LunarRay
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- Mar 2, 2003
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Originally posted by: shira
It definitely would have been more accurate to have written, "No one understands what goes on inside the human brain when a person reasons . . . . " However, I personalized that statement to you because it's relevant to what you say you can't accept.Originally posted by: LunarRay
Originally posted by: shira
Man used to believe that the world consisted of what was visible from horizon to horizon and that lightning was a message from an angry god. What man couldn't see he imagined didn't exist and what man didn't understand he gave magical explanations to.Originally posted by: LunarRay
In the above I'd agree that a computer can learn... and can understand... but I can't accept yet that a computer now or in the future can reason.. Can't learn to reason and can't understand reasoning or the reasoning process... No matter what data it ingests it will utilize some math process to deduce the next step... emotion is absent. Its Zen is complete..
Mankind has gotten a lot smarter over the last 100,000 years, but the design has essentially remained unchanged.
You say a computer can't "reason." And can't learn to reason or understand reasoning.
I believe that the fact that you don't understand what goes on in your head when you "reason" - that, in fact, you really don't understand "reasoning" at all - is, ironically, why you think you reason and computers don't.
OK... hehhehehe I'll buy that... I accept that I don't know what I don't know and to extrapolate from that ignorance out to some probability is not worth much... So I'm stuck with what I do know or at least think I know and add to that those 'bits' that I accept as truth with out tangible proof... faith... Then using that limited base I can see clearly what has to be...
The one sure thing we both must accept is that tomorrow's events are NOT known today. We never, as an Earth, may see the tomorrow that holds the answer... So at best all we can say is: Shoulda, Woulda and Coulda.... And cuz we don't agree on the base from which we both project our end results have to be different... but given Infinity as a possibility I'd suspect all things that can occur will... I don't, however, see Infinity as a reality as it applies to this universe.. or actually, humankind on earth... we will or ought to be long gone by the next ice age..
Edit: ... the bold bits of your statement.... are quite telling.. you have made as fact certain thingi. You have empowered your dialog using as fact assumption and ascribe to me the absence of a basis with which to opine with any potential to be correct... hehehhehe You should qualify a bit... don't you think.. ?? If this then that... hehehehe
I think I know a bit about how the brain functions and thus the mind... and from that add the factor I previously made regarding God.... You can't take part and not the whole... you'd not go to the store and bite a part of the apple and not expect to pay for the entire thing now would you?
That statement is not an "assumption". Science has the barest information on what goes on inside a human brain. We have maps of where within the brain various higher processes occur, and it's believed that "consciouness" is a consequence of complex interactions between various brain systems. But exactly what those interactions are - how a cascade of electrical impluses traveling/spreading among neurons within and among various areas of the brain - somehow results in consciousness, thought, "reason" is a mystery.
By stating that "reasoning" is now and forever unreproducible within computers you are effectively saying that reasoning is beyond the laws of physics - that it is magic. As I've written in other posts, that's the "God of the Gaps" - you are finding God (or alternatively/additionally, the "specialness" of humanity) in what is mysterious and wonderful. To put it Moonbeam's way, you are letting your ego get in the way.
What's the big deal if human's are just big hunks of meat with highly evolved gray hunks of meat within their skulls? What's so difficut in accepting that the meat-body grows, is born, lives, dies, and decomposes, and that the universe is oblivous from beginning to end?
Indeed... with out question my Ego is not only in the way it is me.. hehehhe as is yours you..
