The Druid Grove • Are perceptual qualities dimesions?
This takes you to the cutting edge of my research, and of course, I can't predict where this will go.
I start with images but the same would be true of other perceptions.
When we see an image, we see all the smallest bits of the image simultaneously. An actual something we are looking at might have more bits to it, but I am only talking about the bits in the subjective image in our heads at single instant of time.
Now to perceive the image simultaneously, all the subjective bits must be in the awareness at the same time, and the basic awareness is singular. The awareness may have all sorts of things in it, but the awareness itself is constant everywhere in one's field of awareness.
Now. for all the bits to be perceived in a singular awareness simultaneously means that some part of each bit must directly touch the part in all the other bits at the same time. The part where they all touch is subtle, so we don't notice what is happening. It might be possible to learn how to see the touching itself, but I don't know one way or the other about that. It is clear that if any bit does not touch all the other bits in awareness, then that bit would not be part of the image.
However, the touching could not happen in a three dimensional space, because too few points in a three dimensional space can touch one another directly at the same time.
I will illustrate this as follows: in one dimensional space, a line, no more than two points can touch each other directly at the same instant. If we try to put a third point with them, it ends up on one side or the other of the pair, so the three don't all touch one another directly. If one forces a third point between the two, then that forces them apart so the no longer touch. Similarly, in a two dimensional space, a plane, a maximum of three points can all directly touch one another simultaneously. In a three dimensional space, a volume, a maximum of four points can all touch one another at the same time. In general, for a space of n dimensions, a maximum of n + 1 points can all directly touch one another in the same instant. I have called this a point cluster in a few other websites in which I have discussed this.
Now if we look at a complex image we are seeing, such as an entire landscape, we are seeing thousands of bits of it at the same time, Therefore, the perception would have to be in thousands of dimensions. But it is very difficult if we try to think of those as additional dimensions of space.
Notice however that time is a dimension which interacts with spatial dimensions in a real way, in Einsteins Theory of Relativity. However, time is also different from a spatial dimensions. This gives rise to a question. Could there be other dimensions that would also be different from spatial dimensions, as time is different from spatial dimensions?
If so, the only candidate which comes to mind is dimensions of subjective quality. So, for example, instead of a dimension in a form, we might see redness, and that redness would really be a dimension. If there are more than one bit of that redness in an image, then the image would be intersecting with the redness dimension at each of those places. There might be several redness dimensions, each seen as a slightly different kind of red. Then, besides color, this would also include sounds, odors, touches, emotions, and so forth. I think it would also have to include meanings, which would add a very large number of additional dimensions.
Then, it would be volition which moves the field of awareness from one intersection of dimensions to another intersection of dimensions. I don't have a theory of exactly what volition is within the above model, so that is a question people might want to research in the future. Also, more research is needed to confirm the theory about perception and dimensions, plus, of course, research to discover various details.
Re: Are perceptual qualities dimesions?
one or two issues here I think. The most important is the structure of perception which has been well researched and is largely guided by expectation in the form of schemas (in schema theory, there are others similar) which are learned complexes of internal representations of objects and events. They pop up on cue to tell us what's there without having to go through the tedious business of actually looking properly. We learn them from birth and perhaps before in some instances, the experiential journey of the child is a marvellous field of study which amply shows how human beings internalize experiences like "red" "stone" "shopping" "run away, its dangerous" etc.. Our adult experience and analysis of the input we get from our senses is not all "bottom up" as your model assumes, but from fairly early in life -and as we age- it becomes more and more "top down". I've sometimes speculated that this is why time seems to go faster as we get older. Maybe the cure for that is to take care to look at things properly.
Things like "red" are qualities which can be applied (evidently) without needlessly multiplying entities. Occam and all that. On the other hand, I think you're right that there are other dimensions beyond the handful we normally think about. Probably not red though, I think that's a quality we learn to apprehend, and which is informed by our memories. Also, time is not a proper dimension, that's a metaphor; it's simply a pragmatic fact of the laws of thermodynamics that one thing must necessarily follow another.
In order to comprehend the way in which the consciousness works it would be worth having a look at the hardware we use for thinking. The neurons in the human mind, their interweaving complexity is so amazing and beautiful- I forget which psychologist said that it's impossible for the mind to comprehend itself, but having a crack at neural networking on the most powerful computer will not yet, or probably ever create a consciousness as good as yours. That suggests to me that a single touch for each dimension is too simplistic a model for the thing you're trying to explore.
Actually, I think that all psychology is still a very primitive science. There are more variables in consciousness than all the biological chemicals in existence, and scientists have only researched a tiny percentage of biological chemicals. So biology is still very primitive also. But psychology is much more primitive than biology because a much smaller percentage of psychological variables have been studied.
It was astute for you to bring schemas in. Piaget thought that schemas were like mollusks, in that they started simple and then slowly grew and changed in interaction with the world. Still, though, I am talking about what schemas are made out of, the basic structure/processes closer to the foundation of the ground of consciousness.
Time really is a proper dimensions, but that isn't widely known except to people who have had college courses in physics. In Einstein's Theory of Relativity, time has PRECISE mathematical relationships to the spatial dimensions which are like the mathematical relationships among the spatial dimensions. There is also data confirming Einstein's theory. So time is as real a dimension as spatial dimensions.
Redness is not something learned. In the neurological system, the firing of certain cones in the eyes indicates redness, and then the impulses travel back through neurons through various parts of the brain, being processed along the way. The cones and parts of the brain exist in the baby, so they weren't learned. Of course, nerve impulses are all the same. They aren't red or blue or have a sound like middle-c. Therefore, redness in the information processing is encoded into the spatial relationships of a group of nerve impulses.
You can see redness easily enough by just looking at any patch of red in the room you are in, or elsewhere. What you see is a specific red, but you can't exactly describe it in words.
In the brain, there is very sophisticated information processing. This processing continues until there is a final nerve impulse pattern. What scientists have never discovered is what integrates the spread out nerve impulses into a subjective image, or something else. They won't find a single neuron in the brain which is the integrator of a pattern because a single nerve impulse carries only one bit of information, but if the information stays on separate nerves, it won't be integrated. Looked at form another perspective, subjective images must be seen by a receiver in many dimensions, but the brain is only in three spatial and one time dimensions. That is to say, the information processing part of the brain. By string theories, and some other theories, there are also a few curled up dimensions, but even if we added those, the brain still wouldn't have enough dimensions to integrate a subjective image.
(1) Actually, I think that all psychology is still a very primitive science. There are more variables in consciousness than all the biological chemicals in existence, and scientists have only researched a tiny percentage of biological chemicals. So biology is still very primitive also. But psychology is much more primitive than biology because a much smaller percentage of psychological variables have been studied.
(2) Time really is a proper dimensions... time is as real a dimension as spatial dimensions.
(3) Redness is not something learned.
(4) a single nerve impulse carries only one bit of information, but if the information stays on separate nerves, it won't be integrated.
(5) Looked at form another perspective, subjective images must be seen by a receiver in many dimensions, but the brain is only in three spatial and one time dimensions. That is to say, the information processing part of the brain. By string theories, and some other theories, there are also a few curled up dimensions, but even if we added those, the brain still wouldn't have enough dimensions to integrate a subjective image.
Druids love a debate. Nothing like taking the little grey cells for a gallop.
(1) Quite sweeping and unsupported as far as I can see. Some firm evidence that there are that many variables in consciousness?
(2) As you say, time is not a spatial dimension. That still makes it a metaphorical dimension. There are lots of firm relationships between physical dimensions and other things too, the universe is like that.
(3) Good point, my bad.
(4) Nerve impulses are not confined to single neurons in the brain, they can spread and leap between neurons - ask any epileptic. Not all neurons have the myelin sheath, only the larger ones outside the brain. There is no myelination in the brain. Evidence: Palastanger Field and Soames Anatomy and Human Movement: Structure and Function this is why a smell can trigger a memory, the areas of the brain involved have rather hazy boundaries. A thought can theoretically sweep the whole brain and is not confined to a neuron.
(5) See 4. I think it does in fact, "thought soup" is consciousness. It has many ingredients from many sources both internalized and external. My own experiments into artificial intelligence for my honours module in cognition made me understand that thinking and understanding can't be achieved using wires.
If I'm wrong and the human brain does not have the capacity to do the things we self-evidently do, then how do you speculate that it happens? After all, these "dimensions" would need processing too presumably?
Sciethe::::(1) Quite sweeping and unsupported as far as I can see. Some firm evidence that there are that many variables in consciousness?
Jim:::My thinking on this is very imprecise, so your comment might be right. I will say this. Fritz Heider (1958) THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS, New York: Wiley spent his lifetime trying to find continuous measures by which one could move gradually from the meaning of one word to the meaning of another word. He failed to find such continuous measures, and nobody else has come up with them either. My interpretation of this, which might be right or wrong, is that this hints that the reason that there aren't such measures is that word meanings are all distinct and different variables. Remembering that some words have several different definitions, that would put us up to about a million or so variables tapped by English. A number of foreign words have the same meaning as English words, but some don't. The foreign words with definitions not in English would add some extra variables. That is reasonably calculated if one assumes that each meaning is a different variable. We would also need to add meanings that only occur in phrases. That could add another million variables, but the number could be fewer or greater. Then, we have I don't know how many potential meanings that humans have never discovered yet. Then visually, Cantor says that the largest of the three infinities he discussed is the infinity of all possible forms. I imagine that much of that variability collapses, so that, for example, several different isosceles triangles might really be visually the same variable, and so forth with other kinds of shapes. Nevertheless, there should be a large number of variables just from shape. Then, there are a number of different odors, and so forth. As you can see I think there are a large number of psychological variables, but what the actual number is I am far from knowing.
Sciethe:::(2) As you say, time is not a spatial dimension. That still makes it a metaphorical dimension. There are lots of firm relationships between physical dimensions and other things too, the universe is like that.
Jim::: Not spatial and not a metaphor. Remember, I don't know what almost all the processes are. This whole thing is a research question. However, I don't think the mathematics would allow an interpretation as a metaphor. If we accelerate an object, an observer who remains still sees time on the object slow down, and sees the front-to-back spatial length of the object contract. This has been tested and thus confirmed to happen. Now we can set up a graph like a + with time as one of the lines and a dimension of space being the other line. If we rotate the graph in four dimensions, the rotation increasing with acceleration, the lines look shorter as acceleration increases, because we can't see the part of the line which is in the fourth dimension. The shortening of the lines with rotation of the graph are precisely like what actually happens in real life as the object is accelerated. The spatial line and the time line are completely synchronized and don't become unsynchronized. Since this relationship occurs in the physical world, it would not be a metaphor --- unless you had a philosophy that all physical objects are metaphors.
Sciethe:::(4) Nerve impulses are not confined to single neurons in the brain, they can spread and leap between neurons - ask any epileptic. Not all neurons have the myelin sheath, only the larger ones outside the brain. There is no myelination in the brain. Evidence: Palastanger Field and Soames Anatomy and Human Movement: Structure and Function this is why a smell can trigger a memory, the areas of the brain involved have rather hazy boundaries. A thought can theoretically sweep the whole brain and is not confined to a neuron.
