Nietzsche's Higher Man

Peter_Kropotkin · May 24, 2020, 4:11pm

fixed cross, two things, first of all, I have read Nietzsche,
virtually all of his writings…and as part of my going from
past to present study of philosophy, I shall be reviewing his
works… I won’t even need to buy his books as I already have them…

second, you suffer from a common disease, thinking that
YOUR interpretation is the ONLY interpretation possible…

that is part of the greatness of Nietzsche, you can create
several interpretations of his writings and different people
do come away with their own Nietzsche… based upon
their own thinking about the world………
100 people can come up with 110 different interpretations of Nietzsche

I submit you are wrong based on MY interpretation of Nietzsche
and you submit I am wrong based upon YOUR interpretation
of Nietzsche…

and who is right? we both are… and we are both wrong…

depending upon how we grade this thing……

Kropotkin

Fixed_Cross · May 24, 2020, 4:18pm

Look in the mirror Peter.
I made a thread about my own personal view. You came in here unilaterally denouncing it without giving any reasons or arguments. You were very impolite and crude, and not referring to Nietzsche to back your position. It seemed like you were jus giving your personal opinion as if it is Nietzsche’s position, and being very angry that I do not share your opinion. But I have read Nietzsche very extensively, and have focussed on this particular problem for 20 years, and never deviated from Nietzsche’s writing.

But there is such a thing as what Nietzsche did write, and then there is what he didn’t write.
I prefer to take what Nietzsche writes to be what he meant to say.

The point is, how does Nietzsche’s philosophy help overcome those all too human weaknesses, that disgrace the Earth and nature?
Right and wrong isn’t where the argument ends.

Work is the issue. Does your interpretation work? Does it help people? Does it invigorate life?
If so, you are justified.

My work is always for the Earth, animals, and for those humans that long to live natural lives. This work makes me many enemies, I am not often appreciated, as most people do not like nature. But when I am appreciated, I am able to cure many mental as well as physical diseases and improve conditions of life greatly. Ive done this quite a lot now. I know why I am in this line of philosophical work; love. I have to deal with a great deal of hatred, as a result. People are not very advanced beings at this point. And that is precisely the meaning of the Uebermensch.

Fixed_Cross · May 24, 2020, 5:26pm

Let us grab this bunny by the ears.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gd8g21O_d4[/youtube]

promethean75 · May 24, 2020, 10:53pm

streamable.com/oe4y7i

iambiguous · May 24, 2020, 11:23pm

What he said. Only intelligible.

Fixed_Cross · May 25, 2020, 5:09pm

Well, yes, and no. I do think there is probably some significance in the detail.

Onward! Premieres soon.
(Ill never get the views Zoot gets but hey. )

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnqCYftY6h8[/youtube]

Fixed_Cross · May 26, 2020, 3:19pm

youtube.com/watch?v=Hi-Fy_zQD7Q
Reading Zarathustra part 3

(edit: Endlich aber verwandelte sich sein Herz means: But finally his heart changed. (Not, his heart moved))

Fixed_Cross · May 26, 2020, 3:30pm

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-khHlI0Rfk[/youtube]

this is a nice feminine reading.

Fixed_Cross · May 26, 2020, 4:20pm

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLscThvuGM0[/youtube]

This excellent scholar provides a very succinct illustration of Aristotle’s completely useless mind.

His three categories of good:

Pleasure, political life, and contemplation.

First of all, there can be an infinite amount of categorizations like this.
Such categories are the ruin of thought. They caused European thought to be entirely fruitless for a millennium and change.

The categories furthermore, as categories of Being always do, overlap.

Is political life not pleasurable? Is contemplation not pleasurable? Doesn’t contemplation aid in political life? As well as: doesn’t political life interfere with contemplation? Doesn’t pleasure interfere with contemplation?
Etcetera etcetera,

Further, who can honestly believe that political life ennobles by definition?
Aristotle seems to have believed it. I actually sincerely doubt that he really thought this; and this is perhaps what some people consider “esoteric” - to lie, to mean something other than what one says.

Fixed_Cross · May 28, 2020, 10:32pm

Beings are self-valuings, and Being is beings -

this is what we know.

What we infer directly from experience on the other hand, i.e. consciousness, tells us that there is a One, namely our own Being, which is all and radiates forth from its own inevitable existence, because there can not be non-existence.

This was never in dispute.
The question that existed was: from what do beings draw their Being, while being not One but Many?

a technical question. with a technical answer.
the pure radiance of being is not a technical Logick, but an inspiration. One may call it will to power but more accurately, vigor. Will to power is also a technical term, though not quite a method.
Inspiration must come well before method. WtP is a self- transforming inspiration, with a method as its final form.

I know that Logic is not the first form of the WtP, and thus not the only form. It is the form in which one can analyze and produce, it is the scientific formula.
The inspiration of breaking-forth is far more ancient than Amen, and very holy of course - and I understand the attempt to ontologize it. But such attempts must fail; it can only be demonstrated.

Such as in, the development of a full function Logos hewn out of the brilliance of “will to power”.

Fixed_Cross · May 28, 2020, 10:36pm

In as far as consciousness is a reflection or circumference to being, its stands in a sense as its opposite.

From this fact philosophers have drawn the idea that consciousness is negative existence. This is a fertile idea, and proves accurate at least in the allegorical and practical sense of things always happening their own way and not as planned, often the plans obscure the way things really work, – the Ego, as the construct of negative existence.

Fixed_Cross · May 29, 2020, 12:09am

All electromagnetic activity is “Negative” and the brain operates negatively, Huxley was right, it is a filter. It reduces.

The autumnal electron, counterpart to the proton which is the emerging-overpowering nature as seen in nature’s emerging itself, Spring. The ram, the emperor, the word.

Fixed_Cross · May 29, 2020, 7:55pm

youtu.be/I4xU7ApIL3U

Fixed_Cross · May 30, 2020, 10:03pm

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PostSubject: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeWed Nov 16, 2011 8:20 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Perhaps this is concerning an issue of definition… but I have always found it absolutely contradictory when people have said that people with Attention deficit disorder have a tendency to be over focused.

It seems to me that focus requires attention and the ability to hold to an idea without being distracted from it. Being over focused would seem to suggest an over efficiency of the mind to drown out other things… but then perhaps by attention it is generally meant ability to pay attention to many things but that doesn’t makes since either because most people I know with ADD are quite good at multi-tasking… it seems to me that ADD really amounts to a problem with giving attention to the things that are not of current interest… that ability to pay attention is not deficit rather in many cases it is plethoral…the reason it seems like a disorder is because others aren’t as capable of keeping track of multiple digressions and fear losing the train when it can always be redirected back to anyways. Though perhaps time constraints can be an issue.

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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeWed Nov 16, 2011 9:40 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Focus as ability to sufficiently ignore distracting or irrelevant informations, attention as ability for extracting information from what is the object of focus?

“Be clever, Ariadne! …
You have little ears; you have my ears:
Put a clever word in them! —
Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself? …
I am your labyrinth …”. -N

“A man is not great if he is not small, and he is not small if he is not great. Concepts flirt with the loss of their significance in the oscillation between ambiguous states, and this is in part the function and purpose of concepts.” -Primer on Meaning
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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeWed Nov 16, 2011 5:04 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Capable wrote:
Focus as ability to sufficiently ignore distracting or irrelevant informations, attention as ability for extracting information from what is the object of focus?
your definition of focus seems accurate though i would not think that attention is the ability for extracting information…
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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeThu Nov 17, 2011 12:34 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
More and more people are diagnosed with this condition, which is really a compound of symptoms. As the only criterium for ADD-qualification is that one needs to have x of z amount of symptoms, it speaks for itself that there may be several physiological conditions, possibly very different, amounting in different people to the same diagnosis.

The most interesting case I know of a ADD ‘patient’ is a guy who does indeed possess an incredible power of focus, but his problem is that he needs to sink his teeth into an goal/object like a pitbull or rottweiler, in order not to be completely dispersed in nonsense and tomfoolery. If he is not working to accomplish his aim of becoming a millionaire at the age of 30, for which he has chosen the rather difficult field of running cafe’s and catering businesses, he is prancing around, sometimes naked, often dressed up as a female prostitute or an easter bunny. In the latter outfit he is known to get quite violent. He will elbow someone who stands in his way to the bathroom to the ground.

If he is indeed focused on his business, he is extremely effective, and he may well attain his goal through sheer focus and determination.

" The strong do what they can do and the weak accept what they have to accept. "

Thucydides

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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeThu Nov 17, 2011 5:06 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Fixed Cross wrote:
More and more people are diagnosed with this condition, which is really a compound of symptoms. As the only criterium for ADD-qualification is that one needs to have x of z amount of symptoms, it speaks for itself that there may be several physiological conditions, possibly very different, amounting in different people to the same diagnosis.

The most interesting case I know of a ADD ‘patient’ is a guy who does indeed possess an incredible power of focus, but his problem is that he needs to sink his teeth into an goal/object like a pitbull or rottweiler, in order not to be completely dispersed in nonsense and tomfoolery. If he is not working to accomplish his aim of becoming a millionaire at the age of 30, for which he has chosen the rather difficult field of running cafe’s and catering businesses, he is prancing around, sometimes naked, often dressed up as a female prostitute or an eastern bunny. In the latter outfit he is known to get quite violent. He will elbow someone who stands in his way to the bathroom to the ground.

