I THINK therefore I AM

@richrf,

kennethamy;72763 wrote:

Is that your reply to my point that we can often know what a person is thinking or feeling?

No, that is my response to how annoyingly glib you are:sarcastic:. My response to your point is this: :detective:I think you are wrong, we don't know what the other person is experiencing. We know what we feel in a certain situation, and we can infer how some situation would make us feel. We know that when someone screams and yells and turns red in the face when something isn't going right, they are socially indicating anger. Sociopaths can emulate an appropriate response to any event about which they feel something totally different. Since the indicators can be faked, how are they any sort of true indication?

Would you agree that it is a simple matter of fact that there is no way to tell if what you visually experience when you look at the wavelength that your eyes pick up as red, is possibly the same qualitatively as how my eyes pick up blue? If the switch always occurs, so that when I say that something is red, you would also claim that you see it as red, how is it possible to know that I don't see your red as my blue and your blue as my red?

kennethamy;72763 wrote:

I think I once tried to read Lang a while ago. I just couldn't put that book down. I had to throw it down-into the trash.

Oh no! How scathing! I can't take it! What a mercilessly witty remark! Smile

:a-ok:

@richrf,

richrf;72957 wrote:

Hi Alan,

I know people who love their garden, their pets, their home, their car ... I mean really love them.

As with everything, the concept of love seems to be very much dependent upon the individual, and I dear say that each person, when asked will come up with a different definition of love. And who knows, if a dog was able to speak, maybe they too would have their own definitions - e.g. I love be taken out at night by my owner.:bigsmile:

What I have learned is that many times people think there is an agreement on a concept or word, but there really isn't. Consensus is arrived at but the consensus rarely matches what each individual actually believes. I remember asking a group of Taijiquan practitioners what Taiji was, and each person had a different answer. One suggested: You know it when you see it. So they were talking about something the definition that none of them agreed on, but were still able to converse. I think that is amazing.

Rich

Rich

HI Rich :bigsmile:

As a boy I had a dog called Bully I know he loved me and I loved him to the extent that I cried for a month after he died. Strangely this is the worst and most profound grief I have ever experienced in my somewhat protracted life.I did not have this sorrow when my beloved patents passed on

I had him from the age of twelve until he died of kidney failure some 17 years later when I was already married with four daughters. I was so overcome with grief that I even made some bad mistakes at work, how could I tell my then boss that I was grieving for my little pet dog?

He was a black and tan sausage age dog, for the life of me I still cant spell the correct name for that breed of dog :perplexed:

peace and light to you Rich Smile

@nameless,

nameless;72852 wrote:

I'm happy to have risen up from the 'parrotish sage agreer' that you perceived me.

Of course I didn't perceive you as that. I just thought you agreed with them.

You've missed the point of my post. It was not a personal attack. I was suggesting that you speak more rigorously and so make yourself seem more thoughful. In particular, what you say about mysticism reveals your understanding of it to be inadequate to an informed opinion, let alone an understanding. You do it a great disservice by speaking about it as if it were otherwise.

@Whoever,

Whoever;73006 wrote:

In particular, what you say about mysticism reveals your understanding of it to be inadequate to an informed opinion, let alone an understanding. You do it a great disservice by speaking about it as if it were otherwise.

Well, as a sucessful mystic for about 25 years or so (and worked pretty dilligently at it for about 25 years prior to that), I'm just going to have to bow to the 'superior understanding' or 'informed opinion' that you feel that you possess. :a-ok:
heh
Perhaps, sometime that you care to get into any greater depth in your condemnations and self justifications, you know, more than simple "you don't know anything, nyah, and you bother those of us who do!", like specifics, feel free...
But I don't see any meaningful discussion on the subject between the two of us, because I've seen no evidence that you have anything to contribute.
Obviously I have prickled a vanity of yours somewhere. Be a man and get over it.

