Thursday, May 12, 2016

On "Peaceful Qualia, The manhattan Project of Consciousness"

Dear Andrés:

These are my thoughts upon reading your "Peaceful Qualia, The Manhattan Project of Consciousness"

https://qualiacomputing.com/2016/03/29/peaceful-qualia-the-manhattan-project-of-consciousness/

"The purpose of this program was to find a phenomenological technology to address core causes for the failure of cooperation in human societies. "

"Phenomenological technology" is very unclear. Can you substitute if for its definition like in math?

"When the identification with any one of these programs as oneself is made, it begins to accumulate a gloss of ontological qualia."

If the "ontological qualia" depend on the identification are they not then, by definition, not really qualia? they would seem to be more akin to the "objects" constituted from qualia through the operation of the sensory apparatus-brain-mind...

"Evolution has recruited one of its orientable positive manifolds to represent what we call realism."

What? I really don't get this sentence...

Why do you use the word "manifold"? what definition can we substitute it for in every sentence where you use it?

"Rather than perceiving mathematical ideas as living presences, they see them as timeless and expressionless patterns."

Actually Steiner (and to an extent, Husserl) wants us to experience ideas as living realities, and says we can verify for ourselves that this way lies the next type of consciousness ("Anschaunde Urteilskraft", -power of judging-in-brholding- Goethe's term. Husserl's would be "Eidetic intuition" not quite the same. For an exploration of the nuance see the essay by Hicks that i sent you)

("Spiritual beings Dwell in The Ground of Propositions" by Scott E hicks. It doesn't seem to be available online right now, you can get it from me)

You seem to use  the word qualia as a singular. I have noticed that Wikipedia gives "quale" as the singular. This is just poor latin.

Qualia and Qualium, like Quanta and Quantum.

As a native spanish speaker this should be very clear to you. The words "cualidad" y "cantidad" must belong to the same grammatical category. They basically mean "which-ness" and "how-much-ness" The questions "cuánto" y "cuál" are inextricably related. almost like nonidentical twins.

"In its extreme form, realism can spark spiritual experiences, which are the result of saturated feelings of being in one’s experiential field. Being overflows one’s sense of time and space, and one experiences an ontologically solid absolute necessity"

If the experience of absolutely ontologically solid necessity is just a configuration of the mind, where is the Real then? The only way out left is that Mind is the only reality. Welcome back to Vedic India.

"One’s object of interest may feel unattainable, but one’s feeling of the existence of this problem is full of realism"

I think you meant "full of realiTY" you often seem to confuse things and the ideas thereof, for example you ofthen say "phenomenology" when you seem to mean "phenomenon".

Maybe it has to do with rythmic properties of the number six as intstantiated in six syllable words, which most of the time sound really authoritative and greek...

"And while we do have the ability to turn on our senses’ realism very strongly, what usually has the most realism is our sense of presence as narratives. Our sensory modalities are not the place in which this realism is expressed the most. In humans, there is a typical hyper-expression of the realism of their social logico-linguistic selves."

Let's comment on this one from Steiner's point of view:

1.-when we learn to "ignore the senses" we are in "the spiritual world"
2.-the logico-linguistic self corresponds to the rational soul, that corresponds to conceptual thinking, that started becoming mainstream in greece. Plato's dialogues are accounts of Socrates patiently trying to help people think conceptually. Our task in this next cultural epoch is the development of the "consciousness soul" which corresponds to the aforementioned "Anschauende Urteilskraft"

"turn on our senses' realism"

kind of reads as if each of your senses has a mind and a philosophical view. Maybe you mean something more like "grant/assign reality status to sensory input".

"Coincidentally, a vast proportion of human conflict can be tracked to excessive identification with one’s self as a collective, yet narrow, narrative. This is compounded with a strong, yet naïve, omnipresent phenomenology of realism associated to one’s own experiences"

The phrase "phenomenology of realism" is very vague. Maybe you just mean "appearance of reality". Don't you think this second phrase is more clear, even if less "cool"? If not , please elaborate on the difference of meaning.

I think you'd benefit greatly from learning from phenomenologists to use verbs as nouns without changing their ending. e.g. "el aparecer de lo que aparece".

"The technology also helped them forget about these experiences on a meta-cognitive level."


"Meta-cognitive level" sounds quite interesting. can you elaborate?


"One can finally conceive of a God’s-eye-view utility function for the entire universe. This experience is the maximum possible qualia synchrony level before memory stops working, and is often described as peak bliss in the human organism."

"a God’s-eye-view utility function for the entire universe"

This one phrase, on the contrary, is extremely clear and useful. I've been dancing around its meaning for years, and somehow just never composed it. Thanks!


"Typically, the realization would be forgotten." Not so. Around age eleven I would spontaneously drift into non-subject/object mode. When I "came back" I could vaguely tell that I was coming back from where my "self is not even assembled" (constituted, to use the language of Sartre) through witnessing the later stages of the "reboot" (remembering there is a planet with a country with a city with a school...where i have this name, btw.)

"The deathless state is one memory away." Cheers to that!!

"Propositional qualia is the experiential modality that..." First, how is a non-quotation-marked plural followed by "is"? Furthermore: How is a qualium a modality? Or maybe you mean the set of all possible "propositional qualia" as you call them? The syntax and the grammar are really vague here. At least to my humble understanding.

"whether it is possible to fully integrate the experience of universal oneness into one’s conceptual landscapes"

I'm sure you are aware tht a big bunch of writings by the mystics are trying to do just that. Read them much?

