Consciousness: Emergent property or A'Priori condition?

In love with?

I found myself at a gathering like that not involving mushrooms nor a television set. For ninety minutes I heard what people were saying before they said it. I'll chalk it up as familiarity with our lives common themes.

Do you know what death looks like? How can you say you nearly died? I wouldn't deny you had a desperate moment. We are all interminably close to death, that is until we die. You have no idea the hour of your demise only that it come when you do not expect. Of course for all I know of your special situation, you could be in your ten thousandth year of perpetually youthful incarnation.

My idea of cyclical nature is not perturbed, life is demonstrably redundant. I think your life's potentials, including death, would not be had by you if not for your birth. Do you deny the practical phenomena of having been parented?

 

Not all thought is cultivated.

When I write symbols for thoughts on a page, are they in an embodied state?
If what I wrote you hadn't seen at it's inception

 

If I write symbols for thoughts on a page and you read those symbols and the thoughts are conveyed, had they been then, embodied on a page?, that is thought/s.

 

lol Should have seen that coming. Enjoy. Better?

About trying to return to ourselves without parting...well, let's let the thought come first. :-D

After I was suffocated, I was later told my life had been saved and I'd been resuscitated. :-D

lol What's my special situation?!

Death, one of lifes potentials!? LOL Who could deny their birth? Our deaths follow our births. Causality only "ties" us to life. Life only yields to more.

All thought is embodied. Yes, when you "write symbols for thoughts on a page" they are in an embodied state, your own, regardless of whether or not I can 'see' their inception. Even if you don't write them. Or do you mean when you don't have thoughts? lol

 

Good point--I actually thought that argument was a bit weak after I wrote it---but I had already posted it.

On the other hand, would disembodied consciousness be an error if, for example, mass itself is actually an illusion, and the physical world is a creation of consciousness, a force (or characteristic of nature) we still do not understand?

In reality, even the most solid of substances is almost all hollow empty space, just as an individual atom is much like a marble in the center of a football field with the electron marbles circling at points starting as far away as the goal posts---something like that.

The researcher's Bernard Haisch and Alfonso Rueda took Newton's Inertia equation, Force = (mass)(acceleration), and reexamined it in terms of the zero-point field--the base level of electromagnetic radiation, or quantum light, that exists throughout the universe. Their theory, as I understand it, demonstrates that mass is nothing more than the Casimir Force from the zero-point field slowing the acceleration of quantum particles. This theory taken further implies that the physical world is nothing more than light energy (their conclusion).

Isn’t it possible that consciousness, at dimensions above the physical dimensions, and at a level we humans do not understand is what shapes this light energy into the shapes and forms of the physical universe? Then in order to experience itself, there are points of specific consciousness that manifests itself in the lower physical dimensions by shaping this light energy (matter) into it’s own individual living beings, that evolve into continuously more complex life forms. Death is then a release from the physical dimensions to return home to reconnect with its individual point of consciousness (though the fact that they were ever separated is also an illusion brought on by a portion of that consciousness trapping itself within the lower physical dimensions, in order to experience life).

I guess it would be just as easy to argue that an illusory physical world that is in fact, nothing more than light energy, would develop an emergent consciousness. But in my experiences, it would not explain how a small group of people in a pitch black room during a Lakota Yuwipi Ceremony would see rattles fly around the room, over their heads, shaking and rattling against each other, giving off blue sparks whenever they knock together, and to feel the solid floor rattle to heavy hoofs as they hear the sounds of a large buffalo enter the room, with its snorts and grunts, but without the physical presence of an actual buffalo. And that these and other spirits (who entered with their own sounds and actions) would give significant and relevant answers to the visiting medicine man, who had no contact with most of those who came to the ceremony, other than to receive their tobacco prayer ties that circled the Yuwipi altar before it started.

To me, these too, represented specific points of consciousness, displaying intention, but disembodied, and independent of physical matter.

 

THE BEST ARGUMENT EVER IN FAVOR OF AN A PRIORI CONSCIOUSNESS

Or

How The Enlightenment Ruined The Best Thing Going For Men Everywhere

>------------------------------<



The idea of consciousness as an a priori suggests that it is possible that there are beings that are more powerful than mortal man, and if there are those beings that are ‘good’ then it also goes without reason that there may also be those that are malevolent or bad.