Jim::: You've gotten hold of a really bad reference. A number of the myelinated neurons are in the brain. This is one fact I had rubbed in my face very strongly because I have sister with a demylinating disease. For references, you could take a look at Multiple Sclerosis. A misleading thing is that nerve impulses don't leap from nerve to nerve. The transmission from nerve to nerve is a different process than the nerve impulse. The nerve impulse is a flow of ions across the outer membrane of the neuron, which flow travels down the nerve. Then, when the nerve impulse reaches the end, the end of the nerve secretes neurotransmitter molecules. The molecules float through the liquid in the synapse between the two neurons. Some of the molecules reach the second nerve and enter neurotransmitter receptor pores. When a molecule docks in a receptor pore, the pore changes shape. The change in shape starts a cascade of chemical reactions in the neuron. Since many first nerve fibers are connected with the second nerve, something in the nerve causes the pattern to be important. With a certain set of inputs, the second nerve will fire. With another set of inputs, the neuron will not fire.
In epilepsy, the nerve impulses are still within the same structure of neurons. It's not outside the neural system. What happens is that there are suddenly a lot more nerve impulses using the regular routes. The brain almost never processes something for very long with single neuron, because nerve impulses are digital. Each is like a single electrical impulse in a computer. A neuron can carry coded information. For example, some neurons from they eye only report being near a diagonal. However, if you could see just that one nerve, you wouldn't know that the impulse meant that. The information processing involves a pattern of many nerve impulses, and changes as the pattern moves through the brain.
Sciethe:::(5) See 4. I think it does in fact, "thought soup" is consciousness. It has many ingredients from many sources both internalized and external. My own experiments into artificial intelligence for my honours module in cognition made me understand that thinking and understanding can't be achieved using wires.
Jim::: I've never used the words "thought soup" but that seems to be a reasonable term for you to use. So you see from your perspective that a physical digital system can't be the basis of thinking and understanding, or at least, of the subjective part of thinking and understanding. The brain does do a lot of digital information processing. The few people who are working on the Quantum Theory of Consciousness think that the nerve impulses are linked by a quantum process which swings outside the physical. The theory is that there a small tubules in the neurons, and a place where an electron can be in one of two positions. The position changes with the information processing, and the quantum processes integrate the electron positions in many neurons. I can't rule that out. However, my own favorite hypothesis is that the integration between consciousness and the neurons involves the neurotransmitter receptor pores. The key is that consciousness can set off new nerve impulses in just the right patterns. This is happening, for example, when we report something in the integration which we can only perceive in consciousness. To do that, consciousness must set off just the right pattern of nerve impulses to make the mouth move to say the words which make the verbal report. Starting an ion flow directly would take much more energy than we have observed as energy extra to the functions of the neurons themselves. The neurotransmitter chemical flows involve less energy, but they are unstable and sloppy, so it would be difficult for consciousness to know exactly where the right nerve impulses would have to be triggered. The receptor pores for the most part stay in one place over a long period of time. Thus, consciousness could learn which neurons were activated for the word "the" for example, and could set off nerve impulses in the same places. Activation would occur by consciousness changing the shape of a receptor pore to the shape it would have if a neurotransmitter molecule actually docked in it.
That this involves a physical change of shape implies that it might be gravity which is used to change the shape of the pore, so gravity might be the link between the brain and consciousness. Another hint might be supergravity theory, which might or might not turn out to be true. A detail about supergravity theory is that gravity punches through more dimensions than electromagnetism. Since gravity punches through more dimensions, if qualities are dimensions (which I don't know yet) then gravity would interact with those quality dimensions.
I can argue/assist in equal measure I think!
1. I think point 1 now begs a question, the core of which is that a more explanatory and less exploratory definition of "variable" would assist mutual understanding at this stage, if your analysis is at a stage where that is possible. We are at cross purposes because things that you define as variables, I define as unitary things which can be internalized and need not be processed from scratch, but by recognition. That means that a separate process exists for anything that can be recognised, and so the brain is able to work in a parallel way and not only a linear one. Here I think it is possible use a mathematical model for understanding the creation of integrated conscious perceptions (brain soup consciousness) which could explain how the enormous load that the brain copes with could be handled. No impulses implies the brain at rest. 1 impulse is a single response as one would expect. 2 impulses acting together would produce a complex thought with 2 elements. The complexity of the thought would increase with the number of impulses (units, variables, objects, as you will) which contribute to it, and the complexity of the thought or consciousness state would logically follow and could be theoretically quantified : F n = F n-1 + F n-2 for instance (Fibonacci, as it happens, seems to work). I see no reason why the brain should not have evolved to use a squeezing algorithm in that way, and Fibonacci is an organic form found in natural instances of fractal expression. So a consciousness in "state 15" for instance would be integrating 610 individual variables using 15+1 units of processing at the level of conscious production. 20+1 units would likewise be informed by 6765 variables. The Parallel Distributed Processing model of brain activity tends to support that idea, although I admit that it is off the top of my head and not out of a textbook. But that's the idea here, I think. Perhaps that is of use to you.
2. I understand the physics OK, it's the definition I was having difficulty with.
4. Sorry Jim the reference is good. Most UK medics use or recognise the book as sound. It's backed up by another doctor's shelf classic, Marieb, Human Anatomy and Physiology. The error as always is mine. I mean the grey matter. The white matter is part of the medulla, and is partly myelinated. Damage to this layer is serious and plaque formation is part of the horrible reality of MS. Just as you have a sister who sadly has MS (sympathy to her, I know something of the illness) my wife happens to be an uncontrolled epileptic and also a senior practicing medic. Quite unusual, but quite true. She has understandably studied her condition in immense depth. I have asked her and yes, the amount of impulse bleed over between neurons is substantial even in "normal" people. It is not fully understood whether it is qualitively similar to a regular impulse (readable) but PDP theory suggests that it may be, as -when one thinks it through- does the concept of neuroplasticity.
On that evidence I assert that although there is a network of neurons which act as impulse carriers and works digitally, it does "leak" soupwise, and consciousness is the more effective for it.
More later, must cook supper.
Sciethe:::1. I think point 1 now begs a question, the core of which is that a more explanatory and less exploratory definition of "variable" would assist mutual understanding at this stage, if your analysis is at a stage where that is possible. We are at cross purposes because things that you define as variables, I define as unitary things which can be internalized and need not be processed from scratch, but by recognition.
Jim::: Precise definitions are good, especially as knowledge reaches the end of the discovery period. There is a personal matter here. In part, I model my thinking on what is known in the Psychology of Creative Behavior literature. Thus, in attempts to discover new knowledge, I try to keep my terms vaguely defined. Two main sources. In an interview with Einstein a long time ago, he described his creative process as turning old ideas into nebulous clouds of meaning inside his head, and then moving those around. So, since Einstein is a good role model, I have tried to do some things in a similar way. What Einstein was doing is backed up by some research on Mednick's Remote Associates Test. I'm afraid I've lost the reference, but it could be found again. The Remote Associates Test is one of the best tests of creative skills. In the study, people who did well on the test, so had high creative skills, were asked how they thought while coming up with their answers. They reported that they turned the words into something vague and diffuse, and then sharpened up again. Therefore, I am using the word "variable" vaguely and broadly as anything which changes in the system.
Sciethe::: That means that a separate process exists for anything that can be recognised, and so the brain is able to work in a parallel way and not only a linear one. Here I think it is possible use a mathematical model for understanding the creation of integrated conscious perceptions (brain soup consciousness) which could explain how the enormous load that the brain copes with could be handled. No impulses implies the brain at rest. 1 impulse is a single response as one would expect. 2 impulses acting together would produce a complex thought with 2 elements. The complexity of the thought would increase with the number of impulses (units, variables, objects, as you will) which contribute to it, and the complexity of the thought or consciousness state would logically follow and could be theoretically quantified : F n = F n-1 + F n-2 for instance (Fibonacci, as it happens, seems to work). I see no reason why the brain should not have evolved to use a squeezing algorithm in that way, and Fibonacci is an organic form found in natural instances of fractal expression. So a consciousness in "state 15" for instance would be integrating 610 individual variables using 15+1 units of processing at the level of conscious production. 20+1 units would likewise be informed by 6765 variables. The Parallel Distributed Processing model of brain activity tends to support that idea, although I admit that it is off the top of my head and not out of a textbook. But that's the idea here, I think. Perhaps that is of use to you.
Jim:::Since you have been thinking and experiencing for years, there are probably also unnoticed aspects of your idea in your unconscious that would expand your analysis if you were to become aware of them.
So, it would probably be worthwhile for you to continue what you are doing, and I am trying not to discourage you. Now, as far as I know, nobody has ever reported being aware of a single nerve impulse. However, you could replace "single nerve impulse" with a small set of nerve impulses acting together as your element in your mathematics. I think the really exciting part of your thinking is your use of the word "algorithm". The chances are that evolution has produced a group of algorithms. Teasing those out will be quite difficult, but that is part of the fun of the search. I have some related ideas, but you would know a lot more about the structures of algorithms. The related ideas are in a broader area. There is much more information per minute coming into the brain than the brain can process, so to function, the brain does have to simplify that flow of information. What I am thinking is that when a flow of information is simplified, it introduces distortions automatically. Those distortions appear as biases and blind spots in people's thinking. Sometimes the biases and blind spots don't matter, but at other times, they cause people to make less than optimal decisions. The biases and blind spots should be different in every person because each person has a different set of past experiences, past books and articles he or she has read, past ideas she or he has learned from particular friends, family members, teachers, and so forth. Those differences, I believe, cause people to have slightly different connotations for the words they use . In a group, some of the biases and blind sports become common to all members of the group via conformity as they form a sub-culture. That, however, slows the problem solving process. For example, if there is a single leader, or a rigid sub-culture, then sometimes when there is a new problem, the single leader or sub-culture will have biases and blind spots which make finding the best solution impossible. The counter to that is decentralized decision making. If there are a number of leaders, or sub-cultures, each with a different set of biases and blind spots, then while some of them have biases and blind spots which prevent finding a solution, one or more other leaders or sub-cultures with different biases and blind spots will be able to find a solution.
4. She has understandably studied her condition in immense depth. I have asked her and yes, the amount of impulse bleed over between neurons is substantial even in "normal" people. It is not fully understood whether it is qualitively similar to a regular impulse (readable) but PDP theory suggests that it may be, as -when one thinks it through- does the concept of neuroplasticity.
Jim:::She and you are right about the impulse bleed if you are using a general definition. The question is that of what is causing the impulse bleed? There were some studies back around the early part of the 1900s which demonstrated that the electromagnetic activity of the neurons isn't strong enough for it to affect nearby neurons. So that is just assumed. It would be legitimate to look at the question again, of course. That means that the apparent impulse bleed is part of the processes of the digital system. But again, the question could be reopened.
Sciethe:::On that evidence I assert that although there is a network of neurons which act as impulse carriers and works digitally, it does "leak" soupwise, and consciousness is the more effective for it.
Jim::: If you want to attach your thinking to the word "leak" that is certainly legitimate. However, the important thing is what deeper processes are causing the leaking. At the moment, you are using the non-scientific connotations of the word "leak" in your theory. That is a fully acceptable stepping stone to further knowledge. But, you need to move on from the stepping stone. You might start by trying to list all the possible processes which could cause such a leak.
Since Time and Space are distinctly different qualities with a number of constitutive dimensions that contribute to the phenomenological nature of sense data, I agree that there may be additional qualities beyond Time and Space that function in conjunction with them to inform human experience. You (Jim) illustrated that Space has different dimensions based on the possible connections between co-existing points of reference, so do the same rules of connection apply to dimensions of Time? Can a dimension comprise of multiple qualities (e.g Time-Space), and if so does this change the rules by which the different points associate? If a dimension is limited to one quality, defining a dimension based on sense data types ("color ... sounds, odors, touches, emotions" etc) does not seem feasible since, as an example I am almost certain you (Jim) are aware of based on your solid educational foundation in physics demonstrated, color is only visible to the anatomy of the human eye precisely because of the wavelength and frequency intervals measurable in nanometers (length) and terahertz (length over unit time), respectively. Sound, being a wave-patterned radiating phenomenon also, is measured similarly. As a side note, the color constancy concept seems to at least partially describe and support S in his earlier statements about the 'learned' aspect of color recognition.
