I challenge you: your best alternate to materialism

[ctamblyn]

Symmetry means invariance under some particular transformation. Invariance means that the transformation causes no change.

Perfect symmetry, if it has any meaning at all, would have to mean invariance under all possible transformations.

Thus, if the universe were ever in a state of perfect symmetry, it could not possibly change in any way. If it were in that state prior to the Big Bang, then the Big Bang, and every subsequent change of configuration, could not have occurred.

Since many changes did occur and continue to occur, we must conclude that no state of perfect symmetry could possibly have existed.

It depends on what the set of all "possible" transformations actually includes in doronshadmi's view (I've tried finding out, but I'm having trouble making my question understood), and whether the symmetry can be spontaneously broken in some way. Doronshadmi's description of his model so far may not have been entirely rigorous.

 

[punshhh]

What is the set of possible transformations?

He can't define the set of possible transformations, other than to say it is everything except the empty set. This is because it could never be determined what is possible and what is possible must allow for that which is inconceivable, to humans, or any other none unity knower.

And any unity knower that's around is by definition inconcievable (intellectually) to us. This unfortunately leaves Doron with only one answer to numerous enquiries and no way to explain it other than to recommend TM.

 

[punshhh]

Symmetry means invariance under some particular transformation. Invariance means that the transformation causes no change.

Perfect symmetry, if it has any meaning at all, would have to mean invariance under all possible transformations.

Thus, if the universe were ever in a state of perfect symmetry, it could not possibly change in any way. If it were in that state prior to the Big Bang, then the Big Bang, and every subsequent change of configuration, could not have occurred.

Since many changes did occur and continue to occur, we must conclude that no state of perfect symmetry could possibly have existed.

I agree with your reasoning here, but might I suggest an alternative approach.

If one attempts to apply the concept of Perfect symmetry, as you describe it to existence, one has to acknowledge that human reason is limited and abstract and therefore any conclusions regarding such universals would be like a shot in the dark wearing a blindfold.

I suggest a bit of lateral thinking.

Firstly, while the consideration that the world we find ourselves in, is in every direction and state finite and that we cannot conclude that there is or is not any kind of infinity in existence (while remembering that infinity is a human invention). We also see that it also appears to be endless in every direction. This would suggest to me the concept of only ever being able to address local conditions.

For example we may be discussing a local symmetry, in a larger multiverse, one which is unknown beyond local conditions.

Secondly that a local symmetry may be a transformation from a higher dimensional reality. A reality that follows a different set of laws of nature, of which the laws we are subject to are a derivation.

 

[Belz...]

He can't define the set of possible transformations, other than to say it is everything except the empty set. This is because it could never be determined what is possible and what is possible must allow for that which is inconceivable, to humans, or any other none unity knower.

And yet he claims to be aware of the simplest state of existence through wishful thinking meditation.

 

[punshhh]

And yet he claims to be aware of the simplest state of existence through wishful thinking meditation.

Perhaps you haven't realised, the purpose of meditation is to subjugate the mind and experience existence directly. As such, thinking is irrelevant.

 

[Aepervius]

Perhaps you haven't realised, the purpose of meditation is to subjugate the mind and experience existence directly. As such, thinking is irrelevant.

Meditation is a conscious action you take with your brain. Any observation from results or awareness of its effect is subject to the mind. As such thinking is highly relevant, as it is central to it. That many meditating people do not recognize as such is a given. But it is still a fact that even if subconscious, it is still thinking.

 

[punshhh]

Meditation is a conscious action you take with your brain. Any observation from results or awareness of its effect is subject to the mind. As such thinking is highly relevant, as it is central to it. That many meditating people do not recognize as such is a given. But it is still a fact that even if subconscious, it is still thinking.

Through practice it becomes communion*, the mind is present, but inactive. Anyway your point hinges on the primacy of mind in a being. It is well known through the biological record that significant mental activity and particularly higher mental faculties, are a fairly recent development in living organisms.

As such before this development organisms were in touch with direct experience, entirely without mind, nothing much has changed, other than the complexity of mental activity in humans, the body and particularly metabolic life is unchanged. This being the case, provided a person has the ability to subjugate the mind, he/she can return to that state of direct experience.

Indeed this is one of the main goals in the mystical life.

*the word communion will likely require some explanation, as I have found is the case with theological terminology.

 

[ctamblyn]

He can't define the set of possible transformations, other than to say it is everything except the empty set.

That isn't what he said, though. He said that the set of transformations is "any non-empty set", not that it contains any non-empty set. There is a huge distinction, and since doronshadmi is purportedly competent in set theory, he should understand that difference.

Given any (abstract) object which might or might not be a possible transformation, it should either be the case that it belongs to the set of "all possible transformations", or not. If so, the set of all possible transformations is some particular set, not "any non-empty set". To say it is any non-empty set is to say that whether an object qualifies as a possible transformation or not is completely arbitrary. It is also to say that any object may be deemed to be a transformation. Rotation by 90 degrees about the z-axis, the number 4, the Eiffel Tower, you name it.

