DearDiary.2003-12-27
I has been a frugal but great christmas so far, the holiday celibrations continue. I've been up to my old trickes in my phytsics groups and a "Next Enlightenment" pow wow. Here is some exerpts (rantings) from [chautauqua] I participate in. -JimScarver
Don't throw Socrates in the barrel with Plato and Aristotle, his philosophy that we don't know what we think we know was corrupted by Plato and Aristotle into we know everything. It took about 2000 years before Galeleo proved Aristotle wrong and we built the next grand delusion lasting to this day (scientific revolution). Today Truth has chinks in its armor. Goedel contradicted Plato's law of the excluded middle in 1930, http://home.ddc.net/ygg/etext/godel/godel3.htm but the scientific, philosophical, and mathimatical communities are still largely in denial. Those that face the fact of undecidability often relagate truth to be a relative copncept. The simple fact that proof by induction is inconclusive is totally ignored.
The next enlightenment, I feel, requires that we recognize that we must go back to square one and reevalute all the proofs of mathematics in the light of decidability and define the logical contexts in with they apply, if any. Objectivity must be redefined in a holistic manner which includes all the logical contexts there are.
Truth in mathimatics, science, our cortrooms and public policy has become a matter of popularity. Truth is NOT a democracy. Either we will restore objectivity in the new age of enlightenment or our civilization will fall, just as a bridge or building or any other complex system built by ballot would.
Great questions Dean. The simple fact is that truth is not popular in this age. Everybody knows what they want and whatever supports that aim is the truth, period. My children, my parents, and the members of this discussion generally think truth and ethics are relative and the horrible truth is we are are happily dancing toward world war three with our heads in the sand. The truth is that we are dumb animals, our intelligence is primarily social (collective/cultural) not individual.
1) The supposed superiority of scientific truth(s).
What scientific truth? Science has become a joke. Theories are taught as fact and science has an answer for everything. You can proove anything with science. Absolute truth does not exist.
And then there is real science where the logical context is defined and there are objective criteria where science reviles to us how little we know. It exemplifies our ignorance and allows us to avoid making the same mistakes repeatedly and build bridges and go to the moon.
The first science, I believe, will lead us like lambs to the slaughter. The second will engineer a great society and allow us to populate the galaxy and beyond.
2) What is a "healthy" relationship (when it's all in your head anyway)?
When everybody wins.
3) How do we evaluate ethical statements when it's all culturally relative? (I mean, take some extreme behavior that you find really abhorrent -- wouldn't you like to tell that person that they are doing capital-W Wrong?)
By our social contract. If you allow me to live the good life my way. I'll support your right to live the good life in your way. Tom work, this requires that the tyranny of the majority be minimized by maximal decentralization of regulation of our freedoms while allowing communities to enforse their own norms as deemed necessary by the majority. Such a contract provides an objective bases for collaborative action.
You don't like this social contract? Tough. You are exiled to jupiter. After the last war the majority will support such a social contract.
As far as good and evil are concerned, I am most abhored by the popular view that there is no distinction because there is no objective bases to decide. Please consider this.
Creation is good.
Destruction is bad.
Got it? Don't whine that there is no creation in this world without destruction so you cant be responsible. Grow up.
Often it is as easy as considering the Helgian diletic.
Thesis: Life is good. Antithesis: Death is good. Synthesis: Death is only good in so far as it promotes life.
If we had the will, we could apply our social contract and other objective criteria to our problems and sometimes determine the difference between good and bad. Real objectivity reviels how little we know. We can act collectivly when we know the difference and accomplish greatness, stay the hell out of it when can't determine the difference.
For example, any mathimetitian can tell you that taxing the positive indicators of a chaoic economic system, income and sales, will cause fluctuations, downturns and depressions, while taxing resource depletion and market displacement will lead to sustained growth and sustainance of the environment. Presume that this case can be made, (which it can), who would be interested? Nobody. Intelligence is social not individual. Ideas are cultural. A truth has no meaning until its time has come.
These ideas, true or false, simply does not fit todays culture.
But there is a singularity comming, http://wikiworld.com/SingularityResearch in technology and information. The semantic web now allows all of us to contribute to our shared knowledge base and soon we will all be able to use that web to get objective answers if we choose to, or, as things are now, just use it to promote our personal truths. Objectivity must be redefined in a holistic manner which includes all the logical contexts there are. Doing so makes objectivity quantifyable. No doing so makes us dumber than most animals.
