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Post by Reefs on Mar 7, 2018 21:55:35 GMT -5
Right. Instead of asking "How could you know?" you might as well ask "How could you not know?!" And what about all the squirrel satsang stories? Let's replace 'baby' with Marie and 'suffering' with 'love' or 'mutual understanding' and see how that conversation goes. I'm pretty confident when it comes to arguing the opposite end of the stick that he has argued the exact opposite position. So I'm not really sure what he is doing here. I don't get your point. My point is that when you talked about your squirrel satsangs with Marie, you often talked about intimacy, love and mutual understanding and how you understand each other even without words. So obviously, on a deeper level, you know that Marie is not only sentient but also that she's actually sharing a perspective with you. And there's no doubt that you know exactly what's going on in the other. But when it comes to babies, you suddenly take the complete opposite position. You question their sentience and your ability to know what's going on in the other.
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Post by enigma on Mar 7, 2018 22:43:45 GMT -5
The psychology of bonding is an interesting field of research. That's where I first heard about that experiment. It could be an urban legend, as Laughter suggested. I spent a significant amount of time trying to track down an original source but couldn't find it so far. But given the mindset of scientists at the time in regard to babies and their ability (or assumed lack of ability) to even sense physical pain (let alone psychological pain) I wouldn't be surprised though if it actually happened. There have been far worse experiments though in the name of scientific progress. Also, I think we don't have to exclusively focus on the extreme negative end of that stick. We could as well ask if babies are capable of feeling the extreme positive end of the stick, i.e. eagerness, love, joy or passion. My point has been that the individual (dualistic) feelings that are experienced are subject to individual focus. The baby has the ability to focus. So from my perspective, the whole range of (dualistic) feelings can potentially be experienced by the baby. Would be interesting to see how everyone argues the other end of the (dualistic) feeling stick regarding babies (or animals). I say the extremes on both ends are formed unnaturally.
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Post by enigma on Mar 7, 2018 22:45:48 GMT -5
"There is no baby monkey, there is no cage, and there is no wire mother with a bottle. There is only the always present unlimited and constantly moving vastness of space time appearing in ever changing impermanent waves of ephemeral form. There is no sad face, suffering is only an illusion created by your mind. " Does this mean Mr. Brown Bear acknowledges there are other minds and other perceivers? Take it to the solipsism thread, buster.
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Post by enigma on Mar 7, 2018 22:48:20 GMT -5
I don't really know what a sense of identity is. Is it body identification or something else? Regardless, all that is needed in order to differentiate is the ability to differentiate. The ability to differentiate requires a sense of self that can differentiate . The moment you identify / notice / acknowledge something you have identified that something in reflection of yourself . You don't appear to understand how that works . Even floaters go around saying they are awareness and don't have an identity of sorts as spoken about on the other forums. Peeps don't seem to understand that in order to self relate what they are with or too requires that sense of self identity . If a peep or a bunny had no sense of self identity they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between themselves and something else that is perceived . They wouldn't be able to relate to what is perceived as something else other than themselves . How can they? What is a sense of self identity?!
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Post by enigma on Mar 7, 2018 22:51:15 GMT -5
yeah I do agree, though I believe that there is a useful distinction to be made between animals that can consider who they are and where they come from, and animals (or plants or ameobas or electrons) that can't, because this kind of self-reflection can come with a particular kind of suffering. Making that distinction gives us something to work with in a way. Yep it's useful to take into consideration different levels at play regarding different species and their ability to make sense of things or feel things . I think however that every conscious living 'thing' is suffering even if they don't have the capacity to acknowledge it . I say that because of my understanding of what suffering is compared to not . Being oblivious to suffering doesn't at the heart of it nullify the suffering .
Suffering is subjective. How can one suffer and be oblivious too it?
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Post by enigma on Mar 7, 2018 22:55:16 GMT -5
Aliveness is inherent in creation as it's happening in Consciousness, but when we talk about alive, intelligent, conscious, we're talking about particular expressions in creation. Is a rock alive, intelligent, conscious? No, in that context a rock isn't alive, intelligent, conscious. I do think those particular adjectives can be a bit tricky though as they bridge contexts. I would not say Awareness is alive and conscious. That happens in the context of form.
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Post by enigma on Mar 7, 2018 22:59:23 GMT -5
I see how it's possible to see subatomic particles as alive in some way because they are active expressions of Consciousness, though it pretty much assassinates the term 'alive'. But the terms 'conscious' and 'intelligent' clearly don't apply to electrons. A rock is not conscious and intelligent as we define those terms. But again, I think that's the precise point at which contexts are being mixed. When we say a rock isn't conscious, intelligent, alive....we mean it in the same way that we mean an AI bot isn't conscious, intelligent, alive. It's a valid distinction to make, and a valid conversation. But the broader context is that all things have a consciousness, intelligence, aliveness....whether it is an electron, a rock, or a human. Hence Intelligence is intelligent, Consciousness is conscious, Awareness is aware, Aliveness is alive. See, in your perspective, if a rock/paperclip has no consciousness but a human does, then the reason has to be physical/biological structure, and then we are problematically associating consciousness directly with biology. Talking in the small context I don't have a problem with this, but it has to be situated within the broader context in which it is known that all things have consciousness. This then resolves the issue of associating consciousness with biology (in the small context). - again, this is why I have said the question of whether something has consciousness is only ever a question to be asked in the small context, which isn't the spiritually relevant one. I don't see a context in which everything has consciousness.
