5,636 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2022
    1. Whenever the parameters of survival are at stake,the human agent will choose according to what will increase the chances of its survival that is, thecontinuity of its own organic existence.

      !- exceptions : human agent will always choose according to what will increase chances of survival * Acts of heroism, of giving one's life for others happen

    2. the mechanism ofdouble bind described by Gregory Bateson et al. [35 ] as a pattern of communication

      !- examples : double bind * When one thinks a little, one finds many such double bind situations in life such as: * Persons in positions of responsibility who have access to more resources than they have ability to afford, creating temptation to steal Marrying out of sense of duty instead of love * Challenges identifying with gender identity - LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or sometimes questioning), and others. The "plus" represents other sexual identities including pansexual and Two-Spirit) * Conformity bias - sensing injustice of certain social norms propagated by your own ingroup but feeling peer pressure to conform

    3. All moral codes, all prescribed ways ofliving, all social arrangements do involve to a degree such targeting. Certain behaviours, desires, oreven thoughts are simply unacceptable, will be punished, or at least strongly discouraged. While someof such prohibitions are official and overt and thus can be related to and evaluated, others remainonly tacit and below the threshold of consciousness.

      !- effects : double bind * When we are caught in a double bind, the effects can manifest explicitly and overtly or be subtle and tacit such as behaviors of boredom, frustration, loneliness, unfulfilled, desperation, etc. * the resulting emotional tension is unhealthy

    4. The human-symbolic merger into a single contour further consolidates once the locus of its controlshifts from the human to the social system.

      !- question : human-symbolic merger into a single contour * As in comment on the previous paragraph, the way to interpret this sentence appears to be that we give up or deceive ourselves, minimize our own integrity and the social system wins. * Why does it consolidate? The social systems needs overrides our own and we simply buy into it hook, line and sinker, as they say. * When it consolidates, why does the control shift from individual human to the social system? ....perhaps because we are fully investing in it.

    5. When the assurance of a basic, organic continuity of the cognitive agent is perceived as hingedupon the continuity of the respective personware, it makes sense for that agent to fuse her physicalintegrity and personware into a single inseparable contour.

      !- question : agent fuses physical integrity and personware into a single inseparable contour. * Given the poverty example below, the claim seems to be that the person strips themselves of their integrity, or commits an act of self-deception or denial and simply goes along with the social contour instead. Is this the correct interpretation of this sentence?

    6. Should something new be experienced, it will be unexpected, may beoverwhelming and may not fit into any meaningful representation or expression at all. The new assuch, the possible source of transformation, regeneration and vision, does not submit to the orderimposed by the personware, it is naturally on a collision course with it and a source to various degreesof cognitive dissonance. As such, it poses a threat that a well-functioning cognitive system mustmediate.

      !- for : climate change, rapid whole system change * This is a common response of people conditioned to the status quo personware - it is overwhelming and threatening * Defensiveness and conservatism to preserve the familiar elements of the status quo is a common response, including all forms of climate denialism * Early stages of pandemic in which people were afraid to don masks for fear of being ostracized

    7. select from its intrinsic desires, ideas and dispositions those that may fit into theperceivable societal contours—and to choose what to do with the remains that do not fit.

      !- in other words : double bind * try to fit societal contours and adapt remaining behaviors that do not fit

    8. A Good Enough World

      !- question : good enough world * This term seems a bit counter-intuitive as a "good enough world" is actually advocated as one of the better solutions for the future of our civilization.

    9. the Internet can potentially becomea backbone to a ‘global commons,’ an immense free space of information, products and services towhich everyone can contribute to and from which everyone can profit [51, 52 ].

      !- for : Indyweb * A "good enough" world is contingent on a global virtual commons * Indyweb can play a major role

    10. The human takeover needs to be nonviolent and genuinely creative. It can augment the entirehuman social system not by resolving the gridlock of all the colliding identities and trajectoriesmentioned in Section 2 but by adding a lifeline for humans to hold on to whenever they considermaking a decision that challenges and disrupts; whenever they allow a new thought to take shape;whenever they genuinely feel the genuine need to say ‘no,’ or ‘yes,’ but today must say otherwise.

      !- properties : human takeover * nonviolent communications * genuinely creative * provide a lifeline when choices true to one's heart emerge so that it can be supported and not fall by the weighside * must secure a "good enough" relationship between human and the social system

    11. Instead, we focus on the relationship between the human mind and the mechanics underlying allsocial systems. The search for the locus where the distribution of governing powers can be shiftedhas brought us thus to the human mind itself. Only by affirming the human as different from thesocial persona it enacts can we see the golden thread along which the human takeover can and musthappen. This golden thread runs in the usually unperceived gaps between thoughts, communicationsand decisions that are preconditioned, preprogramed, prethought [5 ,43 ,44 ]. It brings to the light ofconsciousness the thinking, speaking and acting that are present and living. ‘What I propose, therefore,is very simple’—Hannah Arendt [ 45 ] wrote—‘it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.’To think, to voice, to enact each time anew, is the vehicle of the human takeover. To secure the continuityof this golden thread, of this very flow into the governance of society—is our existential challenge.

      !- definition : golden thread * Hannah Arendt writes: "It is nothing more than to think what we are doing". * To think, voice and enact each time anew is the vehicle of the human takeover, securing the continuity of the golden thread used to govern society * The golden thread runs in the usually unperceived gaps betgween thoughts, communications and decisions that are preconditioned, preprogramed and prethought.

    12. The ‘human takeover’ means that humans will reach a state where they will effectively be capableof shedding such programming, gaining control over social systems, so that they will start working inthe service of human well-being rather than for their own self-perpetuation.

      !- question : self-perpetuation * Clarify self-perpetuation - it doesn't sound like a harmful term but in this context appears to be more harmful than shedding their social programming.

    13. ur major interest and challenge is to figure concrete steps towards aradical and possibly disruptive change of society by making accessible to all humans the idea that theyare subject to symbolically fabricated patterns of social continuity that inevitably program their mindsand subjugate their cognitive resources not for their well-being but rather for the purpose of furtheringtheir own perpetuation. Once humans collectively realize it, what we call the ‘human takeover’ eracan begin.

      !- definition : human takeover * promote a global education program that shows each human being that they are subject to symbolically fabricated patterns of social continuity that inevitably program their minds and subjugate their cognitive resources for furthering their own perpetuation instead of their well-being.

    14. Later in life and irrespective to the character of the relationship held, the good enough approachinforms how communication between people can be practiced. One of the widest known formulasfor that is called Nonviolent Communication, subtitled as the ‘language of life’ [ 39]. The subtitle seemsparticularly appropriate to our case, as it describes a method of communication that does not servesocial programming and allow humans to author and own their speech. A nonviolent communicatordoes not reinforce the boundary cuts and refrains from installing the personware-shaping doublebinds.

      !- definition : nonviolent communication, language of life * a method of communication that does not prioritize social programming over an individual's right to articulate and own their own speech.

    15. The ‘ideal’ is nothing other thana representation of social conditioning and the installation of a personware module into the newbornhuman that tries to accord what is with what the social system projects. We acknowledge of course thatsome mediation is always needed. The baby sees the world and the social world in particular throughthe eyes of the parent and only afterwards autonomously. This mediation is crucial to the cognitivedevelopment of the person and cannot happen without a personware. But the personware can beconstructed such that it empowers the individual and does not subjugate it to the social demands.

      !- definition : good enough * From Donald Winnicot, a parent who is "good enough" is actually healthier for the child than the standard "ideal" parent. * A "good enough" parent does not force the child to choose between two aspects of wellbeing, both of which are necessary.

    16. Not only is such thought beyond representation (and therefore beyond personware) possible,Weaver suggests but its occurrence constitutes a fundamental encounter which brings forth into existenceboth the world and the thinker. As such, thought sans image is deeply disturbing the stability andcontinuity of whatever personware the individual thinker may have been led to identify with andopens wide horizons of cognitive development and transformation ([13]: p. 35).

      !- similar to : Gyuri Lajos idea of tacit awareness !- implications : thought sans image !- refer : Gyuri Lajos https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343523812_Augmenting_Tacit_Awareness_Accepting_our_responsibility_for_how_we_shape_our_tools When one becomes cognizant of thought sans image, then one realizes the relative construction of one's social identity and that offers a freedom to take on another one * therefore, realization of thought sans image opens the door to authentic transformation

      !- question : thought sans image * If, as Weaver suggests, thought sans image is a primordial encounter which brings forth both the thinker and the world thought by the thinker, then this has strong similiarities to a spiritual awakening or enlightenment experience.

    17. though personwareis intrinsic to being a complete person it can be continuously modified, evolve or otherwise developed([5 ]: p. 201). More importantly, it can, to a significant extent, at least theoretically, be dynamicallygoverned and authored by the human individual. Hence, the human takeover.

      !- definition : human takeover * The ability for an individual to dynamically govern and author one's own personware. * The takeover gives us agency, rather than victimhood * the takeover can be triggered through realization of the difference between the thought sans image state and the conditioning into the symbolosphere

      !- question : spiritual enlightenment and personware * An interesting question is: "How does enlightenment impact the personware? " * Obviously, enlightenment cannot be an act of removing the personware. Language once learned cannot simply be meditated away. * Does the act of enlightenment then make the personware dramatically known to the individual as if it were indeed like a suit that we are wearing and not our fundamental nature? * Does enlightenment allow us to get more in contact with the prelinguistic and prepersonal

    18. The social sciences remain normally silent about what mental platform is initially there thatthe personware is ‘installed’ on. The humanity of humans can be hardly conceived apart from theirparticipation in and entanglement with social systems, since it is only by virtue of their interactionswith the social system and its corresponding personware that they start making use of language andother symbolic systems. When considered apart from that, humans are alinguistic and asymbolicanimals [20 ].

      !- for : human INTERbeing, symbolosphere, feral children * Indeed, culture is so fundamental a property to modern humans that, though a modern human can exist without culture, it would be a completely unprecedented and alien experience * The study of feral children (from a third person perspective only however) sheds light on the radically different ways an unenculturated person experiences reality.

    19. we term these individually constructed networks by the aggregate namepersonware. Serving as a medium between the individual and the social world, personware provides aself-reinforced and self-cohered narrative of the individual and its relationships with society. It is boththe sense-maker and the sense being made of social reality entangled into an interactive autopoieticconstruct. It maintains a personal line of continuity that interfaces with the broader societal threads bymeans of concrete intentional cognitive selections. These cognitive selections determine how individualminds represent (encode) the state of affairs of the world in language, how they communicate theserepresentations and how they further decode received communications into an understanding of thestate of affairs of the world that eventually trigger actions in the world and further cognitive selections.At moments of decision, that is, attempting to make a choice to affect the world, the human is thusmore often than not symbolically pre-situated. He enacts a personal narrative of which he is hardlythe author and to which almost every decision is knitted in.

      !- definition : personware * individually constructed network of relationships and social systems that * provides self-reinforced, self-cohered narrative of the individual and its relationship with society * Metaphorically conceive of personware as a suit we don based on years and decades of social conditioning "Personware" is a good word to use in SRG / DH framework that views the individual human organism's life journey as a deeply entangled individual AND collective journey or entangled individual/civilzational journey * From SRG/DH perspective the individual human organism is always on an entangled dual journey - from birth to death within a biological body and as part of a much longer civilizational journey since the beginning of modern humans (or even further back) * Individuals make intentional cognitive selections * Individual minds encode state of affair of the world via a combination of cognitive experience and language * Individual minds share their understanding of the world through outgoing language communication * Individual minds decode incoming information and store

    20. responsible-hardworking-breadwinner and of the gifted-self-actualising-researcher are themselvessocial systems, fully realized and maintained within individual minds.

      !- example : social identity * Individual liinguistic/conceptual constructions of themselves are themselves social systems * X: the caring, devoted immigrant wife identity * Y: the responsible, hardworking breadwinner identity * Z: the gifted, self-actualizing researcher identity

    21. The notion of social identity highlights aspectswhich are descriptive of a person’s most stable links with some larger constructs within society [20 ,21 ].The Lacanian subject synthesizes how Hegel, Sartre and psychoanalysis situate the social person’sunique subjectivity within systems of relationships, which are psycholinguistically forged [22], just likethe whole of identity is.

      !- definition : social identity * The portion of an individual's self-concept derived from perceived membership in a relevant social group. * A person's unique subjectivity are psycholinguistically forged within systems of relationships and constructs within society * Hence the role of language is critical in forming social identity

    22. However, since this pre-linguistic, pre-iconicthinking sans image, as discussed above, has no definite contour nor contents yet, it does not come withconsolidated mental forms representing such prospective desires in a manner that could be examined,processed and acted upon.

      !- in other words : thought sans image * pre-linguistic, pre-iconic - Gyuri Lajos would call "tacit awareness"

      !- reference : Gyuri Lajos * tacit awareness

    23. suitable intrinsic dispositions

      !- question : suitable intrinsic dispositions * what is the meaning of this?

    24. processing of differences

      !- question : processing of differences * what does this mean?

    25. We have already stated that all social forms come into existence out of the encoding and decodingof cognitive selections out of a symbolic medium.

      !- in other words : social forms * social forms only have symbolic reality

    26. The sharp boundary created by thesplitting of thoughts and disowning those which threaten to disrupt the personware seems thento be an intelligible choice.

      !- insight : double bind confronted with personal survival, the person is forced to choose the personware * The cost of disrupting it is perceived as too high

    27. The line of solution that we see is based on the possibility of decoupling between the continuityof one’s personware and one’s organic and psychological survival. If a state of affairs is somehowcreated where human individuals universally realize that their organic and psychological continuity issafeguarded unconditionally and does not depend anymore on the continuity of their symbolicallymaintained social persona—their personware, then new horizons will open for human individuals aswell as for social systems to cognitively coevolve.

      !- claim : decoupling personware from biological/psychological survival will result in new possibilities.

    28. FollowingSimondon’s social theory [37] and our previous work [10 ], social systems are themselves individualsthat harbour in them preindividual forces of transformation. Therefore we do not see in the currentorganization of personhood, inasmuch as it seems unassailable, a final unchangeable state of affairs.

      !- references : evolutionary biology * Evolutionary biologists have developed similar ideas to explain how throughout history, groups of individual organisms that clustered together and discovered better fitness as a result of symbiotic relationships began to reproduce as a whole new entity. Hence the collective became the new individual * Robin et al. paper: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556%2Ffull&group=world * Robin et al. video presentation: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F6J-J72GoqhY%2F&group=world * Stuart West video: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FVUfNEHl44hc%2F&group=world

    29. we oppose the popular predictionof the upcoming, ‘dreadful AI takeover’

      !- in other words : Human takeover * The title of the paper comes from a play on the popular term "AI takeover" * It advocates for humans to takeover managing the world in a responsible way rather than machines.

    30. Our issuehere is not against social systems in principle but rather in understanding and perhaps modifying oreven entirely eliminating the adverse effects of personware on the inherent well-being, freedom andcreativity of human individuals.
      • Same as above - searching for a way to have both!
    31. From this perspective the loss of spirit in favour of personware isbut a natural evolutionary process. Obviously we do not subscribe to this theory and especially tothe idea that natural evolutionary processes logically deduce the demise of individuality.

      !- question : personware vs individual spirit * Can we have both?

    32. Though we do not pursue this point here, it is logical to considerthat poor people will be found to experience a greater psychological pressure to identify with theirpersonware as this reduces the overwhelming cognitive load they are subject to.) The task is then onlyto take care that the personware remains consistent with the social roles available—and to steer clearof anything that reminds one of what has thus been lost

      !- insight : poor identify with their personware * it just brings too much pain to know what one is denied

      !- for : social tipping points * building wide bridges requires uniting diverse groups * understanding this self denial as a form of survival is important to understand the psychology of the oppressed

    33. David Bohm [ 31 ]: “Thinking’ implies the present tense (...) ‘Thought’is the past participle of that. We have the idea that after we have been thinking something, it justevaporates. But thinking doesn’t disappear. It goes somehow into the brain and leaves something—atrace—which becomes thought. And thought then acts automatically.

      !- follow up : David Bohm's ideas on thinking and thoughts * Thinking implies the present tense because it is an act we can only do in the present * When the present act of thinking is finished, it leaves traces in our consciousness * Those traces we refer to as "thoughts" * Thoughts act automatically - this is quite a pithy observation. We become thought automatons because once the thought is associated with all the other ideas, it alters the entire network of other thoughts on its own * "Thinking beyond the image of thought" may mean penetrating the existing automatized associations of thoughts with one that is quite novel and does not necessarily fit in, so is disruptive and can bring about a paradigm shift. * Read the reference to gain clarity

    34. While, as we propose, the symbolically constructed personware, seeking to reassert and reinforceitself, selects objects already recognized, thoughts already conceived and sentences already pronounced,the living human being can breathe and utter a voice that is new [5 ]. A human being can thus ‘take over’language. It can ‘take over’ thoughts—by thinking beyond the image of thought ([13 ]: chap.2).

      !- Insight : thought sans image * the symbolically constructed personware continually validates itself * The living, spontaneous, present human INTERbeing can generate something new * "Thinking beyond the image of thought" may mean penetrating the existing automatized associations of thoughts with one that is quite novel and does not necessarily fit in, so is disruptive and can bring about a paradigm shift.

    35. Even though human existence in such a bare state may seem inconceivable, it is therenevertheless: every time a baby is born, a new, not yet programmed, prepersonal human is lookinginto somebody’s eyes ([27 ]: p. 133). This undeniable prepersonal presence we already call human leadsus to logically infer that humans do happen to exist prior to their personware [ 20 ,25 ,28 ]. It is thereforeour fundamental point of departure that humans are marvellous, intelligent, living cognitive agents inthemselves that can be said to exist prior to and independently of any particularly determined socialpersona. The point of acknowledging a prior prepersonal platform is not made towards arguing that ahuman can exist without any personware.

      !- for : altricial, feral children, mOTHER as the significant OTHER * The bare state of zero culture, zero social context is what each and every neonate starts with in life * The mOTHER is the most significant OTHER that begins the process of socializing and enculturating the neonate into a social system * Altrciality forces human parent into role of strong socialization * Without culture, the neonate born into the world outside the womb can become a feral child * https://www.zmescience.com/other/feature-post/feral-children/ * The state of human ferality can tell us an enormous amount of the perspective of virtually every modern, encultured person - we have a bias towards a cultural perspective because almost noone has seen from a feral perspective * Language is the gateway into the symbolosphere, where enculturated, modern humans spend a significant portion of their lives immersed in this ubiquitous, constructed, symbolic reality

    36. Can they reshape the contours and boundaries of their socialsituations instead of being shaped by them?

      !- key insight : can an individual reshape the contours of their social situations instead of being shaped by them? * This realization would open up the door to authentic inner transformation * This is an important way to describe the discovery of personal empowerment and agency via realization of the bare human spirit, the "thought sans image"

    37. In searching for a configuration of intelligences in the world that would make possible for humansto govern, we want the exemplar human agents X, Y and Z to be able to impact the socio-econo-politicalsystem rather than be steered and moulded by it.

      !- in other words : This would be true individual DIRECT governance agency, rather than INDIRECT and ineffective representational agency.