If he is indeed focused on his business, he is extremely effective, and he may well attain his goal through sheer focus and determination.
Sounds like an interesting person…
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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeThu Nov 17, 2011 7:01 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
An interesting individual indeed…

Back to the topic:

It is, I think, important to trace the origin of the physiological “symptoms” of this “disorder”. In fact we find that it is not a disorder but an asset bequeathed by our hunter/gatherer ancestors (the ones who did not notice the stalking tiger, those particular berries, etc. on their periphery did not pass on their genes).

I hypothesize that the current predominance of technological influence in addition to a world in nearly incessant military conflict is causing not only a multitude of intensified cases but an apparent boom in the quantity of effected individuals as a direct result of our diagnostic capabilities–an analogous circumstance would be with severe weather, namely tornadoes (there may not be an unprecedented number of tornadoes but an unprecedented ability to identify and track them due to advancements in detection technology as well as the elevated population density).

From the angle of physiological mechanism, it has been theorized that the human brain operates much like a parallel processor preempted by an asynchronous serial processor (your nervous system operates simultaneously while your perception is a ‘stream of consciousness’ [incidentally, this is perhaps the definition of consciousness]). If this is the case, it may be worthwhile to pursue the possibility that this serial processor aspect of the human brain is somewhat attenuated in the ADD patient.

Fixed Cross makes a good point along the diagnostic line. I would like to add to that the aspect of false or forced diagnosis, such as in the Lexapro (and some other SSRI manufacturers) fiasco where select doctors entered into collusion with the pharmaceutical companies, overprescribing for personal gain.

Additionally, (at least in the U.S.) there is a pseudo scare tactic where commercialization has the public flocking to beg for whatever pharmakon treats the new trendy disorder (Viagra, Adderall, anti-depressants, testosterone cremes, etc.) even if the condition is barely noticeable–the marketing simply activates the hypochondriac in the unwitting.
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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeSat Nov 19, 2011 6:01 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Aleatory wrote:
An interesting individual indeed…

Back to the topic:

It is, I think, important to trace the origin of the physiological “symptoms” of this “disorder”. In fact we find that it is not a disorder but an asset bequeathed by our hunter/gatherer ancestors (the ones who did not notice the stalking tiger, those particular berries, etc. on their periphery did not pass on their genes).

I hypothesize that the current predominance of technological influence in addition to a world in nearly incessant military conflict is causing not only a multitude of intensified cases but an apparent boom in the quantity of effected individuals as a direct result of our diagnostic capabilities–an analogous circumstance would be with severe weather, namely tornadoes (there may not be an unprecedented number of tornadoes but an unprecedented ability to identify and track them due to advancements in detection technology as well as the elevated population density).
Most of the people I know that have been diagnosed with ADD, specifically my brother, actually has a remarkable ability to notice pereferial things… for example he can pick out “punch-buggies” like no other… I tend to think that ADD is rather a type of psychology that benefited us in our times as hunter gathers in that it allowed us to perceive the tiger hiding in the bushes…unless that is what you were saying…

Quote :

From the angle of physiological mechanism, it has been theorized that the human brain operates much like a parallel processor preempted by an asynchronous serial processor (your nervous system operates simultaneously while your perception is a ‘stream of consciousness’ [incidentally, this is perhaps the definition of consciousness]). If this is the case, it may be worthwhile to pursue the possibility that this serial processor aspect of the human brain is somewhat attenuated in the ADD patient.

Fixed Cross makes a good point along the diagnostic line. I would like to add to that the aspect of false or forced diagnosis, such as in the Lexapro (and some other SSRI manufacturers) fiasco where select doctors entered into collusion with the pharmaceutical companies, overprescribing for personal gain.

Additionally, (at least in the U.S.) there is a pseudo scare tactic where commercialization has the public flocking to beg for whatever pharmakon treats the new trendy disorder (Viagra, Adderall, anti-depressants, testosterone cremes, etc.) even if the condition is barely noticeable–the marketing simply activates the hypochondriac in the unwitting.

I think that largely much of the problem we face as a society in the future is balancing the urge to try to better our self by are various growing technologies… we currently don’t seem to be fully taking into consideration who these things can effect our evolution and how certain “disorders” are more really just “differences” that can be aids in various cultural or habitat conditions. I think it needs to be kept in mind that part of the survival tactics of a genetic strain is to produce mutations and wide variety to ensure survival in alternating environmental conditions (environment = culture and nature). That’s why for example I find the ideas of creating a perfect raise (such as in fascism) actually somewhat self-destructive…its like centralizing all control of a system such as a government in one place allowing it to easily in its entirety to be destroyed…
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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeSun Nov 20, 2011 8:35 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Abstract wrote:
unless that is what you were saying…

That is precisely what I was saying.

Abstract wrote:
I think that largely much of the problem we face as a society in the future is balancing the urge to try to better our self by are various growing technologies… we currently don’t seem to be fully taking into consideration who these things can effect our evolution and how certain “disorders” are more really just “differences” that can be aids in various cultural or habitat conditions. I think it needs to be kept in mind that part of the survival tactics of a genetic strain is to produce mutations and wide variety to ensure survival in alternating environmental conditions (environment = culture and nature). That’s why for example I find the ideas of creating a perfect raise (such as in fascism) actually somewhat self-destructive…its like centralizing all control of a system such as a government in one place allowing it to easily in its entirety to be destroyed…
It is a delicate equilibrium to maintain. Too much variation and everything becomes homogenized, too little…and everything becomes homogenized. The trick, to my knowledge, is to maintain a plethora of cells, each cell differing from the next, but hosting intercellular variation to a great degree. The analogy of paint works well here: Mix all the pigments at once, and you are left with some ghastly hue of no discernible bias. In order to avoid this, you must keep the primary, secondary and tertiary colors separate and mix them elsewhere. Let’s not take this as segregation, but certainly we may analyze it in terms of the colors having an unaffected center with integration occurring on the fringes.

This same analogy applies to the socio-political structure as well, not just the evolutionary biology train (indeed social evolution may be a fascimile of biological evolution).
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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeMon Dec 26, 2011 5:35 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Abstract wrote:
Perhaps this is concerning an issue of definition… but I have always found it absolutely contradictory when people have said that people with Attention deficit disorder have a tendency to be over focused.

It seems to me that focus requires attention and the ability to hold to an idea without being distracted from it. Being over focused would seem to suggest an over efficiency of the mind to drown out other things… but then perhaps by attention it is generally meant ability to pay attention to many things but that doesn’t makes since either because most people I know with ADD are quite good at multi-tasking… it seems to me that ADD really amounts to a problem with giving attention to the things that are not of current interest… that ability to pay attention is not deficit rather in many cases it is plethoral…the reason it seems like a disorder is because others aren’t as capable of keeping track of multiple digressions and fear losing the train when it can always be redirected back to anyways. Though perhaps time constraints can be an issue.

Yes the words tend to conflict. But that is only because they have different references. When someone says that you lack attention skills, they are referring to an outward attention. That outward attention is being hampered by an over focus on inward concerns, also known as “worry”. The over focus of inner thoughts blinds the mind to outside stimuli.

The direction of your focus is the issue; inward or outward. The daydreamer has too much inner focus, usually due to neurological discomforts that the mind attempts distraction from. Someone with too much outward focus will tend to not question his presumptions. But presumptions are made in both cases. Questioning presumption leads mostly to self-consciousness (ie. over inner focus). Good solutions for the proper balance are hard to find… I’m working on that one though. scratch
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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeMon Dec 26, 2011 5:47 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster

What is a person who experiences an extreme of inward attention and outward attention?

“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.” -Socrates
“Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God.” -Cicero
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without necessarily believing it.” -Aristotle
“I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.” -Aristotle
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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeMon Dec 26, 2011 6:08 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Abstract wrote:

What is a person who experiences an extreme of inward attention and outward attention?
Extremely rare, fortunate, enlightened, holy… dangerous. Cool
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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeTue Dec 27, 2011 4:46 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Abstract wrote:
Capable wrote:
Focus as ability to sufficiently ignore distracting or irrelevant informations, attention as ability for extracting information from what is the object of focus?
your definition of focus seems accurate though i would not think that attention is the ability for extracting information…
Both require mindfulness.

Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.

Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up."

“If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstancse and my psychological condition, I would feel trapped.”

Thomas Nagel
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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeTue Dec 27, 2011 4:48 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
James S Saint wrote:
Abstract wrote:

What is a person who experiences an extreme of inward attention and outward attention?
Extremely rare, fortunate, enlightened, holy… dangerous. Cool
Or perhaps someone who is ready to implode. Might the ‘extreme’ point to unbalance?

Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.

Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up."

“If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstancse and my psychological condition, I would feel trapped.”

Thomas Nagel
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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeTue Dec 27, 2011 6:21 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
VaerosTanarg wrote:
Abstract wrote:
Capable wrote:
Focus as ability to sufficiently ignore distracting or irrelevant informations, attention as ability for extracting information from what is the object of focus?
your definition of focus seems accurate though i would not think that attention is the ability for extracting information…
Both require mindfulness.