As you (Jim) appear to have a solid physics and physiology background, I would recommend supplementation with philosophy for further exploration of ideas in previous posts of this thread you have touched on. You (Jim) seem to favor mathematical models of understanding, so I suggest reading the work of the mathematician, logician, and philosopher Gottlob Frege regarding mainly philosophy of language but also dipping into philosophy of mind. His work "On Sense and Reference" http://philo.ruc.edu.cn/logic/reading/O ... erence.pdf comes to my mind specifically. Suggested supporting philosophical authors would be Paul Grice's "Meaning", Alfred Whitehead's "Principia Mathematica", Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting", with varied works from Edmund Husserl, Henri-Louis Bergson, William James, and Plato's dialogues, particularly "The Theaetetus".
All Jim's work putting this on here- not usual I'd agree, but it s true that Druids are (at their best) all about truth and reality, and philosophy of course. It's a fine treat that he came here to discuss his thinking.
This has been a very fruitful discussion for me already, I'll be back with more questions and observations shortly.
Before going on, I’d like to say that, for me, Druidry is about being grounded in the world just as it is about the search for some abstract truth - it is about synthesizing these into a meaningful practice of life as ritual. I say that only because most of this (long) post is abstract philosophy. After commenting on some of the points raised in this thread though, and trying to summarize what my take on things are, I offer some thoughts on why my conclusions (and the questions raised in the first post) might be valuable.
Jim – good luck on your research. You are asking some really interesting and thorny questions.... At root, I think they are very similar to my own inquiry. On the view of synthesizing abstract truth with practice, and though I love philosophy, it is my feeling that it is useful only insofar as it serves to nurture a meaningful and rich experience of being in the world. So I also must ask the question that I think is absolutely essential to reappropriate in the Western philosophical tradition – to what kind of life will answering these questions lead? The ancient Greeks had the idea of philosophy as a practice (see Hadot), as do the Confucians and Daoists. We need to ask how will any new knowledge enable us to better engage life and address the massive environmental, religious, social, and political challenges we face? (I have to respectfully but strongly disagree that knowledge nears the end of the discovery period... look around, we are like five year olds at the wheel of a Ferrari, tearing down the motorway at 200 mph... we have a tiger by the tail and we don’t know anything).
Yes, some really big philosophical questions floating around in here... most of which have been handled in almost sickening detail by many philosophers, beginning with Plato, picked up by Aquinas, continued by Descartes, Hume, Kant, the German Romantics, Hegel, the Phenomenologists (beginning with Brentano and Husserl), the Existentialists (esp. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty), and contemporary analytical philosophies of mind, language, and epistemology. My suggestion would be that, rather than totally re-inventing the wheel, have a look at some of the philosophers AlainaFae mentioned. I would highly encourage Husserl for Phenomenology, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Abram for the Existentialists, Frege and Grice on the language bit, and Jung, Ellenberger, and Claxton (a light read) for some of the psychology/consciousness questions. Also, since many of the questions that have been raised are at least partly epistemological in nature, I would recommend, as grounding in the basic epistemological problem Descartes’ Meditations (but really only as a grounding in the problematic). Check out the Gettier problem, as well as the Sellars problem, and for some contemporary ideas, see BonJour, Rosa, and Hopp (phenomenological).
Which raises a problem with images, not only because of our presuppositions but also because of misperception – images can and do deceive us into thinking we are experiencing something that we are not. Plato’s Theatetus engages this fairly extensively. Though I accept Vogel’s Common Sense Hypothesis and reject Cartesian Skepticism, it still must be admitted and accounted for that our senses can also deceive. This applies both to natural and non-natural images. Purely subjective images, such as found in dreams (as Descartes realized), make the question even more complex. So how can we answer any questions about images when we can’t justify claiming any kind of certain knowledge through an experience of an image? Jim, I think you are right when you said that the subjective approach is the only candidate. I will use the term phenomenology for this. For clarity’s sake and to enable communication (since we all have different ideas (in the Fregean or Lockean sense) that we are unable to fully disclose) I will define phenomenology clearly as: the discipline to determine the nature of conscious experiences and the sort of relationships they have with one another from a first person perspective. Phenomenology, as a philosophical method, is certainly much more complex than that, but as an initial definition for our purposes, it should prove adequate.
Awareness needs to be sorted out. There is Polanyi’s concept of subsidiary awareness, for example – those things of our awareness that are not directly in the forefront of our consciousness, but nonetheless are there... background noise, if you will. There is also of course the direct focus of our consciousness, usually related to one or other of the senses most strongly, with the other impressions, if not sharing equally in our attention, being at least in the subsidiary awareness. We also want to account for the many types of unconscious – if the subsidiary awareness is accepted into awareness, though not the primary focal point, I would argue that the unconscious is to be considered subsidiary awareness, which then, obviously, must admit to degrees. (As a footnote, the epistemologist BonJour has posited the idea that each bit of knowledge/experience has its own built-in awareness, and thus no larger awareness is required. I am on the fence on this... while it does seem to stop the justification regress, it does not intuitively, to me at least, seem to account for my experience of a larger awareness).
At any rate, an awareness of an image is to be acknowledged, whether or not we can with any certainty say that the image actually exists as we perceive it... That seems very Kantian. Redness a dimension? Is it possible to experience redness without some object? That is, can we experience redness without it being attached as some accidental property of some object? Can we remove it from that thing to which it is attached and still experience redness? We can at least think about it if we consider Platonic ‘forms,’ Frege’s ‘sense,’ or perhaps Jung’s ‘archetypes’ to some extent. At any rate, some kind of form-matter metaphysics is required to actually experience redness in the absence of some red object (footnote: this is Hopp’s law of conceptual knowledge btw – if something can be thought about in the absence of that thing, it is conceptual; important in epistemological work). Can we actually know anything as the thing-as-such, or is everything subjective? This raises all sorts of epistemological problems, ones that, in western philosophy at least, stretch all the way back to Socrates and Plato, but one that was raised in modernity by everyone’s favorite skeptic, Rene Descartes, who concluded that all we can know is that we exist because we think; that since there is a thought, there must be a thinker.
Leaving that can of worms un-enjoyed and to the side for now... as we already have agreed that the only candidate qualified to approach the question is subjective, we find ourselves facing the question not whether the constituent parts of an image-as-such are of many dimensions, but, from a phenomenological perspective, the question of whether or not the subjective experience of that image occurs in different dimensions.
Now, I understand the idea of remaining vague in order to not hinder the discovery of new knowledge, but in this case, in order to proceed on this particular question, the term dimension simply must be clarified. I would hazard though, considering the different types of awareness considered above, that the answer would be yes if, and only if, different levels of awareness are accepted as different dimensions. From a mythopoetic perspective I would indeed assert that different levels of consciousness are to be accepted as otherworlds; from an analytical and philosophical perspective, I would have to again insist on a clear and precise definition of the term dimension.
Maintaining a phenomenological approach, this question will also be bracketed (with thanks to Jim for raising it and helping me sort out some questions I have been asking...) so that we might proceed on understanding the experience of time and place, and, perhaps, how it might relate to other experiences.
I have more or less arrived at the conclusion that it is neither possible nor necessary for us to even consider or entertain the idea of time and space as different or as dimensions. They are instead the Husserlian Lifeworld and they comprise the Heideggerian da-sein. I’ve already started going on more than I wanted to, and definition of those ideas can (and do) occupy entire philosophical careers. For now, I’ll say that time and space together constitutes our experience. Timespace is where we are, whether that is objective or subjective, for both sides contribute and interact with one another. From a phenomenological perspective, it is not possible to experience any sort of time without some sort of space, and vice-versa.
Based on this idea of timespace and my attempt to be grounded in the world through Druidry (and since I have indeed waffled on), I will try to summarize why I think these questions are important... in doing so, I will use the term place to (roughly) denote not only some physical place (image) but also the fluid sense and nature of both time and space.
In our relationship to the world, we are both artisan and observer, constantly acting and reacting from within some specific place. Objectively and subjectively, each individual is a persistent and constituent part of the place in which they are located at a given moment; place is the container of all human experience and development. As human psychospiritual development is dependent on experiential data, consciously processed or not, from the individual’s relationship to the external and internal world, it is clear that it is directly intertwined with experience of and relationship to place. The persistent relationship to place, on both a conscious and unconscious level, is reciprocal – it informs and is dependent on personal psychospiritual development. Our interaction with the world, which is the bedrock of our development, can only begin in place, and thus, our relationship to world, to self, and to other is inextricably linked to place. Unfortunately, the deeper perception and nurturing of relationship to place are neglected in our contemporary society. This is a tragedy, for it is truly difficult to imagine any experience outside of some place.
Place is the meeting place of objective reality and subjective perception. It is a confluence of various factors of the attributes of things within the place and the sensory perception of them which can provoke psychological, emotional, and spiritual reactions within the psyche and subsequently in actual deed. Place presents itself through this coming together of the world and human perception, whether perceived consciously or unconsciously, and can lead to a heightened state of awareness that is best described as an aesthetic experience. Through this, a reciprocal and active relationship emerges that provides information to the human subject, useful to his or her engagement of the world, and, more importantly, to his or her personal development. Through the immediate reaction and subsequent development, both human subject and objective place are transformed.
Place is often taken for granted. Through repeated exposure to them, many of the places we experience go into a “subsidiary awareness” (Polanyi), where they are registered only as auxiliary experiences. Certainly, this ability is of essential value and is what allows humans to accomplish anything. It is important to note however, that the input from subsidiary awareness, while not processed to the full extent of the main object of conscious focus at the time, does not simply dissipate. It becomes a form, a mental entity, located somewhere between our conscious awareness and our unconscious psyche. Since this subsidiary awareness is neither completely in conscious awareness nor in the unconscious, it forms a bridge between those two parts of the psyche. It is the focusing of attention on the subsidiary awareness of place that raises it fully into conscious awareness of the psyche and can be perceived as an intense aesthetic experience. By consciously engaging the subsidiary awareness of place, and the aesthetics and archetypal nature of our relationship to it, we can not only better understand what it means to be human, but also begin on a broader level to more effectively engage our development and thus be better equipped to address the many challenges we face. This provides the rationale for a decrease, at least during periods of intentional ritual or contemplative practice, of the taking for granted of place.
There is a direct link between the experience of place and human psychospiritual development. Nurturing a deeper relationship to place through an archetypal approach and practice will aid in a meaningful development into a mature and psychospiritually well person. Evidence from depth psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and other disciplines such as neuroscience confirm the existence of psychological archetypes - patterns of human mental energy - that are universal across time and cultures, and that form the foundation of our relationship to place. In fact, the archetypes are found mirrored and manifested in place. Based on accounts of encounters with place (see Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places, an ethnography of the Western Apache practice of speaking in names), and on an aesthetic theory based on an archetypal concept of the human psyche, the experience of place constitutes an aesthetic experience which heightens awareness. Such heightened awareness can provoke further development of the experiencing individual; it seems to be the case that such experiences are required for such development.
Through this meaningful growth of the human psyche, the individual is better able to engage the world through the perspective of his or her authentic self, which is beneficial to self, world, and other. It is for these reasons that it is essential to better understand and nurture the human relationship to the archetypes of place, and thereby foster healthy growth and development of the individual and of society.