    38. The structural constitution of governance thus characterised is that by definition governancerequires the involvement of two kinds of active structures coupled together [ 6,7 ]. The first kind, isthe cognitive agency performed (as of today) by human minds. It is necessary for the performance ofcognitive selections, for symbolic encoding and decoding of such selections and for recognising theobservations of the produced effectuality and continuity. The second kind of structure is the perceivedcontour (by cognitive agencies) of the social system as a whole. (This description is very similar todescribing chains of causes and effects and connecting events which are otherwise unconnected. Suchchains, Hume argued, cannot be logically grounded. They are but manifestations of habits (repetitionafter Deleuze). Apparently, this more fundamental causal chaining is performed by individualminds as well.) In summary, the ontological status of a social system is inherently circular andirreducible. It exists only by virtue of being perceived as actually impacting the state of affairs andits particular impacts are observable as such only by virtue of this perceived existence. Moreover, wewill further claim, that it is mostly the coherence of the emergent recurrent patterns, not the particulardeterminations performed by the participating human minds, that are the actual ‘governors’ of thehuman realm.

      !- question : perceived contours of a social system * Need some clarity about the meaning * Need some clarity about Hume's argument

    39. Consequently, theshape of the gridlock [9], in which further progression towards an ever-greater executive capacity givento a selected group of institutions has become nearly impossible, is not an anomaly to be overcome.The gridlock is the only configuration in which the global system could have settled. It isthe configuration any system is bound to adopt when it is composed of a multitude of differentlypositioned, differently oriented, heterogeneous decision-makers, operating in different dimensionsand scales, none of which universally dominant and all are co-dependent and constrained by others.

      !- question : governance gridlock of disparate actors

    40. Approaching the two extremes of the ‘hierarchical versus collective’ axis as irreconcilablemodels and the two extremes of the ‘governor versus governed’ as distinct social locations seem to bemisleading rather than useful. These are just two opposite conceptual idealisations of an actual broadrepertoire of patterns of distribution of influence.

      !- question : claim: it is not useful to choose between hierarchical and collective and governor and that which is governed * Do the authors mean between capitalist vs socialist systems?

      • This needs some sensemaking and examples to clarify and substantiate.
    41. Socialsystems can organize humans into relationships that are sensible and relatively safe holding in checkmany destructive traits of individual humans. The question remains how to achieve a healthy andflexible balance of control that puts the human first. This balance, as will be argued is far from beingcurrently the case.
      • Social system currently dictate the overall direction of the Anthropocene.
      • Voting, as a collective process within social systems enables the majority of votes to determine the collective action outcome of members of a social system.
      • The final vote can be determined by a number of factors such as power, access and knowledge.
      • In societies with large inequalities and political power assymetries, voting does not always lead to collectively beneficial results.
      • Further, some social institutions can be harmful to individual and collective wellbeing.
      • For example, authoritarian regimes are a prime example.
      • Terror management theory (TMT) holds that there is a preponderance of social institutions that encourage psychological death denialism, an action that can lead to chronic psychological damage that can manifest in pathological social behavior.
      • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fernestbecker.org%2Flecture-6-denial%2F&group=world
    42. The Human Takeover: A Call for a Venture into anExistential Opportunity
      • Title: The Human Takeover: A Call for a Venture into an Existential Opportunity
      • Author: Marta Lenartowicz, David R. Weinbaum, Francis Heylighen, Kate Kingsbury and Tjorven Harmsen
      • Date: 5 April, 2018
    43. is contoured by what the agent perceivesin the social context

      !- word usage context : contour * choices are contoured by what individual perceives about social context (are shaped by)

    44. Underneath whatever threads they have already identified with, there isalways a pregnant potentiality of thoughts yet to be shaped.

      !- Insight : thought sans image * If we recognize our intrinsic bare human spirit, it opens up possibilities to leave our identity behind like a suit we can take off * Nothing is socially predestined and in that recognition, there is a new-found freedom to replace our current personware

    45. Human beings are different from what they seem to be thinking, perceiving, or saying asmediated by social symbolic systems [29 ]. They are different from how they are represented intheir own narratives, they are different from language itself. Interestingly, learning to consciouslybecome aware to that difference—the bare human spirit, the preindividual, or being as becoming asSimondon [30 ] puts it—appears to be the state of mind towards which many spiritual traditionsare guiding. David R. Weinbaum (Weaver) refers to this state as thought sans image [ 13], offering itscontemporary conceptualisation via the metaphysical theories of Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon andGilles Deleuze, in combination with the enactive theory of cognition [14 ] and inputs from complexityscience

      !- key insight : thought sans image !- definition : thought sans image * human beings are NOT defined by what they are thinking, perceiving or saying as mediated by social symbolic systems * They are also NOT defined by their own narratives or language itself - the symbolosphere is culturally imposed upon the bare human being * That primordial nature is described as the bare human spirit, the preindividual, being-as-becoming (Simondon) * Many spiritual traditions guide practitioners to experience this primordial state, the nondual state, stripped of all cultural embellishments * David R. Weinbaum (Weaver) calls this state thought sans image based on the metaphysical theories of Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze and 4E theory of cognition

    46. In summary, X, Y and Z clearly occupy entirely different positions in the social fabric andeach experiences life entirely differently. They live with entirely different sets of constraints andopportunities and consequently face different challenges both psychologically and in their interactionswith the rest of the world. And yet, all three of them suffer from a cognitive dissonance between theirindividual drives and dispositions and the demands of the social roles they feel obliged to play.

      !- example ; lebenswelt, lebenslage, multi-meaningverse, perspectival knowing, situatedness

      !- key insight : social dissonance between their aspirations and demand of social roles they feel compelled to obey.

    47. examining the options available to individual persons weighing a decision vis-a-vis theirperceived socio-symbolically cohered contour. For that, let us look at a few concrete examples.

      !- example: governance decision based on perceived contours of social system * The following three examples give good demonstration of this. * These three examples are good for use in Stop Reset Go / Deep Humanity workshops to demonstrate multi-meaningverse, perspectival knowing, situatedness, Lebenswelt, Lebenslage

    48. A cognitiveagent is needed to perform this very action (that needs to be recurrent)—and another agent is neededto further build on that (again recurrently and irrespective to the particular agents involved).

      This appears to be setting up the conditions for an artificial cognitive agent to be able to play a role (ie Artificial Intelligence)

    49. Only if an event of communication triggers a change and thischange is observed as being causally connected to that same event, the communication event can betreated as a decision. In this sense, a decision is a special category of actions that is, the exercising ofintentionality—doing something in order to change the state of affairs. This is how intentional mentaloperations of humans become functional in the context of a social system.

      !- explanation : when human intention is communicated and triggers a governance decision in a social system * inner to outer flow * articulating inner experience * manifests as outer (communication/language/linguistic) behavior

    50. A decision takes place when the encoding of a cognitive selection triggers, upondecoding, an occurrence of a difference that is, a state change within the system [11 ].

      !- explanation : symbol-anchored encoding and decoding of cognitive selections

      • In other words, people think, imagine, conceptualize
      • and then encode that into live or recorded words
      • that are then heard or read by others (decoded)
      • and then a governance decisions subsequently results.
      • !- gloss : cognitive selection trigger
      • !- gloss : symbol-anchored encoding
      • !- gloss : decoding cognitive selection
    51. the socio-symbolic locusversus the human locus of governance

      !- question: socio-symbolic locus

      • Author seems to be equating socio-symbolic locus with social system - requires clarification

      !- gloss : socio-symbolic locus

    52. At first sight, it might seem that no one but humans (even though in actuality only a few of them)hold positions of influence and power over social systems. We wish, however, to challenge this view.We argue that while human-driven governance is conceivable and in principle possible—and it is thegoal of our research to draw the path towards such future—for now, it is not human beings but ratherthe social system which governs itself [6, 7].

      !- question : human-driven governance * needs clarification !-gloss : human-driven governance

    53. This understanding of governance makes apparent that, for any particular challenge considered byany particular designated ‘governor,’ there is, typically, a considerable number of impactful selectionsthat are made elsewhere

      !- question : governance: * need examples to demonstrate

    54. governance rather encompasses all localdecision-makers as well, as it is actually almost entirely within their own respective dominions ofcontrol where the overall success or failure is determined.

      All local decision-makers are included in the global governance of climate change as well.

    55. For example, in respect to the goal of reducing the global emissions of carbon dioxide, the relevantsystem of governance is not limited to those who conclude that there is a global risk, those whoaccept or reject the conclusion, those who formulate objectives, those who choose to adhere to or toignore them, who conceive of regulations, who choose to implement them or not, who determineprogress, decline or failures, those who select means by which to influence the desired local industrialinvestment, or consumption choices and so on.

      In other words, the role of governance goes beyond the traditional decision-makers, and is more inclusive. Who else gets to participate?

    56. we posit that there is no need to define the global system as a configurationof only such social forms (e.g., international organisations) that remain after the presupposed unitsof their respective environments (e.g., nation states) have first been excluded

      The authors are suggesting an alternative to traditional forms of institutional governance, even on a global scale that is independent of nation states or even an international organization to govern our entire civilization.

    57. Could artificial intelligencebe an ally in this venture?

      Yes, in servitude of humanity, but that must be done so carefully to avoid another progress trap. Indeed, progress traps need to be advanced as an urgent new explicit field of scientific enquiry to develop a systematic process for avoiding and mitigating unintended consequences as a result of (technological) progress.

      https://hyp.is/IhS3BvotEeylDq8MXFT9xQ/thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/09/20/Ronald-Wright-Can-We-Dodge-Progress-Trap/

    58. What configuration would make the system flexibly support people and authenticallynourish their unique idiosyncrasies as well as their universal human need

      !- about : distributed governance

    59. Could social systems be finally reprogrammed, at long last, ‘as if peoplemattered’ [ 8]?
      • They are currently programmed by minority power holders to serve their interest.
      • Many individuals and projects are trying to do this
      • Climate change is a classic example of power holders dictating the agenda
    60. A short interaction with any bureaucratic system wouldbe overwhelmingly convincing in this respect. Symbol-mediated systems that excel at objectifyingsome preselected outcomes, isolating and de-contextualising them, harnessing everything else for theircontinuous self-promotion, putting the production loop on a perpetual repeat and failing to makesense of the fact that the results are not what people originally had in mind—are they not ubiquitous?

      They are.

    61. In this paper, we propose and analyse a potential power triangle between three kinds of mutuallydependent, mutually threatening and co-evolving cognitive systems—the human being, the socialsystem and the emerging synthetic intelligence. The question we address is what configuration betweenthese powers would enable humans to start governing the global socio-econo-political system
      • Optimization problem - human beings, their social system and AI - what is optimal configuration?
    62. it would then be present social systemsand not the future AI the most proper context of considering and understanding the notion of takeover.
      • Author argues that current social systems have already taken over command of humans.
    63. Niklas Luhmann’s [ 6,7 ] terminology, we refer to these dominant symbolic networks associal systems. When approached not as aggregations of people but rather as patterns of communicationssustained among people, social systems can be observed to have enormous powers over humanbeings.
      • definition of social systems
      • social systems focus on the pattern of communication, not on the people who participate in those patterns
    64. In spite of the Anthropocene being the grandiose name attributed to the current geologicalera, it should be clear that this is far from being the case. This era is governed not by autonomoushuman beings but rather by semiotically forged networks of distinctions and rules, whose patternsand logics orchestrate people’s actions, speech, emotions and desires [ 2, 4, 5]. Perhaps naming this erathe ‘Semiocene,’ rather than the Anthropocene, would do it more justice [4].
      • Individual humans have little agency
      • Agency is found within the semiotic systems we have created
    65. instead of worrying that ArtificialIntelligence will soon come to dominate and govern the human world, let us think of how it couldhelp the human being to finally be able to do it.
    66. e moment of transition of the Internet—from mediating information to mediating distributeddirect governance in the sense of self-organization.
      • With proper design, the internet can play a more proactive role
      • From passive to active, sensemaking to action
      • Cosmolocal production: https://clreader.net
      • Web 3 technology
      • Indyweb

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    1. That is to say, he must live in a universewhere the sequences of events are such that his unconventional communicational habits will bein some sense appropriate.

      The analysis of pathological psychological conditions such as schizophrenia may benefit from framing them within Husserl's Lebenswelt concept of lifeworld.

    1. What caused life's Major evolutionary transitions?
      • Title: What caused life's Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET)?
      • Author: Stuart West
      • Date:
    1. There are temperature ceilings that humans and mammals (and many other animals) cannot survive, if breached. What those limits are, and what happens when they are crossed, will have profound implications for agriculture and biodiversity in a warming world.
    2. What happens if the world gets too hot for animals to survive? By Matthew Huber | July 20, 2022 
      • Title: What happens if the world gets too hot for animals to survive?
      • Author: Matthew Huber
      • Date: July 20, 2022
  2. bafybeihfoajtasczfz4s6u6j4mmyzlbn7zt4f7hpynjdvd6vpp32zmx5la.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeihfoajtasczfz4s6u6j4mmyzlbn7zt4f7hpynjdvd6vpp32zmx5la.ipfs.dweb.link
  3. bafybeicuq2jxzrw7omddwzohl5szkqv6ayjiubjy3uopjh5c3cghxq6yoe.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeicuq2jxzrw7omddwzohl5szkqv6ayjiubjy3uopjh5c3cghxq6yoe.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. . It is clear that inorder to achieve certain scientific results complex phenomena must be simplifiedand put in a kind of a straitjacket that deprives them of many if not most of thecharacteristics that make them complex in the first place.

      !- in other words : science and complexity * reductionist scientific methods have limited application within complex systems

    2. This eventof cognition, or better yet the event of making sense – the primal mental event, allencompassing, both forming and dissolving boundaries, multiple4 and affirming, Ifind to be the proper stage to present my research

      !- definition : event * the event of making sense is primordial prerequisite for a conceptual life of mind and is the gateway into modern human culture, into the symbolosphere

    3. The very shift from bounded objects to boundary-forming processes became a new playground and my whole perspective gained anextra dimension of freedom.

      !- in other words : bounded objects, boundary-forming processes * The leap from the unknown to the newly known is a birthing process from the known to a synthesis and new convergence of disparate phenomena into a unitary whole motivated by a compulsion that brings it into existence * Forming a boundary is synthesizing many qualities and bundling into one new one that has some compelling utility * Once formed, the new boundary, the new concept is much like how biological evolution works, from an aggregation of simpler forms that combine and unite to form a new higher level form

    4. e. I found it tricky to try to shed lighton the processes that constitute what can be termed unsupported thought, becausethere is no straightforward way to reflect on these processes without conceptualiz-ing and objectifying them and by that making them supported.

      !- example : strange loop * the thinking mind that tries to analyze itself is the epitome of a strange loop!

      !- question : unsupported thought * Exactly what is an unsupported thought?

    5. thought when making itself its own object remains, atleast in part, intrinsically unsupported, which affirms its incompleteness and open-ended nature. These two inseparable problems constitute together the problem ofthe freedom of the mind.

      !- question : intrinsically unsupported * This needs a lot of unpacking to understand * How does one validate the claim that when thinking thinks about its own process, it is unsupported? * What does it mean to claim that it is open ended? * What are the two problems and why do they together make up the freedom of the mind?

    6. The very notion of thinking aboutlife (or evolution for that matter) as having a definite purpose or goal is already asymptom of a deeply rooted bias in favour of the constant and against change. Thereare voices that will immediately attack this view, blaming it for insinuating that lifehas no purpose at all. But a dialectic of such kind is empty of any credence if notentirely absurd. The view I propose here does not indeed accept that life is sub-jugated to a single purpose or principle but instead affirms life as having not onepurpose but infinitely multiple ones, not one goal but multiple goals and, moreover,the vast majority of these purposes and goals cannot be known a priori because theyare subject to continuous formative processes of becoming. This is why life as suchis open-ended.

      !- question : does evolution have a purpose? * Language is a constraint - it forces us to form questions that may not necessarily make sense, such as "how many angels exist on the head of a pin?" * To say that it has one, or even more than one purpose may itself be a meaningless assertion, as much as insinuating that it has no purpose. If one asks "Is the sound of a bell red or yellow? It is neither the case that it is red, yellow or any color. So arguing about the right and wrong of a quality that is nonsensical is itself nonsensical. * The self-annihilating questioning of Nagarjuna's tetralemma are relevant to shed insight into these deep questions.

    7. worldview as a complex mental object makes sense onlyin the light of evolution – as the work in progress that it is; both fluid and firm at thesame time.

      !- question : strange loop * I'm not sure if I agree with this claim, I'll have to read and see if he can justify it * I would claim instead that language and symbols are even more profoundly entangled, as per Nagarjuna's work * https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FHRuOEfnqV6g%2F&group=world

    8. My interest goes yet further, to the metaphysical ground of cognition andmental processes and how they reflect on existence, meaning and value. There is anobvious and unavoidable strange loop (Hofstadter, 2013) here: the cognitive think-ing agent trying to make sense of these same sense-making processes that bring forthboth her as a subject and the objects of her observation while these are being broughtforth.

      !- key insight : making sense of making sense is a strange loop! * This sentence deeply resonates

    9. Iwill show that cognition can be understood as a fundamental concept that extendsevolution and can be applied to general systems, both natural and artificial, at di-verse domains and scales

      !- claim : cognition is a fundamental concept that extends evolution and can be applied to general systems * applies to biotic and abiotic systems * applies at all scales

    10. This thesis is but a humble and partial attempt to tell the story ofthis journey, always at its first step it seems, to draw some maps and point towardspossible horizons. It is both a philosophical and a scientific exploration but firstand foremost it is a personal research trying to understand my own mind, to makesense of sense itself – to get a glimpse of the knowledge through which “cognition isproduced in me”.

      !- in other words : ouroborous * Ouroboros, emblematic serpent of ancient Egypt and Greece represented with its tail in its mouth, continually devouring itself and being reborn from itself. A gnostic and alchemical symbol, Ouroboros expresses the unity of all things, material and spiritual, which never disappear but perpetually change form in an eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation. * Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ouroboros *

    11. Open-Ended Intelligence
      • Title: Open Ended Intelligence
      • Author: David R. Weinbaum (Weaver)
      • Date: Feb 15, 2018
  4. bafybeicyqgzvzf7g3zprvxebvbh6b4zpti5i2m2flbh4eavtpugiffo5re.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeicyqgzvzf7g3zprvxebvbh6b4zpti5i2m2flbh4eavtpugiffo5re.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. From my own perspective, the conclusion is important that human structural development issubject to a categorical double bond: On the one hand, a person’s lifeworld is his or her ownsubjective construction. On the other hand, this construction is not arbitrary. In spite of allsubjectivity – because of the human’s structural coupling to its environment, this constructionis influenced and limited by the framework of this very environment (Kraus, 2013, p. 65ff.).