And yes, the notion of good and evil is the aspect of reasoning that I ascribe to the Soul... and have guesstimated that the intangibility of both the Soul and the Conscious seem to me - if they or only one exists - to be the same... I see the human as unique among the life on Earth regarding reasoning and having a Soul, however, a friend who works with dolphin at Sea World has convinced me that they reason as well.. and with out a soul... So... how that fits in with Adam and Eve and what flows from there is perplexing at the very least.. It is illogical to look at it all and conclude that there even is a God... and yet I do conclude there is a God... and that I have not a clue about the big picture.. Obviously I can't if it don't fit... so what else am I to do... reject God cuz I can't deduce he exists or accept God and reject what I see... hehehhehehhehe
The mystery of the mind is overwhelming... and my approach is to work from the outside in... IOW.. behavior is motivated by something and lets say that something is unique and has no other motivators.. where does it come from and how is it developed... We can test the brain and see 'hot spots' occur based on different stimuli... We can anger one person and see changes... in the brain.. but not another. So, how did that anger get motivated.. aside from the stimuli... didn't have to be anger... Me thinks there is a central processing unit.. (hehhehe) that when asleep will process that stimuli much differently.. and individually so that suggests the mind has two distinct sections... and the sub-conscious part has memory that is not ummmmm realized when conscious... but gives the conscious mind the input to behave in certain manner.
I think a Neurologist like Freud in today's technological environment could argue his case much more strongly. And I agree that Neurology is about the most interesting field because of what we don't know.. but can see.. I'm not one of those, however... (I know... no kiddin) I am, however, a Phenomonologist (if only in my own mind) ... and this is quite interesting..
Moonbeam said "the greatest truth is that there is no truth"... I think he said that... I think it is all perception... based on belief.. and some of that belief is founded in truth at the moment to the moment but not beyond this moment..
Moonbeam said "the greatest truth is that there is no truth"... I think he said that... I think it is all perception... based on belief.. and some of that belief is founded in truth at the moment to the moment but not beyond this moment..
This was the path by which I went since I could not believe. I first was forced to abandon all hope that I could know the truth, that there was none for me. That caused me to feel what I felt, the deep pain that was masked by my feeling that there is a good and that life had meaning. I experienced utter despair and hopelessness, a feeling that had been hidden in me. I was abandoned by the lover, my love unreturned. Zen posed this question to me. Why do you suffer from the truth that there is no meaning when it makes us giggle. I faced paradox, one I hadn't ever considered before. I assumed that meaning was necessary to life, a happy one anyway. When the wind hit the house I went from deep introspection to instant presence in the room. The shock of the shift opened some sort of door. I am and it's fantastic, without meaning. Meaning is meaningless too. Love is when you are. You get no love at all from the lover because you disappear in your love for her. I am not because she is. "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which he sees me. The lover and the Beloved are one when Love IS.
There is no question as to whether there is a God or not because in Him we have our Being. HE IS when I am not. There can be no doubt because there can be no question. There is nobody to ask the question.
A question is always a fragment of self asking the whole a question with the assumption that the questioner is the whole. Being answers all questions and Being is truth. To be is to die to thought and to enter the NOW.
All around the mulberry bush the monkey chased the weasel. The monkey thought it was all in fun. Pop goes the weasel.
This was the path by which I went since I could not believe. I first was forced to abandon all hope that I could know the truth, that there was none for me. That caused me to feel what I felt, the deep pain that was masked by my feeling that there is a good and that life had meaning. I experienced utter despair and hopelessness, a feeling that had been hidden in me. I was abandoned by the lover, my love unreturned. Zen posed this question to me. Why do you suffer from the truth that there is no meaning when it makes us giggle. I faced paradox, one I hadn't ever considered before. I assumed that meaning was necessary to life, a happy one anyway. When the wind hit the house I went from deep introspection to instant presence in the room. The shock of the shift opened some sort of door. I am and it's fantastic, without meaning. Meaning is meaningless too. Love is when you are. You get no love at all from the lover because you disappear in your love for her. I am not because she is. "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which he sees me. The lover and the Beloved are one when Love IS.
There is no question as to whether there is a God or not because in Him we have our Being. HE IS when I am not. There can be no doubt because there can be no question. There is nobody to ask the question.
A question is always a fragment of self asking the whole a question with the assumption that the questioner is the whole. Being answers all questions and Being is truth. To be is to die to thought and to enter the NOW.
All around the mulberry bush the monkey chased the weasel. The monkey thought it was all in fun. Pop goes the weasel.
