crocodile deathroll

I would like to use my one light many windows analogy:

Imagine if you were locked inside a huge Gothic cathedral for your entire life, and as you were gazing at all those stained glass windows you see that each of them are very intricately unique. Your are told by others just like you who are also locked inside that each window emits its own light and are therefore entirely unique in themselves. Whatever causes that light in the first place is a mystery, but whatever it is behind that mystery is unique to each window just the same, and as such you are only guided to such a conclusion by their own intuition. So it never occurs to you that there is only a single light source, the Sun, but as long as you remain locked inside that source of light will always remain a mystery

That condition of being locked inside a large Gothic cathedral gives you a very skewed view of the universe. Then some day you escape from the cathedral and you venture outside and observe that there is only one light source behind all of those stained glass windows and when the more enlightened you go back inside an tell them, they all promptly brand you as a heretic.

The fact that humanity have been stuck here on Earth for centuries trying to decipher the nature of consciousness and feel there is a unique source of consciousness for everybody, has a very strong parallel to that cathedral analogy. It, like those Gothic cathedral windows to the people locked inside that subjective light inside our heads that switches on in our mind when we wake up in the morning and turns off when we doze off to sleep a night is felt to be unique each person. Not true, I find it more plausible to believe that, like the Sun shining outside that huge Gothic cathedral there is a single unified principle behind it. Consciousness that is spontaneously switched on for everybody at about 13 weeks gestation. This gives consciousness a good material platform to work off. What materialistically exists in real space an time is a sphere of 13th week fetal neural matter that is more of less loosely clustered around the Earth and it can studied and analyzed in isolation to all other earthly matter past present and future, just like the hydrosphere is all of the Earth's water in isolation, the material basis for noosphere is all all the 13th week fetal neural matter in isolation, past present and future. This is the noosphere all primed to spark consciousness into existence as soon as that neural material on the evolution of life on Earth achieves a critical level of complexity.
The fetal brains just keep interacting with each other by at first emulating the same information processes they were genetically programmed to do. So they all think as one unit.
It grant it that is a bit different to Teilhard De Chardin's version which is a lot more spiritual but is a noosphere of sorts just the same. I find it the idea plausible because provides a material platform for the noosphere that can be pushed an poked and prodded like any other matter on the surface of the Earth.
The phenomena of consciousness or the soul is one light, one single unified principle. But the phenomena of all us human beings is many windows

CD

owleye

Well, I can't say as I find your analogy attractive, in the same way I can't accept Plato's parable of the cave. It appears you are following in the long line of thinkers who believe that reality is hidden from us, trapped as we are by what consciousness brings to us, which presumably we must discount since this represents what for the most part is an illusion. Would we be able to shed this cloak, somehow we could "grok" reality. (I think this term is from one of the more famous scifi writers, but it's been so long I'm afraid I can't remember.)

I reject this view. As Paul Feyerabend tells us, this discounting of ordinary experience has come down to us from many a philosophic, religious and scientific quarter, and he thinks it has resulted in the "conquest of abundance" -- injecting the thought that world of everyday experience is not real. I'm in sympathy with Feyerabend here. For you and these great thinkers, it matters not that we live and die in this world, carrying on with all we are obligated to do, and at times what we'd prefer doing. All this is nothing compared to the reality that is largely hidden from us, behind the rose-colored window of conscious experience. For you, I gather, we are saved by our higher intellect which can somehow, perhaps by believing what the analogy tells us, penetrate the window to reveal directly (but not through the senses, as they deceive us) what the rest of us can't, we being trapped.

Well, I'll have none of it, thank you very much.

owleye

crocodile deathroll

It appears to me the Catholic Church it far more hostile on theories challenging its theology then it it on the physical activities of its clergymen. If Teilhard de Chardin was a pedophile he would of only been moved off to another nearby parish in France and not exiled off the China for his "controversial" noosphere theory, if though much if his theories is no more than a lot of mystical gobble-de-gook. Then isn't authodox Catholic Dogma just based largely on a lot of mystical gobbly-de-gook.

CD

DRFseven

Oh, good; then please tell how we may bypass our senses, or, barring that, how we can be sure our senses reflect reality. It will be such a relief to finally know!

Synaesthesia

DRF,


Discerning with certainty whether our perception corresponds accurately to some facet of reality or even being certain what our senses tell us is clearly impossible.

