December 4, 2009
- The Unnatural Selection of Consciousness -
I forget how I found this article, but it's a great one. You can read the whole thing through the link below, but I've summarized what I think are the main points here:
The unnatural selection of consciousness:
The unnatural selection of consciousness:
- Biology does not tolerate anything biologically useless and, given that my brain consumes 20% of my energy supply, and quite a lot of this seems to be used by neurons that are supposed to be responsible for keeping me conscious, consciousness must have a use.
- But how well-founded is this belief? Was it really natural selection that eventually brought into being creatures that could see that they were naturally selected? Was it the blind laws of physics that so organised the matter in us that it could see the laws of physics and that they were blind? If we are going to address these questions properly, we need to start far enough back to see them clearly. We need to ask by what means consciousness could have come into being – if it was not there in the beginning - and what advantages it confers.
- Consider the emergence of sight from photosensitivity. Firstly, chemical or electrochemical sensitivity to light is not the same as awareness of light. Secondly, the content of awareness of light – brightness, colour, never mind beauty or meaning – is not to be found in electromagnetic radiation, which is not intrinsically bright, coloured, beautiful or meaningful. These secondary and tertiary qualities are not properties of the physical world and the energy in question. Thirdly, it is not clear how certain organisations of matter manage to be aware – of impingements of energy, and later of objects, and (in the case of humans) of themselves – when very similar organisations of matter do not have this property.
- Computers, after all, do not get any nearer to being conscious as the inputs are more complexly related to their outputs, however many stages and layers of processing intervene between the two.
- Indeed, the contrast between environment and organism already contains an embryonic hint of the differentiation between a subject and its objects; howsoever this might be concealed by treating organisms as physical systems. Without this fudge, it is difficult to see how energy exchanges between parts of a physical system would count as “inputs” and “outputs”.
- But the question remains: How is it that certain configurations of matter should be aware, should suffer, enjoy, fear etc? What is there in matter, such that eventually certain configurations of it (human beings) pool that experience and live in a public world?
- Why should consciousness of the material world around their vehicles (the organisms) make certain (material) replicators better able to replicate?
- Think, after all, what unconscious mechanisms can achieve: the evolution of most of the universe; the processes that are supposed to have created life and conscious organisms; the growth, development and most of the running of even highly conscious organisms such as ourselves. If you had to undertake something really difficult – for example growing in utero a brain with all its connexions in place – consciousness is the last thing you would want to oversee the task.
- Once you have a species that depends on consciousness, then it is essential for its members to remain conscious. But if we assume the materialist viewpoint and, unlike many evolutionary biologists, adhere to it consistently, and set aside an anthropocentric viewpoint that sees the entire evolutionary process as something that was always leading up to us or creatures like us, it seems highly implausible that, in an unconscious biosphere, consciousness, even if it were on offer, would seem like a good option.
- Looking prospectively from the beginning rather than retrospectively, one could argue that an organism that has to plan, to deliberate, to rehearse possible courses of action, and has to see wholes so as to deal with singulars, in order to survive, is in a mess. Of course, once in the mess, it would be better off with better consciousness – and this applies irrespective of whether we are considering threats and opportunities from the material environment, other species, or competition from conspecifics.
- And there is a serious difficulty with the notion of “better and better” consciousness that will compensate for the disadvantage of having to work through consciousness in the first place.
- For some…the criterion for intelligence…is that the organism is more closely coupled into its environment. If that were true, then a silicate crystal, so hard-wired into its environment that no wires are required, would be just the thing to be.
- Consciousness makes evolutionary sense only if one does not start far enough back; if, that is to say, one fails to assume a consistent and sincere materialist position, beginning with a world without consciousness, and then considers whether there could be putative biological drivers for organisms to become conscious. This is the only valid starting point for those who look to evolution to explain consciousness, given that the history of matter has overwhelmingly been without conscious life, indeed without history. Once the viewpoint of consistent materialism is assumed, it ceases to be self-evident that it is a good thing to experience what is there, that it will make an organism better able so to position itself in the causal net as to increase the probability of replication of its genomic material. On the contrary, even setting aside the confusional states it is prone to, and the sleep it requires, consciousness seems like the worst possible evolutionary move.