Maybe that is what schizophrenia is…seems like it sometimes…(but then maybe that is just being hopeful…)

“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.” -Socrates
“Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God.” -Cicero
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without necessarily believing it.” -Aristotle
“I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.” -Aristotle
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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeTue Dec 27, 2011 6:23 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
VaerosTanarg wrote:
James S Saint wrote:
Abstract wrote:

What is a person who experiences an extreme of inward attention and outward attention?
Extremely rare, fortunate, enlightened, holy… dangerous. Cool
Or perhaps someone who is ready to implode. Might the ‘extreme’ point to unbalance?

Yet if you have extremity on opposing sides is not the scale balanced?

“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.” -Socrates
“Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God.” -Cicero
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without necessarily believing it.” -Aristotle
“I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.” -Aristotle
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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeWed Dec 28, 2011 3:57 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Abstract wrote:
VaerosTanarg wrote:
Abstract wrote:
Capable wrote:
Focus as ability to sufficiently ignore distracting or irrelevant informations, attention as ability for extracting information from what is the object of focus?
your definition of focus seems accurate though i would not think that attention is the ability for extracting information…
Both require mindfulness.

Maybe that is what schizophrenia is…seems like it sometimes…(but then maybe that is just being hopeful…)
As per your response to Capable, attention may not be the ability for extracting information, but extracting information is one of the fruits of attention.

You’re saying that schizophrenia is mindfulness? Well okay Laughing in a manner of speaking you can say this insofar as a schizophrenic’s mind is full, but full of what? The ‘mindful’ person on the other hand is extremely focused - light flows through his mind and he is ever conscious of what he is about.

Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.

Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up."

“If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstancse and my psychological condition, I would feel trapped.”

Thomas Nagel
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PostSubject: Re: Attention vs. Focus Attention vs. Focus Icon_minitimeWed Dec 28, 2011 4:02 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Abstract wrote:
VaerosTanarg wrote:
James S Saint wrote:
Abstract wrote:

What is a person who experiences an extreme of inward attention and outward attention?
Extremely rare, fortunate, enlightened, holy… dangerous. Cool
Or perhaps someone who is ready to implode. Might the ‘extreme’ point to unbalance?

Yet if you have extremity on opposing sides is not the scale balanced?
Actually, I do tend to agree with JSS here - but on the other side of that coin - that person might still be ready to implode. He needs a breather. The scale may be balanced but what is being balanced may be unbalanced…if that makes sense.

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PostSubject: Decision-making and experiential causation Decision-making and experiential causation Icon_minitimeThu Dec 29, 2011 9:37 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Rather than an error, let us call the error-prone human faculties for decision-making imperfect, incomplete and containing very large areas of unknowability and unpredictable. Why is this? Because unlike a rock, which is quite “perfect” and “complete” and “predictable”, the human is a complex and confusing set of innumerable and subtle relations of sensations. Some of these are outwardly oriented, such as in perception, some are inwardly oriented, such as in memory and imagination. Every human experience is a complex conglomeration of innumerable of these sense relations, and together they form a system of relatability-sensationality which is so vast and so deep that the “I”, the unified-emergent function that is the “awareness” of this system (its ability to look upon itself, sense - interact with - itself as a “totality” and thus provide macroscopic direction to lesser more microscopic functions) cannot hope ever to grasp more than a small part of this large sensational realm. So most of what constitutes and gives rise to human consciousness-experience is unknown to us, which is to say unknown to the “sum” of this consciousness/experience itself, its emergent “I”.

Thus every moment of consciousness emerges largely from what it itself cannot understand/comprehend in terms of its proprioceptive-regulating “I of awareness”, its most unified emergent directionality. Consciousness’ own causative and generative inner-relations largely fail to inform its own comprehension of its behaviors and outcomes, with certain relations ending up exerting an undo influence over the total entity with respect to its final actions (the activity of higher cognition as well as that of outward behaviors, i.e. what we are thinking, feeling or conceiving in the imagination at any given moment). This of course touches directly upon our ability to plan, think about our environment and project an inner representation of environmental conditions of the present as well as infer implied conditions of a possible future moment. Because all of this stems from a system of consciousness that is so largely unable to even sense/be aware of its own generating and sustaining “causes”, a very large unpredictability and imperfection is introduced into the system. No two humans will react in the same way to a situation because that from which human reaction/behavior emerges is largely unique to each individual, and even more than this is unable to be called adequately forth into the present moment of judgement and comprehension that would allow it to inform a moment of consciousness.

One reason we may not see “deterministic” causation within ourselves to the same degree as we see it elsewhere (e.g. the falling rock) is because we are largely dependent upon and “caused by” what we cannot know or understand, what we cannot even see or directly sense. Yet because we nonetheless feel the effects and experience the outcomes of this “what we cannot see or sense” at every moment we are constantly frustrated in our attempts to understand the “reasons why we do things”. Our judgements, decisions and actions (including our thoughts and inner feelings) are largely a mystery to us, we are left with the barest fleeting glance of what seems to be a large and largely invisible internal clockwork operating to produce for us a present moment of consciousness. This fleeting-superficial sense of perhaps one or several simple ideas, feelings, memories or sensations that we generally assume constitute the “reason why we did what we did”.

The essential invisibility of this system to itself is an effect of the fact that this system is so massive and internally complex as to be largely unable to render itself unto itself, which is to say largely unable to act with a discernible unity and direction. The sufficient cause/s of our actions (again including our thoughts and feelings), if ever there were such causes, are always and already out of reach.

This imperfection, unpredictability can be seen as an “error” with respect to our self-cognition and comprehension of ourselves, which is also to say that it serves to explain why we err so often in thought, word and deed, but it seems perhaps more accurate to affirm that this complex-chaotic system of human consciousness must have been selected evolutionarily. It may be an “error” or lead to errors, but it is still a highly useful system. How might this be the case? One possible answer I can see is that perhaps the unpredictability, unknowability and even unreliability of consciousness has proven itself able to actually facilitate the survival of this animal species whose individuals (us) possess it. Maybe this sort of conscious set-up gives new expansive possibilities to the individual possessing it precisely because it is unclosed, incomplete and imperfect, and this heightened capacity for “random” or chaotic inner vision and sensational mediation served to strongly facilitate our survival.

(Topic adapted from a post at ILP forum)

“Be clever, Ariadne! …
You have little ears; you have my ears:
Put a clever word in them! —
Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself? …
I am your labyrinth …”. -N

“A man is not great if he is not small, and he is not small if he is not great. Concepts flirt with the loss of their significance in the oscillation between ambiguous states, and this is in part the function and purpose of concepts.” -Primer on Meaning
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James S Saint
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Decision-making and experiential causation Empty
PostSubject: Re: Decision-making and experiential causation Decision-making and experiential causation Icon_minitimeThu Dec 29, 2011 10:09 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Well stated.

OR put much more simply;
Our mind’s accumulator is too small for the accumulation. Wink

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A functional composition of consciousness Empty
PostSubject: A functional composition of consciousness A functional composition of consciousness Icon_minitimeThu Dec 22, 2011 12:09 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
The functional composition of consciousness: a theory of mind.

Part/ial consciousnesses, conditionality and inter-relationality

The present moment passes into the next and becomes a part of the Mnemosyne of experience, the ever-receding content of experiential memory that serves to form the substance from which what we call consciousness emerges. Consciousness itself can be understood as the sensory-streaming reactivity of the present moment filtered through the sieve of Mnemosyne, which produces a set of reactions as effects. Based on the contents and quality of this Mnemosyne, and its interactivity/sensationality with the present-experiencing, a ‘moment of consciousness’ emerges which is the sum effect of this interactive process.

The present moment writes itself upon the past, its own past, as continuous alteration of the Mnemosyne of consciousness, both adding to and changing the weights and meaning of what is already contained within it. As previous meaning-content/s is stimulated based on present moment experiential interactivity this content itself is changed to varying degrees. This then, of course, changes the emergent quality and content of the present moment experiencing, giving to consciousness new flavors, qualities, sense and essence. Both the present moment inter-relational sense-experiencing and the Mnemosyne of consciousness’s past experiential continuously change one other. This explains how the more we experience sensory stand-still or deprivation of the senses the more this interactive changing begins to redouble and reflexively reflect back upon Mnemosyne, having as it does then less outward trajectory in which to release itself. Silence invites change in the contents of the mind, just as overstimulation or constant activity deaden and tend to wither this potentiality for change.

The present experiential meaning-content is ‘written’ directly into the most recency of the Mnemosyne; each moment builds upon a long continuation of past moments all tied and sutured together by complex inter-relations of mutual conditionality and dependency: point A here relies in its being-A on multitudes of various connections to other points B, C, D, E… Nothing is isolate in the mind for everything emerges from everything else, each emergent form/object/event of consciousness attains to varying degrees of relative conditionality and/or autonomy with respect to that from which it has emerged as a event/object/thing. This process is continuous and constant, and taken to the nth degree produces the complex, rich and deep content and potentiality the various and interchanging components of which react to the present sensory experiential stream of awareness to produce an experience similar in image/quality to that a hologram. The form, content, image, feel, sense, proprioceptive qualia are all generatively distilled from the innumerably great and immeasurably deep and subtle inter-relations between the vast contents within Mnemosyne and the present experiential sensory-stream of active consciousness. So there are essentially two spheres of consciousness, similar and highly inter-related—and mutually conditional and dependent—but also very distinct: the sum of all previous experiential content, Mnemosyne, and the present moment of sensory-streaming experiencing.