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Post by enigma on Mar 7, 2018 23:02:16 GMT -5
I wouldn't call it quality of life. The baby is stuck in a crib unable to move about, rarely interacted with, and nothing happening. That's why the baby isn't engaged with life. Without said engagement, there is no reason to live. Is that really so difficult to understand? The physical needs were meticulously provided, and we're still discussing what the non-physical needs might be. Suffering is subjective and you don't know the subjective experience of the infant, so you can't talk like suffering is a no-brainer. Suffering isn't wholly subjective though, our physiological requirements (both tangible and intangible) mean that there is some level of objectivity to it. No, it doesn't. It means there's some level of objectivity to our physiological requirements.
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Post by enigma on Mar 7, 2018 23:04:15 GMT -5
Never heard Smokey talk like that! It's all super top-secret Illuminati stuff. I that Smokey bear on the ISS??
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Post by enigma on Mar 7, 2018 23:09:26 GMT -5
Again, you're confusing knowing with belief. I'm not sure we have discussed the difference between 'knowing' and 'belief' here....Can you briefly give me your definitions of 'believe' and 'know'? You 'believe' that you love Marie but don't 'know' it? Do you 'believe' or 'know' when your observe an adult human is suffering? Do you neither 'believe' or 'know' a baby is suffering when you observe him/her screaming with colic? What do you 'believe' or 'know' when you see a screaming baby? I believe the infant is not subjectively suffering. I don't know anything about that by observing how it acts, even if it's video evidence.
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Post by enigma on Mar 7, 2018 23:12:36 GMT -5
If you find out your wife cheated on you, and in the middle of that strong emotion, you find out it was a misunderstanding on your part, the strong feeling will go away. Feelings don't have to say anything. They follow your thoughts. I have agreed that they are associated with thought, but even in that example (which was a good example), the feeling has only gone temporarily. Whatever one has strong emotion about will come up again at some point, until the feeling has been fully allowed to have its say. In this example, the feeling is likely saying something like...''I am very sad at being abandoned, betrayed and rejected''. And this goes back to the baby's trauma. Do you mean to say you would continue to feel hurt for a while even after you find out the betrayal never happened??
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Post by enigma on Mar 7, 2018 23:20:09 GMT -5
I'm pretty sure if navigation were left up to the birds, there would be massive bird collisions and it would be raining starlings. Are you familiar with the Monarch migrations from the US/Canada to a small grove of trees in Mexico? It's 3000 miles or so and the round trip takes, like, 3 generations. Got an equation for that? Well that's the thingy about equations and models .. yes, someone probly does.. And even a philosopher/scientist/mathematician would agree with you that the navigation of the whole isn't up to the individual starlings. All they have to do (which is implicit in the model), is not crash into each other. They would say that the beautiful order of of the cloud emerges from the apparent chaos of the constantly and rapidly changing individual paths. This is very similar to their idea of the origins of consciousness. Tesla said something to the effect that science has relied so much on mathematics in lieu of experimentation that it has been completely divorced from nature and the object of it's investigation.
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Post by enigma on Mar 7, 2018 23:24:58 GMT -5
My argument is that it's not about love and nurturing so much as engagement with life. That WHAT is about love/nurturing as much as engagement with life? Are you saying the babies died, not because of the absence of love/nurture, but because of the absence of desire to engage with life? If that's the case, then it would be because of the absence of love/nurture that there is no desire to engage with life. That's the existential crisis a baby goes through. An absence of vitality and well-being, probably a sense of emptiness and loneliness. No, the absence of engagement with life. The infant can't crawl to the nearest pub and chat it up with the locals. You're with me on that, right?
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Post by someNOTHING! on Mar 7, 2018 23:27:50 GMT -5
It also brings us one step closer to seeing the truth about Seth's self-aware electrons. You mean like facebook and ST are self-aware? Some critters work collectively to support the group, like bees and ants. I don't believe there's some kind of biological communication going on, so it must be happening on another level. It makes me wonder if they are somehow self aware as a collective, and this somehow translates into individual self awareness. I've talked about the starling clouds before. I don't know how it's done, but it's not choreographed by bird brains. Wonderbeauty: Beautiful. I've never met a single person not impressed by a good murmuration! There are quite a few studies on the different kinds of "swarms" that take place in nature. We've only got grackles here, so nothing quite as spectacular (or graceful) as the starlings, but I have had the pleasure of being under and in swarming schools of fish several times.
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Post by enigma on Mar 7, 2018 23:41:28 GMT -5
What does it have to do with spiritual thinking? (It's deja vu all over again) Spiritual thinking is a mental position. Just look at the sentence structure of some folks. Every sentence is teeming with highly abstract nouns (and of which no one knows their exact definition) - that's how you spot the spiritual thinker. Infants and most animals don't suffer. Where are the abstract nouns? Where is there even an implied reference to spirituality?
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