for - existential isolation - existential loneliness - existential isolation - Heidegger - Deep Humanity

from - Science and Nonduality article - https://scienceandnonduality.com/article/embracing-existential-loneliness-and-waking-up-to-non-dual-aloneness/

• for: example - political polarization, example - trumpism, example - anti- vaxxers, example - conspiracy theories, nonduality - political polarization

• example: political polarization

  • classic dualistic categories will always fail to capture the complexity
  • indyweb mindplex's could reveal the nuances

• for: visual field, visual field - clues of a seer, nondual, non-dual, nonduality, non-duality, science - blind spot, science - subject
• question
  • does the visual field reveal anything about the eye?
• answer: yes
  • vanishing points indicate that the world is being seen from one perspective.

• for: quote, quote - Nietzsche, duality, nonduality, nondual, non-duality, non-dual

• quote

  • The creator wanted to look away from himself. That's why he created the world

• author: Nietzsche, Zarathustra

• comment

  • Bitbol's work is to invert this and explore how we can become aware of the blind spot of science that creates the objective world to study, whilst ignoring the subject..

• for: Edmund Husserl, the Mother of Knowledge, nondual, nonduality, non-dual, non-duality, the ground of existence
• definition: the mother of knowledge
  • the dynamics of lived embodied experience
• author: Edmond Husserl

• for: nondual, nonduality, ground of existence, transcendental, Kant - transcendental, non-duality, non-dual, quote, quote - Michel Bitbol, quote - nonduality, quote - transcendental

• quote

  • What can you say about the transcendental?
  • Can you speak of it?
  • Can you use words to describe it?
  • Can you characterize the condition of possibility of it?
  • And Kant says no.
  • This, namely, the transcendental, cannot be further analyzed or answered because it is of such condition that we are in need for all our answers and for all our thinking about objects.
  • So, the transcendental itself cannot be an object of thought.
• author: Michel Bitbol
• comment
  • Michel Bitbol explains Kant's definition of transcendental that makes sense to me for the first time!
  • It is really quite similiar to the defintion of the nondual.

• for: bio-buddhism, buddhism - AI, care as the driver of intelligence, Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, care drive, care light cone, multiscale competency architecture of life, nonduality, no-self, self - illusion, self - constructed, self - deconstruction, Bodhisattva vow
• title: Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence
• author: Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, AI - ethics
• date: May 16, 2022

• source: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/5/710/htm

• summary

  • a trans-disciplinary attempt to develop a framework to deal with a diversity of emerging non-traditional intelligence from new bio-engineered species to AI based on the Buddhist conception of care and compassion for the other.
  • very thought-provoking and some of the explanations and comparisons to evolution actually help to cast a new light on old Buddhist ideas.
  • this is a trans-disciplinary paper synthesizing Buddhist concepts with evolutionary biology

• for: nonduality, non-duality, duality, dualism, hard problem of consciousness, explanatory gap, relativistic theory of consciousness, human INTERbeing, human INTERbeCOMing, Deep Humanity, DH
• title: A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness
• author: Nir Lahav, Zahariah A. Neemeh

• date: May 12, 2022

• abstract

  • In recent decades, the scientific study of consciousness has significantly increased our understanding of this elusive phenomenon.
  • Yet, despite critical development in our understanding of the functional side of consciousness, we still lack a fundamental theory regarding its phenomenal aspect.
  • There is an “explanatory gap” between
    • our scientific knowledge of functional consciousness and
    • its “subjective,” phenomenal aspects,
  • referred to as the “hard problem” of consciousness.
  • The phenomenal aspect of consciousness is the first-person answer to “what it’s like” question, and
    • it has thus far proved recalcitrant to direct scientific investigation.
  • Naturalistic dualists argue that it is composed of a primitive, private, non-reductive element of reality that is independent from the functional and physical aspects of consciousness.
  • Illusionists, on the other hand, argue that it is merely a cognitive illusion, and that all that exists are ultimately physical, non-phenomenal properties.
  • We contend that both the dualist and illusionist positions are flawed because they tacitly assume consciousness to be an absolute property that doesn’t depend on the observer.
  • We develop a conceptual and a mathematical argument for a relativistic theory of consciousness in which
    • a system either has or doesn’t have phenomenal consciousness with respect to some observer.
  • Phenomenal consciousness is neither private nor delusional, just relativistic.
    • In the frame of reference of the cognitive system, it will be observable (first-person perspective) and
    • in other frame of reference it will not (third-person perspective).
  • These two cognitive frames of reference are both correct,
    • just as in the case of
      • an observer that claims to be at rest
      • while another will claim that the observer has constant velocity.
  • Given that consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon, neither observer position can be privileged,
    • as they both describe the same underlying reality.
  • Based on relativistic phenomena in physics
    • we developed a mathematical formalization for consciousness which bridges the explanatory gap and dissolves the hard problem.
  • Given that the first-person cognitive frame of reference also offers legitimate observations on consciousness,
    • we conclude by arguing that philosophers can usefully contribute to the science of consciousness by collaborating with neuroscientists to explore the neural basis of phenomenal structures.

