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Artificial metabolism and disscociation of MAL

Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2021 2:25 pm
by Dave casarino
After a loong time contemplating, reading, researching and staring at the ceiling I am back with more questions for the idealists. I have concluded that due to many consistent reports from anesthesiologists and surgeons of people being woken up whilst under anesthesia and/or on light doses of anesthesia and not remembering a damn thing even though metacognitive or even just waking consciousness was observed via other people, along with the fact that many flat line coma patients (flat line obviously being lower brain activity than the delta waves associated with anesthesia) experience dreams and NDE like states, so thus I will no longer be bothering with that one. Analytic idealism is indeed a slippery fish to catch.

This post is the beginning of my next dialogue challenging and contemplating idealism, and if I am satisfied with these challenges I will then present something completely different. Anyway lets get on with it.....

One of BK's points is that metabolism is a key sign of dissociation from MAl, but in what way does this account for the recent artificial metabolic life forms created by scientists? A totally artificial yet alive specimen of E. coli was created in a lab by man made proteins and such, as detailed in this article here https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/scie ... teria.html this research can actually be found on numerous news and science journal sites across the internet. They took a real E. coli cell and quote "the researchers built small segments and swapped them piece by piece into E. coli genomes. By the time they were done, no natural segments remained. Much to their relief, the altered E. coli did not die. The bacteria grow more slowly than regular E. coli and develop longer, rod-shaped cells. But they are very much alive."

Okay so this opens a whole can of gooey living and long dead fossilized worms, especially to the very nature of dissociation in regards to all forms of metabolisms (are viruses alters now?) where does dissociation begin, can delicately messing around with DNA chains induce a dissociation in MAL? The simple almost mechanic (albeit also very complex) nature of rudimentary life forms whilst resembling the net-like nature of the universe in that it is blobby and hive like in structures also informs a very mechanistic view of the world, a bunch of proteins are programmed into doing something based on the interaction of complex shapes and charges, is this where consciousness begins? Is messing with matter by human hands capable of inducing a universal subject into one of nearly infinite dismal existences as an oscillating blob? Does this strengthen materialism? Or is constituent matter a resource for experiential states, like the gooey thought forms that float about in your head, like a vast mass of alluring thoughts that can break singular concentration if stimulated into a fixation of experience, changing the identity of the whole into a singular form within the whole? How easy is it to lure MAL or could this be used to strengthen panpsychism or hylomorphism or some buddhist like process ontology? Give me hell.

Re: Artificial metabolism and disscociation of MAL

Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2021 2:46 pm
by AshvinP
Dave casarino wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 2:25 pm After a loong time contemplating, reading, researching and staring at the ceiling I am back with more questions for the idealists. I have concluded that due to many consistent reports from anesthesiologists and surgeons of people being woken up whilst under anesthesia and/or on light doses of anesthesia and not remembering a damn thing even though metacognitive or even just waking consciousness was observed via other people, along with the fact that many flat line coma patients (flat line obviously being lower brain activity than the delta waves associated with anesthesia) experience dreams and NDE like states, so thus I will no longer be bothering with that one. Analytic idealism is indeed a slippery fish to catch.

This post is the beginning of my next dialogue challenging and contemplating idealism, and if I am satisfied with these challenges I will then present something completely different. Anyway lets get on with it.....

One of BK's points is that metabolism is a key sign of dissociation from MAl, but in what way does this account for the recent artificial metabolic life forms created by scientists? A totally artificial yet alive specimen of E. coli was created in a lab by man made proteins and such, as detailed in this article here https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/scie ... teria.html this research can actually be found on numerous news and science journal sites across the internet. They took a real E. coli cell and quote "the researchers built small segments and swapped them piece by piece into E. coli genomes. By the time they were done, no natural segments remained. Much to their relief, the altered E. coli did not die. The bacteria grow more slowly than regular E. coli and develop longer, rod-shaped cells. But they are very much alive."