@nameless,

nameless;73010 wrote:

Well, as a sucessful mystic for about 25 years or so (and worked pretty dilligently at it for about 25 years prior to that)

How do you judge mystical success? That is a new one. Is there a mysticism Oscar?

@Alan McDougall,

Alan McDougall;72963 wrote:

HI Rich :bigsmile:

As a boy I had a dog called Bully I know he loved me and I loved him to the extent that I cried for a month after he died. Strangely this is the worst and most profound grief I have ever experienced in my somewhat protracted life.I did not have this sorrow when my beloved patents passed on

I had him from the age of twelve until he died of kidney failure some 17 years later when I was already married with four daughters. I was so overcome with grief that I even made some bad mistakes at work, how could I tell my then boss that I was grieving for my little pet dog?

He was a black and tan sausage age dog, for the life of me I still cant spell the correct name for that breed of dog :perplexed:

peace and light to you Rich

Hi Alan,

Thank you for sharing your story with me. Yes, there is all kinds of love in this world.

Rich

@richrf,

richrf;73020 wrote:

Hi Alan,

Thank you for sharing your story with me. Yes, there is all kinds of love in this world.

Rich

UGH!, UGH!, UGH! But I am glad he didn't tell his boss what was wrong. He might not only have fired him (I would have) but spread the word around the office.

@kennethamy,

kennethamy;72583 wrote:

Magic is not much of an explanation.

But it's the only thing that could possible explain your magical wake up and suddenly have a memory impanted upon one's mind.

kennethamy;72583 wrote:

But perhaps there are some physiological or psychological causes we don't know about.

If we look at the research available it is most certain that there are things we do not know.

kennethamy;72583 wrote:

There is no good reason (after all) to think we are remembering anything that took place during the night except the feeling of remembering. Is there?

Yes, there is. If you like, you could check out various theories of dreams and see how they explain the phenomena. Most involve the manifestation of waking experience in the dream state, and they differ on why those remembrances appear.

kennethamy;72583 wrote:

But we have a lot of reason to think there are no spaghetti monsters. So that analogy is not persuasive, because it is a very poor analogy.

Actually, you have no reason whatsoever to think that there are no flying spaghetti monesters. It's an old and popular analogy. You could google search it to find mre examples of it's use in philosophy.

The analogy is quite apt. You proposed some strange, nonfalsifiable occurrence by which the contents of dreams somehow pop into one's head upon waking - which is just as nonfalsifiable and absurd as the spaghetti monester explanation.

@Didymos Thomas,

Didymos Thomas;73118 wrote:

But it's the only thing that could possible explain your magical wake up and suddenly have a memory impanted upon one's mind.

If we look at the research available it is most certain that there are things we do not know.

Yes, there is. If you like, you could check out various theories of dreams and see how they explain the phenomena. Most involve the manifestation of waking experience in the dream state, and they differ on why those remembrances appear.

Actually, you have no reason whatsoever to think that there are no flying spaghetti monesters. It's an old and popular analogy. You could google search it to find mre examples of it's use in philosophy.

The analogy is quite apt. You proposed some strange, nonfalsifiable occurrence by which the contents of dreams somehow pop into one's head upon waking - which is just as nonfalsifiable and absurd as the spaghetti monester explanation.

As I pointed out, there may be some physiological explanation which is not magic at all. And, of course, whether it is memory remains an issue.

Of course I have reason to think there are not Spaghetti Monsters, just as I have reason to think there is no Santa Claus. (You do think that we have reason to think there is no Santa, don't you?)

Exactly what are you saying is unfalsifiable? All I said is that magic is not the only "explanation". There might be perfectly good explanations of which we are not aware. It might be that a belief that something occurred during the night springs into your head when you wake up because it has some physiological or psychological function which allows you to express pent up emotions. That has been speculated as the function of dreams anyway.

@kennethamy,

kennethamy;73055 wrote:

UGH!, UGH!, UGH! But I am glad he didn't tell his boss what was wrong. He might not only have fired him (I would have) but spread the word around the office.