I suspect - but cannot yet know - that doronshadmi means something else entirely. I initially got the impression that the "state of existence" E is supposed to be a set of things, and that each transformation T acts on the state of existence by acting on the things individually, so that we can define the image set^[1] T(E) as the resulting "transformed state of existence". To say that the state of existence is perfectly symmetric would then mean that T(E) = E for all T. A fully general solution to this is E = {}, but there could be other solutions depending on what transformations T are deemed "possible", and what E actually consists of. Hence my questions.

---

[1] See definition of "image of a set" here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_(mathematics)

 

[Belz...]

Perhaps you haven't realised, the purpose of meditation is to subjugate the mind and experience existence directly.

How does that even work, or make any sort of sense ? It's rhetoric that's meant to be deep, but it's nonsensical. How can you experience without the mind ?

 

[Myriad]

Meditation is essentially hacking the cognitive processes by which we perceive and interpret the world. Most meditation techniques amount to various ways of applying cognitive faculties to unusual inputs. For example, applying the ability to interpret the linguistic meaning of symbols to a symbol known to be meaningless. Or applying perception to the process of perception, or contemplating the outcome of contemplation.

The former technique can reveal some aspects of how cognition works, just as aiming a camera at a blank uniform field can reveal some aspects of how the camera works (e.g. by revealing film grain or pixel noise). What it doesn't reveal is anything about how the external world works, any more than revving a car's engine in neutral reveals the true nature of the road.

The latter techniques produce stranger results by adding additional strange-looping to the normal processes. This is like aiming a camera at its own monitor, which tends to generate complex and counter-intuitive phenomena, such as pulsating or chaotic patterns from a static configuration. But unlike the first case, this doesn't directly reveal anything about how the camera works, nor is it revealing anything about the world, except perhaps by analogy (where seeing complexity arise from a strange loop suggests, but does not directly demonstrate, that some fundamental level of existence also arises that way). What its actually doing is creating an additional layer of abstraction, a step farther away from any underlying reality.

The claims in the TM video linked in post 874 amount to nothing more than making analogies and then claiming they're something more than that. This can be clearly seen in the diagram shown at 3:30, which juxtaposes a diagram of the rich layers of discovered physical science, with a similarly triangle-shaped diagram supposedly representing TM. But TM's triangle contains only ad copy; it is empty of meaning or explanation. It claims that this form of meditation reveals the deepest "unified" layer at the basis of physics -- but no meditator in human history ever discovered, by meditation, the cellular basis of life, the protein-machinery nature of cellular biology, the atomic nature of molecular chemistry, the subatomic structures of the atom, or the quantum field nature of particle physics. So why should anyone expect it to reveal any layers deeper still? Such faith, and such claims, are absurdly misplaced.

 

[tsig]

Through practice it becomes communion*, the mind is present, but inactive. Anyway your point hinges on the primacy of mind in a being. It is well known through the biological record that significant mental activity and particularly higher mental faculties, are a fairly recent development in living organisms.

As such before this development organisms were in touch with direct experience, entirely without mind, nothing much has changed, other than the complexity of mental activity in humans, the body and particularly metabolic life is unchanged. This being the case, provided a person has the ability to subjugate the mind, he/she can return to that state of direct experience. Indeed this is one of the main goals in the mystical life.

*the word communion will likely require some explanation, as I have found is the case with theological terminology.

Alcohol does the same thing and it's quicker.

 

[Tassman]

Perhaps you haven't realised, the purpose of meditation is to subjugate the mind and experience existence directly. As such, thinking is irrelevant.

By which you presumably mean ceasing to make clear, reasoned judgements, i.e. critical thinking. Why is this a good thing?

 

[punshhh]

How does that even work, or make any sort of sense ? It's rhetoric that's meant to be deep, but it's nonsensical. How can you experience without the mind ?

Life is an experience for any organism with life, this does not require mind. Just look around you in nature, there are lots of organisms doing a lot of experiencing without a mind.

 

[punshhh]

That isn't what he said, though. He said that the set of transformations is "any non-empty set", not that it contains any non-empty set. There is a huge distinction, and since doronshadmi is purportedly competent in set theory, he should understand that difference.

Given any (abstract) object which might or might not be a possible transformation, it should either be the case that it belongs to the set of "all possible transformations", or not. If so, the set of all possible transformations is some particular set, not "any non-empty set". To say it is any non-empty set is to say that whether an object qualifies as a possible transformation or not is completely arbitrary. It is also to say that any object may be deemed to be a transformation. Rotation by 90 degrees about the z-axis, the number 4, the Eiffel Tower, you name it.

I suspect - but cannot yet know - that doronshadmi means something else entirely. I initially got the impression that the "state of existence" E is supposed to be a set of things, and that each transformation T acts on the state of existence by acting on the things individually, so that we can define the image set^[1] T(E) as the resulting "transformed state of existence". To say that the state of existence is perfectly symmetric would then mean that T(E) = E for all T. A fully general solution to this is E = {}, but there could be other solutions depending on what transformations T are deemed "possible", and what E actually consists of. Hence my questions.