Yet even this complex inter-relationality productive of a moment of consciousness is nowhere as simple as that: there are near-infinite variations of scope, breadth, quality, inclusivity and exclusivity, potency and power within every single relation, since its “harmony” can bend and change at any moment to resonate with, touch upon, encompass or be encompassed by more and more, originating from anywhere within the contents of total receded experiential memory. The rules and logics of this potentiality and how it particularly actualizes within moments of consciousness are the indirect object of study for the various “sciences” which aim inward, such as psychology, literature, poetry and philosophy.

This dichotomous productivity-as-potentiality of actualizing unifications between past- and present-sensational contents also projects itself forward into “the future”, into the mind’s image-content space which is imagined through the abstraction of certain or other conditions of temporality with respect to the meaning/contents within Mnemosyne, its “objects of thought”. Embedded temporal conditions are subtracted away to a sufficient degree so that the object may be seen without regard to this conditionality, and thus its meaning becomes free to “wander the mind” and find more meaningful attachments which otherwise would have been forbidden to it through the impositional constraints of time. This plethora of new abstract relationalities creates a rich potency from which new meaning may be generated. This meaning can then be related to that to which it is similar minus the subtracted temporal conditions, and from this relation may be derived certain common features or principles which are then used as a basis for determining the “likelihood” or “relevancy” of the projected content in question. In this we imagine what “could be” or “may be” or “will come to be” (also “what could have been”). This is drawing and tracing, directly deriving implications from the present into the present’s own potentialities. These derivations stem from content freed from temporal object-conditionality are able to directly uncover conditions which have not yet come to be, giving us access to a future-present—we can plan, anticipate, set a goal or purpose, envision. The extent of the accuracy and potency of this access is contingent upon many factors, not the least of which being both the active power of consciousness of the individual—the deep harmonies of its constancies of thought, the extent to which powerful principles and logics relating to this thought have been abstracted and concretized, and the freedom this mind has attained from over-determining influences of extraneous and external conditions of confinement and environmental limitation—and the degree of proximity that the projected future-present has to the actual future-present.

This complex, mutually conditional and self-reflective/reflexive inter-reactivity between the temporal spheres of consciousness is what creates the “holographic” multi-dimensional depth to which a moment of consciousness attains. This is literally “a reality” in the mind, an experiential world/s rich with depth, sense and meaning, produced by combinations between inner and outer sensations. The further interactions of the logics of these sensations produce then new sensations, sum-like effects, the effects of which, directly sensed-experienced, lead to still more abstracted and derived objects of sensation and thought. Sense reflects into itself to produce deeper sensations, more summational and comprehensive sensings, and from these arise qualia, the indirect proprioceptive ‘meta-sense’ of the entire “sensational realm” itself—what the mind/contents of consciousness “feel like”.

Each present-moment’s meaning-content/s that end up being projected upon and then embedded within Mnemosyne also attain certain types and qualities of relations to those previously embedded content-meaning/s already contained within and constitutive of Mnemosyne. The degrees of similarity herein attaining between the most recently embedded content/s and more receded past contents forms a sort of “relational web” the geographic terrain/relief of which is indicative of more foundational similarities or dissimilarities contained within these relational elements. The present-moment active consciousness which processes its experiential sensory streams with respect to the embedded contents of Mnemosyne always senses on many levels, and not the least of these being an indirect sensing (read sensing as merely “a being-affected-by”) of the extent of the topographical relief attained within these inner-Mnemosynal terrains. This factor is used as an indication of the extent of consistency between various contents of past experiences, which can therefore also be used to give indication of the degrees to which present sensory experiential contents coincide and enmesh with each other, or do not well coincide or enmesh. Mnemosyne can then be visualized somewhat like a topographical map projected across time, certain “points” above or below those surrounding it, a sort of graph of change spanning backward into one’s remote past. The overall more similarity that attains between these various points the more stable or consistent the emergent forms of consciousness will be, having as they do then a more consistent and unchanging frame from which to draw its content-meanings productive of this present moment of conscious in its experiencing-projecting. Likewise, certain vast dissimilarities between multiple embedded past contents of Mnemosyne may produce rifts into which the present functional-formative moment of consciousness is unable to penetrate, unable to derive or extract contents from. This would be an example of "closed” or “repressed” memories. These continue to directly influence the quality of consciousness through the shadows they cast based on their absence where consciousness comes within sufficient proximity to these veiled objects and consciousness’s mechanisms of derivation and extraction are foiled from a more complete and synthetic productivity therein.

We can actively re-valuate these more disharmonious, heterogeneous contents from our Mnemosyne in order to “smooth” or refine them into better symmetry and synchronicity with the rest of our experiential Mnemosynal content/s. This is active thinking or feeling, directly and introspectively re-forging the conditions and contents of mind. Thinking and feeling, intentionally and openly, gives direct access to the contents of mind, and provides that these contents themselves are malleable as a result. What is needed are higher “wills”, purpose and direction to which contents being intentionally altered are subjected, these higher laws then being those around and toward which contents begin to gravitate and re-orientate. This active, intentional self-working and creating produces, over time, more stability of consciousness, more constancy of the emergent forms of consciousness, more sensationality with respect to these forms and their relationalities and potentialities, which is to say a greater sensitivity and degree of sensation and meta-sensation (qualia, proprioceptivity) of mind. One grows wider, deeper and more sensitive to the minute inner tracing of one’s mind and heart. Likewise, the more one does not take direct control of one’s active possibility for synthetic re-working and redistributions of the contents of consciousness is also the degree to which one becomes inadvertently bound up within and subject to the dissimilarities and inconsistencies therein - one becomes more or less a product of embedded contradictions and impossibilities at the expense of more expansive and totalizing reconciliations, and this impossibility frustrates the synthetic productive-producing inter-relationality of the present sensory experiential consciousness as it seeks out various useful and relevant meaning-contents from its Mnemosynal-formative conditions, constraints and implications.

Duty and the ethical sense, active and passive consciousnesses

Because Mnemosynal contents are projected through the sieve and focusing lens of the present sensory experiential, the conditions of the present moment - its environment/s - are experienced as limitations, barriers and restrictions upon its otherwise possibilities; its possibilities for actualizing upon the present productive moment of consciousness are limited and restricted to the same extent they are created and freed. We experience constantly the restrictivity of the environment/s in which we are at all times situated, be these environments physical, emotional, social, mental, real or imaginary. The geometries, the shape/s of these restrictivities constitute a patterning which we then sense directly only in that we experience this limitation indirectly, as a shadowy inverse of the impossibilities for our otherwise potentialities. This sensing of the implicit and constant limitedness which conditions our present moment/s of experiencing (our active/real consciousness) is interpreted and given meaning firstly as duty, and this is the origin of the ethical sense. Duty-to as a being-constricted-by, being subject to the indirectly sensed confines of our environmental situational embeddedness. We are bound within these confines which serve as conditioning factors for us, and the “duty” imposed upon us is the limit of our ability to transgress these limitations. Rather than sensing directly these “negative conditions” as objects of/for consciousness (which they are) we instead error and implicitly encounter these limitations based on a form of object-lessness, object-loss, an un-graspability and indiscernibility, a lack of material power/objective reality because these contents are those by which our more salient, immediate and ‘positive’ contents of consciousness are conditioned, differenced by and unable to see/grasp within their own natures. We firstly make sense of, reconcile, make possible the encounter/experience with the feeling of this vague often indeterminate limitedness-conditioning as an inherent obligation imposed upon us by the world/s: we can do this, we cannot do that. This is experienced as obligatory because we are unable to more actively and directly objectify the actual limiting conditions themselves, unable to draw them comprehensively within the confines of object-cognitional meaning. Thus we are bound by what we “do not understand” and this generates the sense of obligation, a feeling of duty as the initial form under which the encounter with these limits obtains. The mind thinks: if we are unable to do this or that, certainly we must be obligated by, bound to to this constraining fact. It is a very short step from “can and cannot do” to “must and must not do”—as a result of highly active and potent social conditioning/meme influence over human evolution, we have, for the sake of social functioning and the continued cohesiveness of social relationships and hierarchies, projected constraint-limitation inward, identifying it with ourselves to a large extent and internalizing these limitations as obligatory behaviors, sentiments, thought-patterns. This is also accomplished through the human desire to feel in control of itself, to project a sense of self-determination across every situation. Thus where we encounter limitation, social or otherwise, we tend to associate with this a feeling of desire, intention in order to “choose” to comply with that which serves as our conditioning limit. The combination of socially regulating power and psychological internalizing have established, over time, the various conditioning limitations to which we are subject as duties, obligations. This is: the “ethics” of “making a choice” which we “must make”. And of course once this ethical sense is established it takes root and begins to grow beyond its initial genesis, it comes to apply to lesser limitations and even limits which could be more easily surmounted, as the mind finds more and more personal-psychological and social utility in the feeling of being obligated to do this or that.

