defining conciousness

Well it's an idea, but the fact that this has never been demonstrated experimentally makes me extremely sceptical that anyone can sense the body's miniscule electromagnetic field visually.

Even if they could, what would this tell us? an "aura" is usually thought of as some kind of manifestation of "soul", not just the random electromagnetism which everything gives off. Why don't they see auras coming from postboxes or lumps of poo?

A psychological explanation not only explains why people's experiences can't be observed and reproduced scientifically, but also why they believe this to be a manifestation of soul.

Isn't synesthaesia genetically inherited?

 

Greetings Lithium or should I call you Job, for certainly you have his patience. Frankly I'm curious how these people navigate around power stations, or high tension power lines, the EMF leakage from these should render them virtually blind. The the rods and cones of the human eye are photo receptors period. I've read perhaps 4 or 5 of the pages of this discussion and am quite impressed by your adhearance and application of sound reason. I would like to recommend two books to any interested in this topic(the original one),
"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", by Julian Jaynes.
and
"The Mindful Brain" Mountcastle and Edleman
Actually it is only the first third of Jaynes book, in which he does an excellent job of operationally defining consciousness, mostly by pointing out what it is not; and the first 8-10 pages of "The Mindful Brain" are about as much as can be, with significant exertion, be comprehendable without specific training in neuroscience. but no matter what it takes, once you have the mental imagery of what is being said in the paragraph that begins, "The basic idea is as follows the large scale structures of the brain......" I can garuntee that your sense of wonder will be profoundly impacted. It is the absolutely most extraordinarily exquisite, and elegant perception I have ever experienced.
Peace, Love and Wonder
sine cera

 

hmmm okay i fell asleep woke up and accidently reposted the above post, sleepily looking for how to delete it.

 

Good point about power lines!

Thankyou for the book recommendations. Another on the topic I would recommend, on consciousness from the perspective of psychology, philosophy and neuroscience is "Consciousness Explained" by the philosopher Daniel Dennett

 

what is being suggested here is that we should find our interpretation of reality in the books of others and build our reality on their ideas...
i mentioned earlier that we should be striving against the ideas of passive reality consumerism and start taking responsibilty for being the co creators of reality.. i fail to see how that monkey's perception of reality is any better or well founded than this mokey's, when all they appear to be doing is basing their interpretation on the interpretation of all the other monkies.

if string theory and multi dimensionality is the best answer we have... then we should be working with it and changing our realities...

rather than sitting back and being told what is best to think by another man with a phd an a white coat.... who incidently will argue his point until he's blue in the face... if he cant be proven wrong.

 

Not sure I follow ... are you suggesting we should not read books?

 

Likewise how can one form an opinion if one does not try to obtain all the facts.

 

I'm not listening to you lot anymore! haha

 

Hey, go and create your own reality for all I care

 

no... i kinda went on a ramble..there
what i'm saying is:-
books can only teach us someone elses point of view.. that point of view is no more or less valid than mine..(assuming we are all privy to the same facts).

science can only proove so much.. beyond that is the void of understanding...

we shouldn't wait on the edge until science prooves another safe ledge for us to stand on.... we should jump into it.. and create it with our own minds, as the last ledge of science suggests.

 

Agreed that books can only teach so much. That is why I cannot take on faith the Bible or any other religious text. Science can only take us so far at our present level of understanding but I have faith, if you want to term it that, that it can provide all the answers if all factors are observable and there are no limitations to observation. That's where I'm standing....

 

I for one have learned masses of new information and been prompted into thoughts I would never otherwise have had by reading books on science ... I still don't really get what you're saying. Of course books are written from someone else's point of view - that's what's so good about them! My own point of view is nowhere near complete enough. The more information I can assimilate from other sources the more rounded my understanding will be.

Also, there are technical reasons why some arguments are more valid than others. Logic is the science of proving what is true according to set and unalterable criteria. If something is shown to be logically true then it is by definition more valid than a position which is logically flawed.