My apologies for being so long winded, and if I strayed too far OT. I hope that these thoughts were at least able to ‘dance’ with those of the original post and perhaps offer something of interest.
Excellent questions, and of course, we need to keep scanning references for hints they may and sometimes do have. It can also be helpful to look at the same problem from several perspectives, and than slowly draw the perspectives together.
Note that physical electromagnetic waves don't have subjective quality components. The electromagnetism is constant, merely vibrating at different frequencies. We don't have red electromagnetism, green electromagnetism, and so forth. There is an interesting situation. We see red as being hotter and more energetic, while we see blue as cool and serene. However, red photons actually have less energy and are cooler, than blue photons. So wavelength in that case isn't coordinated with color properties.
You might perhaps do a survey, brief or intensive, of how subjective perceptions differ from physical objects being perceived.
There is an interesting method for discovering more details about subjective perceptions. This involves sitting back and deliberately changing the direction of one's attention. As a preliminary, one might notice the computer screen, then shift one's attention to what sitting on the chair feels like, then shifting ones attention to any sounds that are happening. As one shifts one's attention, one becomes aware of new perceptions and less aware of older perceptions.
One can also, just within the visual field, look at a complex painting of a landscape. At the beginning, one looks at the painting as a whole. However, one then shifts one's attention to a detail within the painting. When one does that, all sorts of smaller details near the detail one is focusing on appear, while more distant parts of the painting fade. Then, one can shift one's attention to another part of the painting, and so forth.
Something similar can be done with what one directs one's attention towards while listening to music, and other things.
Filleadh:::Before going on, I’d like to say that, for me, Druidry is about being grounded in the world just as it is about the search for some abstract truth - it is about synthesizing these into a meaningful practice of life as ritual.
Jim::: Yes, I quite agree. I think that mystics of all religions and secular traditions are a kind of brother-sisterhood, all working towards ultimate knowledge, which won't necessarily all be abstract. I've generally found Pagans to be less dogmatic than some other traditions and having stumbled upon or been led to (I can't tell which) this message board, I have found much wonderful thinking here. A question might be, what is the most advanced life-as-ritual possible, if we had ultimate knowledge?
Filleadh::: At root, I think they are very similar to my own inquiry. On the view of synthesizing abstract truth with practice, and though I love philosophy, it is my feeling that it is useful only insofar as it serves to nurture a meaningful and rich experience of being in the world.
Jim:::How fortunate I am to have found you. What might, the most, meaningful and rich level of experiences of being in the world, possible be? If those interested were to keep improving for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, what might experience become?
By the way, it looks like we will all be reincarnating, so this is also a personal question about something we ourselves could become after many lifetimes. Essentially, nerve impulse patterns are so very complex that our consciousnesses couldn't have learned the skills needed to decode those nerve impulse patterns into subjective equivalents, in just a few months in the womb. Those skills therefore seem to have been learned in previous lifetimes, in which case, reincarnation is a natural process of our consciousness becoming attached to a new brain, or an equivalent if philosophical idealism is true. Consider that the information in a nerve impulse pattern is encoded in the relative positions of the individual nerve impulses. Nerve impulses themselves are all the same. So decoding goes something like this: We detect a nerve impulse pattern with hundreds of thousands of nerve impulses, each on a different neuron. Since they are all the same, this is like seeing a wall with several hundred thousand dots. It's quite like those hidden figure patterns because in testing different locations on the cortex, images in the brain are highly distorted. They don't map accurately onto the neurons. In addition, there are many irrelevant nerve impulses within the pattern. Then, consciousness has to decode all that and generate an equivalent visual image. Furthermore, the decoding is done in less than a second. For example, let us say one is driven blindfolded to an overlook from which one can see a large landscape THAT ONE HAS NEVER SEEN BEFORE. Then the blindfold is removed, and in less than a second, one can see an image of the landscape. That is better than our most advanced supercomputers can do, so implies that we have a very high level of skill in decoding nerve impulse patterns, which must have been learned over many past lifetimes.
Filleadh::: So I also must ask the question that I think is absolutely essential to reappropriate in the Western philosophical tradition – to what kind of life will answering these questions lead? The ancient Greeks had the idea of philosophy as a practice (see Hadot), as do the Confucians and Daoists. We need to ask how will any new knowledge enable us to better engage life and address the massive environmental, religious, social, and political challenges we face?
Jim:::Some of those problems could be solved now, but the majority refuse to do it. We could, of course, probably find some better solutions with more research, but what we have now is adequate. I think I might discuss some of this in a different section of the board. Other problems need quite a bit more knowledge. My feeling is that we probably know less than a tenth of one percent of what full and ultimate knowledge would be.
Jim::: I've sampled most of those, but not studied them thoroughly. Some ideas have been helpful, while other ideas have not. I don't know what percentage of the ideas I have seen in the sampling. Important ideas get repeated again and again in many books, and again and again by individual thinkers. So I am aware of a large percentage of the repeating ideas. Sometimes a rare idea not discussed by others have stimulated new discoveries.
Jim:::Nothing is potentially off topic. One does need to find deeper connections, however.
Jim::: True. My particular analysis is different however. It is an analysis of a subjective image at a single instant of time, and of a final nerve impulse pattern at a single instant of time. I'm not going to be able to get into changes throught time in the time I have left in this lifetime, but those are important research directions.
Filleadh:::Which raises a problem with images, not only because of our presuppositions but also because of misperception – images can and do deceive us into thinking we are experiencing something that we are not.
Jim::: Again, important points. In my analysis, however, I am only considering the image as we are perceiving it. It doesn't matter if the image is an illusion, because it is a real illusory image. It doesn't matter if the image is a misperception, because it is still a real misperceptieved image.
Filleadh::: Plato’s Theatetus engages this fairly extensively. Though I accept Vogel’s Common Sense Hypothesis and reject Cartesian Skepticism, it still must be admitted and accounted for that our senses can also deceive. This applies both to natural and non-natural images. Purely subjective images, such as found in dreams (as Descartes realized), make the question even more complex. So how can we answer any questions about images when we can’t justify claiming any kind of certain knowledge through an experience of an image?
Jim:::Again, excellent general points. However, I'm not claiming knowledge through experience of an image, at the first step in the logical derivation. I am claiming knowledge OF the image. Look at whatever is in front of you. That is the image. You can see some things about the image. That is the data.
Filleadh::: Jim, I think you are right when you said that the subjective approach is the only candidate. I will use the term phenomenology for this. For clarity’s sake and to enable communication (since we all have different ideas (in the Fregean or Lockean sense) that we are unable to fully disclose) I will define phenomenology clearly as: the discipline to determine the nature of conscious experiences and the sort of relationships they have with one another from a first person perspective. Phenomenology, as a philosophical method, is certainly much more complex than that, but as an initial definition for our purposes, it should prove adequate.
Jim::: Yes, and after people got themselves all confused with that method, most of them gave up. If people had persevered, I think we would have a much better phenomenology field than we do now.
Jim::: That is one legitimate way to slice one's approach. However, I am assuming that the image is real, and bracketing things like where the image comes from. Essentially, I am comparing the image with nerve impulse patterns. I don't know how information gets from the one information processor to the other, although I have a favorite hypothesis. Regardless, I can tease out similarities and differences in the two kinds of information processing, even without knowing the link.
I am assuming that if two systems exchange energy, they must have a common ground, or one is the ground of the other. But that is an assumption.
Jim:::At an instant of the perception of an image, the bits are there and simultaneously, the "re-assembly" and larger awareness are also there. All of that is there in the single instant of the image.
Filleadh:::Awareness needs to be sorted out. There is Polanyi’s concept of subsidiary awareness, for example – those things of our awareness that are not directly in the forefront of our consciousness, but nonetheless are there... background noise, if you will.
Jim::: I would agree that there are lots of tacit type things going on. If one can perceive them in an image at a single instant, then they would be part of the analysis. If they are not perceived in the image, they are not part of the analysis.
Filleadh::: There is also of course the direct focus of our consciousness, usually related to one or other of the senses most strongly, with the other impressions, if not sharing equally in our attention, being at least in the subsidiary awareness. We also want to account for the many types of unconscious – if the subsidiary awareness is accepted into awareness, though not the primary focal point, I would argue that the unconscious is to be considered subsidiary awareness, which then, obviously, must admit to degrees. (As a footnote, the epistemologist BonJour has posited the idea that each bit of knowledge/experience has its own built-in awareness, and thus no larger awareness is required. I am on the fence on this... while it does seem to stop the justification regress, it does not intuitively, to me at least, seem to account for my experience of a larger awareness).
Jim:::In the analysis, I'm not trying for all that. To try for all that will require a number of lifetimes. I've heard is described as like a little man in one's head to see something, but then there has to be another little man inside him to see what he sees, and so forth in the infinite regress. Some advanced Zen and Tibetan Dzogchen take one there also. My feeling is that the idea may be partly true. In terms of the bald statement, if each bit does have its own separate awareness, then there is no way to be aware of more than one of the bits at a time. Separate awareness means that our awareness can't integrate bit awarenesses different from itself. Thus, one would need a linking awareness. Then, within the linking awareness, all the information from the separate bits of awareness would have to in some way directly touch all the other awarenesses simultaneously. If any bit awareness didn't touch the other awarenesses, it would not be part of what one is aware of.
Filleadh:::At any rate, an awareness of an image is to be acknowledged, whether or not we can with any certainty say that the image actually exists as we perceive it... That seems very Kantian. Redness a dimension? Is it possible to experience redness without some object? That is, can we experience redness without it being attached as some accidental property of some object?
Jim:::I don't know. Could a mind potentially perceive one thing at a time? For example, could the mind perceive a line without perceiving space around the line. I don't think we know enough about consciousness to be able to say at this time. I assume you mean a subjective object.
Filleadh::: Can we remove it from that thing to which it is attached and still experience redness? We can at least think about it if we consider Platonic ‘forms,’ Frege’s ‘sense,’ or perhaps Jung’s ‘archetypes’ to some extent. At any rate, some kind of form-matter metaphysics is required to actually experience redness in the absence of some red object (footnote: this is Hopp’s law of conceptual knowledge btw – if something can be thought about in the absence of that thing, it is conceptual; important in epistemological work). Can we actually know anything as the thing-as-such, or is everything subjective? This raises all sorts of epistemological problems, ones that, in western philosophy at least, stretch all the way back to Socrates and Plato, but one that was raised in modernity by everyone’s favorite skeptic, Rene Descartes, who concluded that all we can know is that we exist because we think; that since there is a thought, there must be a thinker.
Jim:::Bringing this up to date by considering more than the current human mind ---could there be any kind of mind which could perceive a single quality without perceiving any surround? We need a much better theory of consciousness before we can project and say that there is this or that other potential kind of mind different from our, and say what it can do. My analysis is just a small thing in this dawn age of knowledge, and it deals with groups of bits perceived simultaneously. Therefore, it is not necessary to deal with the above question at this stage in the analysis. Of course, those things will eventually have to be dealt with in order to expand the analysis.
Filleadh:::Leaving that can of worms un-enjoyed and to the side for now... as we already have agreed that the only candidate qualified to approach the question is subjective, we find ourselves facing the question not whether the constituent parts of an image-as-such are of many dimensions, but, from a phenomenological perspective, the question of whether or not the subjective experience of that image occurs in different dimensions.