• comment

  • This is a promising approach to solving the hard problem of consciosness

• for: doppleganger, conflict resolution, deep humanity, common denominators, CHD, Douglas Rushkoff, Naomi Klein, Into the Mirror World, conspiracy theory, conspiracy theories, conspiracy culture, nonduality, self-other, human interbeing, polycrisis, othering, storytelling, myth-making, social media amplifier -summary
  • This conversation was insightful on so many dimensions salient to the polycrisis humanity is moving through.
  • It makes me think of the old cliches:
    • "The more things change, the more they remain the same"
    • "What's old is new" ' "History repeats"
  • the conversation explores Naomi's latest book (as of this podcast), Into the Mirror World, in which Naomi adopts a different style of writing to explicate, articulate and give voice to
    • implicit and tacit discomforting ideas and feelings she experienced during covid and earlier, and
    • became a focal point through a personal comparative analysis with another female author and thought leader, Naomi Wolf,
      • a feminist writer who ended up being rejected by mainstream media and turned to right wing media.
  • The conversation explores the process of:
    • othering,
    • coopting and
    • abandoning
  • of ideas important for personal and social wellbeing.
  • and speaks to the need to identify what is going on and to reclaim those ideas for the sake of humanity
  • In this context, the doppleganger is the people who are mirror-like imiages of ourselves, but on the other side of polarized issues.
  • Charismatic leaders who are bad actors often are good at identifying the suffering of the masses, and coopt the ideas of good actors to serve their own ends of self-enrichment.
  • There are real world conspiracies that have caused significant societal harm, and still do,
  • however, when there ithere are phenomena which we have no direct sense experience of, the mixture of
    • a sense of helplessness,
    • anger emerging from injustice
  • a charismatic leader proposing a concrete, possible but explanatory theory
  • is a powerful story whose mythology can be reified by many people believing it
  • Another cliche springs to mind
    • A lie told a hundred times becomes a truth
    • hence the amplifying role of social media
  • When we think about where this phenomena manifests, we find it everywhere:

• for: self, constructing reality, constructed self, constructed reality, constructing the sense of self, self and other, nonduality, duality, insecurable, comment, question

• paraphrase

  • sense of self is a construct
  • a psychological and social construct
  • it's not something that infants are born with
    • it's actually something that develops as we grow up
  • our caregivers look into our eyes
    • give us a name that we learned to identify with and
    • also basically we learn to see ourselves as they see us
      • we internalize that which is why we are so preoccupied with what other people think about
    • we learned to use language in certain ways
      • mine
      • you
      • yours
      • his
      • hers and so forth
    • that's all very essential to it
  • so we could say that the sense of self is being a construct
  • it's composed of mostly habitual ways of
    • thinking
    • feeling
    • acting
    • reacting
    • remembering
    • planning and
    • tending
  • it's the way that these mostly habitual processes work together re-enforce each other
  • but does that give us insight into what the fundamental problem is?
• I think it does and here's what it is as I understand it
  • because the sense of self is a construct
    • because it doesn't refer it
    • doesn't depend on it
    • doesn't point back to a real self that has any self-reality or or self-identity

• this sense of self by virtue of its lack of essence is inherently uncomfortable

  • we can say it's basically inherently insecure
  • in fact it's not only insecure but it's insecurable

• comment

• question
  • I agree with David's analysis but also have a question for him:
    • what about the biological, evolutionary definition of the self of a living organism. Is there a contradiction here?
    • reference
      • Major Evolutionary Transitions occur when a group of individuated living organisms achieve greater fitness by mutualism and begin to reproduce together as a new unit
        • How do we harmonize the claim of a psychologically constructed self with this evolutionary formation of new biological SELF units through MET?

• for: further inquiry, unpack, self-other entanglement, dual, nondual
• paraphrase
  • Our real challenge, perhaps, is in relearning what the “collective interest” actually means,
  • and why it is so important,
  • and how we got to this perverse situation
    • where we have such monstrous distrust of each other,
    • and of collectives in general,
    • that we have assumed that, somehow, 7.8B people acting in their
      • isolated
      • individual,
      • personal, and often
      • trauma-influenced
    • self-interest,
    • will somehow be synonymous with an optimal collective interest.
• comment
  • it points once again to a deeper understanding of the relationship between
    • self and
    • other
    • and their entanglement

This is a key statement: how we experience the world depends on the perceptual and cognitive lens used to filter the world through.

Francis Heylighen proposes a nondual system based on causal dependency relationships to serve as the foundation for distributed cognition.(collective intelligence).

https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbafybeicho2xrqouoq4cvqev3l2p44rapi6vtmngfdt42emek5lyygbp3sy.ipfs.dweb.link%2FNon-dualism%2520-%2520Mind%2520outside%2520Brain%2520%2520a%2520radically%2520non-dualist%2520foundation%2520for%2520distributed%2520cognition.pdf&group=world

Another way to articulate our two ignorances: we're overwhelmingly tempted to believe when we have perceptual experience including introspective experience of our own minds we think that we know that content immediately. When we are experiencing a cognitive state, we believe we know that state and the idea that our inner states present themselves to introspection even trained introspection just as they are

Jay introduces the purpose of Buddhism is to get to the root of suffering, shine the light of wisdom on it to dissipate the ignorance.

The ignorance manifests in two ways: 1. We have an immediate and indubitable knowledge of our own minds 2. we impose an equally compelling subject/object dualism upon our nondual reality

• Title: Mind outside Brain: a radically non-dualist foundation for distributed cognition
• Author: Heylighen, Francis & Beigi, Shima
• Date: 2016

The proposal is to interpret mind and matter as aspects of the same process network, and decouple both from the Cartesian/Newtonian mechanistic worldview. Catalysts of elementary reactions are agents exhibiting intention, which can exhibit increasingly complex behavior Distributed cognition that emerges from high level social interactions cannot be situated in any single individual brain.

Miranda suggests "being honest about where we don't always tell the truth" to others or to ourselves, because of shame, fear, or other long held pain.

She talks about her spiritual experiences, including a challenging experience of "dark night of the soul" and how she navigated that by continual acceptance practice: "feeling everything".

The partial truth of the self-talk of "I'm not good enough", is that the separate self actually cannot, because it is illusory.