It’s a good point, that the theory of evolution demands that features can evolve gradually through intermediate stages; a sudden ‘switch-on’ is hard to explain. This is good because we don’t know what consciousness is. If we think it evolved, we should go looking for these intermediate stages! They should be all around us…
Comment by speedbird — December 7, 2009 @ 4:30 am
I guess it’s a bit like the problem of speciation… no-one has ever seen a variety turn into a species, and yet here they are all around us. I think the idea is that once a variety can exploit a new evolutionary niche, it will rapidly diverge from its fellows and occupy that niche (rather like a quantum ‘jump’), and intermediate forms will vanish quickly. Thus intermediate forms are seen only in the fossil record.
Clearly there is a problem with analysing the fossil record of mind, because there’s no obvious physical structure associated with consciousness which can be preserved. I guess we’re left with examining ancient histories, and things like the theory of the bicameral mind.
Or then again consciousness could be a cultural, behavioural thing, and we could expect to find isolated tribes in the amazon with the same genetics but an entirely different level of consciousness to ourselves. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but I suspect there’s a grain of truth in it from stories of such encounters.
Comment by speedbird — December 7, 2009 @ 6:55 am
Hey, what if we take McLuhan at face value and say that all technologies are just the fossil record of consciousness…?
I mean, if you take a look at ancient Babylonian and Assyrian carvings (going back a bit, I know), there are a lot of things that look like the sort of pictures that kids draw, but with adult patience and artistry. I mean, this is the stuff that adorned the kings’ palace so we can assume it was pretty much state-of-the-art. And what they do is, they draw the King really big in the middle and all his enemies small and ugly lying around either dead or chained up or whatever, and like lots of arrows flying and the odd head getting chopped off. It’s how I drew battles when I was like nine or something.
Comment by speedbird — December 7, 2009 @ 7:17 am
Yeah, this is a really good point. I’ve had a couple theories kind of bouncing around in the back of my head for a while:
1) The mentality of the human race as a whole is going through the same kind of stages that children do, and that recent history has essentially been our “adolescence”. Or anyway, that the way society’s (and even global society) mature could have patterns in common with how we mature as individual people. Anyway, there should be SOME fractal pattern at work there, I think.
2) That evolution happens in bursts, with long periods of statis in between (which is pretty much what your saying in regards to evolutionary niches). The same way that children grow up very quickly the first few years, then get locked into child-mode, then grow again during adolescence, then have a sort of breakthrough around 30, then again at the mid-life-crisis stage, then at 70 kind of settle into whatever they’ve become. This is sort of an extension of “punctuated equilibrium”.
There’s also a part of me that wants to believe that this is controlled by the rate of opening and closing of both the heliosphere and the magnetosphere, but that’s rather speculative fantasy at this point. Anyway, both things are kind of related in a “as below so above” kind of way, but I think that they might be useful as a metaphorical system of prediction.
Yeah, this would make sense. Especially in a Ken Wilber, “transcend and include” kind of way, where we all have that tribal level of consciousness operating inside us, but our surface level operations are beyond that. And we’d never really know, would we, since any attempt at communication would necessarily change the level of consciousness of both parties. They would create a common ground to the exact extent that they were able to communicate. Anything different would be much harder to understand, and likely to be written off.
Also, your combustion engine to jet engine metaphor comes to mind as well here.
Comment by Ian — December 7, 2009 @ 2:16 pm
Was it you that gave me the quote?
Anyway I think its simple. Consciousness is a duality. Its the ability to experience oneself having an experience.
