http://www.geocities.com/Athens/9068/sayingz.htm

Once you thingk it, you can’t improve it.

Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. :)

a pre-existing ineffable stuff

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.

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’.

/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.

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…

So, if this article is a catalyst for saying “Wow, all my assumptions are total horseshit!” Then its good.

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. ;)

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.

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.

Actually, the way I see it, it’s more like separation creates consciousness.

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…

As Pirsig put it (might have been in Lila), evolution isn’t /approaching/ anything. It’s more like it’s /moving away/ from something.

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.

The characteristic change in evolution is one of increasing diversity, not ‘improvement’.

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.

This ‘consciousness’ thing starts to look quite primitive. Effective, but primitive.

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.

How do we know that other creatures aren’t self-aware to some degree?

Because they’re not stopping us.

Actually, the way I see it, it’s more like separation creates consciousness.

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?

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.

http://www.lycaeum.org/drugs/other/mckenna/mushroom.html

What’s wrong with a chemical soup having an infinitesimal amount of ‘consciousness’?

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…

Almost just the ability for one part of Things to become to-some-extent separate from the rest of Things.

Is consciousness separate from other things?

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…

Once you form a Word you’ve made a conscious act…

In fact, once you form a Word, you finally have a “thing” there to be conscious of…

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:

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.

“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?

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…

It’s too limited. :)

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?

I like that a lot :-D