Nature of consciousness

[Eric the Green]

(10-29-2018, 06:26 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(10-28-2018, 11:24 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I agree of course about the Papuan hunter, though I don't know why you mentioned him.

You mentioned people who are anti-intellectual. I went even further, using an example of a person who was never in school  and engages in mythical or magical rather than intellectual thinking.

Intellect is there to describe reality, but it would exist even if there were no intellects to describe it.

Quote:The brain is a principle link between the soul and its bodily functions and activities. We also have neurons in 5 other centers (called chakras) as well as 2 of those in the brain itself. These are the primary links between soul and body, although there are many more throughout and beyond our bodies. The 7 main chakras are each nerve ganglia, and are also spirit centers of feeling and intelligence that we experience directly. The heart is the principle nerve ganglia center outside the brain, and is the center of the embodied soul. Only heart-centered actions are authentic. The solar plexus is also a powerful chakra and nerve ganglia. You punch someone there, and you shut down his or her power, as though shutting it off.

Consciousness is everywhere in the body and beyond the body. The brain is just part of the body, so we need a body to interact with bodies. Bodies are not material or physical (there is no such thing), but are dense forms of energy. Beyond our physical bodies, we have (or are) spirit bodies, less dense expressions of spirit energy than our physical bodies are. Some spirits get trapped here on earth, and we see their spirit bodies as ghosts. Others can see souls expressed in spirit bodies directly.

The brain does not do anything of itself. It is the switchboard of our nervous system. The soul is who we are, and it is what does all actions, here on Earth or anywhere. The body/brain is the soul expressing itself; there's no need to think that it's "job" is somehow different or separate from that of the soul. There are no separate material and spiritual worlds, except relatively speaking. It's just a question of how much we can perceive beyond our limiting conceptions.

It's a great thing to have (and be) a body/brain, because of all the delights of the senses and the glories and learning challenges we face in this dense dimension. Basically, the so-called physical dimension is just the energy that we experience through our senses and brains. We experience energy as both outside us and within us, but this outside world (which we call physical objects or objective) is interdependent at all times with our inner or subjective world. So there really ultimately is only one world, and each of us is IT, here and now and forever.

That's my understanding, anyway. I assert that no understanding of the universe is complete without this and other spiritual understandings, although I also think we need physical science to understand behavior of those things we call mostly dead (or not self-moving), as these can be explained more-or-less by empirical evidence and generalized generalities that we discover. The more alive an object of our knowledge is, the more that spiritual knowledge is also needed to know it. And philosophy and the arts are also needed to understand reality fully.

Myths and magic again... I thought we left such beliefs behind during the Renaissance! But I agree about philosophy and the arts. They are very necessary for fullness of life. A civilized being with only intellect, with no heart, would be like a bird with one wing. Myths are not true, but they might provide us some emotional experiences we need. That's why people still like to watch movies about the Greek gods.

However, emotion is a result of extremely complex interplay of interactions between atoms in a material body. So there is no fundamental reason a computer couldn't have it.

Intellect is only one means of describing reality, and is so superficial that it misses most of it. 

My above descriptions of actual, real experiences are not beliefs. I don't think you can pinpoint a location for any feeling or awareness. We experience reality with our full bodies, and beyond; not just with neurons in our brains. That is not magic or myth; it's just common sense experience. Great frontiers of knowledge beckon on this inner journey. Joseph Campbell aroused a lot more sense of adventure than Carl Sagan did. See The Power of Myth. We do indeed need to revive and update the deeper traditions within western civilization, as well as eastern civilization, that lie beyond the purview of so-called post-Enlightenment intellect. These western esoteric traditions were in fact a highlight of the Renaissance, and were only suppressed later on, in the 18th century. Renaissance artists and intellectuals were well aware of the soul centers.

Emotions or anything else cannot be reduced to interactions between atoms in material bodies, so a computer built on that model cannot perceive or feel them. At least, not genuinely. I don't doubt AI can create virtual emotions. But many of us would not like to live in a virtual world, much less create one. Most people want the real thing. Most people want, as Joseph Campbell said, an experience of being alive.

The more people peer into the nature of what they call "matter," which is just a description of a feeling of resistance we experience with our senses, the more empty space they find. Even within protons is more empty space. The most elementary particles are just impressions on a screen in a particle accelerator. String theory says these small constituents of reality are massless. Since we know that matter really is energy anyway, why carry around this delusion that the world is made of "matter," and call those who question this myth, the ones who are like Papuan hunters? No, a better description of the universe is that it is music. When you peer into yourself, instead of into a microscope or through your own senses to look outside yourself, or even at yourself from the outside, you don't experience any matter anyway. You are only pure consciousness.