      !- in other words : lifeworld and life conditions, constructed and discoverable reality * We construct our lifeworld with our umwelt * https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FG_0jJfliUvQ%2F&group=world * Each human senses the environment in a way unique to our species * Our personal evolution as an individual also causes us to treat unique aspects of the environment with higher salience than other aspects, forming our unique salience landscape * Yet, structural coupling constrains us to the laws of behavior of the environment * Hence, there is always a constructed part of our experience of reality and a non-constructed, discoverable part consisting of repeatable patterns of nature, culturally consolidated in human laws of nature

    2. Accordingly, the life conditions describe a person’s material and immaterial conditions,whereas the lifeworld describes the subjective perspective pertaining to these conditions

      !- comparison : Lebenswelt (Lifeworld) and Lebenslage (Life Conditions): * Lebeneslage - Life conditions are the person's material and immaterial conditions * Lebenswelt - Lifeworld is the subjective perspective of these conditions

    3. The life conditions term, which was borrowed fromKarl Marx, was introduced to the social scientific discourse mainly by Otto Neurath (1931)and Gerhard Weisser (1956)

      !- eytomology : life conditions * borrowed from Karl Marx * Introduced into social sciences by Otto Neurath (1931) and Gerhard Weisser (1956)

    4. The Life We Live and the Life We Experience: Introducing theEpistemological Difference between “Lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) and “LifeConditions” (Lebenslage)
      • Title:The Life We Live and the Life We Experience: Introducing the Epistemological Difference between “Lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) and “Life Conditions” (Lebenslage)
      • Author: Bjorn Kraus
      • Date: 2015
      • Source: https://d-nb.info/1080338144/34
      • Annotation status: incomplete
    5. Eventhough the lifeworld term is not precisely defined, neither by Husserl nor by Schütz (seeFelten, 2000, p. 75; Bergmann, 1981, p. 50ff.; Welter, 1986, p. 77, 170), the relevance of thesubjective perspective can be identified as a crucial characteristic. Coming from aphenomenological perspective, lifeworld is regarded as the result of a subjective appropriationof the world. This process is based on previous experiences as well as on the usage ofindividual mental and physical characteristics. Accordingly, the phenomenological alignmentto the lifeworld implies much more than a simple orientation towards a person’s life situation.Speaking phenomenologically, not only differences in the life conditions have to beconsidered, but also differences in the individual’s perceptual conditions (Hitzler, 1999, S.232)4.

      !- gloss : lebenswelt * even though Husserl does not properly define lebenswelt (lifeworld), the subjective perspective is identified as crucial. * lifeworld is regarded as the result of a subjective appropriation of the world.

    6. The subject of this article is theintroduction of a lifeworld-concept, that is based on an epistemological distinction between“lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) and “life conditions” (Lebenslage).

      !- gloss : Lebenslage

    1. von neumann was furious at him furious that he would waste precious machine time 00:04:20 doing the assembly that was clerical work that was supposed to be for people right and so we saw the same story happened just a little bit later when john backus and friends came up with us idea they called fortran this is so call high-level language where you could write out your formulas as if your writing mathmatical notation you could write out loops and this was shown to the assembly programmers and once again they just 00:04:46 they weren't interested they don't see any value in that they just didn't get it so um I want you to keep this in mind as I talk about the four big ideas that I'm going to talk about today that it's easy to think that technology technology is always getting better because Moore's law because computers are getting always more capable but ideas that require people to unlearn what they've learned and think in new ways there's often 00:05:10 enormous amount of resistance people over here they think they know what they're doing they think they know a programming is this programming that's not programming and so there's going to be a lot of resistance to adopting new ideas

      Cumulative cultural learning seems to be stuck in its own recursive loop- the developers of the old paradigm become the old "guard", resistant to any change that will disrupt their change. Paradigm shifts are resisted tooth and nail.

    1. Is our planet doubly alive? Gaia, globalization, and the Anthropocene’s planetary superorganisms

      Title: Is our planet doubly alive? Gaia, globalization, and the Anthropocene’s planetary superorganisms Author: Shoshitaishvili, Boris Date: 25 April, 2022

    1. A special case is when the content is program code, and the environment becomes an intelligent IDE
      • Within Indyweb ecosystem,
      • would this be when a user uses Trailmarks to identify a potentially useful application
      • and a bounty can then be offered to app developers
      • to develop an Indyweb app
      • to process the new function?
    2. interactive documents that capture more richly what the user is trying to accomplish.
      • Once again, is Indyweb and Trailmarks doing this?
      • If so, can you provide some examples?
    3. The environment can operate on these intentions and assist the user to create semantically richer documents that can be processed and executed, similar to a spreadsheet.

      @Gyuri, * Is this what Indyweb and specifically Trailmarks is also attempting to do? * Is there an example you can provide for clarification?

    4. In computer programming, Intentional Programming is a programming paradigm developed by Charles Simonyi that encodes in software source code the precise intention which programmers (or users) have in mind when conceiving their work. By using the appropriate level of abstraction at which the programmer is thinking, creating and maintaining computer programs become easier. By separating the concerns for intentions and how they are being operated upon, the software becomes more modular and allows for more reusable software code

      Definition of Intentional Programming * In computer programming, * Intentional Programming is a programming paradigm * developed by Charles Simonyi * that encodes in software source code the precise intention which programmers (or users) have in mind when conceiving their work. * By using the appropriate level of abstraction at which the programmer is thinking, * creating and maintaining computer programs become easier. * By separating the concerns for intentions and how they are being operated upon, * the software becomes more modular and allows for more reusable software code. * Can we see an example of this in action for clarification?

    5. Intentional programming
    1. e first present the updated socio-economic trends in Figure 1 as global aggregates as in theoriginal set of 12 socio-economic graphs. We have also now, where the data permit, split ten of thesocio-economic graphs into trends for the OECD countries, for the so-called BRICS countries(Brazil, Russia, India, China (including Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan where applicable) andSouth Africa), and for the rest of the world (Figure 2). OECD members are here defined as coun-tries that were members in 2010 and their membership status was applied to the whole data set,which in some cases goes as far back as 1750.

      Socio-economic trends are split into three groups: OECD, BRICS and all other countries. This split reveals the unequal distribution of the indicators.

    2. The post-1950 acceleration of the human imprint on the Earth System, particularly the 12 graphsthat show changes in Earth System structure and functioning, have played a central role in thediscussion around the formalisation of the Anthropocene as the next epoch in Earth history.Although there has been much debate around the proposed start date for the Anthropocene, thebeginning of the Great Acceleration has been a leading candidate (Zalasiewicz et al., 2012).

      The Great Acceleration of socio-economic and earth system indicators after 1950 make it a good candidate as a Golden Spike for the start of the Anthropocene.

    3. The ‘Great Acceleration’ graphs, originally published in 2004 to show socio-economic andEarth System trends from 1750 to 2000, have now been updated to 2010.

      Description of Great Acceleration graphs

    4. However, the differentiatedgraphs clearly show that strong equity issues are masked by considering global aggregates only

      Global aggregates mask the uneven distribution of wealth and ecological footprint.

    5. The trajectory of theAnthropocene: The GreatAcceleration
      • Title: The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration
      • Author: Steffen, Will; Broadgate, Wendy; Deutsch, Lisa; Gaffney, Owen and Ludwig, Cornelia Date: 2015
    1. 16:15 - Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations

      Adam Smith thought that there were two sides to us, one side is our concern for SELF, that gets what it needs to survive but the other side is our empathic side for OTHERS, we cares for the welfare of others. His economic design theory distilled into THE WEALTH OF NATIONS was based on the assumption that these two would act in a balanced way.

      There are also two other important and related variables at play that combine with Whybrow's findings:

      1. Death Denialism (Ernest Becker) A growing meaning crisis in the world due to the waning influence of Christianity and significant misinterpretation of most religions as an immortality project emerging from the psychological denial of death

      John Vervaeke's Meaning Crisis: https://www.meaningcrisis.co/all-transcripts/

      Glenn Hughes writes about Becker and Denial of Death: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fernestbecker.org%2Flecture-6-denial%2F&group=world

      1. Illusion of Immediacy of Experience Jay L. Garfield explains how philosophers such as Nagarjuna, Chandrakurti and Dogen have taught us to beware of the illusion of the immediacy of experience that consists of two major ways in which we mistaken conventional, relative reality for intrinsic reality: perceptual faculty illusions and cognitive faculty illusions. https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FHRuOEfnqV6g%2F&group=world
    2. 08:58 - Migrant gene DRD4-7R* Allele and correlation with the pursuit of novelty

      DRD4-7R is the specific gene that Peter implicates in migrants who are adventurous enough to come to America. This is associated with the "can do" perspective that has propelled America into a world leader but also drives America reflexively into the future...on autopilot.

    3. 04:04 - American Mania: When More is Not Enough

      Peter's book explores the biological and evolutionary roots of America's culture of exceptionalism.

    4. 42:28 - Perception-action cycle

      When we think about it, choice exists and that can impact our habits.

    5. 39:38 - Issues with current U.S. education system

      Education in the US is all short term now.....pass the exam, get to college, etc.

    6. 37:35 - Evolutionary benefits of habits

      learning creates habits - automated, reflexive behavior. The rational, reflective part of the brain is what can mitigate the bad habits.

    7. 36:10 - Waste from electric cars
    8. 35:41 - The problem with infinite economic growth

      We have to replace the idea of continuous economic growth with something else.

    9. 34:11 - Rats and cocaine experiment

      Most animals are not smart enough to create an addictive society.

    10. 31:15 - The importance of trust and empathy for human societies and self-constraint

      Neonates are altricial. They have no choice but to trust the mOTHER. Nature teaches us trust from Day Zero. This is how we build self-constraining human beings, by becoming human INTERbeings.

    11. 30:15 - Why it’s so difficult for us to constrain ourselves

      Most people do not reflect and change course based on that reflection. The "Well-tuned Brain" sought to answer that question of how to constrain oneself.

    12. 28:19 - We try to compete for status with our peers

      Gamify sustainability?

    13. 25:32 - We have no social constraints anymore

      Technology has liberated us and there is nothing to constrain us, except our reflective ability. We are wired for accumulation. Americans are, on average shorter than they were two decades ago, and this is a reflection of poorer health.

    14. 24:40 - The proximate vs the ultimate

      The proximate is to get food, but the ultimate is to satisfy the neurochemical processes that were evolved for survival.

    15. 23:45 - The neurology of chemical addiction can also apply to things like gambling and shopping

      Brains are hardwired to optimize resources.

    16. 22:23 - People are addicted to “more”

      The book "American Mania" fostered an attitude of "more".

    17. 21:27 - We are just as smart now as we were in the ice age

      Our neurophysiology has not changed much since the ice age. In other words, were an ice age descendent were transported by a time machine and were born in our current era, (s)he would have the same cognitive capacity as a modern human.

      Peter mentions that we came out of our caves and begun agriculture. There is an interesting research paper that hypothesizes that over a period of the last 1.5 million years, human hunters in the Southern Levant successively extirpated the largest species by overshooting hunting over many generations, until the wild fauna population could no longer support human populations, at which point, humans may have turned to agriculture out of necessity. If true, this would support the idea that nonsustainable practices have been with us for a long time and we were out of balance long before Adam Smith wrote about it.

      https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2021%2F12%2F211221102708.htm&group=world

    18. 20:19 - Loss aversion

      We evolved to have this trait of loss aversion to help us survive in lean years by holding onto the precious resources necessary for survivai.

    19. 18:07 - Adam Smith - The Theory of Moral Sentiments

      He felt, in the Theory of Moral Sentiment that human beings can control themselves. The Church used to be the moral constraint and there was a big debate about getting rid of it. Adam Smith disagreed. He had faith that the empathic side of human behavior would be present to balance out the self-interest side. He was not right about this, unfortunately.

      Our poorer living conditions provide the necessary conditions for inventing technologies that would alleviate our difficult life conditions. Progress has principally been about making our human lives more comfortable but beyond a certain threshold, self-interest started to runaway as technology allowed us to go far beyond survival.

    20. 17:30 - Feedback loops

      Adam Smith did not foresee that we would create self-reinforcing feedback loops that would spiral inequality and consumption out of control.

    21. 14:12 - Evolutionary Psychology

      Since we are short term discounters, we don't think long term.

    22. 11:32 - Reflective vs reflexive thought

      80% of what we think about is reflexive, we are on autopilot. We need to support the REFLECTIVE side. Most of us don't reflect on a daily basis. The more technology we have, the more we are on autopilot. Social media stimulates a positive feedback loop of our REFLEXIVE nature.

      Whenever we learn something new, we must apply reflective thinking but once learned and habituated, the reflexive system takes over.

    23. 08:11 - 1800s Irish migration 

      America is a unique migrant society. Peter observed that there is a "migrant gene". Dopamine plays a role in migration. Those who migrated further like down to South America have a different variant of the dopamine gene.

      There is a biological driver associated with immigrants to America. The Irish migrants found success in the US but many who stayed behind starved to death. American culture is partly shaped by the migrant gene.

    24. 04:27 - The Well Tuned Brain

      Peter explains that the 3 books: A Mood Apart, American Mania and The Well Tuned Brain were all related. He connected them through the observation that dopamine drove maniacal behavior. the Well Tuned brain was an insight of how to mitigate the maniacal behavior that caused the dot com bubble to burst, as well as the financial meltdown emerges from pathological brain behavior.

    25. Peter Whybrow: “When More is Not Enough”

      Title: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation Author: Nate Hagen Guest: Peter Whybrow, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and author Date: 6 July, 2022

    1. If this notion of human existence as a unity of participation in both perishing and non-perishing reality sounds odd to modern ears, it is mainly because philosophical and scientific–and consequently popular–thought during the last few centuries has been busy constructing a very different image of the human person. The image of participation has been changed and simplified into an image of two entities: a body, and a mind inside the body that has intelligence and ideas. This is the image that eventually came out of Descartes and Hobbes and other early modem thinkers, and wound up as a portrayal of human beings as mental entities encased in physical entities: a mind-thing imprisoned in a body–thing. Now a mind-thing imprisoned in a body-thing cannot experience participation in the ground of reality. Why not? Because it is imprisoned, isolated in the head. It can only have ideas about it and “project” them out onto reality. What becomes, then of the non-perishing dimension of meaning? Accepting the modem image, we could have faith that we have a relation to non-perishing reality only through first conceiving of a non-perishing reality–let us call it “God”–in the isolation of our bodily-encased minds, and then projecting that conception onto a “beyond” of things, and finally engaging in the desperate procedure of believing that it is real and that we have a connection with it in spite of not knowing anything of the kind. In other words, as long as self-understanding is dominated by this modem image, human consciousness cannot make sense of its own experience of immediate participation in a non-perishing ground of reality. And therefore, it cannot really make sense of its moral striving–since what is the point of the struggle for goodness if goodness is nothing more than temporary private opinion? Thus the modem image of human nature short-circuits the Socratic and Kierkegaardian understanding of existence, and leaves us with the familiar contemporary mess of radical moral relativism. This modern image of human existence is tenacious, though–partly because it is so closely connected to the modem view of what real knowing is, a view that enjoys an almost unassailable status. It might be summarized with extreme brevity as follows. If the mind is a thing encased in the physical body that only knows reality through the mediation, through the channeling, of the physical senses, any valid knowing has to validate itself through the presence of the relevant sense data. And this means that all true knowing is the type of knowing involved in the natural sciences, where empirical verification must take place through quantifiable data. Data that cannot be mathematically measured, such as the data consciousness discovers in its own activity and awareness–for example moral insight–can never be a matter of knowing, merely of opinion. How could the Socratic experience of discovering that the moral autonomy of the soul involves a non-perishing dimension of meaning ever be verified, if the data of sense, quantifiable data, are the only relevant data for affirming truth? The life of Socrates–an exemplary model for over two millennia of the moral liberation of the soul through the catharsis of practicing death–is, in this view, a life based on nothing more substantial than a private irrational belief. So to sum up: what has happened is that the enthronement by modem philosophy and science of an image of human nature as a thingly mind entrapped in a thingly body, has made all symbolizations of a non-perishing dimension of reality non-credible to many people–particularly to the intelligentsia, who emphasize their modem credentials by presenting themselves as the cultured despisers of religion. And, of course, one of the reasons why this modem image is so popular and so resistant to critique is what it appears to promise. If we go back to the founding texts of modernity, to the writings of Descartes, of Bacon, of Hobbes, we find a great optimism. If there is no participation in a mysterious origin of non-perishing meaning, there is no mystery essential to human existence. If there is no such participation, then all knowledge originates only in human consciousness itself. And if there is no primal mystery, and if all meaning is of human creation, we can hope one day to bring nature, human society, and history fully under human control. In his last book, Escape from Evil, Becker wrote: “Hubris means forgetting where the real source of power lies and imagining that it is in oneself (37).” I would suggest that imagining that notions of a non-perishing dimension of meaning are the pure creations of an isolated human consciousness, entails a forgetting of where the real source of consciousness lies: in the experienced mysterious ground of consciousness, which grants us the quite rational opportunity of a free and loving commitment to an enduring dimension of meaning. Of course, in some sense, human awareness of the non-perishing mystery in which it participates remains alive and well, because people keep striving to be moral, and they keep asking questions about that experience. Human questioning will always keep uncovering the eternal dimension of meaning, keep introducing people to the Socratic catharsis, and keep leading people to what Becker called a life of courageous self-realization. But they can be helped to do so by promoting insights like those of Becker on the choice between denying death or facing up to mortality. Like Becker in his chapter on Kierkegaard in The Denial Of Death, what I’ve tried to show is that the problem does not lie in the notion of human participation in imperishable reality. Rather, where the problem lies is in the self-comforting delusion that one possesses eternal meaning, and especially in the measures people take to defend their feeling of righteous invulnerability, especially through aggression. Authentic faith, by contrast, affirms enduring meaning in the context of an open if anxious acceptance of mortality. And so one must conclude that there are two opposites to authentic faith. One is the dogmatic clinging to an immortality project; and the other is the equally dogmatic insistence that enduring meaning is an illusion. Both of these are denials of our real human situation, making up two sides of the same counterfeit coin.

      The essay closes with a critique of the subject / object mind / body framework that now dominates modernity. Socrates, Kierkigaard and Becker's claims, when seen through the lens of Cartesian modernity, are relegated to the margins. materialism denies any legitimacy to such claims. Recent 4E cognition is an attempt to push back on this. Hughes notes that:

      "In his last book, Escape from Evil, Becker wrote: “Hubris means forgetting where the real source of power lies and imagining that it is in oneself (37).” "

    2. Both types of inauthentic existence involve running away from the awareness of death, not allowing the fact of death to penetrate into consciousness, not facing up to the human situation, and not undergoing the crucial moral catharsis. So Kierkegaard, Becker, and Socrates all agree: the denial of death is indeed at the center of human inauthenticity. Kierkegaard and Socrates would further insist that authentic human living–the open embrace of life structured by death–can only be rejected or embraced to begin with, because perishing meaning and non-perishing meaning co-constitute conscious existence.

      Here we find Kierkegaard, Becker and Socrates all in agreement. Both types of inauthentic existence involves running away from death and disallowing the fact of our own death from penetrating into consciousness, and avoiding our human existential condition.

      This also prevents us from reaching the next stage of moral catharsis. Denial of death lay at the center of human inauthenticity.

      Hughes closes by saying that an open embrace of life structured by death is embraced when perishing and non-perishing meaning co-constitute our conscious existence. This is similar to the Buddhist principle of the middle way and the Stop Reset Go maxim:

      To be or not to be, that is the question To be AND not to be that is the answer

    3. Kierkegaard has essentially this same view of human existence, a view that Becker praises in The Denial of Death. Because we are this tension of opposites, says Kierkegaard, in order to be authentically human we need to accept the mystery and responsibility of participation in both of these dimensions of reality that constitute life structured by death. Most people fall short of this authenticity, he declares. They flee its difficulties. And there are two basic ways of doing this. People either (1) immerse themselves in the dimension of things that perish, the things and pleasures of the world, which allows them to evade the awareness of death: the attitude summed up in the advice to “eat, drink, and be merry.” Or they (2) cling to some false certainty about immortality, imagining that some kind of immortality is their assured possession, and this too allows them to evade the awareness of death.