LunarRay
Diamond Member
- Mar 2, 2003
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Good thing Moonbeam was not in the forest under whatever tree may have toppled... We'd never know if that tree made a sound when it fell had the witness to the hearing event been terminated before we learned the truth of that particular tree... But, there may be others who were proximate to the event and I wonder if both the hearing and deaf conclude the tree made a sound upon falling... or neither...
Actually, I believe Christ's goal was for everyone to be his equal someday. If it was anything else, than I have been overestimating him all these years.
A fascinating question, in my opinion. I believe that we are in the mess we are in, inferior to Christ in all ways, because we hate ourselves and that self hate kills the goodness that was intended. Self hate is a kind of guilt, a feeling of worthlessness that creates emotional needs, such things as a desire to get love from out there because you feel your own self love to be worthless. Also the belief, in my opinion again, in this worthlessness is profound. And because it is also unconscious we are in a real mess. We hate ourselves but can do and do do nothing about it because we are not aware that this is our condition. I believe this is why Christ came, to tell us we are forgiven. Well here we are filled with unconscious guilt and somebody tells us we are forgiven. Who has the best chance of getting that across. Are you going to listen to somebody who says he is just like you, even if he says it in the form of 'you are just like me' or are you maybe going to pay more attention if you think the speaker is God? We are trained to authority from birth and God is the highest law. I think more people will accept forgiveness from God than they will from Joe Blow. On the other hand, though, if that forgiveness is supposed to set you on a journey to become like Christ, the inferiority complex kicks right back in. Oh, I can never be God because I am worthless. Additionally there is nothing more dangerous that I can think of off hand than the madman who thinks he is God. My guess is that wise people long ago decided that the best way to help humanity was to equate truth and God. What I am not so sure of is if that is the best thing today in scientific Western culture where the notion of God is fading. The problem, of course, is that people who feel worthless and don't believe in God set themselves up as God anyway.
There is no foolproof escape from unconscious self hate. The path to resurrection is in the memory of crucifixion and nobody wants to do that. But we are all on the cross. It's just that we will not know it.
When a person walks a religious path and follows somebody who once found the way he creates of the false self his self hate forced him to become, a new entity that strives to emulate God. That emulation can become so profound and identical it becomes real. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Alternatively the self can be extinguished in humility. One can become or surrender to the will of God or do both at the same time.
shira
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Now wait just a second there. Some of us desire "love from out there" because there are some awfully nice things "out there" that aren't really available if you spend your time just ogling your own navel.
For example, hot monkey sex isn't nearly as hot or monkey-like when practiced with just these two hands, these two feet, and, er, other appendages. And I don't know about you, but receiving for the holidays a silk tie that perfectly aligns with my own aesthetic sense (but which was purchased by me for myself) - receiving THAT tie isn't nearly as wonderful as receiving a silk tie with a pattern that makes me cringe BUT which was purchased for me by a particular woman who sends my entire nervous system into meltdown at the merest crinkling of her cute little nose in my direction.
So although I agree with you that if the quest for the "other" is predicated on the misguided notion that "she will make me happy" the quester probably has some serious issues that need improving, that doesn't necessarily mean that looking outwardly for companionship, mutual affection, and (yes) love is a sign of self-hatred or a devaluation of the love we're able to give ourselves.
But perhaps all you were saying is that some people seek love out there because self-hatred leads them to believe their own love is worthless. With that I can agree. That's very different from saying people seek love out there ONLY because self-hatred leads them to believe their own love is worthless.
I think maybe I have or think of seek and need in somewhat different ways than you do. The strawberry does not seek tasters. The cornucopia does not look for someone to sample its fruit. Illusion may be illusion but it is persistent. You seek a morsel: I say be one.
shira
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- Jan 12, 2005
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These are false analogies.
A strawberry is a strawberry plant's way of spreading its seed: the sweetness of the fruit ensures it will be consumed. A strawberry is intended to be eaten. The strawberry requires the "other" to fulfill its purpose.
Similarly, a cornucopia is a collection of fruits, each with a reason for being similar to the strawberry's. The fruit without the consumer of the fruit is incomplete.