The less active, largely passive consciousness does not break free from this sense of duty. Rather the feeling of duty/obligation is given further meaningfulness through its injection into various available forms/images from within the contents of Mnemosyne. Thus there is an artificially generated ethical sensibility: “I must do, I must not do” as an interpretation of the “I can do, I cannot do” conditions of limitation to which one is subject. Once this ethical sense is birthed—which occurs at the moment in which consciousness has developed so as to be able to sense (read: be affected by) its own inner-sensational potencies and therein extract a certain degree of its own embedded conditions by which these emerge—this sense becomes a useful tool that is appropriated toward other ends within consciousness, a form that is easily applied wherever less than discernible or understandable limits/conditions are sensed-encountered. For example, a social situation which is too subtle and nuanced to be fully cognized under the available concepts and language terms borrows some of the ethical sense for itself, imbuing this social phenomenon with a feeling of obligation. Other examples would be a limit of knowledge, for example the limit of understanding of the more ultimate origins of oneself or one’s world, or a limit of activity, for example the inability to accomplish a certain feat with respect to the imposed laws of nature, becomes understood, given into meaningful embeddedness within Mnemosyne under the form of the ethical sense, as duty or obligation. The secondary, subsequent objectifying of this form itself gives rise to the more image-oriented, positive object-contents such as, for instance, God or the gods, fate, karma, eternity, heaven or hell. These ideas serve to objectify the form/s under which the ethical sense obtains, and at this point there is very little within the frame of human meaning and experience which has not been to some extent touched and colored by the ethical sense.

The passive consciousness is satisfied with this sense of imposed duty against itself, imposed by its world/s situated conditions and objectified under certain or other forms and images which sufficiently coincide with its own previously meaningful contents of consciousness. The more active consciousness, however, seeks rather to further extract conditions from this duty, to see itself therein and that which leads it to a more full sensation and encounter with the ethical sense. This is the ethical sense more directly encountered, with its logics and conditions more directly perceived. At this point the reliance on the formal images under which this ethical sense has previously been objectified begins to wane (i.e. we lose “God”, we have no more use of gods). This consciousness is able to pierce directly into the sense of duty and to derive it more fully with respect to itself, generating a more comprehensive and powerful ethical sense as this sense is progressively freed from the images and forms in which it had previously been objectified-confined. Eventually this ethical sense is abstracted enough to where it is seen as derived from within every moment of consciousness, the entire vast sphere of Mnemosynal content and every inter-relational event of any present moment of consciousness yields a discrete ethical sensibility; at this point this mind disassociates the ethical sense and the ’imperative of duty’ enmeshes with the entire subjective world/s-reality, the consciousness then becoming most sufficiently and therefore also least necessarily bound to the objectified ethical sense. This is the ethical sense reified. It should also be noted that as an effect of the dictates and requirements of the evolutionary-selective history of man he has come to associate the ethical sense with many activities and with many diverse and largely arbitrary experiences and activities of common social or daily life - these socially- or personally-adapted mores, which borrow from the utility of the ethical sense, tend now to be largely dissolved by the active consciousness which has reified its ethical sense to the level of its total world/reality. The ethical sense seen nowhere becomes the ethical sense seen and dispersed everywhere and into all things, effecting a vast universalizing of conscience within and across all manner of conscious experiencing.

This more active mind experiences its duty as both to itself and to its world/s-reality at large, rather than, as is the case with the passive consciousness, to certain or other image-objectifications of the conditions of certain of the meaning-contents of its Mnemosyne. This reified ethical sense is still that which emerged and continues to emerge from (directly or indirectly) sensed encounters with the limiting conditionality of one’s present and past experiential consciousness and Mnemosyne, but this sense has now been condensced and refined into an originary essence, a functional form operating intermedially within the ‘gap’ between the temporal spheres of consciousness, the present moment of sensory conscious experiencing and the past-extracting of embedded Mnemosynal content-meanings. This functional element allows for deeper and more powerful relations between these sphere, in effect it establishes a new ground of commonality on which new potencies of extracted and projected potentiality may be based. This new ground becomes a central element to the comprehensivity-constancy of the inter-relational consciousness productive of the “I” of experience, the self-sense of being one entity rather than being not-one. In other words this entity passes through a self-sense of oneness to a sense of its own vast discursivity, of its own not-one, and then through the reification of the ethical sense passes as an originary new object and universally medial functionality passes back into a new self-sense of being-one which attains to a new ground of cohesive power. This cohesiveness allows for new vast unifications across the spaces of this entity, re-workings of Mnemosynal contents with direct appeal to a stronger sense of self-unification that asserts a powerful (re)organizing effect upon the contents of consciousness. With respect to this new ethical functionary are new possibilities for more totalizing organizings brought into being, and the possibility for steering and directing consciousness and it’s systems and operations in certain or other directions, which is to say teleologically, is found. Thus we see that it is duty/the ethical sensibility that provides a possible medium through which the consciousness can attain to its own self-transcendence.

Particular, abstract and literal consciousnesses

A particular consciousness is that which tends to think-encounter-project under largely closed and self-contained, arbitrarily contrived forms. It thinks particularly in terms of a crude “this” or “that”, here or there, yes or no. Its experiences are distilled into a finite number of reducible forms themselves directly contingent upon certain relations to assumed irreducible principles. It is the relation of these concretes to each other that then produces a semblance of a consciousness. This consciousness experiences only a fraction of its true potentiality for sensation and meaning-projecting possibility because it binds itself up within crude forms/images that attain to a “positive” (closed) meaning only. The logics of this consciousness thus being equally crude and linear, simple logistical operations upon the surface level of thought, which lends this consciousness to the tendency to never break out of its contrived-imposed linear mode of experiencing. We can see that the inter-relationality between the temporal spheres of this consciousness is relatively shallow with only the most salient of meanings extracted from its embedded situatedness. This is a superficiality of potentiality that in its overt nature is more an unconscious automatism and reactionism which loses the ability to relate to its own actual conditions and possibilities, for it cannot actively sense and extract conditions or implications from its own Mnemosyne nor can it project these extracted contents upon a temporally-subtracted field of possibility. This consciousness therefore has become most necessary and least sufficient to itself. This is the typical sort of consciousness of the “average human”, the sort of consciousness which our world-societies actively produce in the majority of cases.

In contrast, the abstract consciousness is that which has learned to out-think itself to a certain extent, to skirt the edges of confining cognition and conceptuality to encounter more discursive, abstract and tangental conditions emergent from the machinations of the interactivity between the temporal spheres of its consciousness. Within the improved scope and range of this interactivity, freed from undo constraint and imposition by crude forms and unsensed limitations is born a new capacity for relating between the various contents and experiences of consciousness. This opened field in turn produces vast new possibilities for the present moment sensational consciousness to construct and project new meaning and experiential possibilities from its Mnemosynal extractions, e.g. it is vastly more able to create knowledge for itself, to process and derive actual conditions and implications from all manner of its experiences. As the logics of the abstract consciousness are more expansive and less restrictive than those of the particular consciousness it is more able to expand and grow naturally, to change and adapt, to produce and create. The abstract consciousness elevates ideas into a position of primary importance and focus, rather than, as is the case with the particular consciousness, focusing its energy on more self-closed and concrete objects of thought and surface-level sensory manifestations. The abstract consciousness transcends the particular consciousness, building upon it to become a new sort of mind.

In contrast to this, the literal consciousness is the sufficient synthesis of the abstract consciousness with respect to particularity, which is has previously overcome. To synthesize oneself deliberately with respect to past obstacles one has already supplanted and overcome represents the limit of the self-power of the abstract consciousness, which has to accumulate the strength within itself to bear the image of itself with respect to its most sufficient other, that from which it emerged, particularity itself. When the abstract consciousness submits its new potentialities and logics to those of particularity, and is able to do so without compromising or losing its abstractivity, the abstract logics are focused through a lens and magnified as the formative logics of particularity - such as for example those of limitation and insensibility - are projected within the others of their own conditions, dissolving the particular logic into a new, “higher” form and synthesis that situates these logics within a new potency and scope of potential sensibility. This synthesis leads to thinking-experiencing literally as opposed to superficially or abstractly, as a synthesis of particular with abstract, where content is seen as it is, as highest potentiality written upon pure conditions of actuality. That which previously escaped the abstract consciousness, which loses a large part of itself as a condition of its own heightened sensitivity, is re-caught and re-directed back within the sensational mediations of the literal consciousness which is now able to focus immensely on the object/s of its sensation, directly encountering and experiencing the sum of this object, its logics and conditions and its situatedness with respect to its local environ/s. The literal consciousness in this powerful sensation and experiencing-projecting does not, unlike the abstract consciousness which also attains to powerful experiencing and sensing, lose itself or lose sight of its own contextualities and conditionalities. Nothing escapes from the literal consciousness.

