[MD] Consciousness

[ml]

Morning Platt,

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Platt Holden" <plattholden at gmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Friday, December 19, 2008 2:25 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] Consciousness


 <snip>


Platt:
> What are the "tool sets" of intellect besides science and reason?

mel:
The "tool sets" are the competencies-one-gains to leverage
our abilities to "model and transform" the parts of the world
outside of our brains into meaningful reflections within our 
minds.

Just as the hand of an ancestor picked up a stone, a stick, and
a strip of rawhide and created something new, an axe,  the mind
combines sense data (patterns), experience, and context to
create something new.

Platt:
> Does one need to understand the physiology of the eardrum or how sound 
> travels through the air in order to lose one's separate self sense in 
> listening to Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto? That's the sort of 
> experience I was driving at. 

mel:
It is not that one needs to understand the abstracted physiology,
but one does need to learn the operational possibilities of hearing
and appreciate them beyond JUST the experience.

I grew up in a house without music.  I vividly remember the first time 
I heard classical music played.  The grade school teacher brought in
a record player and put on the "Grand Canyon Suite."  I was in the 
front row, next to the left side speaker and recoiled at the tumbling 
chaos of noise that errupted in a confusion from the speaker...it was
horrid, an immediately low quality experience.  

Jangling, whining, screeching, booming, confusion rained and 
flooded the room.  I looked around and saw that no one else was 
sharing this experience and I turned back to the speaker.  

What was I missing?

I watched the red label in the center of the disc and the big
RCA circling 33 times per minute and tried to hear what was
going on.  Some parts of it were more bearable than others.

Maybe midway through the first movement something suddenly 
aligned and I "got it."  There was pattern, regularity, harmony, and
melody, stuff I had no name for, music and space and flow
and not just individual sounds.

Music "theory" would be a tool.  
To perform certain "forms of music" they must be
understood and whether its by formal theory or
fast, personal aprehension, the musician has to 
"get it" or there will be no success in performance.

Complex, fine motor skills are also a heavy modeling
activity on the CNS.(central nervous system).  Diving 
is a very complex task and the divier needs to learn
to express motions of position, time, change, and
movement, that will cause the outcome.

Before you dismiss that from intellect, there is one more
item that makes it intensely interesting as a "tool set"
of its own.  Divers develop an intense non-verbal language
by which they can understand each other's movements
outside of the actual performance of the dive...

The language is a physical shorthand of small motions
expressing the reaches, bends, twists, flips, and entries
that make up their technical repertoir.
Two divers who do not share the same linguistic 
background can communicate meaning in the realm of 
diving, while standing  together outside the pool.

Martial artists often do the same.  

In both of these cases the participants "model and transform" 
parts of the world outside of their brains into meaningful 
reflections within their minds AND communicate them to
others.

Painters, sculptors, anyone in complex technologies, potentially
can have specialized intellectual "tool sets"

Science is simply one very specialized and powerful tool
set.   Reason is not so much a tool as the talent to leverage,
create, and use the tools we need and derive the meaning.

Maybe the most important part of this is that as we are not 
truly used to looking at the world in terms of MoQ we often 
forget that anything we do crosses multiple levels of our 
existence to make things happen in life.

example:
The [biological] diver pushes on a [physical] board that is
a [static construction of intellect expressed on the physical]
to gain speed and hight for motion [dynamic physicality] to 
express a form [static intellectual construct] in competition
[a social function of a diving meet] and other people [in a 
defined social role] will assign numeric values for various
attributes, aesthetic and intellectual, upon the result.

So...that is how I see it when I use the tool box analogy.

Thanks for the oportunity to work this out.

thanks--mel