Being a morsel presupposes that consumers of the morsel exist. Yet if all of us were to follow your advice - be morsels rather than seek morsels - we would all be sitting around in isolation, morsels wasting our sweetness on the Zen air.
Humans require interaction with other humans. Children kept isolated from others experience arrested mental development and psychological problems. Humans evolved the ability for speech because of the obvious advantages it provided in human-to-human interactions.
Love is not just loving yourself, it is also loving others. The expression of love for another requires interaction with the other, and the other allows that interaction only because of the desire to experience your expression of love for them and to express their own love for you.
You can be as self-contained as you like, but eventually it's time to come out of the cave.
I said the illusion was persist and and you are proving that. I told you that for the lover, 'yourself' does not exist. There is only the Beloved. Try to imagine your are upside down in this mystery and cannot understand. You can't get away from the trap of duality and the illusion of self. You are talking about what you are and know, not what you can become. There are no thoughts, there are no questions, there is only love. To be is to be with everything. There is no in or out of the cave.
It might be wise to consider why we love in the first place. Primarily, it is a function of evolution, love is a bond that creates children and keeps our genes going strong. From that point of view, love is something we all must desire, because our DNA demands it.
shira
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The first line of your last post is merely circular: You claim that duality is an illusion. I disagree and point to external counter-evidence. You reply: "See how powerful the illusion is."
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Just because you think they're out to get you doesn't necessarily mean your paranoid. And the fact that I perceive myself and that lovely lass over there as separate entities and I'd really like to make her acquaintence doesn't mean I'm imagining a duality where none exists, that I hate myself, or that I can't get around my ego.
I feel the keys of my computer here as I type this - I have no reason to doubt my ability to accurately perceive reality. But you claim almost all of us are perceptually deficient. If that's so, then the burden is on you to to offer up evidence to support your contention. That's why I've written, "be specific" in past posts.
"The wind hit the house," you say, and you were totally in the moment. Yet your very phrasing describes a duality - "wind" and "house." You didn't write, "The wind-like part of me pushed against the house-me and the consciousness-me felt transcendence."
Frankly, this self-universe you describe where everything is one and one is everything sounds VERY ego-centric and grandiose as compared with a universe in which each of us is just "little-ol' me."
Babies and young children think they are all-powerful, in control of the universe. However, as they mature they gradually learn that they are just small and insignificant, not at all in control. That is reality, not brainwashing. But to read what you write, you think that this maturation process is instead a brutality inflicted on the young and innocent. You seem to think that the misperceptions of the infant mind are in fact the reality.
I don't need to be "everything." Why do you?
s: The first line of your last post is merely circular: You claim that duality is an illusion. I disagree and point to external counter-evidence. You reply: "See how powerful the illusion is."
M: No, I replied with "I told you that for the lover, 'yourself' does not exist." You are an ego trying to make sense of what would be if you did not exist with out ceasing to exist. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. What you call circularity I call your persistent illusion of self.
s: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Just because you think they're out to get you doesn't necessarily mean your paranoid. And the fact that I perceive myself and that lovely lass over there as separate entities and I'd really like to make her acquaintence doesn't mean I'm imagining a duality where none exists, that I hate myself, or that I can't get around my ego.
M: Why not? You see, I hope, this is just your opinion.
s: I feel the keys of my computer here as I type this - I have no reason to doubt my ability to accurately perceive reality. But you claim almost all of us are perceptually deficient. If that's so, then the burden is on you to to offer up evidence to support your contention. That's why I've written, "be specific" in past posts.
M: Hehe, I have no real burden. Any need I might feel to convince you would only be some silly need of the ego. I will tell you how I see though, as best I can. What evidence can there be for personal experience
s: "The wind hit the house," you say, and you were totally in the moment. Yet your very phrasing describes a duality - "wind" and "house." You didn't write, "The wind-like part of me pushed against the house-me and the consciousness-me felt transcendence."