This literal consciousness now grows with respect to the degree to which it is able to expand both the range of its sensibility to its inner and outer environment/s as well as the power of its influence within this range. The extraction and abstraction powers of the literal consciousness are, with respect to those of the abstract consciousness, without limit, just as those same powers of the abstract consciousness are, with respect to those of the particular consciousness, also without limit. The literal consciousness is able, essentially, to sense what it senses, to encounter under so many multitudes of form and possibility that so little content is lost that a least sufficient object may be ascertained clearly, and this ascertaining may be allowed to most necessarily influence other conditions of this consciousness, projected with or without respect to any other conditionality and possibility within it. Within the literal consciousness the two spheres of temporal consciousness, the present-moment sensational consciousness and the past-Mnemosynal inter-relationalities of content/meanings across time are actively synthesized as Mnemosyne is now able to be more completely brought into the conditions for the present moment, as the present moment of consciousness has grown wide and deep enough so as to be able to contain more and more of the receded experiential content. This synthesis produces a new way of relating between the consciousnesses, and each is reborn within the direct image of the other. .

“Be clever, Ariadne! …
You have little ears; you have my ears:
Put a clever word in them! —
Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself? …
I am your labyrinth …”. -N

“A man is not great if he is not small, and he is not small if he is not great. Concepts flirt with the loss of their significance in the oscillation between ambiguous states, and this is in part the function and purpose of concepts.” -Primer on Meaning

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PostSubject: Re: A functional composition of consciousness A functional composition of consciousness Icon_minitimeTue Dec 27, 2011 6:57 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
It is of course easy to see that this analysis is an attempt to “experimentally” derive a model/schema as an understanding of consciousness. In no way should the analysis be taken as positing what consciousness “is” but rather as an attempt to explore a possibility for a model-representation of consciousness in a functional/structural/compositional sense. I am curious to what extent such attempts to model consciousness rationally, in “pure thought” sort of derivation can be said to be successful.

Ultimately I would like to expand and further develop this sort of model of consciousness into a more complete system, at which point a juxtapositional meta-analysis will be done with respect to value-ontology. The present analysis can be seen as an attempt to better explicate the possibility for a rationalist-abstract model of consciousness, which would in a way, due to its reductionistic-empirical nature, act as an antagonism and counter-force posited against a more “organic”, “non-scientific” or “phenomenological” value-ontological approach to understanding “what consciousness is”.

In this way we win the possibility for better explicating two somewhat counter perspectives, using one against and for the other. I am unsure whether a synthesis would emerge from this, or whether one perspective would act merely to refine the development of the other.

That being said, there is a lot of work ahead of us in terms of developing a compositional model of consciousness as a system, as well as developing a more value-ontological approach that would work “from the ground up” rather than “from the top down”, organically rather than empirically, phenomenologically rather than (merely) analytically.

“Be clever, Ariadne! …
You have little ears; you have my ears:
Put a clever word in them! —
Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself? …
I am your labyrinth …”. -N

“A man is not great if he is not small, and he is not small if he is not great. Concepts flirt with the loss of their significance in the oscillation between ambiguous states, and this is in part the function and purpose of concepts.” -Primer on Meaning
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PostSubject: Re: A functional composition of consciousness A functional composition of consciousness Icon_minitimeThu Jan 05, 2012 7:12 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
James S Saint wrote:
When you finally come to see what consciousness is, you will feel a twinge of embarrassment from how your subconscious kept you bemused for so long concerning something so simple as to be mundane.

The general set-up can certainly be called simple, we can sum up “what consciousness is” in only a few short sentences. And yet this hardly does justice to the sheer immensity and depth of this consciousness, and not even to mention the possibilities and potentialities of this consciousness. It appears “simple” only from a distance, only in the most abstracted-generalized form possible that still affords actual understanding.

“Subconscious” here meaning perhaps only the unknown/unknowable elements involved in conscious manifestations? What bemuses us is a sense of unidentifiability that extends even to the highest emergent expressions of consciousness, so naturally we tend to over-emphasize the particulars in order to win a semblance of a sense of certainty and constancy. We can be certain about these particular experiences, their substance and sense to us, and so elevating the value of these to consciousness generally creates an illusion of certainty that succeeds only because it disguises layers of experiece underneath, more abstract and essential to consciousness itself.

In this same manner, to cling to the particular-ist abstract-general conceptual understanding of “what consciousness is” we re-enact this suppression of the more subtle and expansive (and uncertain) possibilities of self-conscious understanding for the sake of retaining a sense of certainty and control-closure. Thus this is certainly not what I would advocate here, and indeed despite how “simple” this conceptual/functional understanding of “what consciousness is” may be, as well as despite how “accurate” or descriptively powerful it may be, we cannot fall into the position of failing to be immediately and powerfully affected by the sheer immensity, unfathomable depth and complexity that constitutes consciousness. We must always marvel and be amazed when we stare at this consciousness, despite how well and precisely we are able to abstract a most-general conceptual form-al understanding of the structure/s or function/s of this consciousness.

The “simplicity” of consciousness is certainly far from being a mundane simplicity - rather we might call it, at this higher level of encounter and understanding, a deceptively simple profundity.

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PostSubject: The Black Box The Black Box Icon_minitimeWed Jan 11, 2012 8:40 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
The Black Box

In engineering, there is a common entity referred to as “a black box”. The black box is an often approximated and always generalized model of a chosen entity. It is composed of 3 fundamental notions;

Inputs (S)
Inner functioning (I)
Outputs (B)

Every entity that can be identified is identified by every mind as a black box wherein the inner functioning is seldom known, often speculated, but usually irrelevant. In electronic circuit design for example, the engineer very often obtains an integrated circuit, IC. The IC is quite literally and physically a small black plastic box with conducting pins sticking out of it. The engineer knows that any particular IC uses some of its pins for input signals and some for output responses. He knows that if he raises the voltage on certain pins, other specific pins will respond by either raising or lowering their voltage in accord with the internal functioning. He most often doesn’t care what is actually within the box, how it works or why.

In reality, every mind, no matter how small, is always “thinking” in terms of black boxes. Every object identified whether given a label or not, is inherently categorized as an entity with an expected behavior relating to its stimuli.

Given stimuli “S” and an internal functioning of “I”, a behavior of “B” is expected.

B = F{S,I}
Behavior = a Function of Stimuli and Internal responses.
Or
“I choose my Behavior in response to my Situation/Stimuli”

By noting in general terms those 3 qualities, every mind categorizing every object of thought, every word, every sentence, every construct, every action, and every object, endeavors to resolve what behavior to enact. The mind simply can’t function without such an inherent model.

When deriving its chosen ontological view of its surroundings, the mind has no alternative but to classify subsets of its surroundings into such black box models commonly referred to as entities, objects, and actions.

Even when any person views another person, to merely identify the person, the mind must utilize the black box concept;

“Person A is that entity which behaves in B manner when given S stimuli.”

All psychological categorizing of behavior is codified by such a scheme. All fields of Science utilize the black box concept so as to identify and predict behaviors within each field of study. Of course, people often don’t appreciate being thought of as a “mere predictable black box”, but the truth is that every mind has no choice but to use such a model if it is to think at all. Unfortunately, societal engineering, requiring generalizing designs, requires generalizing black box categories for all people from which political strategies, psychological media, economic designs are formed. A governing body is itself a black box assigning black box generalizations, rules, and reactions.

Even Life itself is modeled by every mind as “this general entity that generally behaves in this general way when given a general type of stimulation from a general type of situation and I don’t know or often care how it works inside.”

Every General that shuffles his small models of tanks, planes, and battalions around on his map, every religion or government in dictating its truths, and every philosopher constructing his world-view or perspective, instinctively, naturally, and necessarily assembles his ontology by choosing the black boxes within; the entities that regardless of internal method “I”, always behave in “B” manner, given “S” stimuli.

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PostSubject: Re: The Black Box The Black Box Icon_minitimeSat Jan 14, 2012 1:52 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Almost all true. A thing/entity is indeed usually, almost necessarily defined as a particular correspondence between input and output. It values its input in terms of what it is, and by virtue that it is, it produces an output.

“I am THAT I am” is the self-description God gave to Moses, often misinterpreted as I am what I am.

The black box definition does not account for the fact that it is.

This is what value ontology has on your thinking, what makes it a proper general ontology - it describes a requirement for being, does not simply give a description of being – it describes the inner working of the black box.

It is only a small shift from out to in, and it is severely limited, as “value” is the ground-meaning of all language and thought, so it can not be broken down further. But one can use the formula to construct living black boxes, from political systems to AI’s (any pre-designed and working political system is an artificial intelligence) and perhaps even life.

If you would use the terms of value-ontology in your thinking and formulating, I believe that we would make more progress on this site toward an end that not just one would embrace. The formulation makes us capable of effectively bringing together otherwise irreconcilable “black boxes”, i.e. entities now defined by very different particularities of in and output.

Not to specify positive and negative values, but to explicate the act of valu-ing.

" The strong do what they can do and the weak accept what they have to accept. "

Thucydides
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PostSubject: Re: The Black Box The Black Box Icon_minitimeSat Jan 14, 2012 8:00 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
This is crucial in recognizing the difference between the Black Box view of entities, and a value ontologica view:
An entity is not a manufactured object – it does not exist primarily because of its use to another entity. A black box in the normal, engineering-meaning, a physical apparatus serving to translate an input into an output, is not self-valuing, and can therefore not, in my ontology, be said to be being. It is an attribute to being, in terms of helping being to be in accordance with things it would otherwise not be able to value in terms if itself (in other words, an attribute enabling power) bit it is not in itself carrying the requirements.

