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Post by laughter on Sept 15, 2014 22:27:41 GMT -5
Actually that's a misconception that any honest physicist will tell you is also a forever unprovable conjecture, and why that is should be obvious: even if it was the case, how would we ever be informed of that? How can you design an experiment to prove that it's true? Physicists know all about the Quantum Observer and it's part of the sophomore level curriculum. What you're referring to with the primacy of consciousness is interpretation and metaphysics, and I've never done a poll but they're likely all over the map on that. For example, I'm sure some of them just radically redefine materialism and consider the QO to be any individual and account for object permanence by noting that everything is entangled with everything else. If that's their interpretation then consciousness can arise as an epiphenomenon in the brain, and need not be singular. edit: by my recollection, there are several different metaphysical interpretations of QM that preserve material realism, but they all account for the Wigner's friend paradox in one way or another. When Erwin Schrodinger proposed the famous experiment called Schrodinger's Cat, his intention was to poke holes in Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics (precisely what we're discussing now), he was trying to show how absurd trying to take quantum physics into the classical (big stuff) world was, like a cat simultaneously being 1/2 dead and 1/2 alive, he didn't expect to be taken seriously. sdp Nobody likes the CI and I thought it was B.S. from the moment I heard it and spent years wondering and reading and looking for a way around it. For a long time I subscribed to the idea that the QO was a unitive consciousness which was primary. The beauty and elegance of the CI, is what it doesn't say. It disclaims any idea about the object that it models other than at the instant of observation.
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Post by laughter on Sept 15, 2014 22:34:11 GMT -5
Hi Silver: Those are ideas and theories that people choose to believe, "positing" their speculations as if they were more than snapshots of a process happening.. People can all experience the same tree, rock, food, but.. each person's understanding of those experiences is unique to that person, more so is each person's imagined reality beyond the commonly verifiable experiences of their existence, their mindscape.. It sounds like a good read, it can't hurt to read it. I realize it's theory. We're (some of us) always wanting to know more, to venture forth in whatever direction seems promising. Mind play can be fun, interesting, even profound and trans formative! ... and as long as, at the end of the day, it's recognized for what it is, then the only downside is the opportunity cost of not Attending the Actual.
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Post by silver on Sept 15, 2014 22:35:47 GMT -5
It sounds like a good read, it can't hurt to read it. I realize it's theory. We're (some of us) always wanting to know more, to venture forth in whatever direction seems promising. Mind play can be fun, interesting, even profound and trans formative! ... and as long as, at the end of the day, it's recognized for what it is, then the only downside is the opportunity cost of not Attending the Actual. Do you mean that reading a book - any book - is a time when one is not attending the actual???
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Post by laughter on Sept 15, 2014 22:42:57 GMT -5
Mind play can be fun, interesting, even profound and trans formative! ... and as long as, at the end of the day, it's recognized for what it is, then the only downside is the opportunity cost of not Attending the Actual. Do you mean that reading a book - any book - is a time when one is not attending the actual??? Perhaps ZD's the right guy to ask that question to. I'd just give you an opinion of a fellow practitioner.
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Post by silver on Sept 15, 2014 22:48:57 GMT -5
Do you mean that reading a book - any book - is a time when one is not attending the actual??? Perhaps ZD's the right guy to ask that question to. I'd just give you an opinion of a fellow practitioner. Maybe I will. Guess it stands to reason, that reading a book is a whole lotta minding, eh?
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Post by runstill on Sept 15, 2014 23:10:30 GMT -5
What you think you are has its existence in consciousness as does all existence, when physicists understand this 'the hard problem ' will disappear. Physicists deal with evidence and mathematical theories which they hope to be able to verify by evidence. They therefore will not and cannot merely accept a theory that everything originates from consciousness. This is an insurmountable problem, one will never be able to give objective proof to another that everything originates in consciousness. Proof would merely expand the boundary of the known. sdp Well some of their theories sound kinda nutty. I mean their best theory on creation is the big bang, according to that there was nothing just pure nothingness, then there was something in like nanoseconds the whole freaking universe appeared, that doesn't sound all that rational, and the latest one is that a particle can be a wave and/or a particle, ...really! I mean a particle is pretty f'ing small to all of sudden be this huge wave the size of a galaxy and what the heck would the wave be made of , one big particle?! Consciousness being primary just seems more logical even it hasn't been a direct experience.