M: But I am talking here in the world of duality using words to point to something else about which there are no words and none are needed. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.
s: Frankly, this self-universe you describe where everything is one and one is everything sounds VERY ego-centric and grandiose as compared with a universe in which each of us is just "little-ol' me."
M: Pie in the sky as they say.
s: Babies and young children think they are all-powerful, in control of the universe. However, as they mature they gradually learn that they are just small and insignificant, not at all in control. That is reality, not brainwashing. But to read what you write, you think that this maturation process is instead a brutality inflicted on the young and innocent. You seem to think that the misperceptions of the infant mind are in fact the reality.
M: Except as you be a little child you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.
M: No, I replied with "I told you that for the lover, 'yourself' does not exist." You are an ego trying to make sense of what would be if you did not exist with out ceasing to exist. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. What you call circularity I call your persistent illusion of self.
s: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Just because you think they're out to get you doesn't necessarily mean your paranoid. And the fact that I perceive myself and that lovely lass over there as separate entities and I'd really like to make her acquaintence doesn't mean I'm imagining a duality where none exists, that I hate myself, or that I can't get around my ego.
M: Why not? You see, I hope, this is just your opinion.
s: I feel the keys of my computer here as I type this - I have no reason to doubt my ability to accurately perceive reality. But you claim almost all of us are perceptually deficient. If that's so, then the burden is on you to to offer up evidence to support your contention. That's why I've written, "be specific" in past posts.
M: Hehe, I have no real burden. Any need I might feel to convince you would only be some silly need of the ego. I will tell you how I see though, as best I can. What evidence can there be for personal experience
s: "The wind hit the house," you say, and you were totally in the moment. Yet your very phrasing describes a duality - "wind" and "house." You didn't write, "The wind-like part of me pushed against the house-me and the consciousness-me felt transcendence."
M: But I am talking here in the world of duality using words to point to something else about which there are no words and none are needed. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.
s: Frankly, this self-universe you describe where everything is one and one is everything sounds VERY ego-centric and grandiose as compared with a universe in which each of us is just "little-ol' me."
M: Pie in the sky as they say.
s: Babies and young children think they are all-powerful, in control of the universe. However, as they mature they gradually learn that they are just small and insignificant, not at all in control. That is reality, not brainwashing. But to read what you write, you think that this maturation process is instead a brutality inflicted on the young and innocent. You seem to think that the misperceptions of the infant mind are in fact the reality.
M: Except as you be a little child you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.
Originally posted by: Moonbeam
Originally posted by: LunarRay
That (the bold part) is another issue Moonster has mentioned in the past that I've been at odds with since I first read about that.
Intelligence is reasonably defined as the ability to reason, learn and understand... Granted a machine can do calculations faster and memorize data and information and take that and formulate new information and perhaps extrapolate independently within some parameter(s). I keep falling back to Hal the computer in 2000 and 2010 Space Odyssey. AND Gary Kasparov versus that massive computer in chess.
In the above I'd agree that a computer can learn... and can understand... but I can't accept yet that a computer now or in the future can reason.. Can't learn to reason and can't understand reasoning or the reasoning process... No matter what data it ingests it will utilize some math process to deduce the next step... emotion is absent. Its Zen is complete..
A machine won't have the 'human' factor that employs reasoning... but maybe it can.. I just don't see it..
It took nature several billion years to produce a spider. We are at the spider level of intelligence in machines already today, I think. That took only a few decades to achieve. The study if the brain with a view to reverse engineer its functions is proceeding at an ever quickening pace. I think we are a biological machine made up of essentially lifeless atoms. It is our complexity that gives life. Dead atoms not based on carbon will, I think, be no less alive given the same complexity. The miracle is not human consciousness, I think, but that the universe produced it as a function of universal law. The universe itself seems to have as its fundamental property the potential to awake. Perhaps then it will unwind itself to find all its past conscious parts and bring them home. Wouldn't you?
I think it's going to be very hard to make any kind of an assesment on the possibility of ever creating a self-aware artificial intelligence. I mean one day scientists say something is bad for you, the next day they're saying "no, we have new evidence and it's good for you" and then the day after that they change their moind again.
