TAGTL is live and undulating through the airwaves tonight
The theme of this installment is loosely, "the mind is what the brain does". On tap for discussion or the following in no particular order: The Buddha's Brain, Jacob Needleman and mystical experiences, do animals really feel love, the yoga cult, Richard Feynman, altered states and much more. Plus some musical interludes from Tom Petty, Bowderbirds and Band of Horses.
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A Strange Dance In The Outback
As a follow up to my last post about Robert Burton and how do we know anything. What this is taking into account is that we all have the same basic 'knowing' abilities, the standard human kit, but of course, this isn't true. Right off the bat I think of people who have synesthesia. Their ability to process information and understand it in different ways is very different so in effect, they may 'know' things we don't. In other words, they see patterns we don't.
The other follow up idea I had was how he uses the example, "Try to visualize the big bang - a single infinitely dense point that suddenly explodes." to show "...how reason cannot be separated from bodily sensations. Any notion of space - no matter how abstract - must be filtered through our bodily perceptions of space." At first I though, "exactly, he's right, we'll never be able to really think about those type of concepts in the right way." But later after mulling it over, I realized that perhaps the fault lies in the description, not the interpretation of the description. There are an infinite amount of ways to describe something, just because science says 'a single infinitely dense point' doesn't mean that is the only way to describe it. And by describe it, I mean conjure up the feeling in someone of what the concept is.
Perhaps this is why 'science' falls so flat for so many people. Because they expect everyone to see the world as a right brain nerd would. But we don't, in fact I would argue, we're built in the complete opposite, NOT to see the world that way. So we're constantly trying to learn a language that we're not naturally good at speaking. We speak in stories, we feel in stories, we grasp concepts in stories. Maybe the right way to describe the beginning of the Universe never mentions any of those things, maybe it is a song, or a painting or a strange dance in the Outback.
A man tells his story of how he became unstuck in time and abducted by aliens.
A Harvard scientist conducts experiments on himself with a hallucinatory drug and an isolation chamber that may be causing him to regress genetically.
As people get older, "they just have this sense, this feeling that time is going faster than they are," says Warren Meck, a psychology professor at Duke University. This seems to be true across cultures, across time, all over the world. No one is sure where this feeling comes from. Scientists have theories, of course, and one of them is that when you experience something for the very first time, more details, more information gets stored in your memory. Think about your first kiss.
Science of Self is a student-run university club. The two themes are science, or the pursuit of verifiable and useful knowledge, and the self, or the individual, and self-growth.
We are a non-profit research and education organization dedicated to investigating consciousness and helping people develop their human potential to the maximum. At IAC, great emphasis is placed on the rational study and development of psychic and energetic abilities, especially the out-of-body experience (OBE), as a means of understanding the multi-dimensional fabric of our reality and learning how to live better within it.
This led to another peculiarity in Blankenhorn’s testimony: Perhaps because he did not speak in detail about his own original research, his testimony lacked the authority of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses. Instead, his language was strangely self-referential. For example, when he described the process that brought him from opposing domestic partnerships to favoring them, he did not recount a scientific study. Instead, he described a personal “journey” and “exploration” that required him think about social discrimination. “That was the big thing I had to grapple with in my own mind " to be able to look myself in the mirror,” Blankenhorn said. He ultimately concluded that “it means a lot to me personally … that I have been able to understand this” but did not clarify what new information led him to reverse his professional opinion.
Even though all participants in Brown’s experiment expected to receive a series of “vague and ambiguous statements” that could apply widely, they all still fell foul of the personal validation fallacy.
The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.
I drift, half awake, half asleep. Moving through the city I recall but have never been to.
Needless to say, not everyone will be pleased by this argument. Those strong religionists who believe that the overweening claims of science (or scientism) must be denounced daily will not be pleased by an argument that says nothing about redemption, salvation and sin, and gives full marks to science’s achievements. (Smith, a pupil of B.F. Skinner’s, has been a sympathetic and knowledgeable student of science for many years.) And those materialist atheists who see religion as the source of many of the world’s evils and all of its ignorance will not be pleased by an argument that finds an honorable place for religious beliefs and practices.