Jim:::As far as I know, no human so far has been able to subjectively perceive the structure of all dimensions, just as nobody has directly perceived physical objects. At the moment, my basic approach is to find subjective properties Sn which would exist if and only if Hn hidden things existed. Don't slide over "if and only if".
Filleadh:::Now, I understand the idea of remaining vague in order to not hinder the discovery of new knowledge, but in this case, in order to proceed on this particular question, the term dimension simply must be clarified. I would hazard though, considering the different types of awareness considered above, that the answer would be yes if, and only if, different levels of awareness are accepted as different dimensions. From a mythopoetic perspective I would indeed assert that different levels of consciousness are to be accepted as otherworlds; from an analytical and philosophical perspective, I would have to again insist on a clear and precise definition of the term dimension.
Jim::: I don't know whether or not different levels of awareness exist. What is in awareness may look like different levels of the awareness, but upon repeated inspection, the awareness itself, to me, always seems to be exactly the same. If, for example, I am sleepy, it feels a little like a lower level of awareness at first glance, but looking closer, the actual awareness "looks" the same in both cases. In one case, the awareness is filled with sleepy feelings and less detail, and feeling alert has alert type feelings and more details, but the basic awareness seems the same.
There is also a Dzoghen claim that awareness is a constant. but I don't know whether it was arrived at by direct observation or from theory. Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche and Richard Barron, translators, Longchen Rabjam, THE PRECIOUS TREASURY OF THE BASIC SPACE OF PHENOMENA, 2001, Junction City, California: padma Publishing.
Filleadh:::Maintaining a phenomenological approach, this question will also be bracketed (with thanks to Jim for raising it and helping me sort out somproce questions I have been asking...) so that we might proceed on understanding the experience of time and place, and, perhaps, how it might relate to other experiences.
Jim:::That seems true. If the physical does exist, and that has been questioned, that experience and the physical have some parallel processes, though evidently ot all processes are parallel. I will repeat that I suspect only that consciousness is basic energy of some kind in a large number of dimensions, and the physical is the same basic energy in a much smaller number of dimensions.
Jim:::In terms of your "acting and reacting" volition is something else in the system, but I don't understand exactly what volition is.
Filleadh:::Place is the meeting place of objective reality and subjective perception. It is a confluence of various factors of the attributes of things within the place and the sensory perception of them which can provoke psychological, emotional, and spiritual reactions within the psyche and subsequently in actual deed. Place presents itself through this coming together of the world and human perception, whether perceived consciously or unconsciously, and can lead to a heightened state of awareness that is best described as an aesthetic experience. Through this, a reciprocal and active relationship emerges that provides information to the human subject, useful to his or her engagement of the world, and, more importantly, to his or her personal development. Through the immediate reaction and subsequent development, both human subject and objective place are transformed.
Jim:::Is aesthetic experience a group of emotion-type dimensions, or a group of bits, or a property of the smallest bits. Bits not being used as in a computer sernse.
Filleadh::: Place is often taken for granted. Through repeated exposure to them, many of the places we experience go into a “subsidiary awareness” (Polanyi), where they are registered only as auxiliary experiences. Certainly, this ability is of essential value and is what allows humans to accomplish anything. It is important to note however, that the input from subsidiary awareness, while not processed to the full extent of the main object of conscious focus at the time, does not simply dissipate. It becomes a form, a mental entity, located somewhere between our conscious awareness and our unconscious psyche. Since this subsidiary awareness is neither completely in conscious awareness nor in the unconscious, it forms a bridge between those two parts of the psyche. It is the focusing of attention on the subsidiary awareness of place that raises it fully into conscious awareness of the psyche and can be perceived as an intense aesthetic experience. By eadhengaging the subsidiary awareness of place, and the aesthetics and archetypal nature of our relationship to it, we can not only better understand what it means to be human, but also begin on a broader level to more effectively engage our development and thus be better equipped to address the many challenges we face. This provides the rationale for a decrease, at least during periods of intentional ritual or contemplative practice, of the taking for granted of place.
Jim:::It's not all that precise, but it could be. A subsidiary awareness could merely be a closer relationship with the unconsciousness in those locations. If there is a subsidiary awareness separate from consciousness awareness, separate from the unconscious, and separate from the physical, then it sounds like a three mode universe. Perhaps. In any case, my analysis of the information processing in consciousness would be the same no matter what that which is hidden is.
Filleady:::There is a direct link between the experience of place and human psychospiritual development. Nurturing a deeper relationship to place through an archetypal approach and practice will aid in a meaningful development into a mature and psychospiritually well person. Evidence from depth psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and other disciplines such as neuroscience confirm the existence of psychological archetypes - patterns of human mental energy - that are universal across time and cultures, and that form the foundation of our relationship to place. In fact, the archetypes are found mirrored and manifested in place. Based on accounts of encounters with place (see Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places, an ethnography of the Western Apache practice of speaking in names), and on an aesthetic theory based on an archetypal concept of the human psyche, the experience of place constitutes an aesthetic experience which heightens awareness. Such heightened awareness can provoke further development of the experiencing individual; it seems to be the case that such experiences are required for such development.
Jim::: From the results, the experience of place would look the same as some kinds of meditation. Jung evidently had two definitions of archetype and collective unconscious. One is that an archetype is something basic one is born with, which satisfies the brain-only theorists. On the other hand, from the preface he wrote for the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching, he talks about direct long distant connections, like a kind of telepathy.
Filleadh:::Through this meaningful growth of the human psyche, the individual is better able to engage the world through the perspective of his or her authentic self, which is beneficial to self, world, and other. It is for these reasons that it is essential to better understand and nurture the human relationship to the archetypes of place, and thereby foster healthy growth and development of the individual and of society.
Jim::: You have nothing to apologize for. Your comments dance well enough to set up perhaps thousands of years of research.
Jim - sorry I haven’t been able to jump back in over the past few days, things have been a bit hectic. I enjoyed reading your post. It seems that you dive deeper into the ‘bits and bytes’ of things, and I kind of take a more abstract approach to the inquiry. Both valid approaches, with one complimenting the other.
What might, the most, meaningful and rich level of experiences of being in the world, possible be?
I think there have been several acceptable formulations of what that is... the Confucian striving to become an “exemplary person” or the Socratic “examined life” spring immediately to my mind.
As does the Irish myth The Voyage of Bran, in which there is a silver branch that sings to Bran, and by doing so, upends his world dramatically. As Moriarty explains in his book Invoking Ireland, this is a breaking of the habit of being human which leads to silver branch perception - a way of seeing the entire Ecology of the world, natural and spiritual. No easy thing, it requires the breaking of societal and personal habits of being human that are based on a myriad of conditioned and usually unconscious presuppositions. The most dangerous of these presuppositions is that there is a separation between the mundane and the sacred, between human and nature, between nature and the sacred. Cultivating silver branch perception is a journey toward awareness of all of nature as the song of the silver branch; the singing of the sacred. Everything always already is sacred, and all we have to do is change our way of seeing from one which sees only the presupposed, mundane world, to one which sees the already present sacred in everything. From this perspective, wherever we might choose to engage in a spiritual practice is appropriate; in fact, considering Moriarty’s idea of silver branch perception, everywhere already is a place of spiritual practice. Cultivating the seeing of things in this manner has been and continues to be a journey toward awareness. I am not sure if silver branch perception can ever be fully reached; actually, I am fairly confident it cannot be, and yet I must engage that journey.
Having said all that, for me the meaningful and rich life is about engaging in the process of becoming more than it is about someday arriving somewhere. In my experience, the Jungian individuation process is the most meaningful and rich expression of that engagement.
Yes, and after people got themselves all confused with that method, most of them gave up. If people had persevered, I think we would have a much better phenomenology field than we do now.
Is aesthetic experience a group of emotion-type dimensions, or a group of bits, or a property of the smallest bits.
Jung evidently had two definitions of archetype and collective unconscious. One is that an archetype is something basic one is born with, which satisfies the brain-only theorists. On the other hand, from the preface he wrote for the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching, he talks about direct long distant connections, like a kind of telepathy.
Hauke, Christopher. "The Unconscious: Personal and Collective." The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications. Ed. Renos K. Papadopoulos. London: Routledge, 2008. 54-73. Print.
Hillman, James. A Blue Fire: Selected Writings. Ed. Thomas Moore. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Print.
---. Re-visioning Psychology. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. Print.
Jung, C G. "Approaching the unconscious." Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell Pub, 1968. 18-103. Print.
---. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. [Princeton, N.J.]: Princeton UP, 1980. Print.
Stevens, Anthony. "The Archetypes." The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications. Ed. Renos K. Papadopoulos. London: Routledge, 2008. 74-93. Print.
---. The Two Million-year-old Self. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1993. Print.
Filleadh:::I think there have been several acceptable formulations of what that is... the Confucian striving to become an “exemplary person” or the Socratic “examined life” spring immediately to my mind.
Jim:::Those ideas are fine, but what an exemplary person, etc. might be should change as knowledge advances. I don't have a proof of that. However, my feeling is that an exemplary life 2500 years ago is different from what an exemplary life would be 10,000 years from now if we don't destroy ourselves and continue to do research for another 10,000 years.
Filleadh:::As does the Irish myth The Voyage of Bran, in which there is a silver branch that sings to Bran, and by doing so, upends his world dramatically. As Moriarty explains in his book Invoking Ireland, this is a breaking of the habit of being human which leads to silver branch perception - a way of seeing the entire Ecology of the world, natural and spiritual. No easy thing, it requires the breaking of societal and personal habits of being human that are based on a myriad of conditioned and usually unconscious presuppositions.
Jim:::It's hard to say what that means personally, especially since it might be different for different people (different entrance points). I remember on one of my solitary retreats, this one in a high valley across the lower valley from Mt. Shasta, that after a number of weeks, I felt like I was part of the forest. This especially was the case when I heard some hikers, only once because there are no trails into where I was, I felt like they were human intruders on us, forest-animals-me. To feel anything as an intruder, however, isn't as advanced as it could be.
Filleadh::: The most dangerous of these presuppositions is that there is a separation between the mundane and the sacred, between human and nature, between nature and the sacred. Cultivating silver branch perception is a journey toward awareness of all of nature as the song of the silver branch; the singing of the sacred. Everything always already is sacred, and all we have to do is change our way of seeing from one which sees only the presupposed, mundane world, to one which sees the already present sacred in everything. From this perspective, wherever we might choose to engage in a spiritual practice is appropriate; in fact, considering Moriarty’s idea of silver branch perception, everywhere already is a place of spiritual practice. Cultivating the seeing of things in this manner has been and continues to be a journey toward awareness. I am not sure if silver branch perception can ever be fully reached; actually, I am fairly confident it cannot be, and yet I must engage that journey.
Jim:::The word "sacred" could be used in a large number of different ways. A mistake would be to use the word as something that separates oneself from nature, for example, thinking "I am looking at the sacred, which is outside of me." Something more positive would be to think something like "We are sacred."
Filleadh:::Having said all that, for me the meaningful and rich life is about engaging in the process of becoming more than it is about someday arriving somewhere. In my experience, the Jungian individuation process is the most meaningful and rich expression of that engagement.