Here's a book by steiner outlining the slow birthing of a clear concept of
"god-being-(re)born-in-us-as-a-higher-I"

through some of the renaissance mystics. (The same idea I commented about on your "mystical hypothesis" post.

http://www.globalgreyebooks.com/Pages/mystics-of-the-renaissance.html

"Thus, LSD-like states allow the global binding of otherwise incompatible schemas by softening the degree to which neighborhood constraints are enforced."

True, Once I was playing rythm guitar while a friend played classical, neither of us listening to each other in order to "play together". However, in the lsd state, it was remarkably easy to understand the "mutually unacknowledging" streams as meaningfully-related parts of a somewhat "soberly-unimaginable" whole.

" the grand pattern is somewhat different. It is more stable; one arrives at a more globally consistent state"

Sounds like Jung's goal of "Individuation".


"Total order of consciousness"

Levinas, in "totality and infinity" argues that totalizations are unlawful violence to the actual infinity of the other's presence as experienced in the fundamental experience of the "face to face"


"On the third day of taking Bienavi, people become aware of the phenomenology of transparency".

Again, since it ends in "-logy" phenomenology means a type of DISCOURSE. Maybe you mean "they experience the phenomenon of transparency" but since phenomenon means "appearing" you could just say "transparency appears" or "transparency begins to stand out", but maybe simpler words make you less excited.

There is research about people liking "soldier talk" (e.g. "to take evasive action" instead of "to flee") because it makes the world seem more complex and therefore more magical (in the demeaning sense of the word)

"Between you and your surroundings you now see, with clarity, a luminous spaciousness"

this reminds me of a little bit of TSK that i did get to read, the part about "great space".

(Time, Space and Knowledge by Tarthang Tulku)

"Every stimuli experienced is a delight; and yet, the light of love towards all sentients shines as in no other state."

The singular of stimuli is stimulus, btw.

So are you delighted at the suffering you perceive? I'm not saying this is absurd. Thomas Aquinas explains that the "bienaventurados" (the blessed) in heaven do rejoice at the existence of hell... However, one might ask what the incentive to reduce it is then...

"Bienavi-assisted Oneness Therapy"

I wish i could give you a deeper experience of the relatively crude "oneness therapy" practised by the rainbow family. Actually you could describe said family as a self selected association of unity therapy facilitators, and their gatherings as large scale facilitations which reap enormous synergy benefits. Field Data-point: I play the guitar like ten times better there.

There's gonna be a bunch of gatherings in a row in canada soon, maybe you go, they're defined as "ceremonial" so maybe there's gonna be a little too much ritual pompousness, but i think you can factor that out in your measurements. Look it up here: rainbowforum.net

My overall conclusion: Wonderful text. The imprecisions i pointed out are inevitable in a paper of such a scope. Thanks!


Is Silicon Valley selecting for moral idiocy?

Ok so there's a lot of people with high iqs in the bay area, in what sense are they intelligent? my contention is that they are moral imbeciles like Adolf Eichmann.

This guy in "Further Future" (a sot of "Burning Man for the rich):

“This is a high percentage of San Francisco entrepreneurs, and they tend to be winners. It’s a curated, self-selected group of adults who have jobs,” Schmidt said. “You can tell by the percentage of trailers.”

It's not self-selected, it is exclusive and cannibalistic, and these high iq aspergers from the bay area pull their yokes in castrated oxlikeness maybe because they're too autistic to get a gardening girlfriend/boyfriend that's happy with much less money and -especially- hype, or to break out of the work-withdrawal-comfort cycle for that matter.

“This is top-league networking and business folks are all here in the guise of having fun. It’s designed around the music, but it’s about the business,”

Exactly, the spirit of fun is hijacked by cutthroat social climbing, and these poor (moral) imbeciles are unlikely to experience laughing for real at a joke and not because the boss cracked it. Also, the bourgeois are always lame, because the real joke would be about them. The capacity to fake laughter selects in favor of Eichmann style "smart imbeciles" They would be pitiful if they were not despicable.

You might paint a clumsy picture of god money stomping the throat of Pan, but the Cthonic ones are way more fundamental, and one day Shiva might jus send his flying monkeys to your fancy "sacrifice"

If you live in the bay area just ignore that sentence, it's not really for your secular soul-contemptuous worldview.


“What happens post-capitalism? Even post-democracy? What about post-employment, when we have universal basic income?"


I guess "post-democracy" means when we no longer have the right to decide...

"..we have great reverence for Burning Man, but there’s always an element of arduousness. Here, we have spa treatments and green juice,” he said. “There’s already enough in life that’s tough.”


Finally the jewel:

“We’re so privileged to come to these spiritual places – Further Future, Tulum – but not everyone can,” the audience member says, asking Piorkowski how he should reconcile that.

“It’s all about balance. We are the ones meant to be the air, not the earth,” Piorkowski said. “So you have this group who can travel. The purpose can never be to enable everyone to travel because that would create imbalance.”

Translate to: We are meant to have "unabashed luxury" while the rest of you just live a tough life because we can't afford to lift you out of the rough.

Right. Gods and clods. (See the south park episode where one of the dads explains this) Some have to be poor so we can be rich.

In the meantime a bright asperger is finally getting around the key problem that will let one of these sorry excuses for a human to concentrate wealth even more, damning another 10-100 million people to "be earth" (read: dirt, for them to step on)


https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/02/further-future-festival-burning-man-tech-elite-eric-schmidt

Also they starve while working in google...

http://www.alternet.org/labor/silicon-valley-tech-worker-fired-after-blogging-about-starving-while-working-billion-dollar

and there's a lot of homeless in sf...

And also this:
http://religiondispatches.org/the-moral-bankruptcy-of-silicon-valley-asceticism/

Briefly: this idiot thinks he's very smart because he does without ac. How does he do laundry? He just buys new clothes from china. Now that's really smart...

WTF?