[MD] Metaphysics and the mystic.

[Carl Thames]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "118" <ununoctiums at gmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Friday, February 03, 2012 11:55 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] Metaphysics and the mystic.


> Hi Carl,
>
> This whole area of consciousness is indeed difficult to encapsulate,
> and I am sure everything I can think of has already been said.  I
> therefore try to use the format of MoQ to bring the idea of
> consciousness into that metaphysics.  As you and dmb say, this can be
> viewed through the writings of W. James as a starting point.  Despite
> my teasing of dmb, I like W. James and find his writings thought
> provoking.  So, I am not suggesting we dismiss what he writes as
> inconsequential, but rather try to take them to the next level (if we
> assume to be able to do such a thing).  I think this is what dmb is
> trying to do.  He will always know more of James' writings than I
> will, so I defer to what he presents on the subject.

Since nearly everything I know about James is anecdotal, I'll leave it with 
people who know more about it.  I was just making the point that we build 
upon what has gone before.  While I firmly believe in innovation, most of 
what we call that is simply tweaking previous thought.  Then again, with 
people like Gene Roddenbury, et. al., they were coming up with stuff that 
hadn't existed before, and science is trying hard to make those ideas a 
reality.  An intersting aspect of that is that the person who comes up with 
the concept is rarely the person who makes it manifest.

>
> On 2/2/12, Carl Thames <cthames at centurytel.net> wrote:
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "118" <ununoctiums at gmail.com>
>> To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2012 11:07 AM
>> Subject: Re: [MD] Metaphysics and the mystic.
>>
>>
>>> Hi Carl,
>>> Thank you for your post, this could be interesting; I may learn
>>> something.  While in my line of business I must always supply credible
>>> references for what I present scientifically, I have not used that
>>> method in this forum.  However, I am happy to look through the books
>>> on my shelf and do so if necessary.
>>
>> Sorry about that.  When I read your message, I had just finished reading 
>> the
>> article that I cited.  That brings up the question: What do you think 
>> about
>> synchronicity?  That kind of stuff makes all kind of bells go off in my
>> head, and further strengthens what Schroedinger said.  You mention brain
>> science, I read the article and pick up a couple of books on the subject,
>> and then meet with a friend who hands me a brochure announcing a one-day
>> conference conducted by Brian E. King, expert in Applied Biopsychology
>> that's going to be in town next month.  The conference is about how the
>> brain forms new habits.  Seriously, I couldn't make this stuff up.
>
> Yeah, people with too much time on their hands and sometimes a little
> too much arrogance.  The structural approach is an objective view.  It
> does not replace the subjective view, nor control it.  We can break
> appart a painting into all of its components and material composition,
> but that does not explain our appreciation of such painting.  Beware
> of those who tell you what you are, and why.

Carl:
People who try to put me into a conceptual box usually end up shaking their 
heads and walking away. <G>  i.e. They have more to fear from me than I have 
from them.

Mark:
> Don't get me wrong, I like references since that gives me something to
> read.  In this internet setting I just try to get away from constantly
> having to find literary support for what I present as precedence.  If
> requested to do so, I can dig up an article that helped me with my
> thinking.

Carl:
Don't worry about it.  I just did it as the result a wild hair that got out 
of hand.  I had the article RIGHT THERE, and the information was at hand, so 
I included it.  My best advice would be not to hold your breath until I do 
it again. ;-)

Mark:
> Synchronicity is a very interesting subject for me.  It is difficult
> to present outside some deterministic-like setting, but it does lie
> outside of that in my opinion.  A book I read a while ago called "The
> Tao of Psychology" by J.S. Bolen, MD (a psychotherapist of sorts)
> provides a presentation of the synthesis of Taoism and synchronicity
> as presented by Jung.  Jung was capable of incorporating Eastern
> thought into modern psychology in a way that I believe to be thought
> provoking of underlying phenomenon (perhaps the pre-conceptual).  In
> that book she attempts to persuade us of the importance of the concept
> of synchronicity in modern psychology.

Carl:
I read the Wiki article on it, and apparently Jung coined the term.  I like 
the idea presented by Lewis Carroll, in which the Queen tells Alice, "It's a 
poor sort of memory that only works in one direction."

Mark:
> I could wax eloquent (?) on synchronicity, and still not say much.
> One approach is to view the present moment as it unfolds as the
> amalgamation of "all things" into a single instant.  Each present
> moment that we all partake in, as a team, requires the effort of "all
> that is".  Often we get glimpses of this in "obvious" synchronistic
> events.  I am sure you have experienced these as premonitions or
> something.  These "obvious" and perhaps enlightening connections, are
> simple manifestations of what happens at a much larger and smaller
> scale, but that we do not have the capacity to be aware of, in my
> opinion.  I have existed for intervals with the realization "as if"
> synchronicity is present at each moment, and I can tell you that it is
> very disabling and confusing.

Carl:
The way synchronicity normally appears to me is I'll get on a subject, 
usually something I don't normally work with, and suddenly I'll see 
references to it, articles about it, etc. for the next couple of weeks.  A 
good example of that is treehouses.  I got on the idea once, and it seemed 
like every time I turned around there was information about treehouses.  I 
remember going to the V.A. hospital for an eye exam, sitting in the waiting 
area and picking up a magazine at random, and there was an article about 
treehouses in it.  This was Time, or Newsweek, or some other national 
magazie that didn't normally have articles about esoteric topics.  It was 
pretty weird for a while there.  Something similar is happening now with 
brain structure, brain injury, and character.