You post nothing but ugly sarcasm directed at me, try to add something of substance of your own instead of just ridiculing the comments of others who like friendly but robust debate on this great forum :nonooo: :nonooo:

It is obvious you do not like me, then take the sensible option and ignore my posts

@Alan McDougall,

kennethamy;73221 wrote:

As I pointed out, there may be some physiological explanation which is not magic at all. And, of course, whether it is memory remains an issue.

But there is no explanation short of magic which could explain how what we remember as our dreams are, in fact, instantly appearing false memories that somehow manifest themselves upon waking up.

I am not making a complicated nor sophisticated claim. Instead, I am saying that what is witnessed in a dream can, in fact, correspond to what is witnessed in reality in the same way (except in that one is dreaming rather than being awake).

You, for some reason, object to this and do so with fantastical possible yet marvelously unlikely counter-examples, and quibble that I cannot demonstrate the truth of my claim (a point I readily admit). I'm really not sure what you are trying to accomplish by arguing that what I think occurs in my dreams is not what actually occurs in my dreams.

kennethamy;73221 wrote:

Of course I have reason to think there are not Spaghetti Monsters

Only by virtue of Occam's Razor. Which is my point - there is no reason to believe in the Flying Spaghetti monster, and just as much reason to believe in his tentacleness as there is reason to buy into your account of dreams.

kennethamy;73221 wrote:

Exactly what are you saying is unfalsifiable?

The notion that what I remember dreaming about becomes manifest only after I wake. But I'll give you something - thanks to brain scanning technology I do not understand, it may be that your claim is in fact falsifiable. If what passes for demonstration of dream activity in modern science is in fact dream activity, then there is no way your alternative explanation could be true.

kennethamy;73221 wrote:

All I said is that magic is not the only "explanation".

And prior to this you gave a possible account of dreams that was silly.

kennethamy;73221 wrote:

There might be perfectly good explanations of which we are not aware. It might be that a belief that something occurred during the night springs into your head when you wake up because it has some physiological or psychological function which allows you to express pent up emotions. That has been speculated as the function of dreams anyway.

Except that this supposed explanation would contradict a great deal of what little we do know about dreams.

These far out maybe's and possibly's are a bit strange to use when objecting to my claim of dreaming of X and X being as I dream it to be.

@Zetherin,

Kennethamy - Can you answer the following point, please:

Zetherin;72584 wrote:

What good reason do you have for remembering anything that takes place while awake, then? Couldn't we apply your logic here too? We could just say you felt like you remembered, regardless.

The idea that false memories of dreams simply 'pop into our head' when we wake, by some unexplained psychological mechanism, seems to violate Occam's Razor. It seems more parsimonious (as well as much more intuitively plausible) to adopt the hypothesis that we really have dreamed what we think we have dreamed, in the absence of evidence to the contrary. We know there is such a thing as brain activity during sleep, and we know there is such a thing as memory. On the face of it, these two things seem sufficient to explain the existence of dreams. We can suppose that dreams are sequences of thoughts based on experience, altered and mixed by imagination. The idea of 'Platonic forms' seems mystical and unscientific (and besides, we dream of specific entities, not universals).

If the observed pattern of brain activity during the time corresponding to a supposed dream could be shown to be a close analogue of the reported dream events, I think that would be a pretty good falsification of kennethamy's idea.

@ACB,

Hi all,

This weekend I spent more time looking into what others have said about dreams. While I found some interesting literature on the meaning and symbolism of dreams, e.g. Pauli and Jung: The Meeting of Two Great Minds,
I found practically nothing on the nature of dreams - i.e. what is the impetus that moves us in and out of dreams, and why is it that dreams seem so different than what we experience in the awake state.

From what I gather from this conversation, people do experience dreams in different ways. Some, seem to be much more symbolic than others. My dreams tend to be more symbolic, in that they do not, in general correspond to anything that I might encounter in awake state. Also, my dreams are of the type that cannot be described in words. Certainly, they do not feel like being awake. I do not have a definitive sense of time passing and change occurring in a specific temporal order, though change certainly happens. Nor do I feel that I am in a particular space and in some manner constrained in that space. For me, it is amazing that the mind can switch itself in an out of this state.