By nature, all of us men intend to be good to our wives, and certainly faithful and all that good stuff. After all, we did marry them, didn’t we? But we are only mortals, and as mortals we are unable to fend off all those powers and wills that are greater than us mere humans.

Enter the succubi. Those evil creatures of beauty, and perfect figures, and firm breasts, who will stop at no end to tarnish and pollute our good intentions toward our wives—who, with our weak mortal hearts we most certainly do love, and would never want to hurt.

But these succubi are tricky and powerful she-devils with seductive powers that few mortal men (if any) can resist. Sure, we may meet them in places we probably shouldn’t be, like late night bars, or street corners and alleyways. Or they might suddenly appear at the other end of the telephone line, after a day’s hard work at a convention in Las Vegas. But sometimes they are right in front of us. For example, they could appear at work, maybe even sitting at the desk of our own secretaries. They are tricky little devils. They might even appear as our spouse’s very sister, or best friend.

We do love our wives and try so hard for them, even if they do put on a little weight, or gain a few wrinkles, or if coming home to them every night is like eating chicken every single day, when sometimes you’d like to try a juicy steak. But we love them so much we would never try that juicy steak, even when she wears those short tight skirts every day, with that firm cleavage that grabs your eyes every time she leans over. …and that perfume that lingers in the room after she leaves… But we like our chicken, and would never stick our forks in that juicy, medium rare, top sirloin piece of … No—our wives mean everything to us.

But the succubus! Oh, how tricky and evil she is to spoil those good intentions; to break even for just a few hours in a hotel room (or a few minutes in a broom closet) that marital bond, we would never break, if it was a mortal woman trying to tempt us (or we them). They are so powerful! Our wives could never blame us.

But alas, those days are gone. Empirical science has laid down the law that consciousness is nothing more than an emergent property of matter…

 

Wolf:

That's a massive if! :-D Where is the illusion? The physical world is a creation of consciousness, just as consciousness comes from the physical. Becoming is no argument against being.

How above the physical? I don't think anyone would deny that consciousness can form its physicality. Why else does consciousness evolve? Why else develop the self?
There's an answer I'd give, but it's only really a pleasure to give it - Joy. :-D

A friend of mine would say knowledge is being shared. And I'd agree.
But disembodied? Independent of the physical? Why? How?

Science never laid down a law that consciousness is nothing more than a property of matter!

It's its own matter too!

 

Quantum entanglement disagrees with you there IMO

 

tastyweat:

How?

 

Curiously, I have no personal recollection of a time when I was not. I was told that I was born on such and such a date to a particular set of parents in a particular local. I can't say of myself, I almost wan't born.

How does this event inform you, that is your desperate moment, or does it not matter at all?

As your body was to the point that it was not functioning on it's own, was it an issue to you at the time? What was resuscitated Dejavu, the body? Did you find your way to it through desire, or were you called back to it, reminded of it?

Your immortal form. I mean I assume your claims of life holding matter to itself indefinitely comes from experience. My observation is that life comes and goes from material arrangements. By material, I mean mineral, chemical and atomic bonds. The body is a conveyance for life, not life itself. I have seen and held lifeless bodies and they are not the same substance as the people that I have loved.

Death is a word that comes from an observation in life. Biological bodies can be alive, or not alive, dead. Dead bodies are without integrity and are decomposed. I agree life yields only to more life but the life of a particular body, ends. Energy is not destroyed but transduced, changed from one form to another.

What of authors no longer living, are their thoughts embodied still by them?

I wonder if you consider a photon to be a body? How about an electromagnetic current, is that a body?

 

thedope:

Who could? But birth is not the cause of death.

:-D That I almost died? Would you like to see the medical report? Funnily, my first impressions were not that I had almost died, but that I'd almost been killed. lol They wanted to keep me under observation, but I checked myself out immediately. The er team behaved responsibly. The nightwatch crew, well, only they and I really know what happened that evening. To be fair, they did send me up to er. lol

LOL Yes, the body.

I don't claim that life does so indefinitely but that it could come to.

