Abra wrote:

What does this have to do with how humans define what they mean by "truth".

The concept of truth is still a concept of deciding whether or not a particular description of a state of affairs is correct or not.

The basic concept of what we mean by "truth" would remain the same.

I'm that's not the case then perhap you can offer me a definition or example of a "truth" that is not a description of a state of affairs.

What would it mean to say that something is "true" if you haven't even referenced a description of a state of affairs?

What is it that would be "true" if not the description of the state of affairs?

Like Jeanniebean's candy jar example.

The actual state of affairs themselves have no 'truth value' in and of themselves. They can't be said to be "true" or "false" until there has been a description or expectation of some sort.

You have to have a meaningful definition for "truth" before you can start asking how different people might arrive at it.

Truth is autonomously engaged and enacted. Truth is connective, in an odd sense it is relative. It relates/connects thought/belief to reality. It is neither objective, nor subjective.

Truth is not a man-made concept.

My main problem is not being able to comprehend what he writes. If I understood that better I might agree with him more often, but I don't like agreeing to something I don't comprehend.

To a very young child everything is assumed "true." (**see below) They have not been introduced to the idea of false. To a young child just learning to use language, they expect people to speak the truth. They have to learn that people will tell lies.

So what happens when a young child first experiences the difference between true and false and comes face to face with the realization of an utterance that is false?

The candy is in the blue jar. <----- the lie.
The candy is in the red jar. <------the truth.

Her mother told her the lie. Her father told her the truth.

Now if this happened a number of times, she will soon realize that her mother is a liar. Her utterance cannot be believed.

The candy being in the red jar corresponds to the state of affairs.
The statement is true.

**--> The term "true" in the first sentence is not really the right word because without the concept of false it is meaningless to the observing child. Everything is just information at that point. True and false have no meaning.

To a young child everything experienced is the state of affairs.

Obviously your definition of "truth" is vastly different from mine, and from the entire mathematical and scientific communities of all of humanity.

So let's be clear on this point that YOU are the "lone one out here" with some outrageous claim that is far different from any ideas of truth in mainstream humanity.

So you are clearly taking a stance that all of humanity is wrong and you are right. That's a very special CLAIM that you are making.

You should not expect anyone to understand your totally new concepts and ideas until you have laid them out in their entirety. Have you published a paper on this that we can read?

2. If I found a gun and wanted to see if it was loaded I would not fire it at all. I would open it and see if it was loaded. Yes, I believe guns can kill people. I don't believe that 100% but why would I take the chance of pointing it at someone? I would have to believe that guns absolutely don't hurt people to do that.

I don't deny the macro laws of classical physics. But that's a totally moot point when speaking about philosophies concerning the potential nature of reality. Classical physics is obviously not all that exists. We already know this to be the case. We actually have technologies that make use of the modern laws of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Those laws are real. They are currently being used in technologies.

Di, Perhaps you can address this question:

Why do people continually use Classical Physics examples in philosophical discussions, whilst simultaneously proclaiming that they are not holding out for a Classical resolution to philosophical questions?

Di,

Your summary is completely absurd.

You don't understand either.

I'm quite sure that Abra completely understands everything I am saying but he has been banned from posting.

I can see why you and Creative are perfectly suited to carry on pointless meaningless conversations that are completely mental.

I am convinced that there is no way to help you or him understand what I mean considering this post above.

You are either being sarcastic or you are not even near a point of understanding.

I will spare you and him any further 'gymnastics' you two are not reachable.

Perception - I was referring to our autonomous physiological sensory perception. The innate and instinct faculty.

Are you suggesting that thought is only produced by innate and instinctual faculties? Is there more than one kind of thought process going on?

No. I'm asserting that initial thought/belief formation is limited to the available faculties that are not borne of thought/belief itself.

There are different kinds of thoughts. The kinds are categorized by their level of complexity and their content which entails both, the objects of thought, and what the thought/belief necessarily presupposes(what must be already in place, or necessarily presupposed within it in order for it to form in the first place).

When does innate & instinct faculty of autonomous physiological sensory perception become a conscious thought process?

Never, on my view. It is but one element necessary for initial thought/belief formation.

Your use of the term “spatiotemporal distinction” is confusing please expound on its purpose or function as part of realization of ‘other’? Also explain what ‘other’ includes.

All things appear to us in time and space. To consciously distinguish a thing is to set it out(identify it) as 'other', it is to individuate(not Jungian individuation). It is to realize that there is something here or there, and therefore realize the existence of 'other'.

Correlation - Correlation between objects of perception either to one another or to the subject. If a single correlation is a thought, then multiple correlations between new objects of perception and former correlations produce more and more complex thought.

Is a correlation necessary to invoke thought?

Mental correlation between objects of perception, and/or to oneself constitutes being second-order thought/belief formation. Individuation being first-order

Perception - I was referring to our autonomous physiological sensory perception. The innate and instinct faculty.

Distinction – I was thinking more alone the lines of the spatiotemporal distinction required for individuation/identification.

Distinction is the realization of 'other'. It can be crude enough to allow a bacteria to distinguish, unknowingly of course, between fire and food source. I find some rudimentary form of it to be necessary for survival instinct, avoiding danger.