Consequently, if we look at how the societal engineering, but in general, slavery, posits humans as utensil, we can say that in slave-like entities, their very being is being compromised.

This is of course why the notion that Christianity is a slave-religion is not a dismissal of it, as it effectively returns to compromised beings their self-valuing. It restores their ability to value the world truly, as it reinstalls the primordial logic of being that operates through the direct, instinctive perception of value-potential, enables an experience of the world as a source of power and bliss. This direct approach to the world is being lost through the pre-positing of what is of value, through the surrounding of man by products and predesigned self-images. This not only kills life, it kills the very mechanism of being, of materiality. People so influenced are worse than living dead - they are manifest non-entities. Only such a person can be a black box in the engineers sense, existing only as a tool, an object of use, to be placed by a real, self-valuing perspective in a system to transit and translate a certain energy type into another.

The distinction I wish to make is between objects and beings.
In an object, there is simply nothing else that is of significance except the relation between in and output – in a being, there is a primordial significance of it to itself. In order to signify, it uses the world, what is around it and perceptible.

To an object, the world does not exist, it has/is no self-value by which it would be able to interpret, relate.
To a being, the world itself is a black box. It puts its effort into the world in order to receive this effort back as value.

This translation from effort to value is what has been destroyed, or hijacked and transformed, by the technological apparatus that now stands between man and his basic necessities.

" The strong do what they can do and the weak accept what they have to accept. "

Thucydides
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PostSubject: Re: The Black Box The Black Box Icon_minitimeSat Jan 14, 2012 8:25 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Oh really?

Well, do remember that I asked for your clear understanding and in your own words so that I could examine for reasonable compatibility. I gave you my example in my words from which I expect you to derive your own precision in your own words.

Now it is your turn. Be precise.

A) Comprehensive
B) Consistent
C) Relevant

Fixed_Cross · May 30, 2020, 10:06pm

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PostSubject: Presumption and Indecision Presumption and Indecision Icon_minitimeThu Dec 29, 2011 11:36 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
In the 60’s I was told that no one knows why a gyroscope really works. I thought, “That is silly, even I know why a gyroscope works” and proceeded to explain in exact detail why it does what it does. Of course later, I discovered that it was merely that no one “is to know” why a gyroscope works, an issue of old WW2 military secrets.

In the early 70’s I was told that there is an energy crisis because of the shortage of oil. After much pondering, I revealed a design for a small mechanism yielding clean and free energy, only to find that there “is to be” an energy crisis for sake of international stratagems.

In the mid 80’s I realized a means to give any AI system its own legitimate emotions, only to realize how foolish such an act would be.

In the 90’s I displayed how the most hateful and hardened person can be transformed into a person who gives with a smile to strangers expecting nothing in return, only to find that hatefulness is a social engineering tool to be maintained for sake of world domination contests.

In the 2000’s I took on the unified field theory riddle as it seemed to be the last riddle to solve that perhaps actually hadn’t been solved, but then, perhaps not, who can tell anymore. Just recently I managed to prove my theory to the point of being an indisputable law, not merely a theory.

I was going to leave that as my last donation of intellectual pursuit as its proof opens up a wide range of further study to keep Science and social engineers busy for years ironing out the minutia, developing new weapons, and ensuring their world domination lust, but then I remembered an old issue that had stumped me years ago, an issue related to the very core of life and living, an issue perhaps worth one more mind scrambling effort to resolve.

Presumption is the act of taking a step before ensuring its footing, taking a shot before ensuring the aim. Presumption is at the very core of every error the mind ever makes, every belief accepted without careful study, every conclusion drawn without careful examination for validity, every reach made for what wasn’t within reach. Without the act of presumption, the mind can make no error.

But to never presume and always take the time to verify every thought before any action, is a truly impossible task. Thus risks must be taken, but to what degree? Passions increase the presumptions and thus lead to all of what has been called “sin”. And once again serve social engineers in their quest to control all life by ensuring its weakness.

Avoid both indecision and also presumption, a seemingly impossible task, yet a required task at the very root of life; division of need at the very core, corruption of purpose before purpose is even considered.

How does one decide when to think and when to act. By what formula would the highest probability of personal good judgment be assured despite the unavoidable errors.

I can conceive of how a group ensures the best outcome of when to stop thinking and when to act and an individual is merely a society in a sack, but the mind is not so easy to instruct or formulate into a predesigned order. Thus even though the process might be valid, the practical application might be another story and without practical application, what is the need of a design.

By what holistic means would one ensure the timing of his actions versus his contemplation?

Once that is resolved, there is nothing else to resolve.

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PostSubject: Re: Presumption and Indecision Presumption and Indecision Icon_minitimeThu Dec 29, 2011 2:35 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
There must be guess work involved, one cannot know before one knows, which is to say has already figured out. What you call presumption I would perhaps call poor guessing, or largely unconscious-automatic guess work. Hypothesis testing involves… a hypothesis, a risk. The test is a further risk. So perhaps what we need to do is elevate this entire process of decision-making cognition into the more conscious/aware realm/s of the mind. To propose a schema for just how to conceptualize decision-making with regard to postulate and test, risk and reward, which would necessarily involve a lot of prior understanding of the contexts in which such things occur.

To replace presumption, unconscious guessing and risking, with (postsumption?) something more active, more intentionally willed, more fully known and conscious. We can never get rid of the guess or the risk - rather as Nietzsche says we must learn to guess and risk even more! But we can certainly elevate the methods and manners in which this occurs, toward the end of minimizing bad/harmful/ineffective guessing.

“Be clever, Ariadne! …
You have little ears; you have my ears:
Put a clever word in them! —
Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself? …
I am your labyrinth …”. -N

“A man is not great if he is not small, and he is not small if he is not great. Concepts flirt with the loss of their significance in the oscillation between ambiguous states, and this is in part the function and purpose of concepts.” -Primer on Meaning
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PostSubject: Re: Presumption and Indecision Presumption and Indecision Icon_minitimeThu Dec 29, 2011 2:39 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
I would also like to point out that Parodites has already noted that action necessarily effaces reason, that to act is necessarily to interrupt the process of reasoning, and this of course calls reason itself into question with respect to the means and extent to which it supposedly informs our actions. Which is to say, perhaps precisely what you are getting at here: by what means does action supervene upon reason, and how/why? Can this medial interruption and intervention be cognized within the reasoning faculty, and what would this imply?

“Be clever, Ariadne! …
You have little ears; you have my ears:
Put a clever word in them! —
Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself? …
I am your labyrinth …”. -N

“A man is not great if he is not small, and he is not small if he is not great. Concepts flirt with the loss of their significance in the oscillation between ambiguous states, and this is in part the function and purpose of concepts.” -Primer on Meaning
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PostSubject: Re: Presumption and Indecision Presumption and Indecision Icon_minitimeThu Dec 29, 2011 11:03 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Think of in terms of your life being a timed chess game.

But before you begin, you want to ensure that you understand how to reduce the risk of choosing your move before you have had the time to work through the permutations of the game. What strategy would ensure that you are taking the least risk in the least time with each decision to move?

How does one decide how much time is too much to take before he even knows what he might discover by taking more time to discover it?

To formalize the whole matter, one would assign a weighted variable to both time consumed and moves made. Then derive a relational formula between the time variable and the move variables. And then monitor for maxima and minima (the derivatives). The unfettered mind does this process automatically. The skill of “Kung Fu” is precisely that art.

But as I said, the theory isn’t really the issue, but the practice. How much time should one devote to learning Kung Fu? And since the teaching of Kung Fu is not precise (lacking at minimum in momentum), the whole notion of learning it comes into question. Of course, I am merely using Kung Fu as a generic allegorical object of training or practice. The ideal art to learn would be a better art than traditional Kung Fu.

Increasing the momentum of ones life is vital. It is literally no more than that momentum that keeps a person alive. That momentum is made of the firmness of decisions (the “mass”) and the speed of the responses (the “velocity”). The momentum is quite literally their multiple. Your life is the result.

The firmness of decisions depends on how well they are verified. Verification ensures there is no need for them to be changed (thus more “massive/firm”). But that verification requires more time and thus slower response, “think before you act”, “measure twice, cut once”, and so on. There is definite wisdom in verifying before acting.

…I’m just mulling over some thoughts on the issue scratch

…and all too familiar with how to disrupt the process. Neutral

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PostSubject: Re: Presumption and Indecision Presumption and Indecision Icon_minitimeThu Dec 29, 2011 11:37 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Thinking in terms of the formula for sentient life:

Clarification, verification, and memorization/documentation aimed toward the inspiration of the momentum of the harmony of those and applied to the mental, medical, and military realms of a life constitutes the formula for the “holy life”.

I guess the question is how to clarify, verify and remember which of those actions to take in what order so as to inspire the momentum (least risk).

Btw, perception of hope and threat is what inspires that momentum. Sooo… substituting into the equation…

“I guess the question is how to clarify, verify and remember which of those actions to take in what order so as to {perceive the hopes and threats} involved in the harmony of the process of doing so.”