I think the two sides of the duality are the ego and the “witness”
I think only Scientific Materialists get all worried about Darwinism. I don’t think people make biological sense. I don’t think biology even makes any sense.
I’m a mystic. I am a spiritual being voluntarily taking upon limitation and having a human experience inside a biological body. I descended. I didn’t rise up from primordial goo.
Comment by Ted — December 7, 2009 @ 4:07 pm
I don’t think that came from me, but I do like it. I guess the question is why? Where did this come from? And the problem here is that according to the current popular theory on where things come from (evolution), consciousness is actually more a liability.
For those who stand on the spiritual side, such as yourself, the question then becomes, if you are a spirit voluntarily inhabiting a human body, where did they body come from, and how did it come into being in such a way that you, as a spiritual being, could inhabit it? And why is it that only the “human” bodies seem to be aware of this?
Also, I like the duality of the ego and the witness, it’s got a clean, yin/yang, active/passive quality to it. But I have to wonder if that can be transcended…?
Sometimes I feel like human consciousness has something in common with a hernia. Too much pressure on a weak spot, and it popped out into a place its maybe not supposed to be. But seeing as we’re here, better try to make the best of it. I also think of it as kind of like a food pocket in the throat. We feel like we’re swallowing, but it’s not going any where…
Comment by Ian — December 7, 2009 @ 5:11 pm
>> I am a spiritual being voluntarily taking upon limitation and having a human experience inside a biological body.
Isn’t that a Scientology sort-of-thing?
*
Suppose consciousness, as opposed to simply ‘mind’, does have a benefit in evolutionary terms. Then I guess so does the economy, the internet, and organised religion, for all these seem to parallel conscious thought in some way, as the outering of an inner natural tendency. Anyone put that into simple words?
*
Brilliant quote from Ran Prieur I have to share:
‘The internet makes it so easy to move information now that most of the moving of information is being done by people who can only do easy things’
:P
*
I read today at Cern that when they turn on the LHC, it creates 1% of the total information created in the Internet. Make of that what you will…
Comment by speedbird — December 8, 2009 @ 4:02 am
Being a mystic is experiential.
Comment by Ted — December 8, 2009 @ 4:36 am
@speedbird:
That seems pretty simple (in a good way) to me, but for a more detailed explanation, (and I hadn’t realized it when I posted it), the link attached to that Oespensky quote is pretty good. Unfortunately, the site’s blocked at my office so I can’t cut and paste, but, from memory, there’s a section on the essence and the personality, sort of a true self and an ego, where O. points out that the essence is not developed within our culture, while the personality is very developed. The goal of “the work” is to develop the essence, but what I thought was important was that the personality was not painted as a bad thing, just as a kind of useless thing as far as spiritual growth is concerned.
To tie that in with the Ran Prieur quote (which is great), whenever you make anything easy, a lot of people are going to do it, and most of them are going to do it poorly. That’s how things work. We just have to remember that this doesn’t mean that good quality stuff disappears, just that it’s harder to find.
This ties in with your earlier comment about evolutionary niches as well. Back when the internet was new, and it wasn’t so easy to push info around, the quality was good and change happened quickly. It felt alive, in a high quality kind of way. Now that that niche has opened out to more people, the evolution has slowed/stopped. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this. We can either get stuck in the past and be sad about it, we can try to look for new niches, or we can try to maintain the quality amidst the not-so-quality work. All viable options, and I’m sure there are more besides.
But what’s the point of opening that niche up if not to benefit everyone? That new life force that we break into by opening up a new space needs to be shared if it is to grow, and then at a certain point it plateaus and everyone gets on board. Its up to those who don’t want to settle for that plateau to push on to the next mountain and start climbing it. That’s how the energy flows. I think most people think of it as expansion -> statsis/rest -> decline, but why can’t it be expansion -> stasis/rest -> expansion -> etc?
But if you DON’T open it up, it’ll never feel alive.