      Kierkegaard seems to look at death the same way as Becker. If we are authentic, it takes courage, first, but then we recognize it as wisdom. We participate in both the changing, perishable reality as well as the immutable, unchanging reality. Most people are too afraid to reach this point and evade a life structured by death in two major ways of denial of death. First they can live and let live. Enjoy all pleasures today with no regard for tomorrow. Second they can fall into an immortality project

    4. As Eric Voegelin puts it, “The life of Socrates was the great model of the liberation of the soul through the invasion of death into earthly existence” (Plato, 43). And we come across one of the most memorable formulations of this liberating catharsis in the dialogue Phaedo, where Socrates describes it as “practicing death.” Socrates says that this is what the true philosopher does: practices death. Of course all kinds of people call themselves philosophers. But a real philosopher is easily defined: it is someone who truly loves wisdom. And since wisdom is the ever-deepening understanding of how to live a truly good life, no one can be a lover of wisdom except by continually dying to the perishable and focusing on what is truly lasting, letting the fact and possibilities of death penetrate the soul. True philosophers, Socrates says, “make dying their profession,” and so to them of all people death is least upsetting. And if someone is distressed at the prospect of dying, Socrates concludes, it is “proof enough that he is a lover not of wisdom but of the body (Phaedo, 67d-68c).”

      Socrates holds that the true philosopher loves wisdom and practices death. Socrates says "true philosophers make dying their profession."

    5. So we have come to the crucial point. The Socratic catharsis is a matter of letting death penetrate the self. It is the acceptance of the perishing of everything that will perish. In this acceptance a person imaginatively experiences the death of the body and the possibility of complete annihilation. This is “to ‘taste” death with the lips of your living body [so] that you … know emotionally that you are a creature who will die; “it is the passage into nothing” in which “a corner is turned within one.” And it is this very experience, and no other, that enables a person to act with genuine moral freedom and autonomy, guided by morals and not just attraction and impulses.

      This is the age old principle of all wisdom traditions: To die while still alive.

    6. full acknowledgement of mortality and perishability can only take place through a kind of psychological re-orientation, in which trusting affirmation of a non-perishing ground of goodness becomes the ordering principle of one’s life. This is the only way we can break free of the power of those bodily and social distractions which otherwise keep us enslaved and turned away from the good.

      Socrates guiding principle in life.

    7. Kierkegaard puts this same point in his book Either/Or: To choose the ethical is to “choose the eternal”–however clear or not this is to the person deciding to be ethical. Does this mean that, if you decide to really commit yourself to being ethical, suddenly you are claiming to be in possession of absolute truth and eternal meaning? No—it means that you trustingly affirm that the ultimate basis of your moral decisions and actions is an enduring dimension of meaning, and not like the latest fashions, the things that come and go

      To choose the ethical is to choose the eternal - Kierkegaard

    8. when a person does take goodness seriously, he or she finds that this is only possible on the assumption that goodness is not ephemeral–not an illusion, not just a reality constituted by personal opinion. To orient one’s life by the compass of a real commitment to knowing and doing what is good only happens through assuming that goodness is really real, enduringly real: that there is a moral dimension of meaning that does not come and go like flesh, or reputation, or money, or power.

      Socrates says that to take goodness seriously, we must hold that it is enduring.

    9. What are the main distractions that keep us from making ourselves morally better? Socrates lists the obvious: material prosperity (i.e., money and possessions and clothes); status and reputation (looking good in the eyes of others); bodily pleasures; and all the emotions that keep us bound to these things. Naturally, Socrates observes, we love these things when we are children. But to cling to them as the highest priorities once we become morally conscious adults is sad–in fact, this is what is a truly shameful way of life. So Socrates chastises the Athenians at his trial: “Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?” (Apology, 29d-e). In order to morally improve one’s soul, according to Socrates, it is necessary to purify it from such distractions. In the dialogue Phaedo, he tells his friends: “The body fills us with loves and desires and fears and all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense, with the result that we literally never get an opportunity to think at all about anything (Phaedo, 66c).” It is simply impossible to steadily deepen one’s understanding of how to become a better person without a sustained effort to break free from these distractions. And this effort, says Socrates, is the true struggle, the true agon, of human existence. People think the real problem in life is to escape harm and death. “But I suggest,” Socrates says at his trial, “that the difficulty is not so much to escape death; the real difficulty is to escape from doing wrong (Apology, 39a).”

      A koan to meditate on: “that the difficulty is not so much to escape death; the real difficulty is to escape from doing wrong (Apology, 39a).”

      "In order to morally improve one’s soul, according to Socrates, it is necessary to purify it from such distractions. In the dialogue Phaedo, he tells his friends: “The body fills us with loves and desires and fears and all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense, with the result that we literally never get an opportunity to think at all about anything (Phaedo, 66c).” It is simply impossible to steadily deepen one’s understanding of how to become a better person without a sustained effort to break free from these distractions. And this effort, says Socrates, is the true struggle, the true agon, of human existence."

    10. Death is a mystery. Maybe it is annihilation. One simply can’t know otherwise. Socrates is psychologically open to his physical death and possible utter annihilation. But still this does not unnerve him. And if we pursue the question: why not?–we do not have to look far in Plato’s portrait of Socrates for some answers. Plato understood, and captured in his Dialogues, a crucial element in the shaping of Socrates’ character: his willingness to let the fact of death fully penetrate his consciousness. This experience of being fully open to death is so important to Socrates that he makes a point of using it to define his way of life, the life of a philosophos–a “lover of wisdom.” Let us consider this life of the philosophos as Socrates understands it. It is – famously – “the examined” life. Meaning? That it is a life committed to the ongoing search for how best to live. Now in every society there are plenty of people–like the character Callicles in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias–who would say that the best life is having as much power and pleasure as possible, which of course means always being able to successfully protect oneself and one’s friends from any encroachment on their privileges, from discomfort, from pain, and of course from death. In the Gorgias Plato makes the character Callicles a wonderfully eloquent spokesman for this outlook. Callicles says: any way of life is shameful that doesn’t make its highest priority the ability to save oneself frorn suffering pain or death at the hands of other people. Plato has Socrates replying to Callicles: “My good sir, just reflect whether what is good and noble is not something more than saving and being saved. Perhaps the true man should ignore this question of living for a certain span of years and should not be so enamored of life. . . ” (Gorgias, 512d-e). Socrates is indicating to Callicles that really caring about goodness–genuinely desiring to do what is good, as one understands it—inevitably shifts the value of physical comfort and even physical survival, demoting them somewhat. Too much concern with avoiding pain or with physical survival gets in the way of doing the right thing. A real effort to become good means: keeping attention focused on the things that help one to be good, and learning to avoid distractions.

      Socrates is a lover of wisdom and is committed to an ongoing search of how best to live. This helps overcome his fear of death. This is worth unpacking.

    11. it will be worthwhile to develop his idea of a courageous breaking away from culturally-supported immortality systems by looking back in history to a character who many people have thought of as an epitome of a self-realized person, someone who neither accepts his culture’s standardized hero-systems, nor fears death: the philosopher Socrates. When Socrates was brought to trial in 399 BC before a jury of 501 Athenian citizens on charges that included impiety and corrupting the youth, he disappointed most of the jurors (and irritated many of them) by not petitioning for leniency, or appearing intimidated by the penalties he might face if found guilty. And when the jury condemned him to death, he remained composed, and spoke carefully about the consequences of the judgment first for himself, and then for Athens. Through Plato we understand that Socrates’s typical tranquility and self-control never left him throughout his month in prison and up through the final minutes of drinking the hemlock. The eyewitness report has it that he drank the cup of hemlock “calmly and easily,” and had to chastise his friends for their weeping. Combined with other testimony about Socrates’s bravery as a soldier–and the record of his dangerous refusal to obey what he considered to be immoral orders from the leaders of a temporary govemment-all this adds up to the portrait of someone very much at ease with his mortality. What accounts for it? Did Socrates’ courage come from a psychological denial of mortality through embrace of some “immortality system?” Let us look at what he had to say about death to the jurors at his trial immediately after his condemnation. “Death,” he said to them, “is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything; or … it is really a change: a migration of the soul from this place to another (Plato, Apology, 40c-d).” Those are in fact the only alternatives: maybe its nothingness; maybe it isn’t. Socrates shows himself prepared for either eventuality. Note well: there is no dogmatic assertion of an immortal afterlife here. An assertion like that would, after all, contradict Socrates’ first principle of conduct, which is to never assume that one knows what one doesn’t know. Earlier in his defense speech Socrates had stated the matter about death carefully: “To be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know …. [Not] possessing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it (29a-b).”

      Socrates confrontation of death without fear is an example of how to live authentically with death, without the need for immortality projects.

    12. For what purpose? So that the process of what Becker calls “self-transcendence” may begin. And he describes the process of self-transcendence this way: Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism …. He links his secret inner self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness … to the very ground of creation. Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self there remains the mystery of the private, invisible, inner self which yearned for ultimate significance. …This invisible mystery at the heart of [the] creature now attains cosmic significance by affirming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation. “This,” he concludes, “is the meaning of faith.” Faith is the belief that despite one’s “insignificance, weakness, death, one’s existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force (90, 9 1).” This, then, is what we might call good faith, not a flight into some immortality system. And clearly, some Christians, some Buddhists–at least the Zen Buddhists Becker himself mentions!–have faith in this sense, a faith that Becker characterizes as growing out of tasting one’s own death, embracing one’s own nothingness, and affirming–not a known ultimate meaningful–but an “invisible mystery” of ultimate meaning.

      Embrace the mystery, the sacred - accepting that one will be gone forevermore is a mighty task as our culture teaches us to seek recognition. The last thing we want to be is unrecognized, a nobody. And yet, when we are dead and dissipated back into the rest of the world, that is exactly what we will become.

      But we have to accept that reality before we can build and think beyond it to a deeper possibility of meaning. Reality brought us forth to begin with. Every moment is already sacred.

    13. Above all, Becker says, adopting a phrase from Luther, you must be able to “…taste death with the lips of your living body [so] that you can know emotionally that you are a creature who will die (88).” Then quoting William James (who is himself quoting the mystic Jacob Boehme), Becker further describes this “tasting” of death as a “passage into nothing, [a passage in which] a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one (88).” Thus in this process of self-realization, Becker writes, the self is “brought down to nothing.”

      Confronting death honestly is the first step to authentic transcendence of death, and to authentic living.

    14. We all want out lives to have meaning, and death suggests that life adds up to nothing. People want desperately for their lives to really count, to be finally real. If you think about it, most all of us try to found our identities on something whose meaning seems permanent or enduring: the nation, the race, the revolutionary vision; the timelessness of art, the truths of science, immutable philosophical verities, the law of self-interest, the pursuit of happiness, the law of survival; cosmic energy, the rhythms of nature, the gods, Gaia, the Tao, Brahman, Krishna, Buddha-consciousness, the Torah, Jesus. And all of these, Becker says, function as “immortality systems,” because they all promise to connect our lives with what endures, with a meaning that does not perish. So let’s accept Becker’s thesis: that fear of death and meaninglessness, and a self–deluding denial of mortality, leads many people to these “immortality systems.”

      Immortality projects are deeply associated with avoiding a meaning crisis, as per cogntive scientist John Vervaeke's project: The Meaning Crisis:

      https://www.meaningcrisis.co/all-transcripts/

    15. as members of society, we tend to identify with one or another “immortality system” (as Becker calls it). That is, we identify with a religious group, or a political group, or engage in some kind of cultural activity, or adopt a certain culturally sanctioned viewpoint, that we invest with ultimate meaning, and to which we ascribe absolute and permanent truth. This inflates us with a sense of invulnerable righteousness. And then, we have to protect ourselves against the exposure of our absolute truth being just one more mortality-denying system among others, which we can only do by insisting that all other absolute truths are false. So we attack and degrade–preferably kill–the adherents of different mortality- denying-absolute-truth systems. So the Protestants kill the Catholics; the Muslims vilify the Christians and vice versa; upholders of the American way of life denounce Communists; the Communist Khmer Rouge slaughters all the intellectuals in Cambodia; the Spanish Inquisition tortures heretics; and all good students of the Enlightenment demonize religion as the source of all evil. The list could go on and on.

      Once we give ourselves over absolutely to a cultural immortality belief system, that is when our complete identification can emerge a self-righteousness so powerful that any other mortality-denying system that claims to be the truth and therefore threatens ours, must be eliminated.

    16. Human beings are mortal, and we know it. Our sense of vulnerability and mortality gives rise to a basic anxiety, even a terror, about our situation. So we devise all sorts of strategies to escape awareness of our mortality and vulnerability, as well as our anxious awareness of it. This psychological denial of death, Becker claims, is one of the most basic drives in individual behavior, and is reflected throughout human culture. Indeed, one of the main functions of culture, according to Becker, is to help us successfully avoid awareness of our mortality. That suppression of awareness plays a crucial role in keeping people functioning–if we were constantly aware of our fragility, of the nothingness we are a split second away from at all times, we’d go nuts. And how does culture perform this crucial function? By making us feel certain that we, or realities we are part of, are permanent, invulnerable, eternal. And in Becker’s view, some of the personal and social consequences of this are disastrous.

      This is a good summary of Becker's findings concerning denial of death. * Mortality is an existential, perennial and persistent threat; * It generates a persistent anxiety, even terror; * We devise both individual and cultural ways to escape awareness of it as a means to deal with it; * Death denial is one of the basic drives of individual behavior; * One of culture's principal roles is to help individuals avoid awareness of mortality; * Suppressing awareness plays a crucial role in keeping us sane and functioning; * These cultural methods Becker calls "immortality projects" and they are powerful narratives that keep the fear and terror at bay; * This self-deceit comes with a high price, however, as we may not be truly convinced of the narrative and it can cause hatred, ingroup/outgroup and conflict;

    17. Menu Workshops Mortality Awareness Preparedness Project About Us Mission History People Contact About Becker Biography Becker’s Synthesis Books Related Works Becker Fans Resources Terror Management Theory Webinars Educator Resources Book & Film Reviews Interviews Lecture Texts Audio Recordings Video Resources This Mortal Life Becker in the World Death Acceptance Religion and Death Anxiety Art and Artists Climate Talk Discrimination and Racial Justice See All Blog Store The Denial of Death and the Practice of Dying
      • Title:THE DENIAL OF DEATH AND THE PRACTICE OF DYING
      • Author: Huges, Glenn
      • Date:?
    1. dalai lama has said i'm in a wonderful public talk um madhyamaka approaches emptiness from the side of the object of knowledge while yoga chara approaches emptiness from the side of the subject i think that's a great way 00:28:26 to see matters and so i'm going to present uh yogachara here as supplementing um yamaka rather than as conflicting with with it and i think that this approach makes good sense of the most important differences between 00:28:39 majamaka and yogachara it shows us how to reconcile the difference as well and the difference is this while majamaca takes emptiness through the emptiness of intrinsic identity or intrinsic existence yogachara takes 00:28:53 emptiness to be the emptiness of subject object duality or the absence of externality to the mind of the object of mind

      HH Dalai Lama described the difference between Madhyamaka and Yogacara schools as approaching emptiness from two different sides, from the subject and object respectively.

    2. what happens um when we're thinking about our inner states one of the things that we need to recognize is that our introspection when 00:22:54 we we become aware of our beliefs our desires and our hopes and our fears and so forth is all done through language and on the model of language when i decide that i believe that john dunn 00:23:07 gave a great talk this morning when i believe that hal roth is a great scholar of zen and when i believe that alan wallace gave us a beautifully inspirational talk about the role of practice and contemplation in the 00:23:19 understanding of the self and i introspect that way i'm using those sentences alan gave that great talk john gave us a great talk about pramana and so forth as models for my inner states and i'm not 00:23:32 doing that because i looked inside and saw little english sentences in my brain i'm looking i'm doing that by using language as a kind of introspective model that's a matter of self-interpretation 00:23:44 it's easy to forget that because it feels so immediate so language gives us the concepts that we use to think about the world but it is also the model for the concepts of our propositional attitudes like belief 00:23:58 desire knowledge and so forth and as a model we have to recognize that the model the map isn't the reality to go back to what john uh reminded us of he reminded us of earlier introspection in 00:24:11 terms of language gives us an interpretation it doesn't give us an independent reality that is being interpreted and when we think about the madhyamaka 00:24:23 of nagarjuna and chandrakiri we remember that to be empty is to be empty of any intrinsic nature and if we follow chandra charity as i suggested earlier that means that it is to exist only 00:24:37 dependent on conceptual imputation and what i am suggesting now is that all of our inner cognitive states that we introspect we encounter only through a conceptual imputation only through 00:24:50 interpretation only through language and that is they exist conventionally not intrinsically even though they might appear to us to exist just as we see 00:25:02 them and to do so intrinsically

      Another key point:

      Language is the tool we use for introspection and as Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti hold, are empty of intrinsic nature. All inner cognitive states that we introspect are attained only through linguistic conceptual imputation so can only exist conventionally and not intrinsically.

      This underscores the importance of the symbolosphere, of symbols and language.

    3. another aspect to cognitive illusion here is the illusion um that our sense perception is something that 00:22:02 is transparent and simply delivering us a world as a telescope does and not as a cognitive not as a kaleidoscope does as a consequence then the sense that we 00:22:15 know our own cognitive states directly and accurately through inner sense as well of outer sense has got to be a cognitive illusion as well are of the the sortals or the concepts that we use 00:22:28 in order to introspect are just as opaque to us as our senses are and give us just as a non-transparent access to our inner world as our senses give to the outer 00:22:42 world

      Jay reiterates a key point: we are under the spell of a cognitive illusion whereby the concepts we use to introspect are as non-transparent to us as the cognitive faculties used to organize sensations.

    4. another way to put this is um that if you think about using a telescope an example that alan offered us a little while ago to examine celestial objects as indeed did 00:20:37 galileo you can only interpret the output of that telescope the things you see in the telescope correctly if we actually know how it works that's really obviously true about 00:20:48 things like radio telescopes and infrared telescopes but it's true of optical telescopes as well as paul fire opened emphasized if you don't have a theory of optics then when you aim your telescope at jupiter and look at the 00:21:00 moons all you see are bits of light on a piece of glass you need to believe to know how the telescope works in order to understand those as moons orbiting a planet 00:21:12 so to put it crudely if we don't know how the instrument that we're using uh if we don't know how the instrument that we're using to mediate our access to the world works if we don't understand it we don't know whether we're looking through 00:21:24 a great telescope or a kaleidoscope and we don't know whether we're using a pre a properly constructed radio telescope or just playing a fantasy video game

      Good example of how astronomers must know the physical characteristics of the instrument they use to see the heavens, a telescope before anything they observe be useful. The same is true when peering into a microscope.

      The instrument of our bodies faculties is just as important to understand if we are to understand the signals we experience.

    5. the illusion that pervades our sense perception is that what we experience is something external to us that somehow 00:20:10 we've got a world that exists as it is independent of us and that we simply happen to be perfect world detectors and we wander through it detecting things just as they are

      This is a key statement of our illusion. We sense that what we experience is the way the world actually is, not seeing that our bodies play a huge role in what we observe. We don't know what it's like to be a bat!

    6. our mind functions as dharma yearly 00:19:43 emphasized as an instrument through which we have access to the world

      the mind has faculties that construct our cognitions about the world.

