessary connection between them.

When Müller says no one has ever seen a tree, he is mistaking what he knows about an object for the object itself. Every weary wayfarer after miles under the hot sun has seen a tree. So has every cat, squirrel, and chipmunk when chased by a dog. The bee has a concept of a flower, the eagle a concept of a sheer-faced rocky ledge, as a nesting thrush has a concept of a crotch of upper branch awninged with green leaves. Concepts are simply classes of behaviorally equivalent things. Root concepts are prior to experience. They are fundamental to the aptic structures that allow behavior to occur at all.

Indeed what Müller should have said was, no one has ever been conscious of a tree. For consciousness, indeed, not only is not the repository of concepts; it does not usually work with them at all! When we consciously think of a tree, we are indeed conscious of a particular tree, of the fir or the oak or the elm that grew beside our house, and let it stand for the concept, just as we can let a concept word stand for it as well. In fact, one of the great functions of language is to let the word stand for a concept, which is exactly what we do in writing or speaking about conceptual material. And we must do this because concepts are usually not in consciousness at all.
That's all I have time for for now.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by jupiviv »

Glostik91 wrote:Concepts are fundamentally webs of relation i.e. causality. Intuition is the immediate awareness or consciousness of an object, no concepts allowed.
Both intuition and concepts are fundamentally webs of causality, just like everything else. If concepts are causal relations, but intuitions are not, then it follows that the latter has no cause; that isn't possible.
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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by Eric Schiedler »

Glostik91 (and others who are interested),

As far as I am aware, Julian Jaynes never wrote about wisdom and genius. If he did so, please point out the relevant passages.

Julian Jaynes worked on a theory to explain the empirical evidence of the development of cognitive functions in humans.

His definition of consciousness is the emergence of the narrative of self-existence. This is in contrast to any awareness an organism may have of perceptions or sensations, which is the use of concepts, again, in his model. Thus, in his theory, humans were capable and in fact did develop many civilization projects without the use of a sense of self but by other methods such as heuristics (trial-and-error). This is one of many implications, and many of the others attempt to explain the emergence of quizzical human behaviors such as religion, cruelty, addictions, the construction of ancient monuments, etc.

Furthermore, in no way that I can tell, did Jaynes' description and explanations imply or state that this internal narrative of the self was independent of causal processes. Thus, this explanation of consciousness does not warrant an interpretation of special significance as an empirical fact - consciousness in this model is quite ordinary phenomena.



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Re: Examining The Wisdom of the Infinite

Post by Glostik91 »

Diebert van Rhijn wrote: Then you are experiencing this quality or that quality. But they are all objects in their own right, that is, to a subject, no matter how shifty or timely you care to define or remember your experiences as.

Aren't you just shifting your "mouse" here towards a more loosely defined set of existing but shifting causes and effects?
Whether the object exists or does not exist, the raw experience of the object in question is similar. I can dream of genie, but genie does not exist. Why does genie not exist? Because genie was a dream. It is a way of understanding things. Without understanding like this, we would not understand a difference between an experience where things don't exist such as a dream and a state where things exist such as a waking state.
Existence or nonexistence of any things is not a conscious experience.
So, what is?
Intuitions of time and space are the raw conscious construction in which we are conscious. Existence/nonexistence is a separate matter regarding our understanding of the raw conscious construction.
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