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Post by tzujanli on Sept 16, 2014 5:17:48 GMT -5
Hi Silver: Those are ideas and theories that people choose to believe, "positing" their speculations as if they were more than snapshots of a process happening.. People can all experience the same tree, rock, food, but.. each person's understanding of those experiences is unique to that person, more so is each person's imagined reality beyond the commonly verifiable experiences of their existence, their mindscape.. It sounds like a good read, it can't hurt to read it. I realize it's theory. We're (some of us) always wanting to know more, to venture forth in whatever direction seems promising. I want to experience what 'is'.. i can imagine so many fantasy scenarios, chase so many people's imagined scenarios, or.. i can be still and experience what 'is' actually happening.. for all of the talk happening and for all of the philosophies studied, the human experience has, is, and will forever be dependent on the individual's interaction with its interconnected environment, part and whole functioning in unison to translate potential into reality.. sometimes, less IS more..
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Sept 16, 2014 10:58:29 GMT -5
Mind play can be fun, interesting, even profound and trans formative! ... and as long as, at the end of the day, it's recognized for what it is, then the only downside is the opportunity cost of not Attending the Actual. Do you mean that reading a book - any book - is a time when one is not attending the actual??? This is a very good question. I just went over to the un-moderated section. Steve had started a thread on meditation, I was going to refer to it, it's no longer there, don't know what happened to it. (Edit: It's on this side, not in the un-moderated section, the OP of Do you value meditation?) Anyway, he said meditation isn't a practice, it's a state. I don't wholly agree, it depends upon definitions. Anyway..... it's no longer there so it doesn't matter..........I'd say what Steve calls the state of meditation is akin to what Merrell-Wolff calls Consciousness Without an Object (below). A couple of posts down you recognize that reading is a whole lot of minding. By ATA ZD means ATA-MT, at least that's where it's headed. He later added minus thought to clarify. Anyway, laughter was pointing out that almost by definition, you can't ATA while reading. However, there is a state one can be in where one is not wholly absorbed in the reading while one is reading. But previous to this, it's easier to find this state in ATA-MT, one is not wholly absorbed in what one is attending to. And a further state Franklin Merrell-Wolff described as Consciousness Without an Object. But further, one can be in the state of Consciousness Without an Object, in the presence of objects, IOW, while ATA. sdp
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Post by laughter on Sept 16, 2014 12:06:59 GMT -5
Perhaps ZD's the right guy to ask that question to. I'd just give you an opinion of a fellow practitioner. Maybe I will. Guess it stands to reason, that reading a book is a whole lotta minding, eh? Well, the first thing to notice is that there's going to be some element of mind play at my engaging the question. So what's happening when we read? Perhaps comparing the reading of a poem to the reading of a book about science or Zen or some other subject might be useful. Particularly in the commonality between them. If the text you're reading is, say, a history book, then it will involve a story about events that took place in the past, and in the reading you'll be following along in your mind constructing images from the words about those events. For the most part, this is going to involve engaging the intellect. A poem, on the other hand, is read differently, and tends to engage the emotions. In both instances, the words are evocative of and depend on our conditioning and our memories in order to convey the meaning of the text. There are generally two kinds of meditative states, and one of these is referred to as "flow". Now in flow, we're also engaging with conditioning, but we're doing so in action, as opposed to abstraction.
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Post by silver on Sept 16, 2014 13:18:19 GMT -5
It sounds like a good read, it can't hurt to read it. I realize it's theory. We're (some of us) always wanting to know more, to venture forth in whatever direction seems promising. I want to experience what 'is'.. i can imagine so many fantasy scenarios, chase so many people's imagined scenarios, or.. i can be still and experience what 'is' actually happening.. for all of the talk happening and for all of the philosophies studied, the human experience has, is, and will forever be dependent on the individual's interaction with its interconnected environment, part and whole functioning in unison to translate potential into reality.. sometimes, less IS more.. I personally am not reading it because I think it has answers for me, well, maybe in a more oblique way, but it just sounds interesting. I pretty much have all the 'answers' I think I'm gonna need in this lifetime -- I'm just doing a little re-arranging of sorts, but book-reading I do just for the adventure....like monkey bars and other playground apparatus for the mind - but it also engages the heart and soul. Just outta curiosity, what's the last couple of interesting books you've read?