Since I still AM in this state, then I am using this as evidence that I EXIST even though there is no sense of physicality or time. Therefore, I THINK therefore I AM. Not in the sense of physical existence, but in a sense of BEING.

Comments?

Rich

@ACB,

ACB;73340 wrote:

Kennethamy - Can you answer the following point, please:

The idea that false memories of dreams simply 'pop into our head' when we wake, by some unexplained psychological mechanism, seems to violate Occam's Razor. It seems more parsimonious (as well as much more intuitively plausible) to adopt the hypothesis that we really have dreamed what we think we have dreamed, in the absence of evidence to the contrary. We know there is such a thing as brain activity during sleep, and we know there is such a thing as memory. On the face of it, these two things seem sufficient to explain the existence of dreams. We can suppose that dreams are sequences of thoughts based on experience, altered and mixed by imagination. The idea of 'Platonic forms' seems mystical and unscientific (and besides, we dream of specific entities, not universals).

If the observed pattern of brain activity during the time corresponding to a supposed dream could be shown to be a close analogue of the reported dream events, I think that would be a pretty good falsification of kennethamy's idea.

I was just kidding about dreaming in Platonic Forms. The issue is whether dreams occur during sleep, or whether they occur at the time of awakening. Or, even, as sometimes happens, later in the day. Or, even, after that. The trouble with the accepted view (during sleep, remembered later when conscious) that there is no reason to think it is true, except an intuition or a feeling. I don't see that it better conforms with Ockham's Razor than my hypothesis. In fact, I think it is the opposite, since under my hypothesis, we need not suppose that we can think anything when not conscious.

Of course, if we could get the kind of physiological evidence you suggest, then I would have to reconsider.

It seems to me that the same explanation we might come up with for why we dream at all (and there is no settled explanation) could, very well explain whether the dream occurs while we are asleep, or whether it occurs when we are awake. Why would there be any difference?

@kennethamy,

Who are we really in the now?

The essential complete you, or your whole real essence, is a field of awareness that interacts with its own self (Soul) and then becomes both mind/brain and body. In other words, you are consciousness or spirit, which then conceives, constructs, governs, and becomes the mind/brain and the body. The real you are inseparable from the patterns of intelligence that permeate every fiber of creation.

At the deepest level of existence, you are an infinite eternal Being, and you are nowhere and everywhere at the same time. There is no other "you" than the entire cosmos. The God + cosmic mind creates the physical universe, and the personal mind/brain (Soul) experiences the physical universe. But in truth, the cosmic mind and our personal mind are both permeated by "God The Infinite Consciousness". "God The Infinite Consciousness" is our source, and all manifestation is inherent within it.

"God the Infinite Consciousness" observing itself creates the notion of observer, or the soul; the process of observation, or the mind; and that which is observed, or the body and the world. The observer and the observed create relationships between themselves; this is space. The movement of these relationships creates events; this is time. But all these are none other than the "God the Infinite Consciousness" itself.

In other words, we are "God the Infinite Consciousness" with a "localized point of view" An aspect or facet of the great reality we call God. And yet our whole system of thought divides the "Great Observer God" from the observed us; it divides the "God the Infinite Consciousness" into a world of objects separated by space and time. The "the intellect of the brain" imprisons us in a cage of fictitious images, a suffocating web of space, time, and causation. As a result, we lose touch with the true nature of our reality, which is powerful, boundless, immortal, and free.

We are all prisoners of the "the intellect of the brain". And the "the intellect of the brain's mistake in one simple sentence is this: It mistakes the image of reality for reality itself. It squeezes the soul into the volume of a body, in the span of a lifetime, and now the spell of mortality is cast. The image of the self overshadows the unbounded Self, and we feel cut off or disconnected from "God the Infinite Consciousness", our source.

