The Central Topic

[Jim Cross]

Cleric,

Yes, that's exactly what I said in the previous post:

I must have missed that. Are there any other paragraphs that are non-essential? I'm just tying to get to the Central Topic. Maybe you could just provide the short version of it? Or highlight the paragraphs I should pay attention to?

It doesn't require university degree but only our ability to observe what we're doing in our mind when we think.

Easier said than done if you mean that literally. Consciousness is primarily a serial activity. We can't usually be thinking of one thing while simultaneously thinking of ourselves thinking of the same thing. We might think of ourselves thinking and recall we were thinking of something else but that's different. This is in contrast to reflexive activity or learned behavior that has become automatic that can occur while we are thinking of something else, including thinking of ourselves thinking.

Aside from that, what evidence do you have that introspection provides reliable information? More bluntly, how do you know you are not fooling yourself?

Maybe no university degree is required but common sense could help. We frequently are mistaken and most of all about ourselves.

Ashvin,

I have read Gebser. It was a time ago and I don't remember being all that impressed by it.

The problem with all of the grand theories about consciousness evolving is they always are looking at a selective subset of cases that make their point and ignore the rest. Perspective that is key to Gebser argument can be found in cave art.

https://archeologie.culture.fr/lascaux/en/perspective

Christian Hillaire, Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, and Jean-Marie Chauvet stumbled upon the cave one day. Once inside, they discovered the over 1,000 unique cave paintings. Experience Ardèche tells us that the drawings were of animals, such as horses, lions, and bears. More interesting, they say, is that the paintings used modern techniques such as perspective and movement.

What makes the paintings in Chauvet Cave unique is that you can tell the walls had been prepared as a natural canvas before applying the paint. The walls were flattened and smoothed to make them ideal for painting.

There are complete drawings of animals, including an entire pride of lions. The technique is almost three-dimensional, making it appear as if the animals are perched to leap off the walls at any moment.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/08/09/chauvet-cave/

Maybe you can try to explain the Central Topic.

[Jim Cross]

Moving along. Cleric, you write:

Practically all branches of modern human life utilize this mode of cognition which really consists of ordering thoughts in logical arrangements. Ever since the exploration of propositional logic, formal systems, universal computation (Turing machines, Lambda calculus, etc.) and things like that, the intellect has reached it's grounds so to speak. From this point onwards anything that may be discovered can be immediately shown to be equivalent to some of the axiomatic systems of thinking. For this reason, as far as the logical grounds of the intellect are concerned, the ceiling has been hit, so to speak. From now on it's all about refinement and filtration of the correct intellectual thoughts which supposedly should represent the laws of Nature. The state of philosophy is even more sorry because it is completely lost in abstractions which can hardly be related to anything of practical significance.

What do you mean "all branches of modern human life utilize this mode of cognition which really consists of ordering thoughts in logical arrangements"?

Marketing and impulse buying, religious belief, attraction for conspiracy theories, ignoring science about climate change or vaccines- I could probably go on.

We live in an age where lack of logic, irrational belief, and superstition rule.

Yes, we have computers but probably less than one in a hundred have a glimmer of understanding how they work.

No ceiling has been hit. Science is just at its beginning, barely a few hundred years.

[Cleric K]

Hi Shajan

But there are thoughts that cannot be communicated unambiguously. In such cases we employ metaphors or other indirect means, hoping the other party understand what is in our mind. IMHO, any attempt to express the inexpressible/unknowable with precision will only lead to confusion.

Is there anything which can be communicated unambiguously? In certain sense all of our language can be seen as metaphorical. When you say "I see a tree" this is a metaphor to a blind man. The so called objectivity of the sensory world doesn't result from the unambiguity of perceptions but from the fact that we live in shared meaning that is connected with our individual perceptions. We understand each other not because we're having the same perceptions but because the ideas that we experience in relation to them are the same. If I see the Statue of Liberty from one side and you from another, it's clear that our perceptions can't be exactly the same, yet we agree that whatever it is that causes our perceptions is the same. Note that this "is the same" can come only as result of thinking. It is through thinking that we reach the conclusion we're being affected by the same world process. This seems very obvious thing but it is really important to realize that the perception in itself doesn't say anything about an outer spatial world and different perspectives of it. All of these are attained to as meaning added by thinking about the perceptions.

With this in mind, there's no need to arbitrarily hard-split the conscious phenomena into things which can be unambiguously communicated and things that can not. It's really about if we can find the same ideas which unite the ambiguity of perceptions.

Observing one’s own thought process is the beginning of wisdom. But silence born of wisdom is not an effective counter to the excesses of physicalism. We should find an intelligible path to ‘higher knowledge’ starting from ‘lower knowledge’.

Here is a short essay I wrote some time ago.

Thank you for your essay, I've read it. Two questions. You say:

Words such as ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ cannot be used to explain knowledge because we do not know what these words mean. There is no mind to begin with, only the objective certainty of biological evolution.

I agree that with the first sentence. But what would you say about thinking? Not as some abstract term in the way we speak of 'computation' but as the actual experiential reality when you observe your thinking, when, say, you multiply 13x17? We may not have theoretical explanation of thinking but we certainly know what it is from the standpoint of direct experience. We can't start with 'mind' because we must first think about what 'mind' means. But biological evolution is not so primary either. Trace back your life and try to remember if you were born with that certainty of biological evolution. Or it came only at some point as you were growing up and you have thought about such things? In this sense, would you agree that thinking is more immediate and certain than both 'mind' and 'biological evolution'?