Now that you enticed me Dean, to tell everybody that they are Wrong (or Right), I'll probably be banned from the group. The bottom line, Dean, nobody is interested in truth these days, it is downright unpopular.
Thankfully, we are only dumb humans, and there is a collective spirit guiding us toward a comming era of unprecidented individual freedom and wealth.
Someday WE will be ready. How much pain and suffering we must endue first is all that is at issue
I have difficulty separating Truth from enlightenment. As such, enlightenment is a dynamic process, not static. It is now we deal with new information. It is learning. The deer in the forest, the bushman in the Kalahari, the members of this forum, are confident their model of them selves and their environment is complete and consistent and have no incentive to be confused by the facts. They are not Wrong, but they are not Right. Enlightenment is the ability to apply intelligence to assimilate information in a holistic manner and act with purpose that serves creation and is greater than self.
When we stop learning we are the walking dead, not enlightened.
Goedel proved there are no systems that are complete and consistent. There are always new surprises in nature. New perspectives, new logical dimensions, to explore. And Truth related to a distinct logical context is not arbitrary, it is absolute.
As an information physicist enthusiast, I consider the big bang can be considered an information explosion of white noise manifesting all conceivable logical systems like monkeys and typewriters from Alice and wonderland to planet earth. What exists out of all that is conceivable is that which is perceived in a collaborative participatory existence. The past is created by accident of perception, or even passive reception and retransmission of information signals (energy). Physical existence is collective, not individual. All is one. All signals have been sent. Only those perceived exist.
From simple rules at the bottom layer, complex systems emerge. The process of organization, be it quantum binary differences, atoms, molecules, cells or societies is a collective process, not individual.
The line between the physical and the abstract becomes blurred. We have no independent physical existence beyond the cells that comprise us. Our being and intelligence manifests the collective organization of those cells, a group process, not an individual process. Organization by nature is a collective, emergent process.
Thus Being is perceiving and being perceived.
Self-awareness is having a model of oneself and ones environment that works.
Enlightenment is having the means of incorporating new knowledge into those models in a win win manner that promotes collaborative existence.
I abandoned the discipline of Zen in a quest for differentiation (science) rather than oneness (faith) and integration into my culture rather than isolation as I discovered my social nature.
The clearest vision of enlightenment I know of are the words on Nostredamas about entering a meditative trance. "....then I sit among the gods." Again this emphasizes the group nature of enlightenment and intelligence in general.
IQ doesn't mean much. My oldest son has the highest IQ of my children. He is in the army and believes Islam is evil. My second son has the lowest of my boys, is a superior musician, and the most understanding and universally liked. His challenge to me is how he can make a difference because he sees the unpleasant truths and wants to do something positive about them, so that perhaps we avoid world war three rather than dive into it.
Enlightenment differs from intelligence in that it has purpose, (to promote creation), and is global and universal. We are one family after all. All for one and one for all.
The awful truth is painful when we cannot do anything to about it. We must use the adrenaline or it becomes a poison that will kill us.
What we can do to make a difference is exactly what this group is about, making connections. Creating and reinforcing positive connections and allowing negative connections to atrophy. In network theory we see nonlinear relations, making or breaking a few connections can radically change the outcome of the network. I pray that we may do so purposely in the promotion of creation giving all the freedom to thrive so that we thrive together. It is the connection history created that makes any transformation inevitable.
We might dig up some more of our old connections, such as Peter+Trudy, Murray&Roxanne, D.C.Hayes, Steward Brand, Alvin&Hiedi, Frank(lurking?), Engelhard and whoever we can think of and find that we have already created sufficient history and resources to make the transformation inevitable now.
"Doesn't meditation strive turn off the "noisy mind"? " Yes Dean, Normally the brain operates at the beta level, generating 30 cycles a second electromagnetic waves. If you are really humming, it is about 55 cycles per second. In meditation you go through alpha arount 12 cps, theta around 8 cycles, delta arount 6 cycles.
Ordinarily the brain works as a transmitter, transmitting electromagnetic waves. My educated speculation is that when you turn down the power enough, it becomes a receiver, just as a real radio transiver does.
It can also be thought of like evolutionary regression down to the monkey brain in the human brain, the mammal (alpha), the reptile (delta), fish, and worm.
My experience is that there is an independent consiousness at each frequency.
