Me

[kelly_lesbo]

I'm beginning to realize that my service to Eris is leading me down particularly odd personality paths of late. The fact that I identify with buddhist philosophy does not negate my deep appreciation of the discordian nature of being. My sense of humor is so deeply entrenched in pushing the boundaries of my own mind space that I'm losing "normal"

Comments

[drainboy]

I agree chairs aren't self-repairing in the same way as a biological process (which is why I asked what you meant by self-sustaining so there was no confusion :), however to say that pattern breaking is "death" because the system is self-sustaining doesn't make much sense in any objective way. Would a robot arm that stacked up a set of blocks "die" when you perturbed the system in such a way that the blocks stopped being restacked just because it had at one point been self-sustaining? Does a caterpillar "die" when it reforms as a butterfly?

Not sure what you mean by this. I don't have a specific sense of being alive.
No and you don't have a specific sense of breathing or running either. In fact I'd argue that you don't have a specific sense of sight or smell, just a lot of interesting chemical reactions that come together to give you something your brain thinks is cohesive. If it being cohesive to your brain is what makes it a single sense then I would say that you have a sense of running (as long as you go running long enough) where I could say "are you running" and you'd be able to answer without consciously thinking about it. You'd have a "am I running" detection device as real as any of the other supposed 5 senses.
In that context I'd say that I have a sense of being alive as some self-conscious entity interacting with the world and separate from the world by my own observer-led distinction. In that case I'd question what I mean by illusionary...which I'll try to figure out whilst you reply to the rest of this :)

[andrewducker]

If you mean "All in our heads" then you're basically saying "My feelings are in my head".

Which sounds pretty tautological to me :->

[kelly_lesbo]

Sometimes Andrew I can't tell if you are playing devil's advocate or you attempt to be deliberately disengaging to the meat of the topic. The fact yo uput emoticons at the end suggests you do get a little feeling of warmth rushing through you at a point well made. Nothing wrong with that, but it confuses me as to your actual position.

I know some very intelligent people who are great and deconstructing arguments and feel accomplished at doing so even if they don't admit it, but in that process they miss all the potential benefit of growing new ideas and perspectives from shared insights.

Having never met you I can't say either way.

I'm not putting your points down at all though, because they are obviously all well thought out and elonquently put. My writing sounds like the writings of a crazy, bitter person in comparrison so I'm not picking fault here.

Whenever you engage in such discussions, do you have any objectives? Do you feel you can gain understanding with debate that doesn't rely on hard scientific evidence?

The problem with philosophy from a scientific background is that philosophical ideas lend themselves credibility from ideas extended from firm foundations of the scientific tool, but it can often also be restrictive to the point of stifling debate.

Not so much that you and I disagree, or that you demand proof and I do not, it seems we take tangents on being able to view the same things from none regulated and common perspectives.

It's okay to lay out your beliefs and be none scientific if doing so puts you in a better position to make judgements in the rational, scientific and "normal" perspective.

It's just that your points remind a very certain younger version of me, and Mike about 4 years ago and I'm wondering how each of us has ended up with our current understandings and why mine changed so dramatically.

[andrewducker]

I know some very intelligent people who are great and deconstructing arguments and feel accomplished at doing so even if they don't admit it, but in that process they miss all the potential benefit of growing new ideas and perspectives from shared insights.

Or rather, they don't learn from false arguments. I learn new things all the time - but I question _everything_ - I don't trust you to know The Truthg any more than George Bush or George Monbiot. I don't expect you to take anything I say on faith either.

It's just that your points remind a very certain younger version of me, and Mike about 4 years ago and I'm wondering how each of us has ended up with our current understandings and why mine changed so dramatically.
And there we hit the nail on the head - you remind me of how I was about 10 years ago, and I'm intrigued by it.

I mostly engage with smart people because I want to learn from them. I _want_ to be shown to be wrong, or to show them to be wrong, or at the very least find the points where we diverge, work out why we do and be comfortable that the difference is irresolvable.

Do you feel you can gain understanding with debate that doesn't rely on hard scientific evidence?
Most of my debate doesn't - but then most of my debate isn't about the nature of the universe :-> I'm prepared to be persuaded that there are parts of the universe that aren't hard and scientific - but nobody has managed it so far. Which is a shame, because while I think a purely material universe is pretty fucking incredible by itself, one that was also "magical" would be even more so.

[kelly_lesbo]

I do see where you are coming from.

Can I ask you a question..

Can there be such a thing as "everything"?

By "everything" I mean whatever there is conceptually perceived from without.

My stance is there is such a thing as "everything" and it takes that everything to make me who I am. That is as close to god as I can rest upon from a scientific understanding.