Jim:::I agree. Recently, though, everything got POTENTIALLY turned on its head when I realized a possible implication of Cantor's three sizes of infinity. The smallest infinity is the number of all rational number. The next larger infinity in this series is the number of all irrational numbers. The largest infinity is the number of all possible shapes. If time is quantized, as some thinkers believe, the the number of moment in time in an eternity would be equal to the infinity of all rational number. If time is continuous, the number of moments of time would be equal to the number of all irrational numbers. However, the totality of possible experiences would be equal to the largest infinity, the number of all possible shapes. That means that there isn't enough time to have all possible experiences, which is a good thing because I don't think we want ALL possible experiences. Nevertheless, at each moment, we have to choose one next moment, and forgo other possible next moments. So we arrive at a very difficult problem. How do we decide on the best possible next moment for others and ourselves, or even the better possible next moment. That implies that life might also be a kind of research into how to choose the best/better next moments.
Jim:::In the field of psychology, that is one of the reasons that psychologists are not allowed to do theoretical research.
Jim:::Of course, the original question is whether or not various qualities are dimensions, which I don't know. From another point of view, I think that aesthetic activities are some of the most important research that we do. Each painting, musical composition, novel, etc. is an experiment on what is possible for consciousness to experience. In some daydreams, I am able to set up an endowment fund for a university which would do research on the psychological processes involved in perceiving and creating aesthetic feelings. Subjects would be hired for a year, new ones each subsequent year, who would be paid an amount equal to the mean salary of local high school teachers.
Filleadh:::Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure the preface to the I Ching was more specifically about Jung’s concept of synchronicity. While certainly related to the archetypes and the place where they reside, the collective unconscious, I find it helpful to keep definitions separate and within context. I have found the following especially valuable in getting a clearer understanding of the archetypes (from Jung himself and some post-Jungians) in the context of understanding the structure of the psyche:Hauke, Christopher. "The Unconscious: Personal and Collective." The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications. Ed. Renos K. Papadopoulos. London: Routledge, 2008. 54-73. Print.
Jim:::Strictly speaking, you are right. However, the nature of synchronicity is such that archetypes must be in synchronicity also, whether or not the definitions are separate. Remember that to be intellectually accepted, Jung couldn't afford to be what others would say is superstitious. So Jung was in hiding. If the intellectual community had been watching, they would have considered synchronicity to be superstitious, just like telepathy, psychokinesis, etc. are held to be mere superstitions.
What a wonderful conversation... so many sub-threads, hard to choose. Oh well, might get kinda messy (what? is. ) Rather than respond to each item individually, I will just write in general on where my thoughts are right now.
The idea that what constitutes a meaningful life should change suggests that since previous generations did not know what would constitute a meaningful and rich life (the famous ‘good life’) for us, then we likewise cannot know what will be beneficial to future generations and hence have no moral obligations to them. While it is an interesting idea it is also, unfortunately, very dangerous and in fact is often used to prevent us from not destroying ourselves (or to ensure that we do). Applied to environmental issues, the danger in this line of thinking is clear, I think, and thus, it should be sorted out.
Aside from this, I would agree that the idea of the good life would and should change as knowledge advances if I thought humans were born as a tabula rasa, but I don’t. I believe (along with Jung et al) that we humans come into the world with a pre-existing set of archetypes and associated imperatives for development.
When describing the archetypes Jung did not hesitate to equate, or at least closely associate them to instincts. Stevens has taken this idea and developed it into a theory that explains the origin of these instincts of the psyche and also of psychopathology. According to Stevens, the archetypes are a result of evolution and natural selection, providing humans with psychological abilities needed to survive in the natural and social landscapes in which they evolved. He describes the archetypes as the basic units of the psyche, the “archaic heritage” of humanity, and patterns of psychic energy which inform and guide the human life. Stevens differentiates between a conscious intelligence and a deeper intelligence which has evolved over the course of human history. This is what Jung called the collective unconscious, which is comprised of the archetypes. Stevens holds that these archetypes are the result of the phylogenetic development of the human psyche.
In the field of behavioral biology, Stevens refers to Tinbergen’s idea that every species has a “repertoire’ of behavior acquired through evolution, elements of which are activated upon experiencing appropriate stimuli for that behavior. This idea matches up nearly one-to-one to Jung’s descriptions of the archetypes, and informs Steven’s theory of archetypal evolution to a large degree. Archetypal psychiatrists have also picked up on the theory of the archetypes. Specifically, ethopsychiatrists have discovered biological structures which essentially are identical with Jung’s archetypes, and provide goals and behaviors which serve to ensure the fitness of all members of a species to survive. Wenegrat refers to these structures as “genetically transmitted response strategies.” Gilbert calls them “psychobiological response patterns,” while Gardner refers to “deeply homologous neural structures.” With the evolutionary and biological approach, the idea of the archetypes as a result of evolution transcends the Cartesian body-mind split. They are hereditary and behavioral products of evolution, and phenomena which are perceived and experienced through the psyche.
To examine a bit closer the idea of what makes a life meaningful, a comparison of the ideas of Viktor Frankl and Jung might be interesting. Frankl seems to think that meaning is found in the external world, and I don’t think he is entirely wrong, that is, I believe that meaning can be found in the external world but only inasmuch as events correspond to the archetypal imperatives that we all have (that is, that they activate the archetypes, which are dormant until confronted by archetypal events that correspond to them). I do think though, that Frankl’s ideas are inadequate.
Jung and Frankl both agreed that meaning is an essential part of living a life worth living. With meaning, humans are empowered to endure intense suffering, what Jung called “incredible hardships,” such as those experienced by Frankl in the concentration camps. With meaning, humans are able to orient themselves to the world, to understand where and why they are in the universe. Jung and Frankl also agree on the difficulty of cultivating meaning. Frankl built his logotherapy with the goal of cultivating meaning, and worked with other prisoners in the concentration camps to help them do so. Jung takes a more pragmatic approach, acknowledging that things which can give meaning to life (i.e., religion) are difficult to believe in, but indicates that a belief in these things can and should be chosen because it is useful to do so (interesting sidenote – this corresponds roughly to William James’ Will to Believe).
It seems I’ve gone on again... I hope that this long post will serve (at least in a roundabout way) to clarify my idea of a ‘rich and meaningful life’ and perhaps aid further discussions on a possible archetypal form-matter metaphysics. This might also help in engaging the original question of the human subjective awareness and experience of perception and dimension (if we are able to define dimension in the context we are using it in this thread...).
Using the terms of that definition, "system" refers to the phenomenon observed, the 'singular' instant under scrutiny, the "aggregate of points in real or abstract space". If the "system" is the phenomenon, then "element" would correspond to the various sensory complexes (e.g. pressure, light, smell, etc.). Each of these complexes is necessarily and sufficiently described by "a group of properties", Time and Space (and whatever additional quality is relevant), and I gave examples of this in my first response. A dimension, then, is one of these properties such as length (1-dimensional, x-axis). A dimension is a continuum of a singular quality; dimensions are the parameters or coordinate variables "assigned to such a property" i.e. a dimension is a variable. There are, of course, complexes of variables, such as frequency being a complex of length and time variables, but I think for simplicity's sake are still only referred to as being a "variable" rather than a variable complex much like kilocalories being commonly referred to as Calories.
By that definition the purpose of a dimensional reference is to describe differentiation within a continuum, such as x=* being numerically and functionally differentiated from x=^. The differentiation appears arbitrary and discontinuous within abstraction, however. Frege poses the situation in a similar way in On Sense and Reference.
Although x=* and x=^ are functionally different, their x-axis commonality is what allows them to refer in the same manner. Logically, if x=* and x=^ then *=^. The question then becomes "If *=^ because they are both equal to/refer to x, then how can they be functionally different?" Frege gives the example of The Morning Star and The Evening Star; The Morning Star is(=) Venus and The Evening Star is(=) Venus. Intuitively The Morning Star is not(≠) The Evening Star even though in truth they refer to the same object, Venus. If objects are logically equal but functionally different, this would suggest that the functional difference is arbitrary yet having significance. In the example of the numbers 1.999 and 2, 2 is approached by 1.999 but never reached and thus has an asymptotically discontinuous relationship, the relationship being constituted by their axial identity quality. As Frege termed it, they have the same referent, the true object, but different sense.
The points (bits) visibly plotted signify an object identifiable by its uniquely differentiated coordinate(s) on a continuum or within intersecting continua; it is the regular nature of the relationship between the two dimensions that allows each object to be identified is differentiated in significance from another object. Another way to refer to the relationship between dimensions would be that they are a dimensional complex such as a plane being a 2-dimensional (2D) complex.
The object has no significance within a dimension if it cannot be differentiated from another object related to it within that dimension. In the example of congenital blindness, the person has only one, undifferentiated experience of the light dimensional complex; there is (as far as I am aware) no way to describe differentiation in light/color to a congenitally blind person that would allow that person to identify a green apple versus a red apple. Thus difference in color has no significant value to a blind person. And even in the case of someone who has had the differentiated experiences of color, if they eventually become blind then they lose the ability to identify different objects by their color even if abstractly and empirically they know the difference. This suggests that while one may not have the capability to perceive any differentiation within a dimension or dimensional complex, objects can and do occupy those coordinates. It is this capability to differentiate objects/bits/points that allows us to take raw perception, raw sense data, and form an experience accordingly. The ability to form any kind of relationship to an object involves shared constituency of a least one dimension.
This model of understanding would seem to support the idea that the issue is not how objects (bits) on a continuum are able to connect but rather how is it we are able to differential them and what purpose the ability to differentiate them serves.
I agree with the notion that awareness is constant; what changes is our ability to perceive the data, the perspective from which we view the data, and the portion(s) of the data our attention/focus rests on at any given time. One of my favorite examples from physics is Simple Harmonic Motion, and this gif http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/nn24 ... tion-1.gif shows how Simple Harmonic Motion functions beautifully. If you were looking at the blue object attached to the spring straight on with a monocular view (limiting depth perception), the blue object would appear to be getting bigger and smaller rather than moving back and forth. If the red object on the circle was, say, a candle on a turntable that you were looking at straight on with a monocular view, the candle would appear to be moving side to side, getting bigger and smaller, and increasing and decreasing acceleration rather than moving in a circle. Viewing a cylindrical coil (think slinky toy) straight on with a monocular view, an object sliding forward or backward along the length would appear to be moving in a spiral outward or inward and growing or shrinking in size, respectively, instead of moving forward in a circular motion. The same cylindrical coil viewed from the side appears like a constant wave pattern rather than a circular or spiral pattern with the object moving up and down.
Filleadh:::What a wonderful conversation... so many sub-threads, hard to choose. Oh well, might get kinda messy (what? is. ) Rather than respond to each item individually, I will just write in general on where my thoughts are right now.
Jim:::In that way, you of course don't respond to a number of my points. That's OK. On the one hand, I don't think any school of thought is more than primitive and inadequate dogma. On the other hand, unlike a religious dogma, people in schools of thought are still doing research, which means that they are valuable paths to gaining additional future knowledge. It is quite constructive for people to limit themselves to a school of thought. One implication is that if someone likes a school of thought, I should try to be careful not to convert them away from the school of thought they have chosen. Therefore, it is fully OK for you not to respond to some of my points.
Filleadh:::The idea that what constitutes a meaningful life should change suggests that since previous generations did not know what would constitute a meaningful and rich life (the famous ‘good life’) for us, then we likewise cannot know what will be beneficial to future generations and hence have no moral obligations to them. While it is an interesting idea it is also, unfortunately, very dangerous and in fact is often used to prevent us from not destroying ourselves (or to ensure that we do). Applied to environmental issues, the danger in this line of thinking is clear, I think, and thus, it should be sorted out.