    7. these four philosophers in very different ways but 00:18:14 in ways that intersect in very intriguing ways um emphasized that with knowledge sensory knowledge perceptual knowledge isn't the direct access um to sensory properties or descent or 00:18:28 objects around us but rather is always the result of a complex cognitive and perceptual process mediated by our sense organs our sense faculties and our cognitive processes 00:18:41 and just another way to put that this is a way that paul churchill puts this but also um paul fire robin also sellers is that the objects we experience the 00:18:52 world that we inhabit the world in which we find ourselves embedded is not a world that we simply find it's a world that we construct and whose constituents we construct in our central nervous 00:19:06 systems in response to sensory stimulation transduced by neural impulses that is somehow our bodies interact with other bodies in the world um our and through various kinds of 00:19:19 cognitive processes

      These 4 American scientists articulate that we don't simply sense a world out there. Rather, our sensory and cognitive faculties CONSTRUCT what appears to us.

    8. each of these folks in different ways has emphasized that our perceptual and our conceptual apparatus function as we know the world as measuring instruments a word strikingly like the sanskrit 00:18:01 pramana

      Our cognitive and perceptual apparatus are measuring instruments.

    9. he distinguishes three dimensions of dependent origination and this is in his commentary on the guardian of malama jamaica carica called clear words he talks about causal dependence that is every phenomenon depends upon causes and 00:16:19 conditions and gives rise to further causes and conditions um myriological dependence that is every phenomenon every composite phenomenon depends upon the parts that uh that it 00:16:31 comprises and every phenomenon is also dependent upon the holes or the systems in which it figures parts depend on holes holes depend on parts and that reciprocal meteorological dependence 00:16:44 characterizes all of reality and third often overlooked but most important is dependence on conceptual imputation that is things depend in order to be represented as the kinds of 00:16:57 things they are on our conceptual resources our affective resources and as john dunn emphasized our purposes in life this third one really means this um 00:17:09 everything that shows up for us in the world the way we carve the world up the way we um the way we experience the world is dependent not just on how the world is but on the conceptual resources 00:17:22 as well as the perceptual resources through which we understand the world and it's worth recognizing that um when we think about this there are a bunch of um contemporary majamakers majamikas we 00:17:34 might point to as well and so paul fireauben who's up there on on the left well really an austrian but he spent much of his life in america um willard van norman kwine um up on the right wilford sellers and paul churchland

      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

    10. so first i'm going to really focus on that allure of immediacy and then move into this kind of arc from yamaka through yogachara and into zen and my aim is going to be 00:09:49 um to show you that i think the buddhist tradition gets the all of these issues roughly right that is i'm not simply going to be characterizing what buddhists say about this i'm actually defending it and i think that we can 00:10:02 therefore learn a great deal about subjectivity through very careful attention to the multiple ways in which buddhist philosophers have considered this issue so i'm going to try to be shedding light 00:10:13 on contemporary debates as well by attention to buddhist resources

      For Deep Humanity open praxis, we can learn from these compelling philosophical findings from Buddhism and remix them in a form that is authentic to the source but makes it more widely accessible to non-Buddhists.

      The key distinction Jay is trying to convey is that our sense and the allure of immediacy is in contrast to the complex and opaque mediating mechanisms that are responsible for us perceiving the world the way we do and cognizing / feeling about the world the way we do.

    11. let's start with the allure of immediacy it's really easy to see 00:10:25 both why people believe as the spontaneous way that we have immediate vertical access to our own perceptual and cognitive states

      WARNING: Transcription error: It should be "veridical", not "vertical" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/veridical

    12. so in this essay i'm going to explore the what i take to be the very most profound illusions diagnosed in the buddhist tradition and one and the most difficult to overcome and the primary one will be the illusion 00:08:58 that we have immediate access and vertical access to our own experience that we have a direct first-person access to our own minds that gives us our minds just as they are that the duality between subject and object that 00:09:11 structures our understanding is primordial this is the illusion that we're subject standing over and against the world rather than um interdependent beings in the world that's the conviction that we might know 00:09:24 the external world only through the mediation of our sensory and cognitive faculties but that we know the world only in virtue of immediate access to the outputs of those faculties

      Jay sums it up nicely. - the compelling illusion that we are subject standing in opposition to object instead of interdependent.

    13. when we attribute sensory experiences to 00:06:39 ourselves for instance like the experience of red or the experience of seeing blue the model is external properties and we think of there as being inner properties just like those external properties that somehow we are 00:06:52 um we are seeing immediately

      This comment suggests a Color BEing Journey. How can we demonstrate in a compelling way that color is an attribute of the neural architecture of the person and NOT a property of the object we are viewing?

      See Color Constancy Illusion here:

      David Eagleman in WIRED interview https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FMJBfn07gZ30%2F&group=world

      Beau Lotto, TED Talk https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2Fmf5otGNbkuc%2F&group=world

      Andrew Stockman, TEDx talk on how we see color: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F_l607r2TSwg%2F&group=world

      Science shows that color is an experience of the subject, not a property of the object: https://youtu.be/fQczp0wtZQQ but what Jay will go on to argue, is that this explanation itself is part of the COGNITIVE IMMEDIACY OF EXPERIENCE that we also take for granted.

    14. american philosopher wilford sellers is this way that impressions and thoughts appear to be simply given to us as the events they are as instances of the types they instantiate 00:05:48 and this i take to be the deepest form of what sellers identified as the myth of the given the most difficult one to extirpate we always forget that our knowledge of our own states is as mediated by 00:06:00 language and conceptual apparatus as any other knowledge so when we attribute beliefs or knowledge when we attribute cognitive states when we attribute even sensations 00:06:13 to ourselves or to others we're always i'm going to suggest uh engaged in an active interpretation a kind of self hermeneutics or a hermeneutic of the other and we use 00:06:25 language to model our inner life we use external properties to to uh model our inner life and we're always modeling our inner life we don't simply have it as it is

      Wilfred Sellers called this the "myth of the given"

    15. another way to put this and we're going to go there in a moment um is that we could say that we're tempted just overwhelmingly 00:05:09 tempted to believe that to believe that when we have perceptual experience including introspective experience of our own minds we think that we know that content immediately the idea that to be in a 00:05:22 cognitive state is to know that state and the idea that our inner states present themselves to introspection even trained introspection just as they are

      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

    16. buddhism is first and foremost a solution to a problem the problem is the 00:02:47 ubiquity of suffering in samsara and buddhism is all about trying to solve that problem and famously there's a diagnosis of that problem where the immediate conditions 00:02:59 of suffering are attraction and aversion but where the root cause the thing that gives rise to that attraction and aversion to those pathologies is a profound confusion about the nature of reality and it's that confusion that 00:03:13 leads us to the attraction and aversion that takes us into samsara and since it's an illusion we should pay attention to the classical indian understanding of what illusion is and 00:03:25 that is something that appears in one way but exists in another that is an illusion isn't something that's completely non-existent it's something his mode of existence and his mode of appearance are discordant from one 00:03:37 another and we're going to be focusing on that a great deal in this talk but the idea is that because this primal confusion this illusion lies at the root of suffering the only way to end the 00:03:50 problem of suffering is to extinguish the illusion and what i want to talk about today is how that illusion manifests in the case of our own minds and what i'm going to argue is is this 00:04:03 that that confusion manifests as a conviction that we have an immediate knowledge of our own minds that we can be indubitably aware of the contents of our own minds and the second aspect of that delusion equally pernicious is that 00:04:16 it involves the sub the superimposition of a subject object duality on experience that is uh primordially non-dual um so that primal confusion can be 00:04:28 thought of this way um it's taking that which is impermanent to be permanent that which is a source of suffering to be a source of happiness that which is only conventionally real to be ultimately real that which is 00:04:42 interdependent to be independent and the important point for our purposes is that the thesis that our own experience is permeated with illusion applies to our experience of our own minds as well 00:04:55 that's what i want to emphasize here

      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

    17. cognitive illusion and immediate experience perspectives 00:01:44 from buddhist philosophy

      Title: cognitive illusion and immediate experience perspectives from buddhist philosophy Author: Jay L. Garfield Year: 2022

      This is a very important talk outlining a number of key concepts that Stop Reset Go and Deep Humanity are built upon and also a rich source of BEing Journeys.

      In brief, this talk outlines key humanistic (discoverable by a modern human being regardless of any cultural, gender, class, etc difference) concepts of Buddhist philosophy that SRG / DH embeds into its framework to make more widely accessible..

      The title of the talk refers to the illusions that our own cognition produces of both outer and inner appearances because the mechanisms that produce them area opaque to us. Their immediacy feels as if they are real.

      If what we sense and think is real is an illusion, then what is real? "Real" in this case implies ultimate truth. As we will see, Nagarjuna's denial of any argument that claims to be the ulitmate is denied. What is left after such a complete denial? Still something persists.

    1. so this is white light passing through a dispersive prison and this is a visible spectrum from about 420 nanometers in the violet through 500 nanometers and 00:00:18 the green 580 yellow 610 and orange and 650 red and some of the slides that have this along the bottom axis so how dependent I'll be in color what do you 00:00:30 think we depend on color a lot a little lots okay
      • Title: How do we see colours?
      • Author: Andrew Stockman
      • Date: 2016

      Many different color illusions Good to mine for BEing Journeys

    1. I want to start with a game. Okay? And to win this game, all you have to do is see the reality that's in front of you as it really is, all right? So we have two panels here, of colored dots. And one of those dots is the same in the two panels. And you have to tell me which one. Now, I narrowed it down to the gray one, the green one, and, say, the orange one. 00:00:41 So by a show of hands, we'll start with the easiest one. Show of hands: how many people think it's the gray one? Really? Okay. How many people think it's the green one? And how many people think it's the orange one? Pretty even split. Let's find out what the reality is. Here is the orange one. (Laughter) Here is the green one. And here is the gray one. 00:01:16 (Laughter) So for all of you who saw that, you're complete realists. All right? (Laughter) So this is pretty amazing, isn't it? Because nearly every living system has evolved the ability to detect light in one way or another. So for us, seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does. And yet, even at this most fundamental level, 00:01:40 context is everything. What I'm going to talk about is not that context is everything, but why context is everything. Because it's answering that question that tells us not only why we see what we do, but who we are as individuals, and who we are as a society.
      • Title: Optical illusions show how we see
      • Author: Beau Lotto
      • Date: 8 Oct, 2009

      The opening title is very pith:

      No one is an outside observer of nature, each of us is defined by our ecology.

      We need to unpack the full depth of this sentence.

      Seeing is believing. This is more true than we think.Our eyes trick us into seeing the same color as different ones depending on the context. Think about the philosophical implications of this simple finding. What does this tell us about "objective reality"? Colors that we would compare as different in one circumstance are the same in another.

      Evolution helps us do this for survival.

    1. so here's a straightforward question what color are the strawberries in this photograph the red right wrong those strawberries are gray if you don't 00:00:12 believe me we look for one of the reddest looking patches on this image cut it out now what color is that it's great right but when you put it back on 00:00:25 the image it's red again it's weird right this illusion was created by a Japanese researcher named Akiyoshi Kitaoka and it hinges on something called color constancy it's an incredible visual 00:00:39 phenomenon by which the color of an object appears to stay more or less the same regardless of the lighting conditions under which you see it or the lighting conditions under which your brain thinks you're seeing it

      Title: Why your brain thinks these strawberries are red Author: WIRED Date:2022

      Color Constancy

      Use this for BEing journey

  5. bafybeibbaxootewsjtggkv7vpuu5yluatzsk6l7x5yzmko6rivxzh6qna4.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeibbaxootewsjtggkv7vpuu5yluatzsk6l7x5yzmko6rivxzh6qna4.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. What is so maddening is that there are alternatives. There is an abundance of theory and arguments that could lead the way. The latest IPCC report had an entire section that doesn’t propose technofixes but instead explores how energy demand could be managed to ensure that everyone has enough to thrive while ensuring the biosphere doesn’t die. 

      IPCC AR6 WG III chapter 5: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Freport.ipcc.ch%2Far6wg3%2Fpdf%2FIPCC_AR6_WGIII_FinalDraft_Chapter05.pdf&group=world

    2. The assumption that we can safely overshoot, then recover temperatures back down by the end of the century, is seriously misguided. Alas, this is the story that we are telling ourselves.

      Progress traps will certainly occur.

      Ronald Wright asks: Can we still dodge progress traps? https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthetyee.ca%2FAnalysis%2F2019%2F09%2F20%2FRonald-Wright-Can-We-Dodge-Progress-Trap%2F&group=world

    3. Most academics continue to insist that it is still – barely – physically possible to limit warming to no more than 1.5°C. There are strong incentives to stay behind the invisible line that separates academia from wider social and political concerns, and so to not take a clear position about this.But we need to clearly acknowledge now that warming will exceed 1.5°C because we are losing vital reaction time by entertaining fantastic scenarios. The sooner we get real about our current situation and what it demands, the better.

      Slight chance. We need nonlinear solutions and to find all the leverage points, social tipping points and idling capacity we can.:

      Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050 https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pnas.org%2Fdoi%2F10.1073%2Fpnas.1900577117&group=world

      An Introduction to PLAN E Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First-Century Era of Entangled Security and Hyperthreats https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.usmcu.edu%2FOutreach%2FMarine-Corps-University-Press%2FExpeditions-with-MCUP-digital-journal%2FAn-Introduction-to-PLAN-E%2Ffbclid%2FIwAR3facE8l6Jk4Msc8C1nw8yWtwnzSCXVZGlO7JLkjqo8CWYTYAqAMTPkTO8%2F&group=world

      Science Driven Societal Transformation https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2Fz9ZCjd2rqGY%2F&group=world

    4. Some studies estimate that we could be spending trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to drag temperatures back down to 1.5°C. Will rich, industrialised nations spend that much cash when they cannot even forgo the modest economic impact of not putting the carbon in the atmosphere in the first place? 

      They may if they are forced to. Look at Covid!

    5. So what can we make of politicians who continue to argue that ‘1.5°C is still alive’? Are they misinformed or are they simply lying?I believe many are in denial about the types of solutions the climate crisis demands. Rather than do the – admittedly – very difficult political work of eking out our supplies of fossil fuels while accelerating a just transition to post-carbon societies, politicians are going all out on technological salvation. This is a new form of climate denial, which involves imagining large-scale carbon dioxide removal that will clean up the carbon pollution that we continue to pump into the atmosphere. While it may seem much safer to stick to the script and say that it is still physically possible to limit warming to no more than 1.5°C, while pointing out that the scale of change demands much more political will, I believe that this can no longer be a credible response to the climate crisis.We have warmed the climate by 1.2°C since pre-industrial periods. If emissions stay flat at current levels, then in around nine years the carbon budget for 1.5°C will be exhausted. And, of course, emissions are not flat – they are surging. 2021 saw the second-largest annual increase ever recorded, driven by the rebound in economic activity after Coronavirus lockdowns. We did not ‘build back better’.The clock has been stuck at five minutes to midnight for decades. Alarms have been continuing to sound. There are only so many times you can hit the snooze button.

      Going all out on technological salvation is a form of climate denialism.

      We are at 1.2 Deg C and emissions have climbed after rebounding after Covid. If they flatline for the next nine years, we will hit 1.5 Deg C.

    6. We Need to Stop Pretending we can Limit Global Warming to 1.5°C

      Title: We Need to Stop Pretending we can Limit Global Warming to 1.5°C Author: James Dyke Date: 6 July 2022

    1. some people will 01:52:34 read nagarjuna as allowing for the existence of true contradictions that something can be both true and false at the same time and uh graham priest is a philosopher who has a 01:52:46 uh reading of nagarjuna as under his uh dialethis logic which allows for certain uh contradictions to be true um [Music] i don't think that actually works in the 01:52:58 case of i think nagarjuna seems to presume the principle of non-principle of non-contradiction in order to run these kinds of reduction reductio absurdum type arguments um by drawing contradictions and incoherencies within 01:53:11 a given concept under analysis and then showing how it leads to contradiction so we should reject that concept um uh yeah do you have any thoughts about uh about 01:53:23 you know quantum physics is is sort of notorious for seeming to violate basic laws of of logic like say the law of non-contradiction or law of excluded middle or uh and so on and 01:53:35 so do you think that um our conventional logic you know it's like say classical logic is uh in if if there is no ultimate reality for madhyamako or for your your 01:53:48 understanding of uh quantum physics slash medium um then should the tools of classical logic what are the tools within conventional discourse broadly speaking as well for um 01:54:01 capturing um what madhyamaka is saying or what quantum physics as you understand it are saying so yeah let me answer specifically um uh 01:54:13 nagarjuna uh main negotiations from one perspective can be viewed as a logician right i mean it's a it's it's a his way of presenting things 01:54:25 uh uh it's it's a characteristic of somebody who's uh who's a legitimation you use logic uh but from from where's the perspective the first first of impact it sounds strange because uh his main tool is the 01:54:38 tetra of course which um somehow uh presents uh the impossibility of four alternative one being a something i don't know time exist uh one being non-a say time does not 01:54:57 exist and the third being um neither a nor not a and the fourth is uh both a and known a so it seems that wait a moment uh we we 01:55:09 we we are talked in logic 101 um that uh uh either a or not a and there is um beginning of logic so it seemed to be a clash here uh my 01:55:23 impression that there's no clash is that the known of non-a is not the same known as uh um as they restotelien known and we can uh we can think of innumerable uh everyday experience in which this whole 01:55:36 possibility it's exactly what we would uh we would consider so the exhaustive thing is the four there's four possibilities i don't want to go technically specifically but so it's not a an alternative logic here it's just a 01:55:48 different way of using known um so i don't see any clash between what we call logic uh in in in it's an interesting articulation but not 01:56:00 any any club it's not a mag logic um the same is true with quantum mechanics uh people been arguing that we can understand quantum mechanics by changing the logic i find it yeah but i find it 01:56:13 it's not really particularly clarifying um it's true i mean the particle doesn't go here normal goes there so if we think of these are two alternative quantum mechanics can be thought of can be 01:56:25 phrased if an alternative logic but all the alternative logic that i found they can be rephrased in terms of logic with different definitions so i don't i don't i don't think that this is the point um that's this is this is the 01:56:38 answer to your your question about logic you know the uh mutha madhyamakar karika his main treatise which we're talking about nagarjuna's text um 01:56:50 it's very short as you mentioned carlos and some of the things that are not there that are not written that are implied and also make it such a difficult text to understand is that he's refuting many different schools 01:57:05 of understanding an essence in reality and so when he does the tetralemma one of the usages is to be complete in terms of all the different you know 01:57:17 traditions or schools that are claiming some essence in reality to refute them and some do say that there's nothing you know not neither alternative and some say things 01:57:29 do exist and do not exist the both so i think he's using that more pedagogically if you will to um to refute all possible understandings 01:57:40 of an intrinsic existence and that's some of the beauty of his work and it's some of the difficulty in understanding it because you know unless you're really well read and really 01:57:53 understand fully all the different positions uh you it's hard to really know what he's doing at any one time um i could comment on this because it could be interesting um 01:58:08 so there is this uh sense in which barry explained that uh somehow answering 12 possible counter arguments at the same time and there's also a very simple way that you can see that this is not really 01:58:20 about a different logic so take the double slit experiment in quantum mechanics what's the point there that you try to explain a certain set of experimental data 01:58:32 by saying where does the particle go does it go through slit a does it go through slit beam let's go through both does it not go to neither and none of these four possibilities explains what you're seeing on the 01:58:45 screen so what do you do there it's not that you've reached the conclusion that everything is wrong is that you uh throw away the presupposition what was the presupposition that the particle 01:58:56 is somewhere so this straightforward use of logic it seems to me that i don't see any [Music] weird logic going on there yeah 01:59:08 you also throw away the the notion of a particle then if particles are that which have to be somewhere no you throw away the doctor there is an intrinsic reality that's what nagarjuna does if you continue doing that then you throw away 01:59:22 everything i i don't agree with uh personally if you ask me i agree that there is no interesting reality um [Music] in the sense that whenever you assume 01:59:37 such a thing you're going to fall into contradictions

      This question regards the use of logic by Nagarjuna in his tetralemma and parallels in quantum mechanics.

