for - adjacency - sensory bubble - umwelt - living in a simulation - Daisetz Suzuki - elbow doesn't bend backwards - quote - Michael Levin - illusion

adjacency - between - sensory bubble - umwelt - living in a simulation - Daisetz Suzuki - the elbow does not bend backwards - adjacency statement - In the Tibetan Buddhist epistemology, the illusory body training is to experience both one's body and reality as an illusion in the sense that nothing is static and fixed - From this perspective, we are all temporary states of convergence of the recirculating elements of emptiness - Daisetz Suzuki, the enlightened Japanese Zen monk who is credited to be one of the ones who brought Zen to the West said that when he experienced Kensho, he could suddenly understand the puzzling koan "The elbow does not bend backwards" with great clarity. - Form is a concentration and temporary consolidation of emptiness, the limitations inherent in any form does not denigrate is absolute origins from unlimited emptiness - The Heart Sutra expresses the equivalence of form and emptiness, finite and infinite. - In Deep Humanity, we have a saying: - To be or not to be - that is the question - To be AND not to be - that is the answer

• Quote: Michael Levin
  • Sometimes people ask me "is it possible that we're living in a simulation?
    • and and if you think about it it's not just possible it's guaranteed.
  • There's no other way it could possibly be
  • If you think about what is the opposite of that
    • the opposite of that is that you somehow have a physically embodied cognitive structure that
      • is able to,
      • is not limited in its sensory perceptions
      • is not limited in the amount of memory and computations
  • All of us are limited beings
  • All of us evolved under constraints of
    • time
    • energy and
    • everything else -We see a tiny, little, narrow slit in the electromagnetic spectrum
  • We have a few other things
    • like chemical senses of things that are right there on your tongue and
    • on your fingers and so on
    • we have a little bit of memory
    • we have this wet squishy substrate
      • that's very error prone and
      • needs to be constantly maintained
    • and all our memories have to be the actively rewritten
    • We were evolved under specific pressures under those conditions
  • Who could possibly think that that we are not living in some sort of very specific representation of reality
    • that is limited in many ways
  • That's not to say
    • it isn't adaptive and that
    • Donald Hoffman would say that in many ways it is completely wrong
  • I I think there's probably some truth to that
    • but in other ways I think the the big lesson from all this is that
    • we are all a brain and a vat
  • Of course we are a brain sitting inside this thing that gives us various stimuli
  • We try to make the best sense of it that we can and creatures will adapt to
  • This is why you can do
    • sensory substitution and
    • sensory augmentation and why
    • you can have neurons in the dish that play Pong
  • but these systems will try to make sense of whatever world they're given
    • in whatever configuration they have and we do the same
  • So yeah absolutely it's an illusion
    • but it's not an illusion in the sense that there is some other way to have perfect direct perception of some underlying reality
  • When we say it's an illusion or a simulation
    • It just acknowledges the fact that we are finite limited beings
    • whose job it is to make the best sense we can
    • using the hardware that we have
    • of what's been going on up until now and what we predict is going to be going on
  • I don't know of another story that could possibly make sense

What is an individual? This is a very fundamental question that John asks, especially from the evolutionary biological perspective as life has evolved over billions of years and what were once separate individuals, came together in Major Evolution Transitions (MET) to form a NEW grouping of what were former individuals to form a new cohesive, higher order individual. Life is therefore COMPOSITIONAL. When these groups of individuals increase fitness by clustering together and mutually benefit from each other, they then reproduce together as a cluster.

Watch this informative video by Oxford researcher explaining MET: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FVUfNEHl44hc%2F&group=world and watch Amanda Robbin's video on research on the same question from an information systems perspective: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F6J-J72GoqhY%2F&group=world based on her paper: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556%2Ffull&group=world

Stop Reset Go and Deep Humanity praxis adopts the same view that the individual human being is a process, a nexus of many different flows of the natural world....and consciousness is part of the that - 4E - Embedded, Enacted, Embodied and Extended. We are more appropriately called a human INTERbeing, and even more appropriately a human INTERbeCOMing (since we are more process than static thing) both from material and information flow perspective.

Our consciousness is at a specific level, associated with a body with sensory bubble that constrains it to this particular scale of experience - not microscopic and not planetary. It gives us a unique lens into the other scales of the individual that are purely cognitive, and only indirectly sensed via instrumentation that extends our naked senses. That siuatedness and perspectival knowing gives us a uniquely, distorted view of reality.

This is an example of the manufacturer / consumer dualism created by the Industrial Revolution. Since manufacturers have become a separate layer that no longer exist as part of the community, as artisans once did, along with globalized capitalism, the consumer does not know the life history of the product being consumed. The sensory bubble limits what a consumer can directly know.

One answer is to promote a trend back to local and artisan production. Relocalizing production can empower consumers to inspect producers of the products they consume, holding them accountable.

Another answer is to develop globalized trust networks of producers who are truly ethical.

Cosmolocal production has networks by the commons nature can promote such values.

The extended mind of Chalmers is like the expansion of the sensory bubble in Stop Reset Go / Deep Humanity framing. It can also be seen as an extension of our Umwelt (Uexskull).

This is the existential reality of humans, that we only know that which is in our own limited sensory bubble. We have zero access to that which lay beyond. Only a fool would argue there is nothing happening out there if we don’t sense it, and yet we have no way to prove it. This is an intrinsic epistemological disconnect with reality that makes each of us feel an intrinsic sense of alienation. Why is our consciousness constrained in this profound way?