Correlation - Correlation between objects of perception either to one another or to the subject. If a single correlation is a thought, then multiple correlations between new objects of perception and former correlations produce more and more complex thought.

I know this topic was probably brought up before, but what are your views on it. Do you believe the consciousness is a mere set of memories we retain for our lifetime until our brain dies or something much more?

The most interesting sentence in it for me was this one:

"For a variety of reasons, including arguments based on complexity theory, developmental biology, evolutionary programming, ethology, and simple inspection, this compact Occam program is most naturally seen to be in the DNA, rather than the brain."

So then do you agree that thoughts are things?
Are these 'thoughts?"

A notion.
An Intention.
A visualization.
An idea.
A perception. (This apple tastes crunchy and juicy and sweet.)
An emotion. (feeling) (I'm so angry or happy..)

I would tend to agree Di. I think thought begins with sensory perception. I mean it is necessary, but insufficient for thought/belief formation, on my view... which has Jungian influence by the way.

I find that there are three distinct elements which, when combined, produce a thought/belief.

Perception
Distinction
Correlation

Now each of these need to be carefully parsed out, however, I believe that it(sensory perception) is a good starting point.

What is Thought? Synopsis
Eric B. Baum
MIT Press, January 2004


What is Thought? proposes a model that explains how mind is equivalent to execution of a computer program, addressing aspects such as understanding, meaning, creativity, language, reasoning, learning, and consciousness, that is consistent with extensive data from a variety of fields, and that makes empirical predictions. To achieve this one must first address how the workings of a machine, a computer, can have meaning, what meaning is.

The summary of the book in one sentence is: meaning is the computational exploitation of the compact underlying structure of the world, and mind is execution of an evolved program, largely encoded in the genome, that is all about meaning.

The discovery of meaning by evolution comes about through a principle called Occam's razor. As William of Occam posed it in the 14th century, Occam's Razor said one should choose simpler explanations in preference to more complex ones. As such it is a powerful philosophical principle that underlies all science and arguably most day-to-day reasoning. Over the last few decades, computer scientists have formalized this principle to explain concept learning. What is Thought? explains and extrapolates the recent computer science literature (to which I contributed) to posit a central organizing principle of thought: Meaning results from finding a compact enough program (a ``simple enough explanation'') behaving effectively in the world; such a program can only be so compact by virtue of code reuse, factoring into interacting modules that capture real concepts and are reused metaphorically.

For a variety of reasons, including arguments based on complexity theory, developmental biology, evolutionary programming, ethology, and simple inspection, this compact Occam program is most naturally seen to be in the DNA, rather than the brain. Learning and reasoning are then fast and almost automatic because they are constrained by the DNA programming to deal only with meaningful quantities. Evolution itself is argued to exploit meaning in related ways, and thus to speed itself up analogously to how it speeds our reasoning.

This picture explains why artificial intelligence (AI) programs have not achieved understanding in the same way humans do. Finding meaning, finding programs that exploit underlying structure, is a very hard computational problem (in a technical sense: computer scientists say it is NP-hard) that requires extensive computation to solve. Humans are not capable of the hard computation that evolution brought to bear or even that computers bring to bear when they train artificial neural nets. Thus human written programs are generally not Occam and so do not understand. To gain insight into what it means to exploit structure and how it can be equivalent to understanding, What is Thought? discusses AI, Computer science, and human approaches to a variety of problems including Chess, Go, and planning problems. Moreover experiments are described in which modular computer programs were evolved to exploit structure in hard planning problems in a human-like fashion. These evolutionary computing experiments employ new principles for evolving cooperation among modules and achieve results that are much superior to previous evolutionary progamming techniques, at least on the problems tested, and give insight into evolution of cooperation more generally.

This theory explains why language is so highly metaphoric (much more so than non-linguists realize). Metaphor is a manifestation of the reuse of computational modules. Words are labels for meaningful computational modules, explaining how they are learned so rapidly. Theories of why evolution took so long to discover language are discussed. Using the abilility to pass along programs through speech, humans have made cumulative progress in constructing, as part of their minds, useful computational modules built on top of the ones supplied by evolution. The difference between human and chimp intelligence is largely in this additional programming, and thus can be regarded as primarily due to better nurturing.

The many aspects of consciousness are naturally and consistently understood in this context. Evolution produces the program of mind to make decisions favoring the interest of the genes. Creatures with such an internal agenda are naturally said to have will-- that is we think about such creatures and ourselves using a computational module attributing will to them. While it is true that the program of mind has many modules computing different things, the unified self can be understood as the client whose interest the whole system is representing: a reification (manifestation) of the interest of the genes. The nature of what we are and are not aware is naturally explained. We are unaware of extensive computations done by our mind to extract semantically meaningful summary information. We are aware of the meaningful information affecting our decisions because it is the decision making portion of the program that reports what we speak and feel. Qualia (the way experiences "feel" to us) have exactly the appropriate nature and meaning that evolution coded in the DNA so that the compact program behaves effectively. This picture thus explicitly and naturally answers "the hard problem" and says why conscious experience feels "like" something, even though it is nothing but execution of certain computer code. The execution of that computer code that we describe as qualia is like what it is like because it evolved to have certain meanings and thus must be programmed in such a way that it has certain qualities.