 

thedope:

Yes, but a self-same body changes its form too. All bodies are particular.
Life could definitely come to hold to itself indefinitely.

That's like asking if a man who died actually lived. All thought is embodied. Embodiment is not something that has ever ceased.

A physicality. Everything takes form. Everything is embodied.

 

This is the reasoning that I referred to in my first response to your posts that you have a very strong argument. But I believe, if I recall correctly, that this is very much like Meagain’s view of the issue. I think this is what Heidegger was getting at also. (Though whether his ‘Dasein,’ was consciousness embodied by the physical is questionable, but he most likely saw it as consciousness at least attached to the physical---maybe not so different than your concept).

But does this not become a codependent relationship of being? In this way consciousness is not emergent from matter, nor is matter emergent from consciousness. If we take the electromagnetic wave for example, is the magnetic force emergent from the electrical force, or is the electrical force emergent from the magnetic force?

(The illusion is not conclusive regarding consciousness—merely that what we see as solid stationary mass, for example the walls of my house, are in reality vibrating quantum particles and empty space—but more empty space than anything else.)

That’s right, and the materialistic perspective of Jungian psychology on the collective consciousness is that consciousness takes experience and creates, for example, the physical neural patterns and structures that we inherit as the collective consciousness buried deep within our subconscious minds. (though clearly Jung did not buy into the purely materialistic explanation, but he tried not to stray too far over that line, claiming that he was a scientist, and could not speak of spiritual matters).

Above the physical would be anything above the 3 physical dimensions and that of time. Any conscious perception we would have of such a higher dimension could be a minute sliver of the actual dimension. But that sliver could encompass our whole 4 dimensions, just like if a single frame of a movie was a reality, it makes up only two dimensions of our reality, and is thoroughly encompassed by the 3rd and 4th dimensions. (Though maybe each frame when put together creates a time dimension for it).

The fact that we cannot truly define what consciousness is, in a multidimensional universe, allows for the possibility that it is a little understood force of a higher dimension.

Are you referring to the advice given by the Medicine Man to the people seeking help or also the shared experience of the animals (spirits) coming into the room, and the other paranormal activity there. Is it possible that such manifestations in the Yuwipi Ceremony are a shared hallucination, as science claims of such things? Is it possible that the collective mind of all the participants created a shared manifestation of their own conscious creation? It is possible, but someone had to determine what that manifestation would be. Each Yuwipi and house ceremony is different, and is visited by different spirits. Then there is the problem that regardless what these manifestations are, don’t they still represent a point of disembodied consciousness? They enter into the ceremony, and communicate specific information to the medicine man. Even if they were a creation of the collective consciousness of the participants, it existed, by virtue of it being a shared experience, external to them. It created an environment of sound, and feeling that was not within their minds (for example the hard basement floor shook with the sound (and feeling of pounding weight of the hoofs).

But then there is the sweat lodge. Each person experiences the sweat lodge differently. A very common way though is to experience spirits in the sweat lodge as lights. But it is very subjective. Or the tail I received that was not there one moment, and suddenly there the next. (Yes, only I can know if that truly happened, and whether or not it could have been placed there while I was looking the other way). But from my perspective, it appeared there from nowhere. It was placed there with a specific intention by something that must have had consciousness but was not manifested in any physical way within our reality. It was therefore disembodied consciousness.

But there is the problem—only I can truly know about it. That’s why we are on two separate paths. (I did just think of one condition that would still fit the emergent consciousness argument—alternate universes. That the tail was placed there by a being in an alternate universe, which would require that information is somehow shared between realities, and that the being in the other universe would somehow have the ability to cause mass to cross over from his universe to ours, and that within that other universe he is once again consciousness embodied by matter. But I have gone too far down the Red Road to easily buy into any such explanation. And this explanation is just as crazy from the basis of our current understanding of the physical laws of nature, as is a disembodied consciousness)

Not scientifically of course, but today we cannot use the evil seduction of a succubus as a legal defense. Though fortunately, adultery is no longer a criminal offense in most countries. But we also cannot use it as an excuse to our wives...

But I hope everyone understands that the post you are quoting from here was posted entirely for purposes of satire (no matter how true it may be).