The way I explained it to Mike once was like this. Scientifically what do I need to make me, me?

I need blood, bone, hair, water, cells.

What else do I need to make me?

Well without gravity my ancestors would have never been, so I need gravity. I need gravity as much as blood, bone, hair and cells to make me.

What else?

I also need time in which to exist or more accurately I need to be following times arrow or else I don't have the ability to think, talk, feel etc

What else?

I need space and the "laws" of physics. Without those there is no me.

So I am time, space, gravity, laws of physics, cells, blood bone - atoms, fundamental particles, wavicles, fuzzy logic.

You can't remove any of that stuff, because if you do I am no longer me.

So in as much as I am the interactions of brain cells, blood, flesh and bone, I am gravity, time, wavicles, quantumn particles.

I may not be every quantumn particle or wavicle, but then I'm not every bone or brain cell. If you don't have issue with defining "me" by terms of flesh then you must also define me in terms of time and particles.

It is not that I - "Kelly" am all of everything (god) it is that I GOD (everything) am all of "Kelly."

So now you can say 'Ah yes, but everything is not the same as a supreme being who can think and control all - not a supreme creator!' and you would be right.

But, it is fact that whatever "everything" is and has been, has created
the "you" that exclaims that there is no god.

It's not about GOD or any religious mumbo jumbo, it's having the perspective of everything whilst never being able or needing to define it.

I'd love to hear your view on that.

[andrewducker]

See, that's fascinating - and a perfect example of how conversation gets interesting once you move past the generalities and pat phrases and get into specifics :->

Aaaaand you'll get a proper answer once I've had a chance to think about it - and as I'm gaming tonight and then off to London for the weekend first thing tomorrow I'll have a couple of days to mull it over.

Cheers for the thought-provoking!

[kelly_lesbo]

There be gold in this here brain o'mine, but gosh darn ya have to dig fer it.

Darn tootin!

[drainboy]

Well I'd say that reality is in my head, feelings no more and no less. What I'm saying when I say "I agree we can never die" is that either we were never really here in the first place or there is some other aspect that survives. We are our own self-delusion.

I have no evidence for "some other aspect" therefore the former by rational deduction, although I always get the niggling feeling that there's something else that I don't seem to have the vocabulary for. Something logically wrong with the fact that I'm an observer at all.

[andrewducker]

I'd say that reality is in my head
I'd completely disagree with you. Your perception of reality is in your head. Unless you're going to go the whole solipsist hog then you're going to have to admit that there's an external reality that your interpretations are coming from.

And why do you think we were never here in the first place? There's some part of The Whole Sort Of General MishMash that's pattern matching the things around it, making predictions, has self-awareness, etc. that we can identify as you. You even use the word "I" 5 or 6 times up there - if that's not what you mean by it, what is?

[drainboy]

Everything you can look at or talk about or point to or sense or think about as being in some way separate from anything else is in your head. You've never experienced objective existence. Anything that is distinguished from anything else is only in the head of anyone that makes such a distinction. Which is what I meant when I said "reality is in my head", which is a wrong use of the word reality. What I meant was "everything apart from reality is in my head, but that includes everything"

So as I am just some transient structure of "whatever" that briefly has the kind of organisation able to create tautological distinctions (anything I define as distinct, is only distinct in the sense that I define it as being distinct), then any distinction of myself as separate from some universal whole is only as real as I define it to be to me. If, then, the material world as we know it is the only world there is, then any existence as a distinct entity is only the self-bootstrapping distinction as made by the kind of entity able to make such distinctions (which can only be defined by other such entities similarly able to consider such an entity distinct), which is all very circular logic-wise and only really leaves us with the position that existence is illusionary, because there is no right perspective with which to view it. So my existence is illusionary, even though there are some other distinction-making-entites out there that can point at some partition of space-time and say "we roughly agree which bits were Mike, because we happen to be very similar sorts of distinction-making entites".

And if the material world isn't all there is then there might be some eternal observer thing going on, but I seriously doubt that however much I'd like it to be true.

[drainboy]

As an addendum to the above, I don't think you don't already think the first paragraph and the second paragraph is my answer to what I meant by "we were never really here in the first place" and "We are our own self-delusion".

[andrewducker]

only really leaves us with the position that existence is illusionary, because there is no right perspective with which to view it.

You seem to be of the opinion that there is either objective meaning or no meaning - a classic aristotalean view of the world, that either A is true or ~A is true, with no room for the fuzziness that real life entails.

Why, just because you're a fragile, momentary chunk of the universe does that make you any less real? Just because an atom is viewed as a "thing" only because we're looking at it at one level that doesn't mean that those observations aren't useful or accurate - it merely means they aren't objective and universal.