Jim:::That of course is your idea, not mine. You have eliminated the future for the most part, which is OK if you want to do your research that way. Personally, I would not use the previous generation as the ultimate data for evaluating whether or not the current generation knows what a good life is. I look towards the time in the future when we have full knowledge of everything. Then, from that knowledge, we will know whether or not the current generation falls short and why. We would also know how to avoid all dangers. Of course, we are a long way from full knowledge, so our ideas about what a good life is should be tentative, and we should be trying to discover how to objectively improve them. For that kind of research, we need to have a lot of diversity in thinking. I personally also wouldn't say that we have a moral obligation to a past generation. Why, for example, would we have a moral obligation to Hitler, and so forth. What I think we have a moral obligation towards is the welfare of all minds, including animal minds, and so forth. Again, we won't fully know what best promotes the welfare of all minds until we have discovered all knowledge. So our ideas now need to be tentative. Given that you have a concern about this, I should talk about some evidence for karma as a natural process, but I will do that in another thread.
Jim:::If archetype are real, then a clear definition isn't yet possible because there is so much about archetypes that we don't know yet. For professional reasons, one might hold to a certain definition of archetypes, and that definition will be useful in research, but that doesn't mean that, in terms of ultimate full knowledge, that the definition is clear.
Filleadh:::Jung’s psychology is based on his model of the structure of the psyche, which he saw as being comprised of three levels – consciousness, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The psyche has an autonomous energy that is directed to some goal, but otherwise is similar to physical energy in regards to principles of conservation, transformation, and degradation. Consciousness refers simply to conscious awareness, which occupies a liminal space between the inner and the outer worlds of the individual (Ellenberger 704-706).
Jim:::Part of the direction towards some goal is volition, and as you will see later on, karma seems to be volition memory. I don't know of any data anyone has come up with which shows that consciousness has conservation, transformation, and degradation. Piaget has done work on conservation, but he is looking at how the idea of conservation develops, not at whether or not consciousness itself is conserved. There is a vague possibility that if consciousness were to follow the law of conservation, the universe would long ago have become rigid and unchanging, but that is merely a hint of a possible idea. More verbally, if consciousness is conserved, then transformation and degradation would, it seems, not be possible. The ideas don't coordinate.
Filleadh::: The personal unconscious is mostly comprised of undesired and repressed material such as fears, anger, or shame (Jung, “Essential” 67), forming what Jung originally called complexes, and later the shadow, which exerts control over the individual without he or she being aware. Another ‘sub-personality’ of the individual is what Jung called the persona, the mask one wears in order to meet societal or personal expectations.
Jim::: A large body of literature, that in the psychology of creative behavior, contains massive evidence that the unconsciousness is not mostly comprised of that negative material. That material is there, but there are vast amounts of positive material in the unconscious. A shorthand for the creative process which is standard in the literature is four stages, preparation, incubation, illumination, verification. The preparation puts a lot of positive material into the unconscious. During incubation, when one is thinking about and doing other things, the unconscious processes that positive material. Then, the unconscious develops a creative solution, such as an idea, a painting, and so forth. The unconscious then transfers the creative solution suddenly into consciousness in what is called illumination. This process is observed repeatedly in creative people. A minor example of the process is what has probably happened to most people in taking tests. One sees a question one can't answer, so goes on to other questions one can answer. Then, suddenly, one has an answer for the question one skipped.
Jim::: You are assuming that minds are unable to obtain information from other minds, and groups of them, via telepathic processes. That is the majority view in science at the moment. However, it has never been proven that telepathy doesn't exist. If perchance telepathy does exist, then the above definition of archetypes is quite incorrect.
Jim:::Nobody can know that that is what Jung really thought, because Jung was speaking into a scientific sub-culture which rejected the idea that telepathy could possibly exist. So he was forced to say it was hereditary, etc. Of course, there are physical organizing tendencies in the brain, so that part is correct. What would not be correct would be to say "only physical organizing tendencies".
Jim:::You mentioned shamanism as part of this, but by your above definitions, shamanism would be impossible, because shamanism in reality has a telepathic aspect.
Jim::: It is honest of you to admit that you have a professional self interest in this, but I think a professional self-interest is OK. There are all kinds of different ways one can discover knowledge, and professional self-interest is one way to do so.
Filleadh:::Sometimes, instincts can be overridden for practical purposes. For example, one of the strongest instincts is to perceive some other people as part of one's in-group, and everyone else as out-group, meaning one is allowed to do things to them one is not allowed to do to people in one's in-group. I have found that I can change perception of another from out-group to in-group by deciding to do so. This produces a sudden change in perception, like the Neckar cube change. The person looks like any out-group member before the sudden change, and then, after the change, looks quite different and a member of my in-group.
Jim:::Nobody has enough data about all groups to be able to say that any of the above actually exists. We do have a perceptual tendency to perceive only partly similar things as more similar than they really are.
Filleadh:::In the field of behavioral biology, Stevens refers to Tinbergen’s idea that every species has a “repertoire’ of behavior acquired through evolution, elements of which are activated upon experiencing appropriate stimuli for that behavior. This idea matches up nearly one-to-one to Jung’s descriptions of the archetypes, and informs Steven’s theory of archetypal evolution to a large degree. Archetypal psychiatrists have also picked up on the theory of the archetypes. Specifically, ethopsychiatrists have discovered biological structures which essentially are identical with Jung’s archetypes, and provide goals and behaviors which serve to ensure the fitness of all members of a species to survive. Wenegrat refers to these structures as “genetically transmitted response strategies.” Gilbert calls them “psychobiological response patterns,” while Gardner refers to “deeply homologous neural structures.” With the evolutionary and biological approach, the idea of the archetypes as a result of evolution transcends the Cartesian body-mind split. They are hereditary and behavioral products of evolution, and phenomena which are perceived and experienced through the psyche.
Jim:::There are such instincts, as far as I know, but there is no way I know of to jump from that to saying that it transcends the more absolute Cartesian body-mind split, nor the Leibnitz monads. It might be noted that the instincts are not at a transcendent level, but are rather plain old ordinary structures of the brain. One of Kant's points is that the transcendent cannot be at the same level as the phenonema/phenomenons. Structures of the brain are all down at the physical level, so could not themselves transcend the physical.
Filleadh:::The archetypes are ultimately unknowable, and it is only through symbols and patterns that they can be consciously experienced.
Jim:::That contradicts your above idea that they are instincts in the brain, in the neurological structures. The structures of the brain are ultimately knowable, not ultimately unknowable.
Jim:::Dreams are certainly important, and it is OK to have theories which are not precise as hypotheses from which to discover more knowledge. In terms of actual psychological processes, how does a manifestation occur? What actually is psychic energy, in detail? If something is interacting with other things, how can it be purely self-directed? And so forth.
Jim:::I don't think it actually solves those problems to go around enslaving and killing out-group people, and sometimes eating them, which are all natural instincts. Then, locusts, elephants, goats, and so forth don't nurture the ecosystem. They destroy whole swaths of the ecosystem. The only reason they don't destroy the ecosystem entirely is that the ecosystem has defenses. Humans are following those very instincts, but are more effective at destroying the ecosystem. The ecosystem probably doesn't have adequate defenses against humans, but humans are doing the natural thing that animals do when they have a chance. It is possible, however, that the ecosystem might perhaps be able to throw up new diseases fast enough to produce a massive die-off of the human population, but I don't know whether or not that will happen.
Jim:::Those are traditional views and I think have some truth to them, but I don't know how large a factor they are. One confounding variable is that people are so often threatened or punished for doing good. So the negative instincts may have been made artificially more powerful than they should be if the entire mind were healthy.
Jim::: People are also threatened and punished for trying to be wise and knowledgeable. Consider the names that the brightest children in school are called, and the rejection they face, for example. Consider the Inquisition and modern processes that are similar to it. Even in modern times, many people are tortured for not believing what the leaders of their nation say they must believe. This seems to be distorting how the instincts function.
Filleadh:::To examine a bit closer the idea of what makes a life meaningful, a comparison of the ideas of Viktor Frankl and Jung might be interesting. Frankl seems to think that meaning is found in the external world, and I don’t think he is entirely wrong, that is, I believe that meaning can be found in the external world but only inasmuch as events correspond to the archetypal imperatives that we all have (that is, that they activate the archetypes, which are dormant until confronted by archetypal events that correspond to them). I do think though, that Frankl’s ideas are inadequate.Jung and Frankl both agreed that meaning is an essential part of living a life worth living. With meaning, humans are empowered to endure intense suffering, what Jung called “incredible hardships,” such as those experienced by Frankl in the concentration camps. With meaning, humans are able to orient themselves to the world, to understand where and why they are in the universe. Jung and Frankl also agree on the difficulty of cultivating meaning. Frankl built his logotherapy with the goal of cultivating meaning, and worked with other prisoners in the concentration camps to help them do so. Jung takes a more pragmatic approach, acknowledging that things which can give meaning to life (i.e., religion) are difficult to believe in, but indicates that a belief in these things can and should be chosen because it is useful to do so (interesting sidenote – this corresponds roughly to William James’ Will to Believe).
Jim:::I wouldn't use "meaning" as an excuse for things like concentration camps, because they enable a few people to respond in a noble way to suffering. I don't think we should have things like concentration camps at all. There are ways people can be noble in positive situations. I'm certainly not saying that you personally are justifying concentration camps and so forth. I am merely pointing out where than idea can lead.
Jim::: I think we do need some temporary ideas, but I don't think we will know what true meaning is until we discover all knowledge. My own view is vague, but followable. For me, meaning is to ultimately provide all minds in the universe with the best possible existence given the basic laws of the universe. I don't think anything could be better than "best possible".
Jim:::I don't think that current archetypes are ultimate. They are just something that evolution has thrown up, and there are strong random type elements in evolution. I suspect that we will ultimately discover the best possible set of archetypes. Before that happens, we should be able to raise the intelligence of everyone, perhaps by hundreds of IQ points, at which time, a number of new options will become available. We should also become able to raise the intelligence of all animals to our level.
In terms of the whole universe, if Einstein is correct, we can never travel to personally help the minds on other planet throughout the universe. However, we can send out transmissions, and use them to send minds on other planets the knowledge we have. We might not be able to go to other planets physically, perhaps, but we can send them knowledge. Of course, to accomplish that purpose, we need to discover much more knowledge than we have now.
Jim::: I'm beginning to think you might be fishing for compliments. Of course, your ideas are important, though I mentioned this before.
Abstracting out some general properties is a major way in which science advances. I hardly dare say anything, because your mind may be going somewhere with this and I don't want to throw you off your path. You're not merely quoting a school of thought here.
I might dare say this. The next step might be to find something in the data never previously noticed, which relates to your abstractions in a way which is a surprise.
In that way, you of course don't respond to a number of my points. That's OK. On the one hand, I don't think any school of thought is more than primitive and inadequate dogma. On the other hand, unlike a religious dogma, people in schools of thought are still doing research, which means that they are valuable paths to gaining additional future knowledge. It is quite constructive for people to limit themselves to a school of thought. One implication is that if someone likes a school of thought, I should try to be careful not to convert them away from the school of thought they have chosen. Therefore, it is fully OK for you not to respond to some of my points.
Sorry if I offended you by not responding directly. I meant no disrespect or anything like that. It was partly due to my lack of time and partly because of the methodology I use when engaging complex philosophical questions. I always go about distilling things down to the simplest possible form in order to better understand the inquiry. Part of that is focusing first on the essential sub-questions. In this case it was the idea that we agreed on that some type of form-matter theory is needed to make sense of things – hence the long post on the archetypes. Whether or not we agree on the specifics, it seems that at least the basic structure is acceptable, which is what I wanted to determine before offering some interim conclusions.