 

We see as energy is transduced. Consensual consciousness as opposed to qualia, ("But there is the problem—only I can truly know about it"), appears to me a crystalline transduction as the facial angles of neural dendrites reproduce the same picture regardless the size of the crystal. Memory is living tissue.

The mind however is naturally abstract and new dendrites may be cultivated and old ones starved of attention. That we change our mind is the most facile way of negotiating consciousness and in turn the appearance of the world.

 

Interdependency. Nothing is ruled out by it. Everything is emergent. There is no static state.

And no true empty space.

I think we are truly defining what consciousness is.
I hope I'm not alone! lol Do we want to end our definition?!

Is there something external to the universe?

I don't follow the bit bolded there. Still could've been kitsune! ;D Or maybe an eagle dropped it over you? For me, that would be far more significant than it having just materialized there.

But do you truly know about it? Aren't you still wondering? You say it was a diembodied consciousness that put it there after all. I still believe all the facts of your tale. But your conclusions? Well, I'd have to be you, wouldn't I?

 

That's right---the zero-point field.

Science does often contemplate that there is a limit to the universe, or an end to the universe, which raises the question, what’s beyond that? On the other hand, the multiple universe theory holds that there are other universes. But in this case I am not referring to something external to the universe—for example if consciousness exists at a higher dimension, if there is a spirit world that is a different dimension from our reality, I would assume that it is still part of this same universe.

By external, however, I am saying that it is of a separate consciousness (in so far as we are all a separate consciousness as individuals) but a disembodied consciousness.

Now if you are saying that because it is manifested within our universe, it may seem disembodied to us, but in reality it is embodied within the framework of the universe—the zero-point field or the space-time continuum, or whatever, and is therefore still an emergent property of matter, or in this case, perhaps quanta, then, you would be talking about a consciousness that may still be emergent, but that represents a more fundamental aspect of being/the universe/reality, than is the simple reductionist scientific view of consciousness as being emergent only from a biological structure that enables emergent consciousness (e.g. the human brain). Such a view could, taken to its limit, affirm an animistic consciousness, yet one that is still emergent from the universe.

But if this phenomena is not external to the people participating in the ceremony, then it would mean that they are each witnessing it in their own minds, as in a shared hallucination. Or that the medicine man is creating the phenomena by creating this mass hallucination, or projecting it into the environment around him. In any of these cases, this shared experience suggests that consciousness can be at least partially projected outside of its biological structure, and in the latter case, can manipulate external matter. This is halfway there to the possibility of consciousness existing in a disembodied form (but also supports the emergent consciousness described in the previous paragraph).

I had several years of many synchronicities akin to having an eagle drop it there for me. But each time I was able to rationalize it away no matter how strangely coincidental it was. If an eagle had dropped it I would have simply rationalized that as an odd coincidence—it was eating the squirrel and just happened to drop the tail there (I would have seen it fall, because it was a very bright night). I had such experiences with animals as I experimented, and as amazing as they were, I always concluded that they were just weird coincidences with a rational, (or at least flimsy rational) explanation.

Am I still wondering? No. I couldn’t believe that it happened at first. I kept going over it that night and the next day I headed back up there to re-enact it. In the daylight I saw my footprint in the dirt exactly where the tail was. I carefully looked down at each step that night, because I didn’t want to trip with my drum. I particularly remember that spot because it was the end of the weeds, and as I stepped there, I was impressed at how well I chose that spot—it was like the medicine wheel was meant to be there. But the point is, I looked there, and if the tail had been there, I would have seen it. I was not there for that long, there were no animals, no people, and there was no way that tail could have been placed there. But only I could know that, so that is why I say that it was meant for me, and no one else could know exactly what happened and how. Therefore, even the spiritual is limited to extremely personal existential experience.

When I picked up that tail, one side of my brain was saying, “What the hell! You are holding a dead thing! A piece of a dead animal! Am I really going to keep this?! But another side of my brain instantly knew that this was the answer to my questioning, and that it was a gift for me. In fact this wasn’t even vocalized in my mind, it was just instantly understood.