It all seems to hang on whether we can figure out a next step to take. Not THE next step, just A next step. The more steps we remember behind us though, the harder it is to take any step, because we’re holding onto so many definitions (for each of the past
steps) that feel the NEXT step MUST have something to do with the past steps (like that 7 is a magic number article). That doesn’t have to be true though. If we can let go of the past when necessary, we can take any step into the future that we want to. We have to trust the momentum of our past to carry through regardless of whether or not it makes sense to us how that will work.
@Ted:
Yes, certainly, being a mystic does spring out of continued experience of direct reality, on as deep a level as possible. However, I find thinking of the human bodily experience as limited is, well, rather limiting. :)
Actually, I think without the body, we have no chance of being a spiritual being. Its like saying a tree is simply having a limited experience as an acorn. True enough, but if that leads to the temptation to ignore the acorn because it’s really a tree. But it’s not a tree until its a tree, and in the meantime, it IS an acorn. I don’t really see this temptation as something you’re dealing with, Ted, but it’s something that’s always bothered me about the gnostic idea of divine sparks trapped in the realm of matter. Matter is a charging station for the divine, rather than a trap for it. An alchemical vessel, if you will, where in the necessary reaction can take place.
Comment by Ian — December 8, 2009 @ 10:33 am
Thanks guys, you really got my brain going this morning. :)
Comment by Ian — December 8, 2009 @ 10:33 am
Well, I don’t think of it as being as negative as how some streams of Gnosticism portray it. Think of it as “creative constriction” you know? Like how you can be more poetic with a limited selection of refrigerator magnets, than with a blank sheet of paper and the entire dictionary.
Rather than being trapped its more like a game. The body is limiting. It creates perspective. You were on a roll with the effects of a flame and gravity/no gravity.
But like you said, working with various types of energy directly, is not the same as faith in some belief system.
So there is something bass-ackwards about Darwinism/scientific materialism. It just doesn’t jibe with my experience. Its just a very limited, overly linear, left brained, pin headed way of looking at things. Its good for building machines, and dominating the planet, I’ll give it that. But for me rather than thinking that linear thoughts whirring away in my left brain are the only valid perceptions, I have accessed things trans-rationally if you will, and gained a broader perspective. So to come up with a cohesive theory of whatever…I have
Comment by Ted — December 8, 2009 @ 12:15 pm
…I have a lot more things to reconcile, then a niave materialist has to deal with.
Comment by Ted — December 8, 2009 @ 12:18 pm
>> you can be more poetic with a limited selection of refrigerator magnets, than with a blank sheet of paper and the entire dictionary
I like that a lot :-D
Comment by speedbird — December 8, 2009 @ 12:24 pm
I guess maybe I should be more Socratic…but I haven’t really developed the knack for it. But anyway scientific materialism leads to a miserable state of isolation and alienation. You identify with matter and the ego and that’s it. I picture it like putting a vice on your head and squeezing it tighter and tighter, and thinking of that as progress. You know? “I can’t trust this, I can’t trust this, I can’t trust this…”until you are just left with this really isolated little ego that knows it is going to die and be gone forever and not only that but it exits merely through blind, though somehow also cruel, meaningless chance.
So with this as the underlying assuption, the author asks why did this Beautiful elegant natural world, this biosphere, we see around us, evolve us into this misearable state? Why doesn’t it seem to make any sense? Of what value is this state of being? Of what purpose?
Comment by Ted — December 8, 2009 @ 12:31 pm
Thanks, Speedbird, I just now saw your comment. I think Art in general is better with some type of creative constriction. And all mediums are limiting in some way.
Comment by Ted — December 8, 2009 @ 12:38 pm
Yeah, I think the author was getting at the same thing you are Ted, that evolution as an explanation for consciousness doesn’t work, so we’d better come up with something else. It’d be easier if didn’t have to, but it doesn’t work.