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Post by Deleted on Sept 16, 2014 16:55:57 GMT -5
Although not having been stated explicitly, there are at least a couple of atheists who regularly post here, you can derive this from their posting. I pondered how to raise this and ask how an atheist could be a part of a spirituality forum. And then it came to me that most Buddhists believe that Buddha did not believe in the existence of God and are therefore essentially atheists. (I personally believe this is an error, that Buddha deliberately didn't speak with reference to the existence of God or the nonexistence of God (except on occasion in personal exchanges, and then he expressed both views), because it wasn't relevant to awakening. Metaphysics comes later in Buddhism, and generally sticks with the psychology of man versus a whole cosmology, more or less). So there is the question, do we exist in consciousness or does consciousness exist in us? For an atheist, is that a relevant question or is it obvious that consciousness is somehow (in a way science can't yet explain, called the hard problem in philosophy) emergent from the material universe? Now, I realize this might be a short thread, but decided to raise the question upon reading the new book, Waking Up, A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by the atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris. sdp As an agnostic, all I have for you is wonder. Not even sure what consciousness means, much less it's status.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 16, 2014 17:01:52 GMT -5
Do you mean that reading a book - any book - is a time when one is not attending the actual??? This is a very good question. I just went over to the un-moderated section. Steve had started a thread on meditation, I was going to refer to it, it's no longer there, don't know what happened to it. Anyway, he said meditation isn't a practice, it's a state. I don't wholly agree, it depends upon definitions. Anyway.....it's no longer there so it doesn't matter........... A couple of posts down you recognize that reading is a whole lot of minding. By ATA ZD means ATA-MT, at least that's where it's headed. He later added minus thought to clarify. Anyway, laughter was pointing out that almost by definition, you can't ATA while reading. However, there is a state one can be in where one is not wholly absorbed in the reading while one is reading. But previous to this, it's easier to find this state in ATA-MT, one is not wholly absorbed in what one is attending to. And a further state Franklin Merrell-Wolff described as Consciousness Without an Object. But further, one can be in the state of Consciousness Without an Object, in the presence of objects, IOW, while ATA. sdp Fwiw, my understanding of Steve's thing was that meditation can be a vehicle for arriving at a 'state of meditation,' which is where we should be. And there might be other vehicles for getting there. But until one is intimately familiar with that state and not just looking at postcards of it, then they don't really have any bizness commenting on anything here.
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Post by silver on Sept 16, 2014 17:12:43 GMT -5
This is a very good question. I just went over to the un-moderated section. Steve had started a thread on meditation, I was going to refer to it, it's no longer there, don't know what happened to it. Anyway, he said meditation isn't a practice, it's a state. I don't wholly agree, it depends upon definitions. Anyway.....it's no longer there so it doesn't matter........... A couple of posts down you recognize that reading is a whole lot of minding. By ATA ZD means ATA-MT, at least that's where it's headed. He later added minus thought to clarify. Anyway, laughter was pointing out that almost by definition, you can't ATA while reading. However, there is a state one can be in where one is not wholly absorbed in the reading while one is reading. But previous to this, it's easier to find this state in ATA-MT, one is not wholly absorbed in what one is attending to. And a further state Franklin Merrell-Wolff described as Consciousness Without an Object. But further, one can be in the state of Consciousness Without an Object, in the presence of objects, IOW, while ATA. sdp Fwiw, my understanding of Steve's thing was that meditation can be a vehicle for arriving at a 'state of meditation,' which is where we should be. And there might be other vehicles for getting there. But until one is intimately familiar with that state and not just looking at postcards of it, then they don't really have any bizness commenting on anything here. Is this state of meditation same as ATA'ing?
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Post by Deleted on Sept 16, 2014 17:31:39 GMT -5
Fwiw, my understanding of Steve's thing was that meditation can be a vehicle for arriving at a 'state of meditation,' which is where we should be. And there might be other vehicles for getting there. But until one is intimately familiar with that state and not just looking at postcards of it, then they don't really have any bizness commenting on anything here. Is this state of meditation same as ATA'ing? Well the parallel, using Steve's distinction, would be that ATA could lead to a 'state of ATA' that May or may not be the state of meditation that he advocates. None of these states are familiar to me. Sometimes ATA happens, other times, not.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 16, 2014 18:00:38 GMT -5
This is a very good question. I just went over to the un-moderated section. Steve had started a thread on meditation, I was going to refer to it, it's no longer there, don't know what happened to it. Anyway, he said meditation isn't a practice, it's a state. I don't wholly agree, it depends upon definitions. Anyway.....it's no longer there so it doesn't matter........... A couple of posts down you recognize that reading is a whole lot of minding. By ATA ZD means ATA-MT, at least that's where it's headed. He later added minus thought to clarify. Anyway, laughter was pointing out that almost by definition, you can't ATA while reading. However, there is a state one can be in where one is not wholly absorbed in the reading while one is reading. But previous to this, it's easier to find this state in ATA-MT, one is not wholly absorbed in what one is attending to. And a further state Franklin Merrell-Wolff described as Consciousness Without an Object. But further, one can be in the state of Consciousness Without an Object, in the presence of objects, IOW, while ATA. sdp Fwiw, my understanding of Steve's thing was that meditation can be a vehicle for arriving at a 'state of meditation,' which is where we should be. And there might be other vehicles for getting there. But until one is intimately familiar with that state and not just looking at postcards of it, then they don't really have any bizness commenting on anything here.
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