Okay so this opens a whole can of gooey living and long dead fossilized worms, especially to the very nature of dissociation in regards to all forms of metabolisms (are viruses alters now?) where does dissociation begin, can delicately messing around with DNA chains induce a dissociation in MAL? The simple almost mechanic (albeit also very complex) nature of rudimentary life forms whilst resembling the net-like nature of the universe in that it is blobby and hive like in structures also informs a very mechanistic view of the world, a bunch of proteins are programmed into doing something based on the interaction of complex shapes and charges, is this where consciousness begins? Is messing with matter by human hands capable of inducing a universal subject into one of nearly infinite dismal existences as an oscillating blob? Does this strengthen materialism? Or is constituent matter a resource for experiential states, like the gooey thought forms that float about in your head, like a vast mass of alluring thoughts that can break singular concentration if stimulated into a fixation of experience, changing the identity of the whole into a singular form within the whole? How easy is it to lure MAL or could this be used to strengthen panpsychism or hylomorphism or some buddhist like process ontology? Give me hell.

Dave,

Your challenge here is actually to materialism-dualism and reductionism, which has also been incorporated into idealism by way of "critical" idealism of Kant (see recent essay on Solipsism). It is that critical idealist view which regards living organisms as atomized beings existing among other atomized beings, and then speculates on ways in which this can be reconciled with the One Mind of consistent idealism (it can't be reconciled). That is what leads to speculations of "dissociation", "alters", etc as the means for explaining distinct qualitative perspectives while also preserving the aforementioned atomization. A consistent idealist approach does not a priori assume there are static living things and non-living things, divided up according to materialist concepts. It does not assume a 3rd person "neutral observer" perspective (which does not exist) from where we can stand apart and view the transformation of these things from 'frame to frame'. It does not assume we all exist in our own private bubbles of conscious experience, created from the patchwork of many smaller conscious things. So your criticism is entirely justified against materialist-dualist reductionism dressed up in idealist clothing, but one should keep in mind that is not actually a consistent idealist ontology.

Re: Artificial metabolism and disscociation of MAL

Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2021 3:43 pm
by Soul_of_Shu
The mystery to this psyche is why this in-body-experience is found to be so compelling? ;)

Re: Artificial metabolism and disscociation of MAL

Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2021 4:49 pm
by Cleric K
Soul_of_Shu wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 3:43 pm The mystery to this psyche is why this in-body-experience is found to be so compelling? ;)
Actually the in-body-experience is so compelling because it is completely real. I'm not saying that the Big Bang is completely real but that our thinking about it certainly is. The way we imagine the outer world may be illusionary but our thoughts about it certainly are not. So the fact that we experience color, tone, warmth, touch, smell and so on are completely real. The fact that we experience ideas about all these sensations is also completely real. Even the meaning of the ideas is completely real. When we imagine a material world independent of consciousness, this in itself doesn't make it true but the meaning of the idea, which fills our consciousness is completely real. We live in the idea - it is what gives us a framework for understanding of our experience.

So we should make a distinction. One can say "I don't know why the idea of material world independent of my consciousness is so compelling". And it is perfectly true that such a view can be extremely compelling, to the point of feeling it is undeniable fact. Yet if someone understands how thinking works, when he goes through something like PoF and peels layer by layer the accumulation of ideas, suddenly the compulsion of the idea of an independent material world, loses its grip. We do that through reaching a firmer ground within our thinking being, we simply begin to see through these ideas as through lenses that we can put and remove at will, while in the past they were fastened in place without our knowing.

The next question is why can't we then remove also the lenses of the body? Here we are making a mistake. The intellectual ideas through which we interpret reality are really like lenses in front of our spirt eye. Through development of thinking we can attain to the freedom to remove these lenses. But we are committing an error when we imagine that the bodily senses and feelings are intellectual ideas. This is what we must be clear with. The bodily senses are so compelling precisely because they are not simply an intellectual lens before our "I". In the most real sense our "I" is submerged in the bodily complex. The bodies are expressions of the activity of beings higher than our current "I". Our "I" is really just a spark entangled in the blood and nerves of this complex. This is a real process extending in time. The error is that we imagine that our "I" is already of the same type of consciousness as that of the highest Divine. This causes us to believe that the whole sensory realm if just an intellectual idea-lens before our spirit eye. Then we wonder why if this is the case, this idea is so compelling that we can't override it.

So this is the point for meditation. It's a mystery only because we start with the wrong premises.