2.	For example, based AlainaFae’s post, if I perceive a tapestry and a mirror within my field of vision, they are both in the same dimension, yet they are clearly different, as they are in different regions of the same continuum of that dimension. That is, they both exist and thus refer to the same thing – the True, yet they are clearly different in that one is a tapestry to my left, and the other is a mirror to my right. They thus have a different sense of meaning within the same dimension. So while they are the same, they are different.
3.	Now, what happens subjectively on that perception? I can consciously focus on the tapestry, and it is funneled into a concept/form of ‘tapestry’ which contains different possible qualities of size, color, texture, etc. I can also not focus on the tapestry, but I still am aware of it being there, I simply am not actively (mostly unconsciously) engaging the concept/form of a tapestry. Is then, this perhaps pre-conceptual perception occurring in a different dimension? Is the focused awareness occurring in a different dimension?
4.	From 3) we raised the additional question: do different types of awareness occur in different dimensions?
5.	From 3) it follows that the focused awareness can be considered similar to the conscious and the subsidiary awareness to the unconscious.
6.	Based on the preceding archetypal/form discussion, 4) and 5) in turn boil down to the question as to whether the conscious and unconscious layers of the psyche are in different dimensions, and if that admits to degrees.
7.	While they can be distinguished, it seems difficult to neatly separate perceptions of subsidiary awareness from those of focused awareness in a meaningful way in the context of our inquiry. The red and grey blur of the tapestry in my subsidiary awareness is still located in the same region of the same continuum as when I focus my awareness on the mandala pattern of the tapestry and appreciate the vibrancy of the reds, greys, and beiges, and the floral pattern within. This suggests that the conscious and unconscious awareness occur in the same dimension, whichever dimension that might be, and yet, like the tapestry and mirror, have clearly different senses of meaning.
8.	The crux of the question then seems to be that if the perceptions do in fact occur in the same dimension as suggested by 7), do they occur in a different dimension from which the perceived objects are physically located?
9.	The physical brain is assumed to exist, and therefore refers to the True and thus us in the same dimension as the tapestry and mirror.
11.	The question thus reduces to: is perception is limited to the brain?
Unfortunately, though the literature on it is vast, I am not well versed in the philosophy of mind, and have not even clearly sorted out where I stand on the question. I tend to think that the mind is separate from, but solidly rooted, in the physical brain. Please forgive me, but considering my lack of knowledge in and my vague stance on the matters of the philosophy of mind, and my lack of time, I doubt if I will be able to offer anything further of real value to the discussion.
Umm... No. No fishing. But many thanks anyway. I am honored that you took the time to read them, but suffer even more from a guilty conscience for my lack of time and not fully articulating what I was trying to do. Again, my apologies for any discomfort I caused by not being able to respond directly to everything.
Filleadh:::Sorry if I offended you by not responding directly. I meant no disrespect or anything like that. It was partly due to my lack of time and partly because of the methodology I use when engaging complex philosophical questions. I always go about distilling things down to the simplest possible form in order to better understand the inquiry. Part of that is focusing first on the essential sub-questions. In this case it was the idea that we agreed on that some type of form-matter theory is needed to make sense of things – hence the long post on the archetypes. Whether or not we agree on the specifics, it seems that at least the basic structure is acceptable, which is what I wanted to determine before offering some interim conclusions.
Jim::: You show good character by worrying if you had offended, but you didn't. You do have other things to do, so not having enough time is quite legitimate. Distilling down is an excellent method, though of course, different people might distill down in different ways. I also appreciate that you have been discussing ideas. It is worrisome when someone does something different, such as saying that a theory can't be accepted, even if true, because that might strengthen religion. Believe me, you are delightful to communicate with.
1. It seems the following questions arising out of the original question are the most relevant: i)Is it possible to imagine something like redness in the absence of something containing redness as one of its qualities?
Jim::: That is a good question for future research in general. I don't think it gets at the question of whether red is a dimension or not. In form, the question is somewhat similar to whether or not we could imagine the z axis in the absence of the x and y axis. If redness is a dimension, we would expect it to be sort of attached to the other dimensions it intersected with, just as we would expect a z axis to be sort of attached to an x and y axis.
Jim:::Certain neural information processing structure are involved in the processing of light at a certain wavelength coming into the eye. However, subjective redness is not those neural structures. Therefore, subjective redness could not be an archetype if one defines an archetype as being only a structure in the brain. If one defines an archetype more broadly, then one could perhaps. If redness is a dimension, then it is up to one to decide whether or not to call a dimension an archetype. One can slice this in various ways.
Jim:::It depends on the relationship between percepts and concepts. I don't have this worked out. One thing one can do, however, is notice the difference between a word and a concept. One can understand a concept without a word for the concept being present. For example, one can say, "I know what it is but I can't think of the word for it at the moment." Then, there is a special problem with a number of abstract concepts. For example, let us look at the nonverbal meaning of "flower". We can know nonverbally that a rose is a flower, a columbine is a flower, a tulip is a flower, an orchid is a flower, a bell flower is a flower, and so forth. However, our knowing that is not a rigid template, such as a template in the shape of a rose, etc. If it were a template, then the template for one kind of flower couldn't identify a quite different flower as a flower. For example, if our meaning of flower were a template shaped like a columbine, that would fail to identify a rose as a flower. So our nonverbal meaning of flower can't have a particular shape. In fact, we can't clearly perceive the meaning flower. We can use that almost invisible meaning to successfully identify various kinds of flowers, and we can sort of feel it, but only vaguely.
Filleadh::: iv) Is it possible that an instant of raw perception, however small, occurs before conceptualizing the experience, or that some perception is not funneled into concepts at all?
Jim:::Again, we don't clearly know yet. The question might be generalized to something like, "Does every concept have to be in some way connected to a percept, and/or does every percept have to be connected in some way to a concept?"
Jim::: My feeling is a no. Two units could connect within a larger or smaller number of dimensions.
Filleadh:::2. For example, based AlainaFae’s post, if I perceive a tapestry and a mirror within my field of vision, they are both in the same dimension, yet they are clearly different, as they are in different regions of the same continuum of that dimension. That is, they both exist and thus refer to the same thing – the True, yet they are clearly different in that one is a tapestry to my left, and the other is a mirror to my right. They thus have a different sense of meaning within the same dimension. So while they are the same, they are different.
Jim::: If the colors in the tapestry image are in different dimensions, then the tapestry image wouldn't be the same as the mirror image.
Filleadh:::3. Now, what happens subjectively on that perception? I can consciously focus on the tapestry, and it is funneled into a concept/form of ‘tapestry’ which contains different possible qualities of size, color, texture, etc. I can also not focus on the tapestry, but I still am aware of it being there, I simply am not actively (mostly unconsciously) engaging the concept/form of a tapestry. Is then, this perhaps pre-conceptual perception occurring in a different dimension? Is the focused awareness occurring in a different dimension?
Jim:::As usual, we don't really know yet. I tentatively don't think there is one conceptual dimension, and I don't think the entire tapestry is a dimension in and of itself. What I think is that there would be the form of the tapestry, quite complex due to the different threads. Then, the redness dimension would intersect the tapestry form here and there, a blueness dimension would intersect the tapestry at a few different points, and so forth. One or more concepts or aspects of concepts might intersect the form-color complex in some places of its own.
Filleadh:::4. From 3) we raised the additional question: do different types of awareness occur in different dimensions?
Jim:::That might take hundreds of years of research to answer. If awareness is a constant (an if) then awareness would transcend all the dimensions.
Filleadh:::5. From 3) it follows that the focused awareness can be considered similar to the conscious and the subsidiary awareness to the unconscious.
Jim:::Again, we don't know. However, the unconscious has ways to focus, or it couldn't do the creative problem solving it is observed to do. We could have a whole family of ways to focus, but that will require much more research.
Filleadh:::6. Based on the preceding archetypal/form discussion, 4) and 5) in turn boil down to the question as to whether the conscious and unconscious layers of the psyche are in different dimensions, and if that admits to degrees.
Jim::: I have doubts that entire layers are individual dimensions, but I would leave the question open.
Filleadh:::7. While they can be distinguished, it seems difficult to neatly separate perceptions of subsidiary awareness from those of focused awareness in a meaningful way in the context of our inquiry. The red and grey blur of the tapestry in my subsidiary awareness is still located in the same region of the same continuum as when I focus my awareness on the mandala pattern of the tapestry and appreciate the vibrancy of the reds, greys, and beiges, and the floral pattern within. This suggests that the conscious and unconscious awareness occur in the same dimension, whichever dimension that might be, and yet, like the tapestry and mirror, have clearly different senses of meaning.
Jim:::That could happen if they are merely different information processors. Could doesn't mean proven, however.
Filleadh:::8. The crux of the question then seems to be that if the perceptions do in fact occur in the same dimension as suggested by 7), do they occur in a different dimension from which the perceived objects are physically located? 9. The physical brain is assumed to exist, and therefore refers to the True and thus us in the same dimension as the tapestry and mirror. 10. The physical brain is responsible for processing both subsidiary and focused awareness of perception and is located in the same dimension as the tapestry and the mirror 11. The question thus reduces to: is perception is limited to the brain?
Jim:::The structure of the brain is such that it could not produce integrated images. Therefore, the perception of images must be done by some other information processor. I've talked a little bit about that with the point cluster discussion. An early form of my thinking can be found in: Newell, James. F. (Aug. 1975) "A Note on Some Internal Contradictions in Modern Materialistic Theory", PRABUDDHA BHARATA, v. 80, pp. 354-5, the house organ of the Vedanta Society. There I did an analysis in terms of differentiation and integration. In a subjective image, there is both differentiation of information and integration of information at the same time. However, the physical brain cannot differentiate and integrate simultaneously. If information is integrated to a single neuron, the differentiation is lost. If information remains differentiated, then it remains on a number of independent neurons, so is not integrated. Since a subjective image is both differentiated and integrated at the same time, it could not be produced by a physical brain. I also later added a different approach. A field of awareness for all practical purposes acts like a point. So an image in awareness contains many subjective pixels, but they merge to an effective point (awareness) while still not running together as different colors of paint would merge together if they were mixed in a can. Merging together could be explained by each subjective point in some way (within awareness) touching every other subjective point simultaneously. That would require a large number of points all directly touching each other at the same time, or a point cluster. The only model I have ever found which could do this would be a base of many dimensions. It is possible that there is some other model I haven't been able to imagine, but the only model I know is one of at least thousands of dimensions, and perhaps many more.
Thus, the question arises of what those many dimensions might be. It would make sense that the perceptual qualities are each a different dimension. That doesn't quite prove that they are dimensions, however. So this is tentative.
Filleadh:::We thus find ourselves squarely in the domain of the philosophy of mind. On this reasoning, a reformulation of the original question to one of the basic questions of philosophy of mind seems to be valid: "is the mind limited to the brain or is it something more somewhere else?” Unfortunately, though the literature on it is vast, I am not well versed in the philosophy of mind, and have not even clearly sorted out where I stand on the question. I tend to think that the mind is separate from, but solidly rooted, in the physical brain. Please forgive me, but considering my lack of knowledge in and my vague stance on the matters of the philosophy of mind, and my lack of time, I doubt if I will be able to offer anything further of real value to the discussion.
Jim::: I've never seen a hint that previous philosophers have thought in terms of information processing processes and dimensions. Therefore, if my work should be sound, no previous thinkers are accurate, because none of them have ever done the kind of analysis I am doing, and none of them has made the theoretical discoveries I seem to have made. They simply haven't dealt with the different kinds of information processes of the brain and consciousness.