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Unfolding Nature Shop: Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: BlueCoyote]
    #5395313 -

what is attention?

the impressions arise from the senses (or in recalling some incident)
and those impressions resonate in the mind.

some combinations trigger associations.

some associations induce pleasurable feeling or alarmed feeling.

either of these can draw ones attention from something else (unless a meditator's concentration is already dedicated),

in this way we attune to the new "diversion", and attention shifts


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:brainfart: _ :finger:

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: MushmanTheManic]
    #5395405 -

MushmanTheManic said:
Have neurologists found the source of our will ? No.

Its hard to find something which doesn't exist.  :tongue:


Oops. Will certainly exists. But it is the question if it is free, or determined..and in context to topic..somehow evil, if facetted in some special egoistic way, linked to some kind of partial knowledge ?


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Though lovers be lost love shall not  And death shall have no dominion
......................................................
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."Martin Luther King, Jr.
'Acceptance is the absolute key - at that moment you gain freedom and you gain power and you gain courage'

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: redgreenvines]
    #5395428 -

attention in the span of pleasure and alarm (of danger) ?
Sounds reasonable...but can there be realm of pleasure and pain, which is not physically based, yet ? Perhaps fiction, perhaps fantasy, something what not is, but might be ?
Adding to concept, ego, knowledge ? :wink:

Ok, now I have some concepts to gnaw on :wink:
:heart:


--------------------
Though lovers be lost love shall not  And death shall have no dominion
......................................................
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."Martin Luther King, Jr.
'Acceptance is the absolute key - at that moment you gain freedom and you gain power and you gain courage'

Edited by BlueCoyote (03/13/06 02:50 PM)

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: redtailedhawk]
    #5397733 -

redtailedhawk said:
Recently I noticed that all major religions - including practice described by Carlos Castaneda - share one comment element. They all see the sense of self (Ego, pride, vanity) as the worst enemy one has to face on the path of self-discovery, knowing God or enlightenment


I don't think these teachings were trying to get us to give up our individuality......just our over inflated sence of self.

I noticed a good example of this at work the other day.

A co-worker was showing me her torn fingernail. I told her "I bet that hurt. At my last job when you fuck up you either loose the whole nail or the finger!"

My ego wanted to tell her that her pain was not that bad. That the pain I had suffered in the past was much greater than hers.

I should have shown more sympathy to her, offered to get her a band-aid or tried to find some nail clippers rather than bring up my own injuries from the past, to diminish her pain today.

It is a simple, off the cuff remark, in the course of a day. A simple thing that did not help my fellow co-worker, just my own ego.

Reading thru this thread (and others) I see many egos that are out of control and have a great desire to put other ideas down in order to make them-self feel better.


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Live for the moment you are in now
Don't be bogged down by your past
Don't be afraid of what lies in your future

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: BlueCoyote]
    #5397736 -

BlueCoyote said:
attention in the span of pleasure and alarm (of danger) ?
Sounds reasonable...but can there be realm of pleasure and pain, which is not physically based, yet ? Perhaps fiction, perhaps fantasy, something what not is, but might be ?
Adding to concept, ego, knowledge ? :wink:

Ok, now I have some concepts to gnaw on :wink:
:heart:


pleasure and pain are about harmony and quantity:

a harmonious stimulus on any nerve group is pleasurable
too much stimulus becomes painful or disharmonious.

if no stimulus or an imaginary condition were interpreted as disharmonious. the pain would be just as real.


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:brainfart: _ :finger:

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: niteowl]
    #5397737 -

or maybe it did help... cuz she realized hey man, this could be way worse, this dude said he could lose his whole finger, im glad i still got my finger, and i just messed up my nail.

seems its just how one chooses to look at it.

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: fresh313]
    #5397743 -

I still should have shown sympathy first and offered to help.

Then once she felt better, relay the story of my last job to let her know it could have been worse.

I fed my ego rather than trying to help her. :shake:


Hopefully, I can learn from this and be more giving in the future and not be so selfish.