Re: Artificial metabolism and disscociation of MAL

Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2021 7:27 pm
by Soul_of_Shu
Cleric K wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 4:49 pmActually the in-body-experience is so compelling because it is completely real.
I never needed to be convinced that the in-body-experience, however real it feels, is far from the only kind of experience one can be compelled to explore, or is any more real than the alternatives, so I just wonder why it is obsessed over, any more so than the equally real alternatives. Are you saying that there is something immanently compelling about it, like a crucible that just cannot be resisted or bypassed, such that it then imperatively overrides all else, leaving one in need of being convinced of the alternatives?

Re: Artificial metabolism and disscociation of MAL

Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2021 8:01 pm
by Lou Gold
Cleric K wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 4:49 pm
Soul_of_Shu wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 3:43 pm The mystery to this psyche is why this in-body-experience is found to be so compelling? ;)
Actually the in-body-experience is so compelling because it is completely real. I'm not saying that the Big Bang is completely real but that our thinking about it certainly is. The way we imagine the outer world may be illusionary but our thoughts about it certainly are not. So the fact that we experience color, tone, warmth, touch, smell and so on are completely real. The fact that we experience ideas about all these sensations is also completely real. Even the meaning of the ideas is completely real. When we imagine a material world independent of consciousness, this in itself doesn't make it true but the meaning of the idea, which fills our consciousness is completely real. We live in the idea - it is what gives us a framework for understanding of our experience.

So we should make a distinction. One can say "I don't know why the idea of material world independent of my consciousness is so compelling". And it is perfectly true that such a view can be extremely compelling, to the point of feeling it is undeniable fact. Yet if someone understands how thinking works, when he goes through something like PoF and peels layer by layer the accumulation of ideas, suddenly the compulsion of the idea of an independent material world, loses its grip. We do that through reaching a firmer ground within our thinking being, we simply begin to see through these ideas as through lenses that we can put and remove at will, while in the past they were fastened in place without our knowing.

The next question is why can't we then remove also the lenses of the body? Here we are making a mistake. The intellectual ideas through which we interpret reality are really like lenses in front of our spirt eye. Through development of thinking we can attain to the freedom to remove these lenses. But we are committing an error when we imagine that the bodily senses and feelings are intellectual ideas. This is what we must be clear with. The bodily senses are so compelling precisely because they are not simply an intellectual lens before our "I". In the most real sense our "I" is submerged in the bodily complex. The bodies are expressions of the activity of beings higher than our current "I". Our "I" is really just a spark entangled in the blood and nerves of this complex. This is a real process extending in time. The error is that we imagine that our "I" is already of the same type of consciousness as that of the highest Divine. This causes us to believe that the whole sensory realm if just an intellectual idea-lens before our spirit eye. Then we wonder why if this is the case, this idea is so compelling that we can't override it.

So this is the point for meditation. It's a mystery only because we start with the wrong premises.
So this is the point for meditation. It's a mystery only because we start with the wrong premises.
Perhaps we might just say that we can learn from The Mystery if it is held with love (meditation).

Re: Artificial metabolism and disscociation of MAL

Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2021 8:26 pm
by AshvinP
Soul_of_Shu wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 7:27 pm
Cleric K wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 4:49 pmActually the in-body-experience is so compelling because it is completely real.
I never needed to be convinced that the in-body-experience, however real it feels, is far from the only kind of experience one can be compelled to explore, or is any more real than the alternatives, so I just wonder why it is obsessed over, any more so than the equally real alternatives. Are you saying that there is something immanently compelling about it, like a crucible that just cannot be resisted or bypassed, such that it then imperatively overrides all else, leaving one in need of being convinced of the alternatives?

I think what Cleric is pointing to here is that there is a depth of Thinking at which the reasons why we have compelling intellectual ideations become more and more transparent to us. The most fundamental reason being that we don't yet know where our intellectual ideations come from and how exactly they inform our experience. Penetrating those subconscious layers of our Thinking is the act of answering your questions, because our ignorance of those deeper forces is what makes them compelling in the first place. He gave before an example of being addicted to smoking - how does one 'beat' this addiction? By deep Self-inquiry which allows one to know precisely how they were previously flowing along with the smoking habit and what currents were making up that flow. Extricating from that flow via higher knowledge does not eliminate the currents altogether (because they are real ideations), but allows one to freely choose whether we will be merrily carried along by them or not. It is through confronting the ideational habits within ourselves that we are freed from their compulsion. All of this is immanently practical stuff. I don't write these comments simply to stick up for Cleric or to prove to others how much I have learned, but rather because taking the ideas and writing them in my own words is a very helpful way for me to confront the mental habits within and raise them higher into the Light of knowing.