---

[1] See definition of "image of a set" here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_(mathematics)

I see, yes I would agree with this, however as I am not a mathematician, I don't normally use this kind of terminology.

 

[punshhh]

Meditation is essentially hacking the cognitive processes by which we perceive and interpret the world. Most meditation techniques amount to various ways of applying cognitive faculties to unusual inputs. For example, applying the ability to interpret the linguistic meaning of symbols to a symbol known to be meaningless. Or applying perception to the process of perception, or contemplating the outcome of contemplation.

The former technique can reveal some aspects of how cognition works, just as aiming a camera at a blank uniform field can reveal some aspects of how the camera works (e.g. by revealing film grain or pixel noise). What it doesn't reveal is anything about how the external world works, any more than revving a car's engine in neutral reveals the true nature of the road.

The latter techniques produce stranger results by adding additional strange-looping to the normal processes. This is like aiming a camera at its own monitor, which tends to generate complex and counter-intuitive phenomena, such as pulsating or chaotic patterns from a static configuration. But unlike the first case, this doesn't directly reveal anything about how the camera works, nor is it revealing anything about the world, except perhaps by analogy (where seeing complexity arise from a strange loop suggests, but does not directly demonstrate, that some fundamental level of existence also arises that way). What its actually doing is creating an additional layer of abstraction, a step farther away from any underlying reality.

Yes I recognise these interpretations, but what you're describing here are mental techniques which can be used in exercising and exploring the mind as in Raga Yoga. However you haven't addressed meditation as I see it. Which is little more than the stilling of the self, with no aim, goal, or purpose other than that.

The claims in the TM video linked in post 874 amount to nothing more than making analogies and then claiming they're something more than that. This can be clearly seen in the diagram shown at 3:30, which juxtaposes a diagram of the rich layers of discovered physical science, with a similarly triangle-shaped diagram supposedly representing TM. But TM's triangle contains only ad copy; it is empty of meaning or explanation. It claims that this form of meditation reveals the deepest "unified" layer at the basis of physics -- but no meditator in human history ever discovered, by meditation, the cellular basis of life, the protein-machinery nature of cellular biology, the atomic nature of molecular chemistry, the subatomic structures of the atom, or the quantum field nature of particle physics. So why should anyone expect it to reveal any layers deeper still? Such faith, and such claims, are absurdly misplaced.

I have very little knowledge or experience of TM, so will have to defer to Doron on that one.

 

[punshhh]

By which you presumably mean ceasing to make clear, reasoned judgements, i.e. critical thinking. Why is this a good thing?

the purpose of meditation is not to make reasoned judgements, or practicing critical thinking while meditating. These can be practiced separately.

 

[punshhh]

You mean, like the stuff we see and hear ? That isn't the mind, it's data that the mind uses. You are playing around with words instead of having a discussion, and it's getting tedious and boring fast.

Feel free to dodge the issue if you so wish. The mind contains the responses and computations (thinking) to data, along with the social conditioning etc etc.

What contents ?

Ditto.

You have demonstrated that you don't understand this issue except in philosophical terms. It follows that you don't understand the science.

i may not converse in the usual science based rhetoric, this does not mean that I am not aware of it, or don't understand it. I am approaching this from the stand point of idealism, you should bare this in mind.

Do you have any evidence for said material ? If not, why even bother supposing its existence since we don't need it to understand the mind ? Aside from lingering idealism, that is.

There may not be a practical reason, so what, humanity has the luxury to be able to think about things, it's not surprising to find them doing it more than is necessary.

Ideas are worthless unless they can be put into practice. Philosophy is about the idea. I want to know if it applies to reality, hence the request for evidence, and it's not surprising that no one has any against materialism.

Materialism has enough short comings of its own philosophically. And ideas can be collected and appreciated, or referred to etc etc.

 

[Belz...]

Life is an experience for any organism with life, this does not require mind. Just look around you in nature, there are lots of organisms doing a lot of experiencing without a mind.

Yes but if you're going to tell me your brain is going to have an experience, THAT requires a mind. The problem is that idealists and ideologists don't think about those things.

 

[Belz...]

i may not converse in the usual science based rhetoric, this does not mean that I am not aware of it, or don't understand it.

You have _proven_ that you don't understand it.

 

[punshhh]

Yes but if you're going to tell me your brain is going to have an experience, THAT requires a mind. The problem is that idealists and ideologists don't think about those things.

You really don't understand the complexity of this point of view, do you.
The brain is no different to any other part of the body, as such it does play some part in experience independent of the mind. However I appreciate that if you are of the opinion that the brain and the mind are the same thing, or inseparable, then you will obviously disagree.

I have pointed out that I categorise consciousness, mind and brain as different processes in a person. Not independent in a person, but distinct objects or processes in a person, rather like sense receptor, motor neurone, brain, mind.