      Jay L. Garfield has some interesting and insightful observations about how Nagarjuna's logic works, and it relates to the different types of experiences where such statements could make sense.

      https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FHRuOEfnqV6g%2F&group=world

    2. we cannot have a discussion about reality unless it's it's it's it's a discussion there's courses involved 01:35:20 but all the discussions i didn't know about reality um as far as i know happened um through sounds or writing in which atoms were 01:35:32 moving so we cannot have a discussion without atoms right um and so on i could i could so then atoms are fundamental no uh 01:35:44 the fact that something is it's it's part of our discussion about this doesn't mean that uh it's primary with respect to the rest i think we have to take this that's my that's my own personal um 01:35:56 view of that so of course we talk about uh from today from within our consciousness of course and of course we have information about reality from within our senses and of course we talk in 01:36:08 english we talk in tibetan we talk in pali but that's not because english tibetan empire consciousness or atoms are a necessary starting point for understanding the rest i think it's uh 01:36:20 that's exactly the uh the the uh what i read in a gardener's uh uh uh chapter about the self um 01:36:33 it's uh we recognize his dependence uh of of i i would i would say levels of the pieces of the story one respect to the other one 01:36:45 and uh uh but also at a clear at a clear logical analysis this is what nagajuna does none of this stands up as primary with 01:36:57 respect to the other that's my reading uh professor halcyas georgios my dear friend and colleague um i agree with you when we talk about reality we are we are talking not about 01:37:13 reality uh we're talking about reality it's not reality and that is not the reality of the uh of nagarjuna nevertheless it's very useful because 01:37:35 without this conventional reality of words and concepts that are correct in understanding nagarjuna without that it's very difficult for us to have that experience that non-conceptual experience of reality so you know 01:37:49 there's a kind of a metaphor that's used is you you know you take a boat and you cross the river and then uh you leave the boat or the other analogy is you you're out in the forest and it gets cold and you 01:38:02 take two sticks and you rub them together and with a friction you get fire and the fire then burns the sticks so the sticks are conceptuality as was the boat that got you across the 01:38:14 river not any conceptuality but very clear understanding of nagarjuna and of course the buddha his discussion on on the buddhist wisdom

      The answer to the question given does not feel satisfactory. The question appears to be a variant of the "If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear". Does reality have an objective, autonomous existence? In other words, the question asks: does objective reality exist?

    3. i think we must bear in mind that any any sort of verbalization about reality um is dependent on consciousness it's not possible to have a discussion about what is real 01:33:02 and not have consciousness in the discussion uh especially when we are to verbalize it i mean of course any reality that is independent of consciousness is not dependent on consciousness 01:33:15 is beyond verbalization and i think the buddhist position is very clear on that and i think arjuna if i read him correctly it's very clear that the when it comes to the ultimate reality to um 01:33:28 it's something that actually we cannot talk about and basically all discussion all this course is very much uh within the level of conventional the conventional real 01:33:42 uh so this is a very interesting i think um a point that i wanted to make that i think i can also raise it as a point for the two of you to respond uh from your respective uh 01:33:54 perspectives um because if consciousness from my understanding is primary to this discussion of what is real uh and if consciousness does not inherently exist 01:34:07 right well at least i mean barry also talked about the different kinds of minds um then how does all this discussion about 01:34:20 what is real what kind of claims can we ultimately make about what is reality now i think i have a feeling that carlos comes from a different perspective 01:34:31 then barry in answering that question so i'd like to really point to this question about can we make any claims about reality and if so based on what 01:34:44 from your respective disciplines so that's my um my question and comments

      The question raised here is how can we talk about ultimate reality unless consciousness is involved? All discussions about ultimate reality must, as Nagarjuna pointes out must take place within conventional reality.

      Perhaps a shorter question is this: Does objective reality exist?

    4. let me make a few comments if i may about time from nagarjuna's perspective there is no 01:25:52 time i don't think i can be more brief and how does he support that he says well when you're in the present moment there's no past and there's no future 01:26:06 if you dissect the present moment even to a more granular present moment some of that's going to be passed some of that's going to be yet to come and then you have even a finer more 01:26:18 granular present moment if you keep going on with that granularity you end up having no time you have no past no future and no presence so that's kind of in a nutshell some of the arguments or 01:26:32 logic that knock arjuna nagarjuna uses to establish no time now of course what he means is there's no absolute time there's no time on a some there's no essence of time um there is you know 01:26:46 time from the perspective of of of conventionality um cause and effect is reciprocal so when we have a cause we have an effect or we know there's 01:26:59 going to be an effect but also from the point of view of the effect the result we know that there must have been a cause so this reciprocality is something unique to the highest 01:27:10 school of prasannika majamaka uh within the fourth highest school of majamaca i just wanted to mention that to to round out one of our previous discussions

      Barry points out Nagarjuna's analysis of time leads to the conclusion that there is no absolute present, past or future.

      It is difficult to fathom the full import of what this means. If time exists conventionally but not absolutely, what are the implications of this?

      Also, there are Buddhist arguments that hold that there is no causality because A and B are different, how could A ever cause B? This has not been discussed here yet.

    5. i was particularly struck by the fact that barry didn't say the mind is this this and that okay barry said well the mind is many things 01:19:18 uh look there's this and this this and this and there's a sort of layers also in some sense in which we can talk about it or or have some understanding partial media 01:19:30 understanding about it some wisdom about it and this layering i find it it's uh absolutely brilliant from my perspective 01:19:43 uh because it it dissolves the wrong question which is what is the mind period what is the thing which is the mind here is the thing which is mine uh let's just 01:19:55 define it characterize it and understand what it is that's a wrong that's a wrong way of thinking about it it's when we say when we think about our mind of course we think something you you unite somehow 01:20:09 it's the set of processes that happen into me and it's about my thinking my emotions but it's not one thing it's a complicated layer there's many layers of discussion possible about 01:20:21 that i don't want to enter into the specific but i found this fascinating and let me go to time immediately because uh it's it's deeply related i got the book of time which is a um 01:20:34 the audio of time in which i carlo this carlo is very timely because we're also kind of running low on time absolutely absolutely 01:20:46 and and and in the book i sort of uh try to collect everything we have learned about time from science from special activity from generative statistical mechanics from other pieces and and what we 01:21:00 tentatively uh learn about time with quantum gravity which is my uh specific field once again you have to sort of uh put your hands on the notion of time and the main message of the book 01:21:12 in fact the single message of the book is that the question of what is time is a wrong question because when we think about time we think about the single thing okay we think we have a totally clear idea about time time is a single thing 01:21:25 that flows from the past to the future and the past influence the president the president of the future in the present this is how things are the reality of the present entire universe is a real state in that and we learn from science that this way 01:21:37 of viewing times is wrong it's factually wrong okay it's not true that uh we all proceed in in in together from 01:21:48 moment a to moment b and the amount lapse amount of time lapses between a and b is the same for everybody and so on and forth because we learned from from experiences especially activity generativity statistical mechanics and 01:22:01 other things so the way to think about time is that it's a very layered thing but with this thing we call time is made by layers um conceptually and when we look at larger 01:22:14 domain the one of our usual experience some layers are lost so uh some aspects some some properties of what we call time are only good 01:22:25 uh are only appropriate for describing the temporal experience we have if we don't move too fast it doesn't look too uh to to to too far away if you don't look at the atoms too in detail as a single 01:22:38 degrees of freedom and so on so forth so the notion of time opens up in a in a in a set of layers which are become increasingly 01:22:53 uh general only if you go down to the bottom level um some aspect of time like the universality of time uh uh only makes sense if if we don't go too 01:23:06 fast velocities for instance um so this is a similarity and that's why the the opening up of what the mind is into layers seems to be uh 01:23:19 the right direction to go right when if if i ask uh does a cat has a mind or does a fly has a mind it seems to me that the only answer is uh to get out of the idea that the 01:23:31 answer is either yes or no i mean i i suppose that certainly a cat has a certain you know a sleepy feeling in the morning and the moment of 01:23:43 joy when he sees his fellow cats but i suppose a cat doesn't go through a complicated intellectual game of trying to understanding what is reality and debating about that so there is some aspect in common uh either not break up 01:23:56 this this notion in in pieces once again uh i mean the the topic is what is real uh 01:24:08 if we start by saying time is real it's a beautiful chapter why you cannot say that time is an intrinsic existence uh we just get it wrong if we think well then atoms are real or the mind is real 01:24:21 all these answers we got it wrong we can say that things are real in a uh in a conventional sense within a context within a within a um 01:24:37 and and then we when we try to realize what you mean by uh something is real this is certainly real in a conventional sense but we realize that um reality the reality of this object 01:24:49 itself it gets sort of broken up into interdependence between this object and else and its different layers 01:25:02 and and that's the reality that as a scientist i can deal with not the ultimate reality the the conventional reality of course conventional reality is real as uh perry 01:25:15 was saying this is not a negation of reality uh it's a it's a it it's a freedom from the idea of the ultimate reality uh 01:25:27 the ultimate uh sort of intrinsic inherent reality being there on which in terms of which building progress

      Carlo resonates with Barry's layered explanation of mind from the Buddhist perspective. The mind is not some simplistic entity. Carlo wrote a book on time and he applied this same layered thinking. Time is different in different circumstances. It acts one way at the quantum level, another at the microscopic, another at our human level, and another at the galactic level.

      In a sense, we tend to make the same type of category errors whether it is our experience of time, space or experience in general. We overgeneralize from an anthropomorphic perspective. A large part of Jay L. Garfield's argument of cognitive illusions and immediacy of experience rests on this fact.

      https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FHRuOEfnqV6g%2F&group=world

      Opaque mechanisms operate in both our sense organs and our mental machinery to give us this illusory feeling of immediacy of the sensed or cognized object.

      Uexkull's umwelt experiments on the snail as explained by Cummins are consistent with Carlo's perspective on time.

      https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FG_0jJfliUvQ%2F&group=world

    6. when we die we go through eight stages according to the buddhist understanding and each of those stages the first four the elements the sort of solidity if you will i we know they're 01:16:07 not solid but from a conventional perspective the solidity elements the liquidity elements the thermodynamic elements the movement the kinetic elements those all dissolve as we die in 01:16:19 the first four and when that fourth one happens there's no more circulation of blood or of air so we don't breathe we have no circulatory you know blood pressure so we're declared clinically dead but 01:16:30 there's four more stages we go through and those are when the mind becomes successively subtler and those are when we get into the non-dual minds that are the most subtle minds and the last 01:16:43 eighth stage it's called worser in tibetan and we translate that as luminosity or clear light it's not light it's not you know but it's the most utter clear clear mind 01:16:57 and that mind if it goes on if we don't die if we meditate on that luminosity and sustain it through our meditation infinitely we can become a buddha and that's why the buddha is 01:17:09 sometimes called a buddhism an enlightened buddha is a deathless state because you don't actually die so those would be the non-conceptual and non-dual minds and just for completeness 01:17:23 those last four minds are called these are technical terms so it won't make much it won't have much give you much understanding white appearance red increase black near attainment and then this worst air this 01:17:35 luminosity so that's kind of the the the road map if you will for for mine and it's not the brain now on the gross level of thinking in our sensory minds there's a very close 01:17:48 connection with you know meant with the brain okay but when you die the brain is supposed to be dead and you're still alive okay and so these more subtle minds 01:18:01 are not related actually to the brain so we could really say that mind is experience it's awareness it's knowing not knowing something but 01:18:12 the act of knowing so the qualities of mind the most important qualities are awareness and clarity so that gives you just some rough idea of the buddhist understanding of mind or consciousness

      Barry gives an explanation of the different levels of mind as the body undergoes death, and particularly, the last 4 of 8 progressively subtler states of mind that are nondual, and therefore, not considered as part of the brain.

    7. for example i'm talking so my primary mind now is going 01:14:37 to be an auditory mind okay and then there's going to be a whole constellation of next secondary ones which are basically positive and negative or harmful uh positive non-harmful and harmful uh 01:14:51 qualities or attributes or emotions or thoughts or attitudes and then the next moment i'm looking at my screen so i have a visual mind and the constellation will change you know some of those 01:15:04 positive and negative qualities like i'm feeling a little sleepy or i'm very alert or i'm feeling jealous or i'm feeling very happy and connected you know with this 01:15:16 conversation those would be part of the secondary minds and then you know you have this infinite continuum everyone every living being every as you rightfully said sentient beings a living 01:15:26 being with a mind carlo um has um its own mental continuum um so it involves it's a big picture of mind it involves you know our 01:15:40 our thinking it involves our intellect it involves our heart feelings emotions uh and it involves those deeper levels in that sixth primary mind mental consciousness such as intuition and 01:15:53 deeper minds

      Barry's explanation surfaces an association in my own mind - the Stop Reset Go / Deep Humanity definition of sensory, affective and cognitive bubbles as sensory, affective and cognitive constraints of consciousness. It also brings up the association with Jakob Von Uexkull's Umwelt concept, which defines the sensory environment of an individual belonging to a species.

      https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FG_0jJfliUvQ%2F&group=world

      and Jay L. Garfield's talk on cognitive illusions and Buddhist philosophical concept of immediacy of experience

      https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FHRuOEfnqV6g%2F&group=world

    8. the question you were asking was what is mind or consciousness so here we're using the words synonymously um and from a buddhist perspective uh there are 01:11:50 six what we call primary minds and then there's a whole slew of secondary minds and some of the more common systems include 51 in the secondary minds now please understand that mind like 01:12:04 everything else that exists in the world doesn't exist permanently it exists there are a few exceptions okay but essentially everything that exists in the world um is not permanent therefore 01:12:18 it's changing moment to moment therefore everything exists as a continuum including mind so that means there'll be a moment of mind followed by a next moment of mind etc 01:12:31 and the next moment of mind is determined primarily but not solely by the previous moment of mind so from that we can extrapolate a continuum an infinite continuum and mind is an 01:12:43 infinite continuum from perspective of buddhism and that means that we've had that implies suggests rebirth and it suggests we've had ultimate we've had infinite rebirths there's been no beginning 01:12:56 and so this then comes up again with the notion of a beginning creator if you will a so-called you know god there are some some problems here to resolve this um 01:13:07 and so mind is a continuum it's infinite now each moment of mind is made up of a primary mind and a constellation of secondary minds these six primary or the five as you read from nagarjuna the five 01:13:22 sensory minds of seeing hearing smelling tasting touching tactile right these five plus what's sometimes called the mental consciousness and that has live different levels of subtlety on the 01:13:34 grossest level is thinking if we go a little bit deeper a little bit more so little subtler we have dream mind which seems like these senses are active but actually 01:13:46 when we're sleeping the senses are inactive so it's just something coming from our sixth or mental consciousness it seems like the senses are active in dream mind that dream mind is a little more subtle than a wake mind awake 01:13:59 thinking mind and then if we go more subtle we're talking now again about awake mind we we talk about intuition when we're in intuition we're not thinking right it's a non-conceptual 01:14:11 mind uh in that sense and deeper yet our minds we call non-conceptual and non-dual where there's no awareness of a subject or an object so subject object non-duality so 01:14:25 that's kind of the rough sort of you know lay of the land

      Barry provides a brief summary of what the word "mind" means from a Buddhist philosophy perspective and says that there are six primary minds and 51 secondary minds.

      The 6 primary minds are the 5 senses plus mental consciousness, which itself consists of the coarse thinking (conceptual) mind, the intuitive mind (these two could be roughly mapped to Daniel Kahnaman's fast and slow system respectively), as well as the dreaming mind.

      Barry also conveys an interpretation of reincarnation based on the concept that the mind is never the same from one moment to the next, but is rather an ever changing continuum. The current experience of mind is GENERALLY most strongly influenced by the previous moments but also influenced by temporally distant memories. This above interpretation of reincarnation makes sense, as the consciousness is born anew in every moment. It is also aligned to the nature of the Indyweb interpersonal computing ecosystem, in which access to one's own private data store, the so-called Indyhub, allows one to experience the flow of consciousness by seeing how one's digital experience, which is quite significant today, affects learning on a moment to moment basis. In other words, we can see, on a granular level, how one idea, feeling or experience influences another idea, experience or feeling.

    9. there's a crucial distinction between what barney called three and four that's what uh captured me so 01:08:55 if you take the mind as fundamental as existing the only existing thing where where the the movie of the world is reflected into i am not happy 01:09:08 my my culture uh rejects then as a useless point of view to do science that's what but there is an alternative much more interesting and i find much more 01:09:21 deep in which which i read in a garage you know which is what uh barry seems to be is calling the fourth alternative in which the mind is not the fundamental thing in which everything is it's 01:09:32 reflected it's just one part of this uh uh uh interdependence now namely it's not the things that not intrinsic existence but mind has intrinsic existence that's not the 01:09:45 the the there's a more interesting answer namely that mind itself has no intrinsic uh uh existence uh and so it's just uh uh 01:09:57 it has an existence but is is it of course it's an existence my mind exists and i exist but uh and and and and if i think in terms of groups to say i mean all sentience being or all 01:10:10 human beings whatever um together uh which is an ideal also some some some some western philosophy that you know um it's collectively that through language and 01:10:22 that would create a vision of the world but i want to think of this as one aspect of the ensemble of things which is existence where uh uh nothing of that has um 01:10:36 uh has intrinsic existence so i want to think about my mind it's my brain my sensation my all my my my love people loving me the the image that people have of me my instead of the set 01:10:48 of processes uh uh which part of the world and it seems to me that the belgian allows me to think at me as part of the world at the same sense of the same ground as the world being 01:11:01 reflected in my consciousness without having to choose one of the two perspective to be the true one the intrinsic existence um 01:11:12 all all perspectives are uh uh empty they're all good but they are um they are not the the one on which the rest is ground they 01:11:24 each of one i can understand dependently on something else so marios you read a a verse or two from the third chapter of nagarjuna and uh let me comment on that

      Carlo points out the view he now holds, influenced by Nagarjuna's philosophy, that the mind exists, but does not intrinsically exist.

      So he argues on one (conventional) level, his mind and all other minds exist.

      Agreeing with Barry's fourth suggested alternative. The mind is not the fundamental thing, but is just ONE PART of this interdependency. Each view, whether of any human or even non-human is empty but conventional exists in interdependence of many causes and conditions.

      From Stop Reset Go perspective and the Indyweb, a web3 technology that can embody each indivdiual's perspectival knowing through the establishment of their the individuals unique and privately owned data repository can enhance the discovery of the process of emptiness. How? By theoretically having all one's (digital) interactions of the world, one can begin to see in granular detail how one learns about the world and begin to sense the flow of the mind. Through repeated use of the Indyweb and witnessing how one forms new ideas or reforms old ones, the indyvidual becomes increasingly aware of oneself as a process, not a thing. Furthermore, one begins to see self knowledge as hopelessly entangled with cultural and social learning. One begins to sense the 4Ps of propositional, perspectival, participatory and procedural learning, also entangled with each other and with individual/social learning.

      https://docdrop.org/video/Gyx5tyFttfA/#annotations:vkOUgv8rEeypE39kg2ckCw https://hyp.is/go?

