Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

It really can move independent of our body and it the result of observation. When the observation is made by a machine, our mind occupies the machine. A simple experiment that demonstrates something that’s very profound when you think about it:

http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/topheadlines/~3/147810269/OUT_OF_BODY

When we drive a car, we build an input/out put relationship with it. We hear the engine rev high, we react by shifting to a higher gear. We feel the steering wheel pull to the right, we counter to the left. The car becomes an extension of our body. And just as we move out hand by controlling muscles in out wrist, we’ve learned what muscles to activate to make the car go faster, slow down, turn left or right. We can feel when the car goes over a rocky road similar to how we can feel when we walk over rocks. Thru experience of driving a car, we’ve learned what it feels like.

What if we built the same sort of synergy with another person? When they feel something, we sense what they feel. When we feel something, they sense what we feel. We can feel thru them much in the same way we’re feeing thru our cars. So our mind can thus expand beyond our own bodies and into theirs. Out of our own emotional states and into theirs. *They* become part of *us*.

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We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

- Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1874)

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When I was young people told me what it was and I believed them. What they said had to be true because they were adults and adults knew everything. Now that I’m an adult I realize that adults aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. As an adult I have dismissed their logic. I feel that I do understand it. It, however, cannot be logically expressed. It is not a logical process and cannot be reached by logic. Logic, art, and other means of expression

can only infinitely approach it. Like a point traveling along an asymptote, the more I try the closer I will get, but I never reach where I’m trying to go. But math is logic and logic can’t explain it. The only way to escape the bounds of the graph is to let the graph paper go.

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The Consciousness convention was absolutely awesome. I wish I could have gone to the whole thing. (Maybe next year). I went to a 4 hour lecture on intracellular and quantum aspects of consciousness. They used lots of big words that I didn’t understand, but for the most part I did understand what they were talking about and I learned a ton about the very fundamental construction of what our consciousness is.

Steward Hameroff was the presenter that I went to see and he didn’t disappoint. His co-presenter Nancy Woolf took on the intercellular part of the lecture which I was slightly less interested in. Dr Hameroff is a anaesthesiologist and I believe a professor at the U of A. He talked about consciousness and losing it thru anaesthetic gasses. He provided a very interesting argument against classical neural networks alone being the building blocks of consciousness. (This should be very interesting to any computer/scifi geek). It takes a certain amount of time for our brain to react. By the time the neural network of our brain has processed a thought, that thought is in the past. So basically, there is no “now” in a neural network. To “be here now” your brain really needs to transcend time, enter quantum mechanics.

To quicky summarize the lecture:
Microtubules in nerve cells contain quantum particles in superpositioned states. Consciousness occurs when the state collapses into a single value. This happens in a cyclical cycle that can actually be measured by sensors placed on the head. The cycle is the gama frequency and is typically around 20 to 30Hz. Very interestingly, during meditation, Tibetan monks have the highest gama frequency ever measured (around 100Hz). Also interesting, if consciousness comes from quantum particles in our brains, these particles could be quantomly entangled with particles in other people’s brains. This would create a collective consciousness.

If you find any of this interesting, I’d urge you to check out the conference next year. See: http://consciousness.arizona.edu

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My terrible spelling has landed me a very interesting find. I was looking up realty on google to look for a house when i actually typed “reality”. That brought me to this site about a huge convention coming to Tucson on Consciousness. (http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/) Only problem is I don’t have any vacation I can take from work to go to it. If nothing else I might just take a half day unpaid to see one lecture that I find very interesting. It will be talking about the quantum mechanics of the brain and how our minds may all be connected thru quantum entanglement. I actually wrote a paper on this in college. Apparently we now live less than a mile from the national epicenter for studies on human consciousness (The University of Arizona). Who would have thunk it?

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Scott Adams is giving away the pdf version of his book God’s Debris for free. It’s a great book and nice and short too. Get yours at: http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/godsdebris/

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Life is a river and we are all boats. We can’t use our paddles to control the river, but they sure are handy at steering the boat.

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