I don't think a quiet mind represents any sort of enlightenment, but it it probably a requirement. Practising meditation may be a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for enlightmenment
My third son told me I'm an angry old man, but I love you anyway, when he called on my birthday while most say I am easy going as hell. http://wikiworld.com/DearDiary.2003-12-21
Im angry that the government dooms me great piece Kip when I'd rather doom me myself and and that nobody gives a damn about Truth and few will take a stand on Good and Evil unless they are fanatical. Other than that I'm still a hippy who loves everybody and all living things.
Charlie, I am so happy that someone got something from that. I was afraid it would confuse everybody. Think of it like russian dolls, one frequency within another, each of them believing they are us. It seems that at the theta level you can program all the bodily functions. At about 28 cycles per minute you become the you that beats your heart.
I should point out Dean that the frequency model is not complete as at each freqency, as you suggest, there is a left side, right side, front middle, back, each concious, contributing to our total conciousness. It is organic and gets complex with respect to specialized funcions like vision, but still working like brains within brains. That was my experience anyway as revieled through meditation...
Is it true that there can generally be no enlightment without meditation because unless you know yourself at every frequency in each independently functioning region of the human nervis system, you do not really know yourself?
I don't know, and I don't maintain the disipline, but I will share my experience since you made the mistake of encouraging me. I am aware, to a reasonable extent, of my various levels of being, and can visit readily. There is no reason I see that being aware of all frequencies in all brain sections can't happen without meditation. I simply lack a counter example.
My experience is that the disipline requires 15 minutes three times a day, in a relaxed open position, with eyes closed, usually. for 30 cycles downward.
Investigating frequencies above 30 (humming), seems to require dancing, sex or other physical activity to prevent adrenaline poisoning.
Everybody experiences many frequencys of Being usually when that frequency is in control the body. The conciousnesses not in control simply become unconcious when thay are not in control.
If being aware of these "jumps" of conciousness, from one frequency or brain/body area to another is a requirement for enlightenment then meditation is probobly necessary for most everybody.
Is the new enlightenment something that can come without any disipline? Or is it like the 100 monkey phenomonon, that once 100 people get it, everybody will get it?
I think it is an ongoing process of doing enlightened acts, not a state of mind. The process is always non trivial, involving principle based action. Thankfully the great teachers have given us the principles.
Truths are relative to some context, the context can be identified, in which case they can be absolutely true, false or undecidable relative to that context.
Scientific truth can be cumulative in several ways. Emperical studies always add to the body of knowledge. Certain relations are shown to be very close to 100%. These add to our toolbox of things that are known. Again, cumulative knowledge.
But popular science uses as little as 3 to 5 percent statistical significance, and Harvard boards endorse the finding as valid. Theories and speculations are presented as facts. Bad science is rampant in our society.
Bad science is not additive, it is arbitrary and dangerous.
Somehow the new enlightenment must restore objectivity to science. The scientific community is like a news service, they tell you want you want to hear. Science must be disciplined as should the news. What can make that happen in the new enlightenment?
To an information Physicist, the literal is also an abstration. The Disciples asked Jesus why God speaks to us in parables. Jesus answered, that we are not capable of complehending the naked/whole truth. I saw a documentary on tv shgowing a Catholic priest celibrating native african rituals rather than displacing them. It was wonderful.
Thus I can believe all religions as they are not literal, the are powerful parables that all reveil God's mystery in marvolous ways.
Thus as a Christian, Jew, Muslem, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., I am blessed by the one and only nameless God of God's, The Creator, Brahman (Allah, etc.).
So Walter, when you speak of "Something that I think makes all this more puzzling (and interesting) is noting that we have different truths at different stages of our lives, sometimes different times of day, and definitely under different physical conditions -- drugs, fever, meditation, sleeplessness, etc." it seems you are recognizing a multiplicity of self such as I have been describing. Perhaps meditation is not needed to be aware of it. Does this multiplicity imply intelligence is a collective phenomonon?
Human IQ has increased over the last century at a far greater rate than can be accounted for by natural selection. Literacy and the dawning of the communications age has no doubt played a role, suggesting a cultural and social intelligence beyond simple genetic mutation.
I think we need to be explicite in differenciating between personal truths and collective or social truth, although the former is generally rooted in the latter, it is the individual intelligence that contributes to and determines the latter. We must worship the individual over the politically correct legacy collective stupidity