Mark:
> If we remove the structured approach that we must use in life, say
> through the intervention of normal thought processes through chemicals
> (psychotropics) which provide such intervention we can also get a
> glimpse into this.  I have not taken that path for many, many years,
> but I still remember what it felt like and can recall it to a degree.
> Perhaps this is the dreaded "flashback" phenomenon.  Yet, I can take
> it or leave it, and therefore stay somewhat grounded.  If I were to
> get stuck there, I could not function to support my family.  I suppose
> this is a manifestation of schizophrenia if it persists.  After all
> schizophrenia is a loss of "normal" awareness.

Carl:
That speaks more to a source monitoring error than to synchronicity, IMHO. 
I've had exactly ONE experience with psycilocybn <sp?> mushrooms, and didn't 
get much hallucinations from them.  I got a bit of tracers that lasted about 
5 seconds, then nada.  I probably didn't take enough of them.  After I had 
given up on the experience, I went inside the tent and laid down.  Shortly 
thereafter, I got the idea to visualize a violet flame (do a search on it) 
above my head, and I fed most of the recurring images from  traumatic events 
into the flame.  I had been dwelling on them for almost twenty years.  After 
that night, I stopped dwelling on them.  I have thought of repeating the 
experiment, but I'm too paranoid about the illegality of the shrooms.

Mark:
> All incoming information must be somewhat separated so that we can
> distinguish sight from sound.  This sensory integration is a
> difficulty that many autistic have.  Sight comes in as smell and so
> forth.  This can possibly be induced through certain chemicals.  The
> lack of such integrative capacity (or "normalization") also gives a
> sense of a synchronistic "reality".  Indeed the newborn child develops
> such sensory integration in order to take part in the societal
> structures that we create.  It is not hard to believe that something
> is lost in such taming of the mind.

Carl:
Agreed.  I've long suspected that "reality" is more of a trap than most 
people realize.

Mark:
> In the past in this forum I have presented the concept of wave
> function collapse.  I just Googled this and the first few hits will
> give an idea of what I mean.  I don't particularly like Wiki, but it
> will suffice.  This is a quantum presentation of how the present
> moment appears.  It is important to note that the individual plays as
> much of a role in this collapse as does everything else.  This gives
> birth to the idea that "we create what we measure" which is an
> interesting result, at least in terms of metaphysical contemplation.
> Of course Schroedinger and his cat that he can never look at is one
> such conundrum.  But these are thought experiments, so I am not sure
> of the strengthen part of it.  If everybody agrees with Schroedinger,
> then I guess it becomes strong.  But we can choose to agree or not.
> Just because he is a physicist does not make him right.

Carl:
I did a search on it as well.  If that's what's happening, then we really DO 
co-create our own reality.  Jung commented on it, along with Pauli, in a 
paper they presented together.  According to them, it would appear that the 
reality we experience is totally dependent on the observations we choose to 
make.  I'm not totally comfortable with that concept.  Even less so since 
I've been reading "Descartes' Error" by Antonio Damasio.  I've barely gotten 
a good start on it, (he describes the effects of lesions on different areas 
of the brain, and more significantly how those lesions affect character) and 
it's making me re-think a lot of previously held assumptions.  I haven't 
read enough yet to decide what I'm going to end up thinking about it, but it 
is stirring the grey matter.

Mark:
> Generally, I can present to you that "wave function collapse" suggests
> that of all possibilities of the present moment, one must be the one
> which becomes.  The algorithm (if you will) leading to this actual
> present moment could be seen as one of synchronicity.  It is important
> to bring free-will into this function, otherwise we are back to the
> never ending unfolding of the original "idea" of the universe in a
> predetermined fashion, which I do not find very convincing.  In
> addition to our own free-will, we must also assume that everything has
> free will (as Pirsig explains in Lila), in my opinion.

Carl:
The problem I have with the predetermined concept is that I don't know who 
gets to do the predetermining.  If we do it ourselves, then Lewis Carroll's 
comment applies, if we attribute it to a divine being, then there's more 
going on than most are willing to admit.  My shamanic background teaches 
that we are all here to learn, and generally we make an agreement before we 
incarn here what that's going to be.  We decide before we come what the best 
situation will be to learn what we need to learn, and we incarn into that 
situation, with those parents, with that socio-economic status, etc. to 
facilitate that learning. The problem with that is that we don't come back 
with full knowledge of what we are supposed to learn.  We have to figure it 
out as we go.  We DO come back with specific interests and talents, so who 
knows?

Mark:
>From this
> attribution of free will to all, we can then claim that the universe
> is moral.  This is another conclusion that Pirsig comes to as I
> understand it.  Is Synchronicity moral?

Carl:
I don't see morality in quite the same way.  I see it as a cultural thing, 
and even then it's something that becomes a choice.  Because of that, I 
don't see free will as being a contributor.  Does that make sense?  We have 
the ability to choose, within a certain set of possibilities, and we tend to 
make those choice based on our preconditioning.  Descartes' Error begins 
with a discussion of Phineas Gage's accident, and the subsequent 
consequences.  Following his accident, his character changed significantly, 
and he began making very poor moral choices, which would indicate that the 
"moral" aspect of his character had been damaged.  This would indicate that 
what we call "moral" has a chemical, or otherwise structural, basis within 
our brains.  Like I said, I haven't read enough of the book to make any 
rational decisions about the whole thing.

Mark:
> I will leave it at that so that I do not confuse myself.  I have
> deleted the rest of the conversation that you have provided motivating
> input to, and will return to it as time presents itself :-).

Carl:
I'm looking forward to your thoughts.

Mark:
> Thank you for your thoughts.

Carl:
They're worth at least what you're paying for them. <G>

> Mark
> ps. I watched part of the Australian Open men's final.  I got to hand
> it to those guys, they are willful atheletes.  It makes me proud to be
> human.

Carl:
Ah yes.  Focused human endeavor.  It is a wonder to see at times.  I'm 
looking forward to the Superbowl later today for the same reason.

Enjoy,
Carl