      Quick John Varvaeke interview on 4P: url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FERdJDVdbkcY%2F&group=world

      One especially begins to sense perspectival knowing and situatedness and that causes and conditions unique to one's own worldview constructs one's relative reality.

    10. let me comment on your quantum physics i have only one objection please i think it's uh uh it's 01:01:21 what you said about the two uh sort of prototypical uh quantum puzzles which is schrodinger the double slit experiment uh it's uh it's perfect um my only objection is that in my book 01:01:34 i described of course i had a chapter about schrodinger cat but i don't use a situation in which the cat is dead or alive 01:01:46 i prefer a situation in which the cat is asleep or awake just because i don't like killing cats even in in in in mental experiments so after that 01:01:58 uh uh replacing a sleep cut with a dead cat i think uh i i i i completely agree and let me come to the the serious part of the answer um 01:02:10 what you mentioned as the passage from uh the third and the fourth um between among the the sort of the versions of 01:02:25 wooden philosophy it's it's exactly what i what i think is relevant for quantum mechanics for this for the following reason we read in quantum mechanics books 01:02:37 that um we should not think about the mechanical description of reality but the description reality with respect to the observer and there is always this notion in in books that there's observer or there are 01:02:50 paratus that measure so it's a uh but i am a scientist which view the world from the perspective of 01:03:02 modern science where one way of viewing the world is that uh there are uh you know uh billions and billions of galaxies each one with billions and billions of 01:03:14 of of of stars probably with planets all around and uh um from that perspective the observer in any quantum mechanical experiment is just one piece in the big story 01:03:28 so i have found the uh berkeley subjective idealism um uh profoundly unconvincing from the point 01:03:39 of view of a scientist uh because it there is an aspect of naturalism which uh it's a in which i i i grew up as a scientist 01:03:52 which refuses to say that to understand quantum mechanics we have to bring in our mind quantum mechanics is not something that has directly to do with our mind has not 01:04:05 something directly to do about any observer any apparatus because we use quantum mechanics for describing uh what happened inside the sun the the the reaction the nuclear reaction there or 01:04:18 galaxy formations so i think quantum mechanics in a way i think quantum mechanics is experiments about not about psychology not about our mind not about consciousness not 01:04:32 about anything like that it has to do about the world my question what we mean by real world that's fine because science repeatedly was forced to change its own ideas about the 01:04:46 real world so if uh if to make sense of quantum mechanics i have to think that the cat is awake or asleep only when a conscious observer our mind 01:05:00 interacts with this uh i say no that's not there are interpretations of quantum mechanics that go in that direction they require either am i correct to say the copenhagen 01:05:14 school does copenhagen school uh talk about the observer without saying who is what is observed but the compelling school which is the way most 01:05:27 textbooks are written uh describe any quantum mechanical situation in terms okay there is an observer making a measurement and we're talking about the outcome of the measurements 01:05:39 so yes it's uh it assumes an observer but it's very vague about what what an observer is some more sharp interpretation like cubism uh take this notion observer to be real 01:05:54 fundamental it's an agent somebody who makes who thinks about and can compute the future so it's a it's a that's that's a starting point for for doing uh for doing the rest i was 01:06:07 i've always been unhappy with that because things happen on the sun when there is nobody that is an observer in anything and i want to think to have a way of thinking in the world that things happen there 01:06:20 independently of me so to say is they might depend on one another but why should they depend on me and who am i or you know what observers should be a you know a white western scientist with 01:06:32 a phd i mean should we include women should we include people without phd should we include cats is the cat an observer should we fly i mean it's just not something i understand

      Carlo goes on to address the fundamental question which lay at the intersection of quantum mechanics and Buddhist philosophy: If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear? Carlo rejects Berkeley's idealism and states that even quantum mechanical laws are about the behavior of a system, independent of whether an observer is present. He begins to invoke his version of the Schrödinger cat paraodox to explain.

    11. i just wanted to interject that uh could i come at this point carlo i would like to insist a bit on this because i'm i'm not quite clear 01:07:22 on whether you are agreeing or not on the question of the mind um thank you this is also i wanted to ask him the same question mario uh so by just raise the question 01:07:40 specifically all right so let me okay since we're talking about nagarjuna now i would also like to uh read some simple verses that he has and get from both from barry and you what do you 01:07:53 think so this is from chapter three examination of the sentences seeing hearing smelling tasting touching and mind are the six sense faculties their 01:08:04 spheres are the visible objects etc like the scene the herd the smell that tasted and the touched the hair sound etc and consciousness should be understood so actually i'm confused from both of 01:08:18 you first of all barry is the mind anything special in buddhist philosophy or is it just like seeing and hearing and carlo are you saying there is anything 01:08:31 special about them right

      Mario interjects in the conversation to clarify Barry's question to Carlo, which is concerning the subjective aspect of experience and how it fits into science as the observer. It comes down the the question of existence of reality and the obrserver's role in that, epitomized in the question: If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?

    12. but before we do that let me talk about something that's even more fundamental um and helps us to understand the progression of thinking through those four schools to the what's 00:42:10 usually considered the most sophisticated in my jamaica school um and that is the distinction which is really important between existence and intrinsic existence 00:42:23 and the ex and the distinction between no existence and no intrinsic existence so this is these distinctions um if one doesn't fully comprehend the the 00:42:37 majamika system uh not fully comprehend but have some idea of the of the uh my jamaica system one then usually make is not able to make these distinctions so 00:42:49 let's talk about them for a moment um so existence um we when we talk about existence we talk about our ordinary understanding of what's real okay that things are 00:43:03 objects uh things are you know they may be in relationship but what's in relationship are two different distinct objects or entities that are in relationship and that's kind of our normal understanding of existence 00:43:15 so lacking inherent existence or intrinsic existence begs the issue to understand what is intrinsic existence okay and that's the 00:43:27 object of negation for the buddha for nagarjuna and for all those following in this tradition of nagarjuna the uh the majamika school and so 00:43:39 that's not so easy to wrap our heads around uh what is intrinsic existence in a way it's so close that we miss it you know it's it's a little bit like you know 00:43:51 staying in a in a new hotel room in a new city waking up and looking for your glasses and you can't find them and then realizing that they're already on your faces and so 00:44:05 intrinsic existence is things existing independently things existing uh through relationship um things not not things existing dependently not in independently 00:44:19 and so if we look at dependence now we can look at that at several levels and the more obvious levels you've mentioned that carlo is cause and effect causality okay but there are also more uh 00:44:33 subtle levels of dependence that the buddha and nagarjuna talk about and are real central to the philosophy so the second level is the relationship between whole and parts and parts to whole it 00:44:46 goes both ways okay that's a a a little bit you know another level if you will of of dependence uh in the particularly you know highlighted by nagarjuna and 00:44:58 then the third level which is the most uh subtle level the subtlest level which is really what we have to start to understand because the opposite of that is this independent or intrinsic 00:45:10 existence okay so this third level we call dependence through designation or sometimes called dependent designation but it's dependence through designation 00:45:22 it's a type of naming or labeling so for example barry we label or name barry my parents gave this name to barry based on a body 00:45:34 okay maybe a little tiny infant body at that time right and also uh in terms of maybe some kind of behaviors or you know how they thought this emotional structure is for this little baby right 00:45:47 he's very calm or he's very you know he's acts out a lot he's very active or you know all those things so upon all that a name is placed in this case barry okay 00:45:59 so that relationship of you know dependence through designation is really what nagarjuna is talking about when we talk about dependence um and so that's very uh 00:46:11 important to understand so the opposite of that coming back to understanding this inherent or intrinsic existence there are many words in english we use synonymous for 00:46:23 ranging not existing intrinsically or inherently or independently or from its own side those are all synonyms um to the tibetan 00:46:36 terminology that i just mentioned um so when people don't have a good appreciation for intrinsic existence and you say then so the second there were two comparisons 00:46:53 the second comparison is uh non-existence and not inherently existent so when when when when regarding says no inherent existence what often people interpret is no 00:47:07 existence at all and they fall into a nihilism that nothing exists at all so they haven't fully under appreciated this notion of um intrinsic existence so they're throwing the baby out with the 00:47:20 bathwater right when we're throwing out or negating uh intrinsic existence that they don't quite understand what that really means they think it's all of existence and therefore they you know think that nothing exists they throw the 00:47:33 baby out with a backlog so that's that's okay can i interject something before you go ahead and you you you promised us before uh the full schools before uh but but can i 00:47:44 can i make a comment here um of course about you to say because this is free flow so yeah yeah so we you know we gave the title uh 00:47:56 what is real to this uh to this i that seems to me um that's exactly that distinction that that you you made between existence 00:48:09 and intrinsic existence um inherent existence it's a it it's it's uh it's idea that that i found central and and and 00:48:22 essentially essentially useful for me for for the following reason first of all um i mean the notion of reality the notion of existence here are close i mean what what exists is what is real what is that i want to say a couple of things one is 00:48:40 that um we make a distinction with an illusory and real in our everyday life uh which it's well founded i mean if i if i see 00:48:53 the chair and there's a mirror there and i see a chair of the other side of the mirror there's a precise sense in which the chair in which the other side of the mirror is not real well this chair is real 00:49:06 um this distinction has a meaning because i can sit on the chair i can touch that one but i cannot sit on that and touch that one but 00:49:18 then we realize that some aspects of what is illusory in the chair in the mirror also are shared by the chair which i just called real which is also illusory in 00:49:31 some other sets um for instance uh the fact of being a chair uh it's uh cut out and back on so i missed you up until now please could you repeat it oh 00:49:44 uh for where for where did you be speak uh when you were saying this distinction between existence and inherent existence and non-existence non-inheritances is 00:49:56 very helpful uh and then after that i lost you yeah i wanted to um make a couple points one is that uh we use a distinction between illusory and real in everyday life for instance we say that 00:50:10 a chair but then i was saying of course then um through science uh we realized that there are illusory aspects in the chair which are just called real as well 00:50:30 but then one is tempted and that's um to say all right so there are many luxury aspects of that chair but there is a a more fundamental level in which uh 00:50:45 there is a description of what is going on there which is a real one and edinton uh made it very very vividly in a well-known uh distinction between the scientific table 00:50:57 and the everyday table when he says look i have two images two tables there there's a table of which i eat which is solid and then there's a table which i view with my scientific eyes which is made by atoms 00:51:09 uh and is not solid there's a lot of emptiness of of not emptiness negatives empty completely different sense i i've heard that that emptiness is 99.9 to the 12th 00:51:20 power based in the atom is that right yes yes but that's of course not negative emptiness that's just the lack of presence of atoms yeah um and adidas says and people use that 00:51:34 by saying the the the the chair of my uh the chairman which i see the solitude is illusory the real chair is the atoms uh this way of using the notion of real and the 00:51:49 notion of um of uh existence so what exists in the atoms uh is dangerously misleading that's what 00:52:01 i uh because uh it uh um it pushes us to try to resolve the relational and illusory aspect of reality that we see 00:52:15 in terms of some basic fundamental physical reality from which to derive it or in western subjective idealism 00:52:28 in terms and its derivation in terms of some sort of uh fundamental mind or fundamental subject which is a real existing entity 00:52:41 the cartesian mind that is certain of existing itself um or the kantian subject or even the the the fundamentality of the perception 00:52:53 itself in whosoever uh and in phenomenology so there is this western need to anchor um the uh what we mean by real or something final 00:53:07 so uh to to realize that there is dependence but then there is some basic grounds on which everything builds up on which to uh on which to sit and this is what i take emptiness 00:53:23 the notion of empty negative notion of emptiness to be useful uh to to get rid of this urge of finding beyond the uh 00:53:35 the illusory aspect of the world a a basic level which is not um uh real in in in the uh 00:53:47 in the sense of uh uh of of uh uh in which this chair is is real compared to the uh to the chair uh in the mirror but but really the fundamental way so the the the bottom line of the story the 00:54:02 the solid terrain on which to anchor the ultimate um uh uh the end point of the line of dependence the line of dependence ends to some point that's what is real 00:54:15 and and what is this nagarjuna is that that's the wrong question i mean uh it's not only that the chair the table is empty because i can understand it's something else but it's 00:54:26 also that something else is also empty because i can understand it's something else until the point in which there is this emptiness itself it's a it's empty because we shouldn't take it as a 00:54:40 as a fundamental sort of metaphysical principle on which to ground all the rest so this putting this this is yeah just putting this in slightly different 00:54:51 terminology emptiness is where it allows functionality emptiness is the lack of any kind of essence even on a you know atomic level and i agree with you what you said 00:55:04 that's i think very true um right and this is a look at when we look at the chair versus the reflection of the chair in the mirror it gets a little more complicated because both of them of course lack any 00:55:17 independent existence both okay they're both empty uh in terms of shunyata having said that the metaphor that the buddha used he gave about 10 different 00:55:29 metaphors for you know something to be illusory and one of the important ones that he used was reflection you know he used the reflection of the moon or the full moon in in the still 00:55:41 water that it looks like the moon but in fact of course it's not it's a reflection he used such things as water in a mirage sound of an echo and you know things 00:55:55 like that to illustrate okay now um let me mention two experiments if i may and you correct me where i'm wrong i'm a 00:56:07 pop physicist from the new york times okay um and one is the uh the thought experiment of ed edwin schroedinger okay the so-called shorting her cat paradox 00:56:21 or thought experiment and you have double steel box in which you have a cat there's no doors no windows right and you have a vial of very powerful acid that's 00:56:33 connected to a radioisotope the half-life of the isotope is the same duration as the duration of your experiment your thought experiment so the chance of the cat so if the radioactive material 00:56:46 decays 50 chance it you know somehow pulls a lever and the acid spills killing the cat if that radioisotope does not decay there's no spillage of the of the 00:56:59 of the acid and the cat remains alive so quantum physicists call this superposition where the cat is both alive and dead when you crack open this steel box 00:57:13 then um you observe what's inside and then the cat is either dead if the radio isotope you know decayed and knocked over the acid or 00:57:25 it's alive it didn't okay and it's it's either or whereas when you can't observe it it's both it's superposition okay second is the double slit you know you you shoot these electrons or photons you 00:57:40 know through two slits in a metal thing and then you have a screen behind and you look at the the pattern and if you have a little camera observation device at the slit level of the slits observing 00:57:52 you find a pattern below on the back on the screen that suggests what passed through the splits were particles whereas if you remove the observation device you have an interference pattern 00:58:05 suggesting what went through this list were waves okay so these two experiments at least in my very uh you know superficial understanding tell us that observer dependence is very 00:58:18 important in terms of reality okay that whether or not there is or isn't or or maybe you can what type of observer you know presence there is very much influences and determines what's real 00:58:31 and so that then uh jumps into the four you know buddhist schools of philosophy and if we go from the so-called least sophisticated up the third one would be the one you alluded to that's somewhat 00:58:45 similar to bishop barkley in the west and other idealists that say that everything is consciousness everything is mine and things that seem to be solid out there in an external reality are nothing more than projections of our 00:58:58 mind and that's actually a very sophisticated philosophy it's a very sophisticated philosophy one of the things it starts to do is it breaks down this notion of a solid external reality 00:59:10 okay but it's con it's it's critique as you have you also mentioned is that it takes the mind you know to be somehow you know uh absolute or ultimate you 00:59:22 know existing and so then the highest if you will most sophisticated school of mediumica says well what the chidoma modulus the mind-only school says that's correct up to a point but the criticism is 00:59:36 there's no uh you know absoluteness about the mind either so then you end up with that you accept an external reality you accept a mind but both you know that is every existent thing uh exists 00:59:49 without having any uh exist in relationship without having any independence or objectivity um and so that's very roughly the at least the the the last two of the three buddhist schools the 01:00:03 third one is divided again into prasannika madhyamaka and spatrontikamanjamaka using tibetan terms that are borrowing from the sanskrit um and the prasangika mud yamaka is considered the most 01:00:16 sophisticated where nothing at all has intrinsic existence the whereas the uh svaltronticom and yamaka they say that some uh conventional reality does exist uh 01:00:30 from its own side having some essence uh so there's a little bit of a distinction in the debate there um so just wanted to to mention those things i'd like you to comment

      Kerzin differentiates between existence and intrinsic existence. Intrinsic existence is what the Buddha and what Nagarjuna is trying to negate.

      Rovelli makes a good point about a prevalent attitude that science offers a truer perspective than common sense, while Nagarjuna is pointing out that even the scientific explanation is not the final one. For one thing, it implicitly depends on the existence of a reified self who is the ultimate solidified existing agent and final authority, which Nagarjuna negates with his tetralemma.

    13. you're quite unique there are maybe a few quantum physics physicists that have interest and you know but few that i think have really read nagarjuna particularly from the 00:41:08 beginning to the end of his uh you know opus magnus is his major treatise of the six we have all of those actually translated into english and you know some of them will deal more with the 00:41:20 compassion side also um so i applaud you for that

      Rovelli thus is one of the few quantum physicists to have dived so deeply into Nagarjuna's work to understand its ramifications for science, and in particular his own field.

    14. et me put it one thing do you think that uh uh it's there's anything wrong let's put it bluntly this way in in in in trying to take that from the 00:37:55 godzilla and and uh letting the thing letting this a bit of wisdom small bit of wisdom that i can get out of it uh influence the 00:38:07 rest but uh using it directly because i think that that's my that's what i think is my contribution somehow uh look there is in this uh 00:38:19 in this large uh aspect of midfield there is a there's a part of it which is definitely very relevant uh for modern physics that could be used for it and 00:38:30 um uh and from modern philosophy and you know the people in modern philosophy the people in cambridge the people in the us um not only garfield but 00:38:42 west of the others who who who are using uh a idea from the guardian in the philosophical context 00:38:57 i i think this is dialogue and i don't know if i don't know if anything could be useful in the other direction in a sense but it's uh you know i think culture is a dialogue it's a dialogue in which uh 00:39:09 in which uh uh we keep learning from from else whether it's a tradition whether it's a different school whether it is nature itself because we interact whether there's us talking to one another this constant exchange 00:39:24 that in my opinion makes the beauty of of of of culture but also uh but also the that's how we learn that's how we know that how we change

      Rovelli is trying to articulate that his focus is in the Wisdom aspect and not so much the Ethics / Compassion aspect of Nagarjuna's results, and that it is relevant for science and philosophy.