Do we really know and understand how the brain works when our science can't tell us for sure if eggs are good or bad for you? Is our understanding of the brain and all it's functions that advanced? If by some wild stroke of luck we did manage to do it, then would we be god's to them? Will they be our obediant servants and bring us sacrafices so that we may recharge them?
LR says machines can't have soul. Call it whatever, but I will cling to the belief that I am more then the sum of my parts, more then just a chemical reaction, and more then an array of wires and transistors. Machines may be made that have limited abilities but they will not be able to "think" as I understand the meaning of the word.
Originally posted by: Moonbeam
Freud opened the door to the notion that we are motivated unconsciously and that makes our motivations not only irrational but curable. Self knowledge is the process of becoming conscious of what we are unconscious of. For that to begin one must first get to first base, begin to credit the notion that we do not understand how we operate. This is profoundly difficult to do because it is an affront to the ego. Imagine you not knowing you. Who wants to believe that? Hehe. But if you saw Forbidden Planet you will know the unconscious is destroying the world.
This is a big part of the reason why I don't think a self-aware AI is very likely to be developed, at least anytime soon. 1000 years ago not many people would have even thought about the idea of going to the moon, but now we've sent people there and brought them back to talk about it, so never say never.
I don't know if this has been asked yet, but
How do you prove logic is the set of rules we should build our assumptions based on observation on? To do so uses logic itself, and using logic to prove why logic is our basis of interpration of all observation is itself a logical fallacy. It is like a definition which uses the word it defines to define that word means. Currently, it's like we first assume logic (despite the fact that doing so conflicts with logic itself), and then we are safe to say "because it hurts when I put my hand on the stove burner now, it will hurt when I do this again later."
Am I wrong?
How do you prove logic is the set of rules we should build our assumptions based on observation on? To do so uses logic itself, and using logic to prove why logic is our basis of interpration of all observation is itself a logical fallacy. It is like a definition which uses the word it defines to define that word means. Currently, it's like we first assume logic (despite the fact that doing so conflicts with logic itself), and then we are safe to say "because it hurts when I put my hand on the stove burner now, it will hurt when I do this again later."
Am I wrong?
The strawberry does seek tasters. That is how it propagates itself, by inticing mobile animals to eat the fruit and spreas the seed. Don't know much about the world outside yourself, do you?
But still a chemical bonding, passed down from your ancestors that (chemically lobotomized) restrained from killing their obnoxious spawn.
Well I put your theory to the test even though it seemed absurd and asked a strawberry why it tasted good. It didn't say a thing. I even shouted and threatened water-boarding, but nothing. Sorry but I remain convinced the strawberry doesn't feel any need at all. One theory has it that they probably just evolved tasting good so animals would eat them and spread their seeds.
I wonder how the strawberry discovered it needed mobility to survive and that mobile animals even existed to provide it with that mobility.... as long as it's fruit tasted good?
shira
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I wonder how the strawberry discovered it needed mobility to survive and that mobile animals even existed to provide it with that mobility.... as long as it's fruit tasted good?[/quote]
The strawberry plant didn't discover anything. There was probably some primordial ancester of the strawberry plant that randomly produced seeds that happened to be encased in a thin layer of sweet, pulpy material. Those seeds were attractive as food to some primordial seed-eating animal, and that plant's seeds became more widely dispersed than those of its competitors. So that plant's gene's became more common. Another random mutation continued the process. And so on. Until we ended up with today's strawberry's (improved by human actions, of course) and oranges and peaches and whatever.
Similarly, the human mind has evolved over the eons such that human males find particularly sexually enticing certain physical traits (a particular breast-to-waist-to-hip ratio, for example) in women that correlate with higher fecundity - that improves the odds that a male will breed with a female who will produce offspring. And considering the extremly long period required for human children to mature into self-sufficient adults, it seems only natural that humans would have evolved a mechanism (emotional bonding [= love]) that keep the male associated with his mate and his offspring; that improves the odds that the children will survive to maturity.
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