No previous familiarity with computer science (or other fields) is assumed-- What is Thought? presents a pedagogical survey of the relevant background for its arguments.

http://www.whatisthought.com/synopsis.html

You state that as though it is a known fact. Has anyone claimed to have shown this to be the case without question?

I have serious doubts that this is correct. My own experiences with thoughts would suggest this this is not the case.

Can you explain why you believe this to be the case?

~~~~

Having said that, I should clarify that I most certainly do understand how sensory perception can indeed be the food for thought. I use that quite often in my shamanic journeys. I will go to a physical place, "take in the physical sensations there" and then use that as food for thought to create a starting place for a shamanic journey.

However, that is certainly not a requirement. I have also started shamanic journeys from pure abstract ideas and concepts that can't even possible exist in the physical world. So where would be the sensory perception for those thoughts?

Yes, I think so Di,

State of mind, or state of consciousness is indeed a good terminology to use. In fact, this is often the terminology that is used in the books on these topics.

However that description alone can be lost in the translation because there are many different facets to each state of consciousness. And sometimes people assume that those facets themselves are different states of consciousness.

In a sense they are. In fact, some people have described these states of consciousness as being like fractals. The way in which they can be faceted is basically endless.

Different authors have different ways of classifying the different states of consciousness.

The most common practice is to divide it into three main sections. The waking consciousness, the dream consciousness, and the cosmic consciousness. Of course different people use different terms. But it's usually divided into these three realms. Although some authors divide it up differently.

I have several very elaborate ways of dividing up states of consciousness. This isn't merely for the sake of classifying things, but it actually helps the consciousness to navigate through the different realms. It's like a psychic map.

Consciousness is imagination, whether being guided by a physical world at times or not. And it can actually help the imagination to create a map for it. Especially if it is our quest to take a specific journey through consciousness. We can even do this in the waking consciousness. In other words, it can have profound practical value associated with helping to guide the walking consciousness as we navigates through the imagination of the physical world.

We imagine a lot in our everyday physical life. We imagine what other people are thinking about us and how they perceive us. We imagine whether or not we are going to like some stranger we meet. Etc.

We actually imagine many of the interactions that we participate in and our imagination of them does indeed "create" profound affects as the interactions unfold to become our reality.

So imagination is paramount to our actually physical lives.

Dreamwork is a great place to work on imagination.

Spiritual work is when we set the imagination free to speak to us without any preconception of what we expect from it. That is when we engage the "mind of God" as they say. Or the "higher self".

Perhaps imagination itself is the cosmic consciousness that we try to pin down as "God".

But yes, states of consciousness is a good way to put it.

But if that's going to be taken too 'technically' in terms of what science might have to say about "states of consciousness" then maybe not. What they might actually be classifying are merely different facets of a single state of consciousness.

So while the term is abstractly useful, I wouldn't carve it in stone. If it's carved in stone, then it's not the concept that I'm attempting to get it.

The light reflected into the eye through the pupil and onto the retina, etc. I mean, this most certainly cannot be left out of the description, afterall thought cannot pull itself up by it's own bootstraps. Thinking requires something to think about. Rather, I find it more reasonable to hold that thought, itself, is combination of other, more simple things. That it is a product of these things, much like an apple pie is a product of it's elementary constituents(ingredients). Now, mind you, we need not invoke the baker of our thoughts for it can only be us... we are the bakers, so to speak.

So anyhow... just putting it out there, we'll see where it goes.

This would be difficult to put into words.

I've been studying and practicing various different techniques in meditations, dreamwork, shamanic journeying, and the art of creating spiritual thought-forms.

These various techniques require quite a bit of background. It's not something that can be easily be explained in a few words. In fact, I'm not sure if it can be explained in words at all. These are techniques that basically need to be practiced and experienced.

About the only thing I can actually share about this in words is to say that I have learned that I have far more psychic ability than I had previously realized. If the term "psychic" conjures up idea of the supernatural just replace the term with consciousness. I have far more conscious abilities than I had previously realized.

To try to explain these experiences in words would be a truly futile endeavor.

Yes Di... all good points, as we both know, people can obliterate the meaning of a word or concept through misuse.

We are innately capable.

--

We look out into the world and form thought/belief about that which we're looking at. We wonder what it is. We perceive that which is there(whatever that is and wherever there is). We detect subtleties about these objects of perception. We look. We wonder. We touch. We taste. We autonomously feed this external stimuli into our physiological being through our central nervous system. Complex thoughts, simple thoughts begin their formation; they begin to expand our mental activities beyond the limits of physical sensibilities. This can lead to pretentiousness, as we see in all confident young children who've yet to have become aware of their fallibility. These simple thoughts/belief begin to combine and create new ones. We call those original ideas.

This is a synopsis of how we learn things, and hold them as true. This is the framework that we all share. Holding them as true begins to form a basis for comparison. We measure, we weigh... old and new with what has already been accepted as true, as being the case, as being they way thing are.

That is how it works... in the abstract that is.