    15. it works on on logic essentially and shows look if you if you take this entity as existence you get into a contradiction for this and this reason 00:36:31 and it slowly demolishes all the possible foundations of our thinking not only objects but also causation itself also time itself also the self 00:36:44 itself and so on and so forth one one by one um showing that uh thinking that they are foundational they're they're they have intrinsic existence uh doesn't doesn't hold

      Nagarjuna uses his tetralema to deconstruct logical arguments of thinking, existence of self, causation, time, intrinsic existence using logical arguments.j

      For other viewpoints of Nagarjuna's Tetralemma, visit:

      Judith Ragir discusses parallels between Dogen and Nagarjuna and employs Trungpha Rinpoche's Diamond Sliver diagram https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.judithragir.org%2F2017%2F08%2Fdogen-nagarjunas-tetralemma-6%2F&group=world Graham Priest's paper on the Catuskoti / Tetralemma technique https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbafybeifum5ioeus3y3hl4lqdwclgxpd6in4muleocuhsk3jev2rd7j3hpu.ipfs.dweb.link%2FThe-Logic-of-the-Catuskoti-by-G.-Priest.pdf&group=world

      Professor Peter Adamson:of King's College London on his "History of Philosophy without any Gaps" podcast series https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhistoryofphilosophy.net%2Fnagarjuna-tetralemma&group=world Here Peter interviews Nagarjuna expert, Jan Westerhoff of Oxford,in an insightful interview https://historyofphilosophy.net/nagarjuna-westerhoff

    1. embodied cognitive science has been greatly helped by an article written last year by elmo felton mined after ook school a foray into the world of ecological psychologists and an 00:23:44 activist this shows you how this work from the 1920s appears to contemporary embodied cognitive scientists and we're going to have the good luck that elmo will join us in class so we should have a very 00:23:58 productive discussion about the very strange world of jakob von ogsku

      Elmo Felton wrote a recent paper about Uexkull and the umwelt in the field of ecological psychology.

    2. he um belt has two sides to it which are not separable in german they're the merkveld and the virgvelt the merkwelt is the umvelt considered 00:19:24 from the aspects of semiotics or signs or meaningful stimuli things to differentiations one might draw distinctions one might draw that are available to one the virgvelt is the same thing 00:19:37 considered under a different aspect which is the space of possible effective actions to draw a distinction is now to move in knowledge of that distinction 00:19:49 this notion of the virgvelt will will appear later in ecological psychology with the notion of affordance and and again a concept that follows totally nails long before it appears in the literature 00:20:02 so when you hear umwelt try not to think entirely visually but to recognize that we we're dealing here with a concept which must be understood as a sort of a stereoscopic fusion 00:20:14 of the idea of meaningful appearance meaningful showing up and capacity for action because of the difficulties in disciplining this view of this emerging 00:20:28 view of the subject you won't find it easy to interpret vulnerability in terms of personal experience he vacillates here and our vocabulary is still not great here but the umvelt has 00:20:40 this important character of being neither a theory of perception or theory of action in keeping with all embodied theories later perception and action are absolutely indistinguishable but we can characterize them in this 00:20:53 with this dual aspect manner so when you encounter sketches like this he's full of bold imaginative sketches in his work

      Uexkull decomposes the umwelt into two parts: 1. merkwelt (signs) 2. wirkwelt (effective action)

      An organism must decipher salience from its experiences and then take action that will increase its fitness based on the salience detected.

    3. e's trying to begin to find the vocabulary to elaborate how we can speak of meaningful 00:17:53 being in the world without a subject there is no meaning his notion of the umvelt or the world as it arises for a specifically embodied organism 00:18:07 is not the same thing as environment he tries to make this distinction clear it's not entirely successful but here you can see he distinguishes on the left between what we might think of the environment of a honeybee which is a 00:18:20 field of flowers and on the right he's tried to draw the umvelt of the the field of flowers from i'm going to use this word from the point of view of the bee now it's unfortunate to have to use 00:18:33 visual metaphors there that's our language that's the way we talk about these things the processes are much more generic but we will inevitably use the language of vision when we're talking about such 00:18:44 things so he's tried fancifully to draw a meaningful umvelt as it might appear to a be we keep falling into this visual metaphor when we're when we talk about um subjectivities 00:18:59 we keep coming back to the notion of seeing which is most unfortunate when we discuss the umwelt you shouldn't think of something which the b see

      With the umwelt, Uexkull surfaces that meaning for an organism is depending on the embodiment, the perceptual and cognitive machinery of the organism.

      Each species of organisms experiences meaning in a way unique to that species.

      As a digression, each individual of a species experiences meaning uniquely as a function of the species it is a part of, as well as the unique lifeworld of events.

    4. read just a little quote from him now we might assume that an animal is nothing but a collection of perceptual and effector tools connected by an integrating apparatus 00:17:02 which though still a mechanism is yet fit to carry on life functions he's saying that you can build up a mechanistic picture of the functioning of the body in in that world 00:17:15 but he said this is indeed the position of all mechanistic theories whether their analogies are in terms of rigid mechanics or more plastic dynamics and one might mention pretty much all contemporary psychological theories 00:17:28 they brand animals as mere objects the proponents of such theories forget that from the first they have overlooked the most important thing the subject which uses the tools perceives and functions with their age

      A quote from Uexkull on how a subject is critical to the entire enterprise of knowing the world.

    5. if we've looked at the synthetic a priori of time he also addresses the synthetic a priori of 00:15:46 space and one very interesting distinction he draws is between animals who have semi-circular canals in their heads somewhere and animals which don't now we do fishes do 00:15:58 limpets don't for an animal with semicircular canals the word this the nature of space is to have right left up down forward backwards it's to be suspended or the 00:16:11 head to move through a volumetric space that we is so familiar with us we think of that as space as simply existing an animal not so endowed with no 00:16:24 semicircular canals encounters space in an entirely different way and he discusses how space arises for something like a limpet or a paramecium so he has taken the synthetic a prioris 00:16:36 of time and space and reconsidered them in a manner appropriate to the 1920s and 30s paying keen attention to the structures and processes of the body 00:16:48 this is work that we still need to do

      Uexkull also studies how animals synthetic apriori sense of space differ between species. Humans and other animals have semi-circular canals in the ear and this helps then determine forward/backwards, up/down and left/right of volumetric space. Limpets and paramecium do not have such a semi-circular canal and therefore do not sense "3 dimensional space" the way that we do.

    6. he's built a little toy he's built a treadmill for a snail isn't that wonderful he's a genuine scientist he's doing lots and lots of experiments with 00:11:27 animals they're very creative experiments in this case he's built a treadmill for a snail so the snail is held by a vice on a rotating ball and the snail is then um approached by 00:11:40 the investigator who chucks it under the chin like this and if you chuck the snail under the chin like this the snail will recoil not surprising i 00:11:52 would recall it as well but as you speed up the frequency of these chucks under the chin at about five hertz once you pass a frequency of about five chucks per second 00:12:05 the snail's behavior changes remarkably instead of being perturbed and trying to withdraw it tries to crawl onto onto something the qualitative nature of what's happening 00:12:18 to the snail has changed for the snail and its response or it's it's um sense making is altered and it's tried it perceives seems to perceive now a constant surface onto which it might 00:12:32 crawl now that might seem strange to you but i'll remind you that if we flash a light for you five times a second you'll see a light flashing and if we speed up the interval 00:12:44 then we shorten the interval between flashes to make them faster there comes a critical point at about 20 site flashes per second where you no longer perceive individual flashes but you 00:12:54 perceive a continuous light something like this underlies the magic that happens with moving pictures as well where you know that the action you see in the cinema is a bunch of projected still pictures 00:13:09 but they um have this character of continuous movement for you likewise in sound if we play that for you you hear a bunch of disconnected claps but if we shorten the 00:13:22 interval between the claps and speed it up there comes a point at which it changes into a continuous low pitch and that happens again about 20 hertz at about 20 cycles per second now for this snail 00:13:35 that border is at a different place it's at about five cycles per second what this shows is quite profound remember kant's synthetic a prioris 00:13:46 time for this snail is different than time for you the time that arises as a function of the body of the snail has this border at about five hertz where you have one at about 20 hertz 00:14:01 his basic insight is that worlds arise for snails that are not commensurable with worlds that arise for humans with which are not commensurable with worlds that arise for earthworms 00:14:15 the notion of an umvelt we get to determine a minute is used to describe this bodily specific arising of a world together with time and space 00:14:28 now i said it's rather weird to think of time being fundamentally different for an animal of a different constitution but i'll remind you that we can use our cinematic tricks to make ourselves aware of our own 00:14:41 limitations on the left there through high-speed photography we managed to make perceptible an event which we cannot otherwise see the event that you see there with the splash is 00:14:53 perfectly real but we can only make it manifest through high-speed photography similarly whoops there are processes going on around us 00:15:05 that we do not perceive and we can use time-lapse photography to make those to speed them up so that they become perceptible to us something like the blooming of a flower or the battles intricate battles fought 00:15:16 between brambles and hedges these make us aware that we perceive time as unfolding at a rate dictated by our own metabolism and bodily processes so this idea that time and space 00:15:32 are considered very different from count but very much tied now to the body this is quite radical

      Here, the speaker, Fred Cummins, introduces us tto the synthetic apriori concepts of time explored by Uexkull.in his clever snail experiment.

      By holding the snail in place on a rotating vertical wheel and stimulating the neck of the snail by touch, by speeding up the frequency of touching the snail to about 5 Hz, Uexkull was able to produce a different behavior in the snail. The snail was no longer withdrawing its neck into its shell, but tries to walk instead.

      Cummins compares this unique sensing of time unique to the snail with that of humans. We perceive individual sounds and individual images as distinct as long as they occur at a frequency below approximately 20 Hz. When the frequency rises above this, we perceive it as continuous. This is how we digitize audio (moving sounds) as well as video (moving pictures), creating the illusion of continuous motion.

      So we, in effect CONSTRUCT the sense of time and motion. Jay Garfield talks about how we also construct aspects of reality such as color: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FHRuOEfnqV6g%2F&group=world

      Color and time are constructed based on the organisms specific perceptual structures. The snail constructs time differently than a human does.

    7. now we go back to jakub von ogskul and we find him critiquing exactly the 00:09:20 same thing for exactly the same reasons 30 years after john dewey there on the left he has picked out the reflex arc pointing out that it is a linear throughput which leaves no room 00:09:34 for subjectivity no room for intentional action no room for meaning to arise if you if the middle is only animated by inputs then it's a puppet 00:09:47 he replaces this with a model on the right that will whose terms will not be entirely clear to you as you read the article but i want you to notice one thing about it it's circular it's not a linear 00:09:59 throughput it's circular he starts by noting the embeddedness of the body in the world and the fact that the activity of the 00:10:13 body is meaningful at all times and not separable into inputs and outputs his replacement of the linear throughput with this circular model that he elaborates in various ways 00:10:25 is remarkably prescient of the basic cybernetic insight that will arise after the second world war in which it's all feedback systems positive feedback systems negative feedback systems 00:10:37 homeostatic systems um reciprocity is always involved the fact that you do something and something is done to you at the same time that that we dance in the world 00:10:50 rather than standing apart from it and recording a movie of it so his um uncovery of this basic cybernetic principle with which one might approach the body and its being in the world is 00:11:02 remarkably prescient but these profound ideas of vulnerable are often hidden because he's well frankly so charming well he's a problematic character as we'll see lately 00:11:14 but he tells a good story and he does cool experiments

      30 years after Dewey's paper, Uexkull affirms the same finding as Dewey in his article: A Stroll Though the Worlds of Animals and Men (1934).

      In his article, Uexkull compares two diagrams, a linear input/output and a circular with subjectivity in the middle. Uekull anticipates the fundamental cybernetic concept of positive and negative feedbacks - you do something to the world and the world does something back to you.

    8. i want to take you back to our lecture on cognitivism where we surveyed among other things the origins of this notion of a psychological subject within our inner architecture 00:05:52 that comes into being in 1896 john dewey wrote a very famous article called the reflex arc concept in psychology you may have missed it it's listed it's provided on 00:06:06 the page for cognitivism and what dewey was doing was surveying the very many very diverse uh research activities that were beginning to bring into being something like a 00:06:19 psychological science there was so many questions so many methods and a single theoretical construct had emerged that many people were leaning on to and was acting as a kind of a unified 00:06:32 construct with which notions of mind and body might be brought together that notion is the reflex arc now the reflex arc you may be familiar with from physiology if you touch something hot 00:06:45 then we can follow a physiological path from the receptors in the skin in this case if you touch a hot stove we can follow a very short path that goes through the spinal cord and immediately causes you 00:06:58 to move your hand away no thinking involved that's a reflex and you're familiar with the notion of reflex but that notion had been elaborated and was being developed by many people into a picture of the an account of the 00:07:11 embedding of the entire body and nervous system in the world john dewey was saying don't do that stop doing that it's a serious critique of this input output model and the 00:07:25 reflex arc starts with a stimulus and results in action and as a one-way throughput john dewey correctly said that an input output model reduces 00:07:40 the intervene the thing in the middle into a puppet there is no subjectivity possible here now this is a fundamental critique as the fundamental shift in perspective we're adopting in 00:07:53 this module which is to get away from the silly notion of the body and person and subject as being driven by inputs producing the 00:08:05 ghost of the cognitive sandwich there we go you've got the cognitive sandwich you've got sensation providing input you've got action on the output in between you have a great big mystery stuffed into the head it's very easy to make fun of this as 00:08:18 susan hurley does with her term cognitive sandwich it's much more difficult to make fun of exactly the same thing when we draw it like this there is an orthodox belief in our 00:08:30 society our society works on the assumption that there is the psychological subject who has inner processes of perception feeding into inner processes of higher cognition 00:08:43 all fueled by the world through senses and this model doesn't even have an output such constructive psychological representational stories typically 00:08:55 ignore action altogether so the cognitive sandwich may be ridiculous when we look at it in one way but it is also the most wide held belief in our society about the person and we 00:09:08 institute our laws our education systems our workplaces are built on this problematic model

      In 1896, John Dewey wrote a famous paper called "The reflex arc concept in psychology". At that time, psychology was nascent and the reflex arc began to emerge as a framework to synthesis the many disparate findings.

      the notion of the "cognitive sandwich" emerged which claimed that sensory inputs fed a mysterious cognitive function sandwiched between the input and motor system outputs.

      Dewey said that the input output models relegates subjectivity to something trivial so cannot be correct.

      This crude model still manifests in today's common belief that after sensing, there is a process of perception that feeds into higher cognition.

    9. the task of biology consists in expanding in two directions the results of cancer investigations by considering the part played by our body and especially by our sense organs 00:04:47 and central nervous system you can see the basic parameters of what we now call cognitive science are coming into being here and by studying the relation of other subjects to objects 00:04:59 it's the subject that kant wants to take seriously that notion is still very undefined and notice here the term animal other subjects so the 00:05:10 animal is a subject here he's trying to take a stance that is not that doesn't traffic in human exceptionalism that takes the embodied being seriously and for him that means something that's 00:05:23 straightforwardly an animal a dog a cat a scientist a limpet and he's going to consider them all with much the same theoretical vocabulary he's pitching in here in 1926

      Uexkull expands Kant's agenda and takes it in the direction of the body, and especially the animal body as playing a major role in knowing about the world. He downplays human exceptionalism by referring to the animal body, not the human body.

    10. we need to understand what the tradition is that he is feeding from and how what his orientation is he is 00:01:21 taking his own work to be an extension of the work of immanuel kant now if you have not noticed anything in the history of philosophy of mind please 00:01:33 notice descartes and kant those are the two principal landmarks so many others but kant had died at the very start of the 19th century kant was working within a 00:01:46 physical framework that was newtonian in which space and time are simply blocks containers within which things unfold mechanistically that was the metaphysics available to 00:02:00 kant was asking with that metaphysics how do we come to know anything now he had the cogito of descartes very much on his mind but also the the empiricists 00:02:14 concerns with the role of the senses following the tradition of hume and kant attempted to resolve this by noting that there were some things that could not be learned from the world that had 00:02:27 to be in place before any knowledge of the world can happen at all he called these the synthetic a prioris those things that well nothing forces the manas but we can't begin to make 00:02:38 sense of the notion of knowledge without prior notions of time and space and causality this is a difficult position to occupy and can't argumentation was developed in very many ways and gave rise to very many 00:02:53 different kinds of science thereafter for the thing in itself this shell is not knowable rather i encountered a phenomenon of the shell the phenomenon of the shell 00:03:11 through mediated through the senses and the body and i can never thus get to the shell itself this is of course the paradox underlying all representational theories 00:03:22 of perception which is that they seem to leave you estranged from the world and not in contact with the world all knowledge seem to be mediated through the sensors so it need you need 00:03:34 to bootstrap knowledge with these synthetic api ras for accounts this is immanuel kant dies at the start of the 19th century and then about 00:03:45 1870 something like scientific psychology starts to emerge and there's a wide variety of approaches they're drawing among other things from kant but they're not following one 00:03:58 unified agenda funux comes in here and he sees himself as taking kant seriously and he's going to develop in his context in the 1920s and 1930s 00:04:10 the notion of a synthetic a priori changes now instead of the physicalist model of time and space and as containers that we have with kant the body is the ultimate synthetic a 00:04:22 priori for von neux cool epistemology or how a being comes to know the world will only be ever understood through careful attention to the structures of and processes of the body

      Uexkull's work, and formulation of the Umwelt must be contextualized in his predecessor Kant's ontological framing to be understood.

      Based on the Newtonian mechanistic view of the world, Kant postulated that there must be some knowledge that must be known about the world prior to a (human) being being born into the world and called this synthetic apriori knowledge.....namely time, space and causality, the things that a Newtonian, mechanistic worldview assumes at the outset.

      Since any object of the world can only be known through the 5 senses, we are estranged from reality, and there must be some knowledge we must have prior to sensing the world that helps us make sense of it.

    11. you are probably somewhat unfamiliar with the term biosemiotics is not in widespread use um and but it represents a very very 00:00:17 important reference point when we come to theories of embodied cognition the founder of biosemiotics is typically held to be jacob von xcool 00:00:29 biosemiotics is a field within the broader domain of semiotics which considers the manner in which meaning arises through various forms of mediation such as signs indices indexes 00:00:42 symbols and the like

      Title: Introduction to Umwelt theory and Biosemiotics Author

    1. to bring it to the present you know the news cycle is about russia and ukraine yeah there are propositional things there about what's the capital of 00:01:15 russia what's the capital of ukraine where's the border then you have sort of procedural um how how do you discuss this matter or or how do we make decisions about this what are the things in play and then you have 00:01:27 um question perspective like how does it look in moscow how does it look in kiev how does it look at the u.n yes and then you have something about participation what's it like to be at the border in the east of ukraine for example yeah 00:01:39 yeah what identities are you assigning what identities are you are are you assuming what roles right yeah yeah i mean it's not nothing immediately politicized i just mean to bring it to bear that in any given context there are 00:01:52 always these multiple ways of knowing that are a big thing

      Example of applying the 4 P's to something topical at the time of this video: The Russia / Ukraine war.

    2. it's a how we know it in some way so it's different forms of how yes it's not based on the content of it so there's different ways you can do taxonomies and people often want to monkey with the taxonomy they said no no like you can make a 00:00:50 taxonomy however you want like if you make the taxonomy on the basis of content you're going to have like you're going to have like you know knowledge about australia knowledge about the solar system and right right now that you're right this is much more about the 00:01:03 manner and the mechanisms of knowing than it is about the content

      The 4 P's is concerned with the "how" of knowing rather than content of knowledge.

    3. so that's me trying to do a synoptic integration of all of the four e-cognitive science and trying to get it 00:00:12 into a form that i think would help make make sense to people of the of cognition and also in a form that's helpful to get them to see what's what we're talking about when i'm talking about the meaning 00:00:25 that's at stake in the meaning crisis because it's not sort of just semantic meaning

      John explains how the 4 P's originated as a way to summarize and present in a palatable way of presenting the cognitive science “4E” approach to cognition - that cognition does not occur solely in the head, but is also embodied, embedded, enacted, or extended by way of extra-cranial processes and structures.