Re: Artificial metabolism and disscociation of MAL

Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2021 8:35 pm
by Cleric K
Soul_of_Shu wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 7:27 pm I never needed to be convinced that the in-body-experience, however real it feels, is far from the only kind of experience one can be compelled to explore, or is any more real than the alternatives, so I just wonder why it is obsessed over, any more so than the equally real alternatives. Are you saying that there is something immanently compelling about it, like a crucible that just cannot be resisted or bypassed, such that it then imperatively overrides all else, leaving one in need of being convinced of the alternatives?
I'm saying that the alternatives (at our current evolutionary stage of consciousness) exist only as images that we shape with thinking. We need to differentiate between phenomena. There's something different in color perceived through the eye and color that we imagine. If we imagine the alternatives simply as different thought-images that we can switch as diapositives, we're smearing out this difference between image and actual sensory perception. We simply need to find the place of our thinking spiritual activity and the kind of content it contributes to the overall World Content. We don't need to presuppose anything, we simply need to let the given speak for itself. Then we'll realize that we're spreading the images of our thinking and asking "Why I'm so obsessed with this particular image, while I have no problem browsing through infinitely many others?" I understand that this may sound uneasy. It demands something which we're usually not very inclined to do. We need to contract, to become smaller and smaller until we become the size of our thought. Then we live with the thinking image that truly belongs to us, that is our true creative contribution to the totality of the World Content. On the other hand, our feelings, the bodily will, the bodily perceptions - they surround us as titanic reality which we simply can't deny. From this standpoint we have found our true size. From this standpoint we realize how we've been spreading our images all over the place and were trying to see the World Content as just one of those images. Now the image is only in what is our rightful possession - the reflection of our thought. That which we do not control, which is not reflection of our activity, we let speak for itself. Now we understand that the World Content is objective reality and much greater and powerful than our feeble thinking spark. Yet from this point we can begin to grow. Not by spreading fantasies again but by gradually learning about the laws, patterns, forces that govern the contents of the sphere. We start by putting our thinking in order, restore its proper musicality. Then we begin to apply this musicality in the realm of feelings, of sympathies and antipathies. As we master these, we come to know deeper forces in our soul, which hitherto have been carrying us as on strings. When we grow lawfully in the world where the strings are, we can guide the metamorphosis of the sphere with more and more freedom. Not by spreading fantastic images over the sphere and feeling disappointed that the World Content doesn't nudge but by finding the real forces of soul and spirit which once purified and organized by the "I", truly become our extensions, we can work and guide these forces - hopefully for the Good of all. When we understand things in this consistent and lawful way, we already know that we're deeply embedded within spheres within spheres of Time waves and we have a whole Cosmic evolution in front of us to evolve through the spheres. The bodily crucible is way greater than us. It is of the same essence as the firmament of the stars.

Re: Artificial metabolism and disscociation of MAL

Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2021 9:25 pm
by Ben Iscatus
How easy is it to lure MAL or could this be used to strengthen panpsychism or hylomorphism or some buddhist like process ontology? Give me hell.
BK has consistently said that there is no reason why dissociation could not be induced abiogenetically - as long as it is has metabolism. If it looks like a silicon chip, it is not dissociation, it has no metabolism, it cannot eat, drink, pee or poo and has no conscious inner life.

Re: Artificial metabolism and disscociation of MAL

Posted: Tue Oct 12, 2021 12:38 pm
by Jim Cross
Ben Iscatus wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 9:25 pm
How easy is it to lure MAL or could this be used to strengthen panpsychism or hylomorphism or some buddhist like process ontology? Give me hell.
BK has consistently said that there is no reason why dissociation could not be induced abiogenetically - as long as it is has metabolism. If it looks like a silicon chip, it is not dissociation, it has no metabolism, it cannot eat, drink, pee or poo and has no conscious inner life.
I guess the question would be if it is possible for metabolism to exist in something non-biological. Metabolism, for some people, is definitionally biological, although many others argue that reproduction is more essential to the definition. My view is that both attributes are critical and they are probably related. In other words, no reproduction without metabolism. That makes sense to me because it is only through excess metabolism are the resources consolidated to reproduce. I agree a silicon chip doesn't meet either criteria no matter which you use.