The problem is that I often have to wrestle with the rational side of my mind. Even last night, I went to a House Ceremony, and I’m watching sparks fly off these rattles that are flying all around the room in the dark. I should have been open to the experience more, but a part of me was trying to find a way that the medicine man, who was sitting in the center of his altar could be doing this himself. There was actually no way---it was a small room and we were all along the four walls, with less than a foot between the boundary of the altar and our feet and legs as we at on the floor around the altar. There were sticks at the four corners of the altar, and in the front of the altar were such things as a stuffed eagle head, a stuffed bird, the sacred pipe of the woman that was being doctored, a buffalo skull and so forth. The rattles were moving along the floor, and in the air, they were moving completely around the altar, and if the medicine man did that, he would have knocked everything down in the pitch-black darkness. I knew that, and I would remind myself that---but then my mind would start again trying to figure out a way he could do that.

When some members of my lodge community and I were discussing having me go up to Bear Butte to sit on the hill (vision quest) people were afraid that the people on the rez would get upset, because I am white. I already knew that this would be a problem, and respected that. But one person tried to explain it to me, saying that the local community knows that some white men go crazy up there. He then explained that, “…they don’t know you. But they know that Indians are tuned into things up there that most White men aren’t.”

I think there is a lot of truth to that, in the sense that as long as I am wrestling with the rational side of my mind, I am missing out on things. On my first vision quest, nothing happened the first day. I sat there holding a sacred pipe for what seemed like an eternity, I prayed and sat, and looked, and it dragged on and on. Then that night I fell asleep, and I probably slept for several hours. All of a sudden I opened my eyes, and in the starlight, I clearly saw two bats swoop in from the West (the first direction, and the home of the Wakinyan (thunderbirds) and bats are messengers of the wakinyan), that flew over my face, one in front of the other, swooping to within inches, then went back up, turned on a dime and swooped right down over my face again and back out to the West. (I say in and out, because I was in my own Hochoka (altar), which was marked off by tobacco ties). They did not make any sound, no squeak, no sound of flying, even though they were so close to my face. I watched in awe—my rational mind was turned off, and I instantly knew what they were teaching me—I didn’t think it, I didn’t vocalize it in my mind, I simply instantly knew: I had to pay close attention, I had to stay aware, because everything spirit was going to show me, would happen silently—like stealth, and I could easily miss it. I didn’t think this through, I didn’t figure it out, I didn’t rationalize it—but I just instantly knew. And that is exactly how everything happened the rest of the time on the hill.

The vision quest is especially hard for us modern people. You have no sense of time. One day seems to last for five weeks, and at the same time, it seems to be over in a few hours. But you sit quietly, and your mind wanders this way and that way, you rationalize this and that, and what your life is and why and blah, blah, blah---but I think as this occurs it begins to shut down that rational side, at least for short periods of time, and that is when spirit teaches you. That is when we modern people can be ‘tuned in’ like the Indians who follow the Red Road, and were raised with a cultural context. Perhaps this is why post-early-planter-civilized India developed meditation—to still the rational side of the mind in an attempt to regain the deep spiritual insight and power of their soma-eating ancestors.

Rationalism is an aspect of the conscious mind, which is controlled by the ego. A tail cannot spontaneously appear in any rational sense of our physical reality. I was so wrapped up in the rational objectivistic viewpoint that I needed something completely irrational to push me into opening up to, ‘tuning into,’ and accepting all the irrational synchronicities that I’ve experienced since and continue to experience now. I still have to struggle at times with my rational side. But there is no question about what happened with that tail.

 

when encountering the conciously irrational , i pause ,
and in this pause i exist quietly and without a story .
it's a sort of lonesomeness but not an emptiness since
an illusion of emptiness will be filled by anxiety .


lonesomeness can accept a new friend - even such
an odd one as spark of light flittin' about and who is
messin' with the contiguity .

 

MVW:

That consciousness can create matter, that it can project itself, doesn't support the existence of disembodiment.

:-D I've enjoyed reading this. Thanks Wolf. You've got me wondering about those rattles now! Triboluminescence?

 

We evolve as we revolve.

Coagulating.

Is there a finer thing than communication?

Locality and Remoteness.

 

lol Don't be such a clot! There's more to it than that!

That's a very good question...

External to the universe? How? In that you have never even remotely located them within it?! I'm sure you have, at least from the perspective of others. lol