Again I don't really follow you. If you're saying we should think about new possibilities to explain the things we don't understand ... of course, that's what science is doing all the time. But at the same time you don't accept these hypotheses as true before they are proven likely. That is an exceptionally poor idea! If they are proven unlikely (like auras, and psychic abilities) then you abandon them and start looking for a new idea which is possible.

 

Also, I admit that I am not clever enough, and don't have access to enough information to make informed and valuable contributions to scientific knowledge. I may have my own half-arsed ideas but I can learn vastly more from listening to people who have better brains than I and who spend their lives investigating and evaluating the kind of phenomena we have been discussing ... than I could from listening purely to my own instincts

 

sometimes though science isnt logical, for example gravity, scientist have not found one 'graviton' or any particle that explains this pull, and it can just be mass or large people would generate a slightly higher one as well as fast moving ojects, except that they create suction. another bit about gravity is that it is a pulling force not a pushing force, so why hasnt earth been pulled into the sun, or mercury for that matter, that is the closest so it should have been pulled in eons ago, and the moon should have like wise crashed into us.


others include fire and oxygens part in it ....since it is used up in a local environment, that means oxygen is attracted to heat (fire) as part of it's behaviour. one reason for this is the need for an energy which causes "lift" in relation to heat other than atoms randomly bouncing off each other. Thermal theory gives no added "mechanics" which drives the atom other than this statement to explain a range of behaviours.It's illogical because it is able to measure behaviour rather than give root cause . both these answers are linked since heat creates lift which defies gravity.

 

All of these questions are explained by Newton and Einstein, as I can recall, there are no holes in the theory. It is to do with mass, and large people do have a larger gravitational pull, but since the difference is infintesimal and virtually nothing in comparison to the gravitational pull of the Earth, it is irrelevant. An explanation of orbits can be explained found here and put in better words than I can:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity

I don't think that there is much left unexplained by Einstein's general relativity as far as gravity is concerned. Of course it's science way beyond my level, and Newton's theories, though slightly out of line, are easier to get to grips with. This is all logical, but you'd have to know the theory in depth to see that. Science is the apex of logic. And when theories are inconsistent they are abandoned for more logical ones. To date, nothing has arisen that has really challenged general relativity except quantumn mechanics, and for that there is string theory to link the two....

 

i'm afraid that einsteins relativity is still just a theory, it hasnt been proved or disproved, and thats illogical from my view because E=MCsq (energy=mass times the velocity of light squred for those that dont know) relies on light vaving a constant speed, which it does not have as when it passes through things such as water it slows down, hence refraction.

but i will concede on the gravity thing, you learn something new every second.

 

The speed of light c denotes the speed of light in a vacuum, which is a constant. This "just a theory" idea is a bit wrong too - the strict scientific definition of a "theory" such as Einstein's is a falsifiable claim based upon experimental evidence. As such E=mc2 describes a relationship based upon observable phenomena and which explains those phenomena in a logically sound way. It is therefore proven.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%3Dmc2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory#Science

 

Or as close as it can be. The nature of falsification means that in theory, nothing can be proven, only disproven, as you cannot infer general laws from a finite number of observations. You may hold a hypothesis that all ravens are black, based on any great number of observations. That theory holds, but it must be continually open to testing and must be discarded or revised should a white raven be found that falsifies it. In practice though, given the lack of falsification, you can call it proven.

 

Yes this is quite true. One thing that is so interesting about quantum mechanics is that there are circumstances under which relativity and classical mechanics become inconsistent with quantum phenomena. So while relativity logically fits observable non-quantum phenomena there are subatomic interactions for which it breaks down.
...as you may be able to tell, I'm a bit out of my depth discussing this!

But this seems to me a good example of new evidence forcing us to refine our understanding and perfectly illustrates how no theoretical frameworks are fixed.

But yeah, the relationship of matter to energy in the non-quantum realm is , as well as it can be, proven.

 

Stop saying that, starting to make me feel like a real pleb.