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PostSubject: Re: Presumption and Indecision Presumption and Indecision Icon_minitimeThu Dec 29, 2011 11:59 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Capable wrote:
by what means does action supervene upon reason, and how/why? Can this medial interruption and intervention be cognized within the reasoning faculty, and what would this imply?
Taking action diverts attention and alters the circumstances that the reasoning was trying to organize before action was to be taken. It takes place due to the perception and inspiration that “time for thinking has run out”. Such a thought rises from deep within associated to fear and anxiety (“something must be done - NOW!”). Unfortunately it is most often medically inspired rather than psychologically.

Once that switch has been thrown, the mind loses authority to inhibit responses. Serious training can substantially decrease the throwing of that switch and thus maintain the authority to reason before action. That is the entire focus of the Buddhistic arts. If not for medical/physiological neurological intervention none of it would be a big issue.
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PostSubject: Re: Presumption and Indecision Presumption and Indecision Icon_minitimeFri Dec 30, 2011 1:48 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
I guess I should mention that it isn’t actually the mere momentum that is the goal, but its the integral sum of the momentum (making it even worse of a problem). The integral sum involves the probability of future progress and thus makes calculating the next decision take more time and demand more information. Both lead to a hesitation in response which eventually gets overridden by the need to act. Too much practice getting overridden causes a loss of will power to accomplish anything based of cognitive reasoning.
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PostSubject: Re: Presumption and Indecision Presumption and Indecision Icon_minitimeFri Dec 30, 2011 10:15 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
This gets to that issue of what to do when you don’t know what to do.
Also related to what to do in your idle/wait time.

Seeking what to do is an issue of the attempt to gain information which comes either by outside source or inner analysis (usually leading to worry or fantasy but on occasion leading to analytical resolve).

Seeking more information from outside is an activity under the heading of “clarification” (of situation). Thus targeted reading seems appropriate as a “to do next” step rather than merely pondering. But how much for how long is still the question.
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PostSubject: Re: Presumption and Indecision Presumption and Indecision Icon_minitimeSat Jan 14, 2012 11:43 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
On presumption and decision making, I wonder of you could state your understanding of the difference between these two ways of grounding action.

intuitive sensing of the right action at the right moment, where type of action and right moment are non- or super-conceptually and instantaneously apprehended together, as an impulse to act.
rational clarification of the right action at the right moment - where both type of action and right moment are separately objectified, and brought together as a premeditation of a course of action.

You brought up the term “kung fu”. This has much to do with cultivating in oneself the means/sensitivity/grounding/awareness required for making non-rational, at least not conceptually based decisions.

Here, conceptuality is invested in the training, in the forms aimed to prepare man to act correctly in all possible circumstances. A “right conceptuality” is ‘bred into the organism’, ensuring that, when the moment of decision comes, he can only act from a right/correct/suitable interpretation of whatever it is that presents itself in that moment. “right” determined by the terms of clarified self-valuing. “kung fu” means “good work” also translatable as “right action”.

" The strong do what they can do and the weak accept what they have to accept. "

Thucydides

Last edited by Fixed Cross on Sun Jan 15, 2012 8:32 am; edited 1 time in total
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PostSubject: Re: Presumption and Indecision Presumption and Indecision Icon_minitimeSun Jan 15, 2012 8:07 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Fixed Cross wrote:
On presumption and decision making, I wonder of you could state your understanding of the difference between these two ways of grounding action.
Indecision is the waiting before action is taken in hopes of a resolve between two possible actions.
Presumption is acting before any resolve of multiple options is sought.

Both states are an endangerment. The presumptuous act tempts error in the action. Indecision tempts error in the inaction.

The art of Kung Fu is one of harmonizing all levels of decision making; instinctive, emotional, cognitive; or unconscious, subconscious, and conscious. Once these levels of decision making have been so intertwined as to become one, the maximum inner harmony has been arranged, the maximum “Chi” and efficacy of effort/spirit. The objective being merely to ensure that as much awareness and knowledge as possible is always being considered in each small action; the ideal state to maintain.

The antagonist to such a state in Christian culture was once conceptualized as the “demon”, meaning any effort/spirit that works against the union of the whole, of the self-harmony, the “holy”. In the Christian paradigm, the demons inhabit the Christian Hell or Jewish Gehenna wherein fiery conflict and division of every effort is maintained so as to utterly destroy life as it is eventually consigned to the abyss. The demon is merely the product of inconsiderate presumptive action or decisions. One of which is the act or decision of indecision.

We could get into how to create such things, but perhaps another time. Currently I am more focused on the precise formula for their expulsion (“exorcism”) and prevention (“chalice”).

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PostSubject: Re: Presumption and Indecision Presumption and Indecision Icon_minitimeTue Jan 17, 2012 6:42 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
FC, I think you use the word “rational” a little differently than I. I don’t constrict it so much to mere cognitive function.

On a fundamental level, there are always at least 3 rationales. You might have one instinctive urging to move forward, another urging you to move back, and a third urging that you do neither.

Each of the 3 urgings are formed with purpose in mind, but each urgling mind is separate and can only see from its own perspective. A decision making process is formed when the 3 basic options are considered with that same purpose in a slightly higher mind.

It can be likened to 3 voters; a farmer, a business man, and a house wife. They each write to their congressman. The farmer says “we need to stay as we are on this issue”. The business man says, “we need to progress on this issue.” and the house wife says, “we need to retreat away from this issue.”

The job of the congressman is to weigh the significance of all of the votes and carry that choice to the next higher level. In a simple case, it is merely a measure of the number of voters involved. In this case, there are an even number of voters for each option. The congressman can merely add his own vote such as to break the tie, but if he was one of those 3 himself and is altruistic, he has a problem.

If he proceeds to congress, he must make a choice. If he doesn’t proceed to congress, he has made a choice to abstain which inherently favors the farmer in this case unless there is an imbalance of other congressmen on the next level. So the congressmen has a much larger puzzle to solve than merely counting votes if the votes happen to be even. He must decide what is going to happen if he abstains because by abstaining, a choice will be made by others and that choice will favor one of the 3 voters in his district.

If the issue wasn’t of great importance, no clear and present danger was apparent, abstaining from decision is the easy choice to take. In effect, by abstaining the congressmen is saying, “We don’t know”, a valid position to take and recognize. And that is the position of “Indecision” even on an instinctive, neurological level.

If the congressmen is very influential, he will end up causing an odd situation. For him to properly represent his constituency, he must represent to congress the position of not being able to decide. In effect, he must attempt to get the other congressmen to agree that “we cannot know”, regardless of their own voters. And there is where the first level of problem arises.

Being in the position of an even vote and thus making the decision to take the non-active choice isn’t really the problem. That state should be avoided, but it can’t always be avoided and thus the chance must be taken. The real issue is when one poorly constructed decision such as that state creates in one district is then propagated into congress wherein other district representatives had more clear decisions.

Due to any extra influence any one representative might have obtained, by whatever means, the subtle and often more correct voices that would have been able to make the decision will not be heard and the indecision propagates up into higher levels which might in term have the same situation.

The issue is really one of ensuring that every whisper is actually heard in the balance and not overwhelmed by extra influence especially by an indecisive participant.

“If you don’t have a solution for the problem, you don’t have a vote concerning it.”

Unfortunately the US Congress wasn’t designed that wisely. And unfortunately, the brain isn’t designed such as to prevent that scenario within itself either. Kung Fu teaches that on a training, conditioning, fundamental engram level - “wait for the whisper.”

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PostSubject: Re: Presumption and Indecision Presumption and Indecision Icon_minitimeTue Jan 17, 2012 4:03 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Just thinking out loud again a little on this subject…

This topic relates very directly with the issue of the anxiety of worry and insecurity. The mind uses the discomfort of anxiety in an effort to inspire focus on what it perceives as an important issue to resolve. Societies go to great lengths to come up with ways to handle that issue; false hopes, medications, inspirational quips, religions, psychological and psychiatric visitations, and so on, but the truth is that they are also the ones instilling it. Society is actually the only serious source for anxiety which it uses so as to help dominate and establish socialistic order, a blind and pointless endeavor but none the less sought and quickly and cleverly defended.

The methods for defending against society are easily categorized and using society, easily formed into very profitable tools and endeavors for society and its individuals. The problem of course is trying to defend against society at the same time as utilizing it. Many religious customs are in place solely for such a purpose. Once free from society’s influence, the formula becomes pretty simple. But until then, it is a bit like trying to form the proverbial snowball in Hell.

While I was developing the UFT solution, it occurred to me that once I could see exactly how particles formed, through conceptual analogy, I could then easily apply it to economics, psychological, and social structure. Unfortunately when it finally dawned on me exactly how and why particles do form, the analog association became rather difficult for me to assemble. With the UFT, I could write a computer program to help both prove the fundamental theory as well as develop its perfection. I doubt that such a method could be used again to do the same with a resolution for Presumption and Indecision, although not totally dismissible.

Hmm…

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Location : The Moon

Presumption and Indecision Empty
PostSubject: Re: Presumption and Indecision Presumption and Indecision Icon_minitimeTue Jan 17, 2012 6:40 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
James S Saint wrote:
In the 60’s I was told that no one knows why a gyroscope really works. I thought, “That is silly, even I know why a gyroscope works” and proceeded to explain in exact detail why it does what it does. Of course later, I discovered that it was merely that no one “is to know” why a gyroscope works, an issue of old WW2 military secrets.