--------------------
Live for the moment you are in now
Don't be bogged down by your past
Don't be afraid of what lies in your future

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: niteowl]
    #5398150 -

niteowl;

your associative mind related personally to the circumstance by reflex. - this is the natural thing. - good.

you can see in it the self centered nature of putting your imprint onto the situation, and you could be right, but her experience clearly struck a chord in you. - you were enough open to catch that wave. - good

so then you responded from your heart (which is filled with self - hmmm, maybe not that good, but how bad?).

naturally it seems kind of weird, because your heart seems selfcentered and egotistical, but what happened was about connecting, and if her heart was opened, she could probably find that you were paying attention to her as much as pressing your own imprint on the environment that had been upset by her need and injury.

anyway you don't have to beat yourself about this
the right thing is already happenning naturally, you can go for some refinement, and should, (all of us can and should) but it is best not to be conflicted about connecting, and to try and steer it to the most helpful results.


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:brainfart: _ :finger:

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: MushmanTheManic]
    #5398477 -

I'm an eliminative materialist. That is exactly what I think, but I cannot fathom how freewill could exist.

To avoid semantical confusion, I will not use the word "free will", I use the word volition - the faculty of will; of choice.


Volition is self-evident. It is axiomatic. I can focus my eye-sight to see very sharply and clearly, and I can release my focus to the point where everything becomes an indiscriminate blur. Likewise, I have the same ability with my mind. I can focus my mental machinery into the task at hand, consciously aware of as many factors as my mental capacity allows for, projecting plans long-range into the future as well as planning ahead short-range, and I can release my control and let my mind coast along without any focus, relax my concentration and lapse into a state of blur and drift.

As I've observed in many arguments concerning the topic at hand, the very beef of our arguments will often rest upon one specific thing: what our identity is. Historically and presently, there are typically two camps.
One camp, the mystics of muscle, believe that consciousness has no identity, i.e., it doesn't exist; it is a myth. They believe we are all bodies without a mind. Therefore they believe all our actions, and conclusions we reach are the blind results of physical factors such as atomic-molecular tangos in the cerebra.
The other camp, mystics of spirit, believe that consciousness is from an otherworldly source, some divine fraction of an entity or mystic ingredient of some sort. As such, they believe that our volition is mystical; an attribute of an otherworldly soul. Whereas one camp invents the old strawman of "consciousness versus science", the other camp simply takes over this false alternative, then promotes the other side of it. This leads to rejecting arbitrarily the possibility of a naturalistic view of consciousness.

You obviously hold the former position, which is the materialist position. The fact that you've attempted to use an analogy pertaining to computers supports the implication that you do not believe we have a consciousness. Ergo, it is unsurprising to see you holding such a deterministic stance, after all, volition cannot exist without consciousness, i.e. without being aware of something or of factors in the matter-at-hand. Consciousness and volition are inextricably entwined.

I hold the naturalist position, which stands on neither sides of the camp. Consciousness is an attribute of percieved entities here on earth. It is a faculty possessed under definite conditions by a certain group of living organisms. It is directly observable [by introspection]. It has a specific nature, including specific physical organs, and acts accordingly, i.e., law-fully. It has a life-sustaining function: to percieve the facts of nature and thereby enable the organisms that possess it to act successfully. In all this, there is nothing unnatural or super-natural.
There is no basis for the suggestion that consciousness is seperate from matter, let alone opposed to it.
Like the faculty of vision [which is one of its aspects], and like the body, the faculty of awareness is wholly this-worldly.

You may argue that consciousness or volition is unnatural on the grounds that it cannot be percieved by extrospection, has no shape, color, or smell, and cannot be handled, weighed, or put in a test tube [all of which equally applies to the faculty of vision].
Yet such an argument is contradictory. It claims that consciousness or volition is impossible, while you claim to be conscious of the fact that it is impossible, and volitionally state the fact that it is impossible. Such an argument is based on the assumption that to really have a choice, one must not be restricted by the laws of identity. As such, it is a rebellion against reality.


Every effect has a cause and the brain is not free from this law.