However, as with the illusionary "absolute frame of reference" it appears that certainty is not required for us to get a very acute and comprehensive understanding of the world's structure. This is possible because we can judge the depth, extent and parsimony of theories, their correspondence to the rest of out understanding and their power relative to other theories.

The conception, for example, that consciousness is independent of the structure of each individual is totally ungrounded. Since it is unparsimonious and adds nothing to our understanding, it should be rejected.

We don't even know exactly what we mean by consciousness, let alone when it is "switched on" or how it develops. We do know, however, that consciousness is not a bifurcated preposition. A rainbow of dimensions separate thinking, feeling beings from the inanimate. It's not a matter of being spontaneously switched on and off. consciousness, let alone how it develops. We do know, however, that consciousness is not a bifurcated preposition. Multiple dimensions, not fairy dust, separate thinking, feeling beings from the inanimate.

DRFseven

Yes, relative. My comment was in response to owleye's silly denial without benefit of explanation. The fact that we can't help but rely on our senses does not mitigate the fact that we have no idea of what's on the other side of the translation; only that relative to what we know, relying on the senses seems to work.

Synaesthesia

DRF,
Because relativity requires that we measure space and time relative to a frame of reference does not mean we have no idea of what's going on elsewhere in space. On the contrary, we have every reason to believe that we can accurately ascertain what is going on and no reason at all to think that we are totally deluded.

The theory that we understand something of the outside world is currently superior to the theory that we understand nothing. The choice of which to believe is far from arbitrary.

Regards,
Synaesthesia

DRFseven

We believe we can, but that is no proof at all. There is no way to get around the fact that we are at the mercy of our senses. Also, we are unable to think we don't know what's going on, so belief is pretty useless (and I don't mean belief in any spooky sense) as a means of establishing absolute veracity. We just have to accept it because there's nothing else.

I'm sure it seems "superior" to you or you wouldn't think it. My opinion is not that we understand nothing, but that we have no idea whether we truly understand anything or not. And that we keep on truckin.

Synaesthesia

*tsk tsk tsk* DRFseven, you really set yourself up.

I'm going to address your second paragraph first because it touches upon a more fundamental point.

You take the absence of total certainty for the presence of total uncertainty. I reject this assumption. Not only is it patently false, it is theoretically sterile and gives no insight into how we can “keep on truckin’”.

It is your belief that we don't have any idea of whether we understand anything. Of course, you believe that you believe this, which presents the problem of whether you understand what you believe. Since your position requires that there is no way of knowing what you believe or whether you believe, you hold the position that you don't know whether you think we have any idea of whether we understand anything or not. In short, you're confused.

I hold that some theories are better than others. For example, theories which: 1. Parsimoniously make detailed and deep (and therefore improbable) predictions 2. Tie other theories together (conservatism) and 3. Accurately anticipate and usefully interpret evidence.

Theories which posit numerous entities that don't do anything, don't predict anything, are totally at odds with everything we understand about anything or are consistently inaccurate are, according to what DRFseven tells us, JUST as good as relativity, quantum mechanics and the theory of evolution. I disagree, and I think everyone (even those who believe that they can't know what they believe) can see why.

I myself do not see how such an obviously false position could be sustained without the assumption that we must either be 100%-money-back-guaranteed certain or skeptical-to-the-point-of-total-paralysis.

Here again is that failure to distinguish between "we have no proof at all" and "we have no means of establishing absolute veracity." There is a gaping ocean of epistemology between these two primitive extremes. Perhaps we sould delve into it rather than swim desperately for a shore we cannot reach.

Regards,
Synaesthesia
“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." -Douglas Adams

owleye

DRFseven...

Just noticed your "response" to me...

It appears you didn't read my post too carefully. You seem to have missed the entire point of my criticism. I was challenging the position of the author of this topic (and, as a byproduct, those who, in opposition to how you see it) believe we have a capacity for an intellectual intuition that presupposes it).

Notwithstanding this, it is reasonable to suppose that we do maintain some sort of intellectual intuition. You may want to consider Husserl's eidetic intuition or Godel's mathematical (Platonic) intuition. Kant held (I think) we have the capacity for a kind of intellectual intuition with respect to "things-in-themselves" at least in its noumenal sense, but none of this falls sufficiently under our cognitive capacity that we could in any sense know what it is that our intellect "intuits" or more importantly determine its existence through it. Freedom, God, and the immortality of the soul are among these kinds of intuitions.

owleye