This is the beginning of fear, the onset of suffering, and all the problems of humanity from our minor insecurities to our major catastrophes like war, terrorism, and all other acts of human degradation. To one who is trapped in the prison of the "the intellect of the brain", all indeed is suffering. But the cause of the suffering can and should be averted. Ignorance of our real nature causes the inner self to be obscured. But when ignorance is destroyed, the powerful, unbounded, free nature of the self is revealed, and we are released into the knowledge of unimaginable freedom , peace, love and everlasting joy.

The real you are non-material and therefore not subject to the limitations of space, time, matter, and causation. The soul, the spirit, the essential you, is beyond all that. In this very moment, you are surrounded by a pure consciousness. Pure consciousness illuminates and animates your mind and body, and it is powerful, nourishing, invincible, unbounded, and free. Pure consciousness, "God the Infinite

Eternal Spirit", animates and sustains everything in existence, which means it is omniscient (all knowing), omnipresent (present in all locations simultaneously), and omnipotent (all powerful). "And when we learn and grow and evolve into understanding we shall be all those things also, indeed co- creators with God"

@Alan McDougall,

Alan McDougall;73376 wrote:

Who are we really in the now?

There you go again! In the know, not in the now.

You really have to work on your spelling.

@kennethamy,

kennethamy;73348 wrote:

The trouble with the accepted view (during sleep, remembered later when conscious) that there is no reason to think it is true, except an intuition or a feeling. I don't see that it better conforms with Ockham's Razor than my hypothesis. In fact, I think it is the opposite, since under my hypothesis, we need not suppose that we can think anything when not conscious.

I suppose it depends on one's view of the plausibility of the idea that we can think when not conscious. I find the idea of 'real' dreams plausible, since it only requires a combination of the entities (a) thought, (b) memory, and (c) unconscious brain activity - all of which we know individually exist. Your suggestion seems to require a fourth entity, i.e. a false-memory-generating mechanism. To me, false memories seem somehow more 'artificial' than true memories, and hence involve more complexity. That is why I mentioned Ockham's Razor.

But that is just my opinion. As I say, science may be able to settle the matter conclusively.

@ACB,

ACB;73433 wrote:

To me, false memories seem somehow more 'artificial' than true memories, and hence involve more complexity. That is why I mentioned Ockham's Razor.

But that is just my opinion. As I say, science may be able to settle the matter conclusively.

Hi,

I think most people have encountered false memory in their lives. But what exactly is this. It is when several people may disagree with what you remember. Then you possibly think that you remembered wrong.

However, once I had this incident in my life. I was on a jury and I remembered testimony that the 11 other jurors were positive was never said. I said, OK, let's call in the written transcript. None wanted to do it. They were positive that it never happened. However, finally, one other person agreed to call in the transcript (in was my right to have it read), and sure enough, the testimony read as I had remembered. No one, however, suggested that they had not remembered correctly.

Now, we have this situation, that with 11 to 1, one might suppose that I had false memory (happens all the time in court testimony, when someone's memory is contradicted). But then, I had the court reporter, who recorded the testimony, on my side. That makes it 11 to 2. But because the court reporter is considered more accurate (this is an assumption of course), then despite the fact that it was 11 to 2, I was considered to have true memory and the others false. Isn't this interesting!

Anyway, I think we all are not sure at times of what we remember and what we don't. When I wake up, I seem to remember more than when the day wears on. I am not always sure which of my memories are remembered better than others.

Rich

@richrf,

Hi richrf

I'm sure most people have encountered false memories in their lives. Indeed, I wonder sometimes if we have any other kind. But a memory is a memory, regardless of how accurate it is.

@richrf,

No, Kennethamy, we can monitor brain activity while people sleep.

I'm no scientist, but I have taken Psych 101. Go do some research and come back when you have a clue about what you're talking about. Heck, an honest reading of the Wiki would probably be enough to correct your misunderstandings.

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