It’s too limited. :)
Comment by Ian — December 8, 2009 @ 12:44 pm
> evolution as an explanation for consciousness doesn’t work
I’m still not sure about that. All we have to show is a continuum for consciousness, even if there’s a series of punctuated equilibria where once you glimpse the next stage you’re sucked in wholesale. Also it’d be useful to be able to explain the evolutionary advantage of consciousness. This is notoriously difficult to do with even simple characteristics. I suspect consciousness is intimately related to language use. Once you form a Word you’ve made a conscious act…
Comment by speedbird — December 9, 2009 @ 8:30 am
Certainly a continuum would imply that consciousness has developed in an evolutionary way, but I think they key point of the article is that the evolutionary advantage for consciousness is not readily apparent, if we go back far enough along our current understanding of the way consciousness came into being.
While I agree that consciousness and language are closely intertwined (a really interesting point, actually), I think the problems the author’s pointing out come in before language. Why even be conscious at all? His argument seems to be pointing out that consciousness itself is not the best survival strategy.
However, I don’t think that’s actually what he wants us to take away, cause it’s kind of an absurd conclusion. Clearly we are conscious beings (more or less), and clearly we are out-surviving pretty much everything else, at this point. I think it’s more a reductio ad absurdum toward our current understanding of the evolutionary process.
The key phrase, I think is:
“beginning with a world without consciousness”. What if that’s not true? What if it was there all along and we’re just stumbling into it now?
Comment by Ian — December 9, 2009 @ 9:30 am
In fact, once you form a Word, you finally have a “thing” there to be conscious of…
Comment by Ian — December 9, 2009 @ 9:32 am
>> Consciousness makes evolutionary sense only if one does not start far enough back; if, that is to say, one fails to assume a consistent and sincere materialist position, beginning with a world without consciousness, and then considers whether there could be putative biological drivers for organisms to become conscious.
I still don’t ‘get’ this. I think the problem is defining what we mean by ‘consciousness’. (Never mind ‘good’ and ‘bad’ kinds of consciousness.) What’s wrong with a chemical soup having an infinitesimal amount of ‘consciousness’? I say, let’s keep Darwin for the mo and use that as a lever to work out what ‘consciousness’ might mean. It’s the same as the biogenesis problem: the theory says all life evolved from one precursor, but we have only sketchy ideas of what that looked like and how it formed.
However.
I suppose in a world without /any/ consciousness you still have to assume a pre-existing /potential/ for consciousness. Almost just the ability for one part of Things to become to-some-extent separate from the rest of Things.
(implying that
>> Computers, after all, do not get any nearer to being conscious as the inputs are more complexly related to their outputs, however many stages and layers of processing intervene between the two
and
>> For some…the criterion for intelligence…is that the organism is more closely coupled into its environment
are likely to be a /massive/ red herrings)
*
But
>> once you form a Word …
which is why ‘In the Beginning was the Word’ is so mind-blowing…
Comment by speedbird — December 9, 2009 @ 10:45 am
I don’t think this is what is meant by consciousness, in the article. I think the author’s going for more of a “aware that you are aware”, not just awareness itself. And I’m not sure if language has anything to do with that…
Is consciousness separate from other things?
Comment by Ian — December 9, 2009 @ 10:57 am
Nothing ever really is completely, I guess, but don’t consciousness and separation kind of associate?
Comment by speedbird — December 9, 2009 @ 11:50 am
I think that consciousness thinks it creates a separation, but maybe it doesn’t actually. And that that’s kind of the root problem with a lot of things.
Comment by Ian — December 9, 2009 @ 12:36 pm
I thought this might add something to the discussion:
http://www.lycaeum.org/drugs/other/mckenna/mushroom.html
Comment by Ted — December 9, 2009 @ 2:42 pm
I do love me some McKenna. Ted, does this mean you’re in agreement with the Stoned Ape theory?
But even if consciousness (defined in this case as awareness of being aware) comes to humanity from “the mushroom”, that still leaves the problem unsolved. Where did consciousness in the mushroom come from?