Of course, the brain is not exempt from the Law of Causality. However, this is where we differ: You hold that the Law of Causality is a disqualifier of volition, whereas I hold that the Law of Causality is a pre-condition of volition, as is the Law of Identity. After all, the LoC is a corollary of Identity.





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Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love.

Edited by SkorpivoMusterion (03/14/06 10:29 AM)

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: SkorpivoMusterion]
    #5400486 -

What causes volition? If consciousness causes volition, what causes consciousness? If consciousness is a product of the physical brain, what causes the physical brain to change from its present state?

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: MushmanTheManic]
    #5401911 -

If consciousness is a product of the physical brain, what causes the physical brain to change from its present state?

Volition. But of course, you mean biologically speaking. Now this is the real debate - not whether it exists, but how to explain it.

I don't know, except that this is what the field of cognitive neuroscience is working on, amongst other things. But not knowing something is not the same as denying something. Let us pretend we're in ancient B.C., in Athens, Greece. I Skorpivius, ask you, Mushmanius, "What mechanism creates those white puffs floating in the air?" Neither of us have the answer, yet, this does not mean that the clouds do not exist.



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Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love.

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: MushmanTheManic]
    #5402020 -

MushmanTheManic said:
What causes volition? If consciousness causes volition, what causes consciousness? If consciousness is a product of the physical brain, what causes the physical brain to change from its present state?


Are you asking why our brains changes, like why do the neurons create new pathways and connections ?

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: MushmanTheManic]
    #5402093 -

skorpius had a good description of cosnciousness, but redgreenvinius dares to explain the how of volition in more organic terms:

the being apprehends a position that is no longer advantageous and moves away (under volition or reflexively).

the being apprehends a position that is more advantageous and moves towards (under volition or reflexively).

we call it volition as many factors and associations coalesce into the apprehension followed by an idea that resolves the inherent issues. it is a complex reflex, and it passes through the cerebral cortex quickly and invisibly. it is complex enough that we can think of it as free will, and mechanistic enough that desire can enchain it.


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:brainfart: _ :finger:

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: redgreenvines]
    #5402116 -

redgreenvines said:
the being apprehends a position that is no longer advantageous and moves away (under volition or reflexively).

the being apprehends a position that is more advantageous and moves towards (under volition or reflexively).



this is what i was going to explain about the Neural Network, it adapts in the same way, making or destroying pathways and connections which are advantagous or disadvantagous to the organism. this is based upon the organisms awareness of its own volition or ability to adapt to better utilize its environment.

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: fresh313]
    #5402282 -

right
so it is mechanistical
as are most modalities of this compulsively regenerative thing called life, yet,
(I am reaching now)
seeing this to be true, one can steer the desire component by slecting and cultivating conditions that this conditioned reaction matrix will interact with. (before someone else does it - like tv commercials)
In that way matter mixes with the more rarefied thing spirit - thin as breath.
it sees the interconnectedness and urges the conditioned matrix regeneratively to an improved meta-state.


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:brainfart: _ :finger:

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Re: The worst Enemy we face (according to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and even Castaneda) [Re: SkorpivoMusterion]
    #5403601 -

No, no. I don't expect you (or anyone else on this forum) to understand the mechanisms behind such complex neurological functions. I certianly don't know either. Rather, I was trying to point out the causality. Choices are caused by volition that is caused by consciousness that is caused by complex neural nets in the brain and on and on all the way down to chemistry.

I also think volition exists, yet I still see it as a mechanistic process that is ultimately controlled by the laws of nature. Our behavior is determined in this causal sense, but it is not determinable. Our actions still effect the future.

Currently, I lean wholly towards determinism, but it seems like such a complex microscopic process that its a moot point. (And, I'm somewhat ashamed for even bring it up. :frown:) Determinism seems like a "so what?" philosophy, similar to Solipsism. Everything is mechanistically determined.. so what? Determinism doesn't lead anywhere. It is determined on such a low level that it isn't noticable in any manner.

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Unfolding Nature Shop: Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order

General Interest > Philosophy, Sociology & Psychology
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