Appreciating this discussion this evening,

My understanding of the ToK system and its implications suggests that, until we do ground our collective understanding in a naturalistic and scientific understanding of the human animal and delineating our shared features, we are somewhat doomed to repeat endless waves of justification systems wiping out and replacing other waves of justification systems.  Culture on culture on culture.  

The irony is that Gregg's work is yet another cultural suggestion or force, which is one reason it is drowned out in the cacophony of competing systems.  However, what I feel is particularly novel about the UTOK perspective is that it allows us a shared platform, the 4th joint point, with which we can safely say is the human condition.  For example, you can connect with basically anyone at a fundamental human level if one internalizes that point. 

Anything after the 4th joint point is a cultural disagreement, and we differentiate as either apes with our own hallucinatory trip, or we can regard ourselves as unique evolved entities in the same way that birds differentiate into manifold niched creatures based upon environmental conditions. 

In other words, on our way to learning as many competing cultural/justification systems as we can, it may behoove us to learn a basic shared understanding that applies to everyone.  The issue is that one must have the capacity to hold the existentially threatening awareness that one's own reality is essentially a provisional solipsism, and yet that solipsism is the most compelling and real "feeling" aspect of our realities. 

-Chance




On Wed, May 5, 2021 at 8:21 PM Cory David Barker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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Hi all, this email is about recursions and consciousness.

I thought about it back when I did my master’s thesis on fractal phase calculus, my central thesis was that cognition is fundamentally a recursive function. I showed that Gödel and Tarski’s theorems are at play with cognitive stages and transitions between stages, and this is likely also a natural function of nature in general. This is also what my YouTube video on the universal prototype is about.

Personally, I’m not really mystified by what “consciousness” is, and I don’t really see any problems with “qualia”. I just think people have gotten twisted into a pretzel about it by inheriting fragmented ideologies and disagreement on definitions. People need to make one-to-one correspondences between ideological terminology, and recognize that the path forward isn’t trying to make one belief system win out over others, but overlap them and see they are all talking about the same thing with different orientations.

My current hypothesis is that different areas of our nervous system and corresponding organ system are specialized for producing different kinds of semiosis. They are networked and create recursive loops in varying degrees of scope from small to great across our system such that different regions can be activated simultaneously. As they coordinate and stack, they create a hierarchy, both within and between brain regions, which accounts for notions of development stage and skill across domains. The Gödel theorems come into play because the neurobiological systems are constantly recursing on themselves and updating the current neurobiological state, as the neurobiological systems are refreshed a hundred times a second, with each new recursion replacing the previous one, creating the moment to moment experience that strings together as time moving forward. This creates a series of concrete states on the neurobiological system, and when the same general areas of the neurobiological system continue to be included in a loop, it creates an abstraction, a generalization from concrete experience, which is what people experience as consciousness. 

Consciousness only seems elusive to define when it is reified. I’ve come to think of consciousness as simply what neurobiological regions are most highly activated at any given moment, subconscious is what neurobiological regions have been recently perturbed but are not immediately tied into the primary recursive neurobiological loop, and unconscious is everything that hasn’t been perturbed strong enough to become part of the loop. Attention is what fascinates me the most, because we can move it, dilate it, and contract it. It is probably that the neurobiological loops pass through the same brain region, probably the prefrontal cortex. Attention might have been the cause for people to think we have an entity that is separate from but resides in our bodies because we can move it around our bodies like a ghost. Anyway, manipulation of attention is how distraction tricks and hypnosis work, creating a strong perturbation on different systems than what one is manipulating.

So in my view, consciousness is just an abstraction, and you can’t nail it down by trying to correspond it with one neurobiological system or another, or explain it with one specific cognitive capacity or another, or explain it by one philosophical position or another, because it is an abstraction for whatever neurobiological regions are strongly activated at any given series of moments. The Wilber-Combs lattice was interesting because they created a matrices of different scopes for the general experience of consciousness depending on stage and perspective, looked at through the lens of integral theory (though they did not include the recursive aspects). It was a step in the right direction because there are many types and experiences of consciousness, and one has to integrate them all to really see what’s going on.

Cory



On May 5, 2021, at 6:42 PM, Brandon Norgaard <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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After Gregg linked the video in the first message in this thread, this was the first I’d heard of this “Theories of Everything” channel.  I scanned through the videos to see what notable thinkers were interviewed.  I don’t have time to watch the videos today, but I took note of the subject matter.
 
James then asked “Has anyone thought of applying Godel's incompleteness theorem to the hard problem of consciousness?”, which immediately made me remember that there is a video on this same channel wherein Rebecca Goldstein does get into this.  Well, that’s what I figure from the title anyways:
 
 
She’s also a notable Whitehead scholar, and she possibly makes that connection as well, who Michael also mentioned earlier in this thread.  A lot of ideas are converging here, but I don’t have time right now to watch this video.  I just thought I’d pass it on, because what she talks about might have connections to several of the things we’re talking about here.
 
Brandon Norgaard
Founder, The Enlightened Worldview Project
 
From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of James Gien Wong
Sent: Wednesday, May 5, 2021 1:23 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: TOK idealism versus naturalism
 
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For me, the jury is still out but I am gravitating towards seeing it from Douglas Hofstaeder's "strange loop" point of view, in which our advanced symbolic nature is a confounding factor.
 
Has anyone thought of applying Godel's incompleteness theorem to the hard problem of consciousness?
 
How do things like atomic particles generate qualia is beginning to appear to me like mixing up 1st person and 3rd person perspectives. Suppose after a century of more neuroscience research carried out in the same vein, it yields some powerful new explanations. It will still rely on some kind of standard scientific theories like atomic theory, quantum theory, etc. So it once again comes down to trying to employ concepts to explain experiences - concepts that are the result of scientific collaboration, which is in effect a form of cumulative cultural evolution. Wouldn't we still fundamentally arrive at the same kind of problem that perplexes us now? ...albeit with perhaps different scientific models that may have replaced currently popular onces a century from now? Wouldn't we still be stuck trying to puzzle how a concept can give rise to an experience? Concepts don't give rise to other concepts, and can predict things in the world, but a concept a century from now will have no greater power to give rise to experiences than it does now, 
Wishing you WELLth
Gien
Future Ancestor
 
Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world. - Nadeem Aslam
 
 
On Wed, May 5, 2021 at 5:11 PM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi Folks,
I am curious if anyone on this list is interested in idealism. I ask because John Vervaeke and Bernardo Kastrup were recently featured on Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
 
The UTOK is grounded in naturalism, and thus is aligned with John in this exchange. If folks have questions about this or believe that Kastrup is making the better case, I would welcome hearing those thoughts. 
 
Best,
G
___________________________________________
Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Graduate Psychology
216 Johnston Hall
MSC 7401
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
(540) 568-7857 (phone)
(540) 568-4747 (fax)


Be that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity.

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