If the universe started as pure matter, and at some point consciousness (whether human or fungal) sprang out of that matter, then why and how did it do so?
The original essay takes the stance that our current theories of evolution (defined rather broadly as how things change in an improving manner) do not seem to support this growth of consciousness out of pure materiality. If consciousness sprang out of pure materiality, why did it do so? It does not seem to be beneficial for the survival of the species and its ability to procreate.
On the other hand, it could be that consciousness existed independently of matter all along, and that humanity has reached (whether with or without the mushroom) a rather unique level of being able to embody that independent consciousness.
This suggests that, rather than survivability as the end goal of evolution, perhaps the conscious embodiment of awareness is the end goal, and that survivability is just a means toward that end.
Comment by Ian — December 9, 2009 @ 3:38 pm
>> I think that consciousness thinks it creates a separation …
Indeed! But it’s really just one way of looking at things.
>> … our current theories of evolution (defined rather broadly as how things change in an improving manner) …
As Pirsig put it (might have been in Lila), evolution isn’t /approaching/ anything. It’s more like it’s /moving away/ from something. The characteristic change in evolution is one of increasing diversity, not ‘improvement’. Diversity is the primary good, as Godesky over at Anthropik put it (before he retracted that statement and went off on some trip I couldn’t follow; I haven’t checked back since). ‘Improvement’ is for the Third Reich.
>> It does not seem to be beneficial for the survival of the species …
Well, here we are stomping all over the planet. What may be more true is that consciousness in the form as practiced by most of the population leads to regular nasty population crashes like bacteria or insects or something. This ‘consciousness’ thing starts to look quite primitive. Effective, but primitive.
>> consciousness existed independently of matter all along, and that humanity has reached … a rather unique level of being able to embody that independent consciousness
How do we know that other creatures aren’t self-aware to some degree?
Comment by speedbird — December 10, 2009 @ 3:39 am
>> I think that consciousness thinks it creates a separation …
Actually, the way I see it, it’s more like separation creates consciousness.
Comment by speedbird — December 10, 2009 @ 3:48 am
Nice one. Yeah, I think the two go hand in hand, or at least that our current level of consciousness seems to spring from our belief in our own separation. Kind of cocoon-y, if you think of it that way…
I haven’t read Lila, but I do plan on doing it at some point. But I think the best way to think about evolution is as an ongoing process, without any kind of beginning or end. That way we’re not reading anything into it, so to speak.
Well, I think the problem (particularly in the Third Reich sense) is that “improvement” needs to be constantly redefined. As soon as you think of improvement as a certain THING, you’ve lost it. And as for diversity, I think it too is just a thing, a means to an end. Diversity does a lot of good, but to think of diversity as an end also causes problems. Too much diversity, even on just a social level, would lead to a lot of alienation and the inability to communicate.
Be it an Aryan Master Race, or a Super Diverse Population, once you’ve locked yourself into a definition, you’ve lost the key ingredient of improvement: the unknown. I think all true improvements springs out of a confrontation of an on going process with the unknown.
Exactly! Life is still learning how to use consciousness, through us, I think. We’re an experiment that life (embodied in us) is undertaking right here right now. As for stomping all over the planet, well, I think that comes our earlier drive for domination, which served us so well in the distant past, but which causes a lot of problems now.
We have yet to realize we’ve won, and that as winners, we really need to start taking care of the whole thing. In fact, our survival instincts are now forcing us to take care of the planet, because our own bad behavior is probably the only real threat to us as a species at this point. Our survival instinct is being forced to turn against it’s past strategies, as we’re all experiencing some serious angst because of it.
Because they’re not stopping us.
Comment by Ian — December 10, 2009 @ 11:14 am
I don’t identify mainly with materiality. So why would I ask the question “How did “I” evolve from rocks to… an ape to.. a conscious being?”