"Illusory" indicates that there's no value at all - that you just aren't there. You clearly are - because you're typing responses to me. What you aren't is an onmiscient objective observer, hard-pressed from a platonic ideal and eternal in your base form. But that doesn't make you _nothing_ - it just makes you part of the Whole Sort Of General Mish-Mash of things.

It's like saying that because our colour senses are dependent on the structure of our eyes and our brains there's no such thing as "Red". Which is true from one sort of not-very-useful point of view, but as you can design purely mechanical systems to recognise the colour red it clearly has _some_ existence out there in etic reality - it's just that we also assign it meaning in our minds.

[kelly_lesbo]

----- Why, just because you're a fragile, momentary chunk of the universe does that make you any less real? Just because an atom is viewed as a "thing" only because we're looking at it at one level that doesn't mean that those observations aren't useful or accurate - it merely means they aren't objective and universal. --------

I'm not sure of the validity of the term "useful" in this discussion. All you seem to be saying that because things appear real and predictable to us then that is good enough for you. I'm sure you'd agree that things "seem" accurate and useful to us. Well to ancient humans the gods "seemed" to get angry with us when a storm came. It didn't matter whether it was weather patterns or gids because it was useful for them to get the heck out of the storm. Some ancient civillisations could predict when the gods would get angry and send storms - the ancestors of shamans figured out the signs of an impending storm by watching the behaviour of animals and the color of the sky. It didn't matter about it being the warning signs of a god's mood or that it was something meteorlogical, those predictions were useful.

In retrospect we can't help thinking how utterly foolish their belief systems were. Our own future generations will surely think the same of us. I'd argue that your belief sysetm is based on what seems good enough for you to go along with, but which has no substance to it, because "reality" is an infinite cascade of effects that seem to us to be useful or accurate. Particles are to us, what gods were to ancient humans.

I think that if you believe that understanding the behaviour of particles is useful and accurate then your underlying reality is as solid as the ancient gods were real. It's all about what you decide to believe, not what reality is. I'm trying very hard not to be caught up in any belief system, i don't buy any of it these days.

[drainboy]

Alright, alright, less of the italics :)

So, there's reality, which is outside our heads, objective, but we cannot look at, talk about or argue about because we can only do that with objects we make distinct ourselves. Then there's our perception of reality, which is shared to the degree that our organisation and experience is also shared. My existence as a distinct entity is only as "real" as the self-bootrapping system that considers it distinct thinks it is. This gives it plenty of meaning in that scope, but it is only self-defined meaning. When you say Just because an atom is viewed as a "thing" only because we're looking at it at one level that doesn't mean that those observations aren't useful or accurate , the terms "useful" and "accurate" are as wound up in the subjective distinction-making process as much as anything else.

The idea that it is illusionary is that by aiming your anthropocentric lens at it you will perceive it as just one aspect from an infinite number of aspects, none of objectively superior value, any of which might argue that their perception is in some way the best and none of which have any right to say that it is.

Which doesn't make any perception worthless within its own scope, it just doesn't make any of them more real.

As to there being an objective "red", well you've seen those illusions where two different looking board squares look completely different but are in fact the same. Where does red lie in this? What if you built a machine that analyzed wavelengths very accurately and pointed it at some light waves and they said "yes" or "no" to red, you'd have built a red detector. One that probably only worked within certain boundaries of the speed of the object taking the measurements and gravitational conditions and probably could only tell you if an object was red to the nth degree if all environmental conditions were identical. In the end you'd probably only have a detector that measured something very specific, an identity detector for a whole range of environmental factors. And merely using a machine to do this is still wrapped up in your perception-of-red-by-machine rather than your perception of red by your own eyes. It's no more a valid tag of that section of reality than any other one, unless you say that evolution originated, anthropocentrically viewed reality is the one true reality.

[andrewducker]

You'd have a "am I running" detection device as real as any of the other supposed 5 senses.

Senses sense _difference_ - I can tell whether I'm running or not by comparison.

I have no idea what being dead feels like, so I can't actually tell whether the current feelings I have would change (or even if that makes any sense).

In that context I'd say that I have a sense of being alive as some self-conscious entity interacting with the world and separate from the world by my own observer-led distinction.
Sounds like you have a sense of the self/other distinction. I definitely have one of those.

[drainboy]

Senses sense _difference_ - I can tell whether I'm running or not by comparison.

Just in sight you have senses of colour contrast, brightness and movement (I'm sure others could come up with more). These are discrete things that form a whole in some senses and are separate in others.

I have no idea what being dead feels like, so I can't actually tell whether the current feelings I have would change (or even if that makes any sense).

Well given how your feelings change just when you're asleep I'm guessing they change a lot more when you're dead.