The second thing is that I'm not sure how what you say about 'higher cognition' ties up with the way you finish your essay:

The foundation, ultimate ground of all reality, will forever remain beyond our objective grasp. Our ancestors were aware of this ignorance and it was the source of their wisdom.

So is 'higher cognition' for you simply the realization that there's something which will forever remain beyond the grasp of knowledge? Or you're being open for the possibility that things that have been hitherto beyond grasp can become objective conscious facts through the appropriate cognitive development?

[Jim Cross]

To understand the modern mind as it really is. Read this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/tech ... ation.html

Somebody started a "birds aren't real they're drones" site as a parody. Thousands of people sign on thinking it is real.

[Soul_of_Shu]

I'm not sure that posting this topic in this section has really helped in terms is its key aim, as it is as apparent as ever that the very kind of outmoded thinking that Cleric is attempting to point out, that must be superseded to make progress in the dialogos at large, remains a prevalent as ever in the responses to the topic, thus serving only to perpetuate it ... and so around and around it goes, and where it stops nobody knows

[Jim Cross]

I'm not sure that posting this topic in this section has really helped in terms is its key aim, as it is as apparent as ever that the very kind of outmoded thinking that Cleric is attempting to point out, that must be superseded to make progress in the dialogos at large, remains a prevalent as ever in the responses to the topic, thus serving only to perpetuate it ... and so around and around it goes, and where it stops nobody knows

Do you want to take a shot at explaining the Central Topic?

Is it just our mineralized thought-forms of modern science-law aren't satisfying enough?

[Soul_of_Shu]

Do you want to take a shot at explaining the Central Topic?

Cleric's posting of the topic is the explication of the topic, however challenging it may be to articulate, express and come to terms with. And so you want someone else to make it more graspable than he has offered. Why would that have any more efficacy, since it would be no less challenging to express than it is for him, and thus no more likely to be grasped.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

So you can't explain the Central Topic either?

You just give me a Table of Contents to a book. Are you kidding?

Gebser is making far too much of artistic convention. It's culture and convention not a change in consciousness.

BTW, Gebser is way out of scope in my view for a topic specific discourse on the Central Topic unless it is tied tightly to the topic. Gebser isn't mentioned in Cleric's original post. Maybe start a different thread. We could look at the sociocultural factors that influence how art in Europe during the Renaissance adapted to the needs of a growing merchant class who wanted realistic paintings and portraits of themselves.

Well what I am supposed to do, copy and paste each chapter for you? If you have no interest in thinking through these things for yourself, then there is nothing we can write to put that interest into you. As Dana also pointed out, Cleric's essay is about as straightforward as it gets if you put some thinking effort into it. You are asking questions, avoiding the answers, and then acting like we are the ones avoiding your questions. Remember you first asked for evidence of the "ancient states" claim. I probably should not have responded here, so I agree it would be best to start a new thread if you want to continue any discussion on that.

Cleric last response directly addressed your questions about the Central Topic and so far you have avoided all his points by simply shifting to different topics and making declarations about what we "know". He is simply asking you to stop abstractly speculating for a moment and reflect on your own 1st-person experience of the world content. Don't try to jump to any conclusions about the essence of the world as seen through the eyes of modern science. Try to see these things through your own eyes with curiosity, humility, sound reasoning, and patience.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Cleric last response directly addressed your questions about the Central Topic and so far you have avoided all his points by simply shifting to different topics and making declarations about what we "know". He is simply asking you to stop abstractly speculating for a moment and reflect on your own 1st-person experience of the world content. Don't try to jump to any conclusions about the essence of the world as seen through the eyes of modern science. Try to see these things through your own eyes with curiosity, humility, sound reasoning, and patience.

And this evokes what I see as the core impediment and conundrum we keep coming up against in this exchange, and many like it, in that, similar to Einstein's observation that (paraphrasing), we can't resolve problems (misunderstandings) with the kind of thinking that perpetuates them, likewise we can't grok integral stage thinking from the mindset of mental stage thinking. I'm also reminded of the Galileo affair, who when he implored the skeptics/cynics, still fixated in their outmoded mindset, to look through the telescope, and in so doing they would understand the cosmos in a far more expansive way, they balked at this offering, refusing to do so on the grounds that since they didn't understand what a telescope is, or how it could possibly do what Galileo assured them it could do, pretty much precluding the possibility, therefore they couldn't trust what it would reveal. Not a perfect analogy I realize, since the mind is not an object like a telescope one can offer for others to look through, but nonetheless hopefully gets the point across.

[Jim Cross]

BTW, Gebser is way out of scope in my view for a topic specific discourse on the Central Topic unless it is tied tightly to the topic. Maybe start a different thread. We could look at the sociocultural factors that influence how art in Europe during the Renaissance adapted to the needs of a growing merchant class who wanted realistic paintings and portraits of themselves.

Gebser's ideas are IMO certainly related to the topic, as according to his model 'thinking' is unfolding/evolving through archaic, magic, mythic, mental and now integral stages, not just in an historical sense, but in the metamorphosis of everyone's psyche. But if cleric feels that it is too tangential to what he's trying to articulate, then we should probably not get too far into Gebser.

Actually I revised my original comment to add "tightly to the topic". So it could be related. It just was never referenced in Cleric's original post.

Furthermore, since I can't make much sense out of the post, I almost feel anything could be related, since everything is some self-thought-law-form. Why not art history? Why not science history?

If everything is evolving in one direction, it would make sense that science would in some way be aiding the metamorphosis. Perhaps, instead of being an opponent to progress, it is the way of progress (as unsatisfying as a thought-form you may find it). Actually I think Gebser is suggesting exactly that. So the mineralized thought-forms of Cleric aren't really a problem. No worries.