If you identify mainly with materiality, you have thoughts like, “Wow what an amazing machine my brain is, able to produce consciousness the way my bile ducts produce bile. It must be a computer! That’s what it is! My brain is a computer!”
Then you get into these conundrums about how and why this would evolve.
To me its just all about Spirit manifesting materially and being pressed into different shapes. Being a human being is being Spirit taking on a human shape, a human experience.
Comment by Ted — December 10, 2009 @ 3:21 pm
But part of the experience of being human is that we took a wrong turn, 10,000 or so years ago, so we are learning about that now as history comes to an end.
Being really ego oriented is part of this blind alley we have gone down. So, if this article is a catalyst for saying “WoW, all my assumptions are total horseshit!” Then its good.
But my thought is that We come from the Source of all being, and have descended into matter. We didn’t start out as a rock and ascend up to consciousness, as some type of brave trail blazer inventing itself out of nothing, which is the flavor Darwinism used to have, nor is it all totally meaningless, which is the flavor Darwinism has now.
That article about time is really interesting in light of this.
Comment by Ted — December 10, 2009 @ 3:33 pm
@Ted:
Yeah, the article about time really blew my mind precisely because it fits so well with this, and with the post on biocentricism as well. Weird stuff, even if taken in only a synchronistic way.
As far as humanity taking a wrong turn, I think looking at things this way can have its uses, but I personally am dead set against it. I think the solution to a LOT of problems is to stop seeing ourselves as some kind of mistake. It’s growing pains, its a kid taking his dad’s car out without permission, except there’s no dad and no cops to chase us down. Its a rut we’ve gotten ourselves into that we need to get out of.
We do shitty things, I’m not saying we don’t. But the idea that we need to somehow go back and choose a different route is, I think, counterproductive. Better to focus on how we can make best use of what we do have. Thinking there is something somehow wrong with us reeks a bit too much or original sin for me.
Also, a question for you (and I know this contradicts what I’ve said above, but still..): Does the source of everything somehow stand apart from matter? That is, can the two actually be separated, so as to allow the source to descend into matter? I certainly don’t know, but your comments did bring it to mind…
I totally agree with you there. In fact, that was actually my original intent in posting this article. It seems to point to a flaw into two assumptions that I had always held as being compatible. Figured it make for good discussion, if nothing else. ;)
Comment by Ian — December 10, 2009 @ 4:00 pm
>> Because they’re not stopping us.
/We’re/ not stopping us either.
Maybe /they’re/ leading by example… :)
>> As soon as you think of improvement as a certain THING, you’ve lost it.
That’s probably REALLY deep. Especially if you link the words ‘thing/k’. Do you thingk that’s what’s really meant by the concept of ‘b/it’ as well? Once you thingk it, you can’t improve it. Improvement is pre-conscious.
Comment by speedbird — December 11, 2009 @ 4:19 am
Ted -
I do kind of get it that there’s a pre-existing ineffable stuff that all the Thingks in the World are gradually approximating towards… so from that point of view I suppose that consciousness (in an ineffable sense) is indeed ‘descending’ into matter.
Thomas 7 springs to mind:
‘Blessed is the lion which the man will eat, and the lion becomes man
Cursed is the man which the lion will eat, and the lion becomes man’.
Comment by speedbird — December 11, 2009 @ 4:31 am
Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. :)
That “ineffable sense” is problematic. It’s the old “relative and absolute” problem. Clearly they are related, but one can’t actually touch the other. It’s strange…
And re: Thomas 7
I’d always read that as:
Blessed is the man who eats the lion and becomes a man
but cursed is the man who eats the lion and becomes a lion.
But yours is right and makes more sense besides.
Comment by Ian — December 14, 2009 @ 3:07 pm
Link I use:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/9068/sayingz.htm
Comment by speedbird — December 15, 2009 @ 3:45 am
Nice, thanks Speedbird.
Comment by Ian — December 15, 2009 @ 9:04 am