This is essentially my "self-realization" or "knowledge of self" — my religion therefore, as Gandhi defined it in the "broadest sense of the word."

"Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." - Solomon (Breath of breaths; all is as temporal as breath, vapor, and therefore, spirit. Achievement of achievements; all is an aspiring to achieve. Will of wills; all is will. Doing of doings; all is a doing "under the sun", a "striving after wind", and a "vexation of spirit" or, of will, that is.)

"Morality is the basis of things, and truth is the substance of all morality." - Gandhi (Selfless and selfish consciousness are the basis of things, and our unique and profound ability for truth is a consequence of all mankind’s acting upon this great potential for selflessness and selfishness all throughout the millenniums; the extent we've organized ourselves and manipulated our environment that’s led to our present as we know it.)

If vanity ("breath" or "spirit," thus, a temporal aspiring to do or achieve; a will), born from morality (selfless and selfish consciousness), is the foundation of human behavior, then what serves as the basis of morality? Here's my theory so far; each category more or less feeds back into the one before and after it:

Sense Organs+Present Environment<>Consciousness<>Imagination<>Knowledge<>Reason<>Logos<>Influence<>Desire<>Morality<>Truth<>Spirit ("Spirit:" The will that's fueled by ones faith or, will to believe in a truth, thus, breath or vanity that's "done under the sun.")

• Spirit is determined by truth,
• Truth is governed by morality,
• Morality is fueled by desire,
• Desire stems from influence, 
• Influence is given life by logos,
• Logos is shaped by reason,
• Reason arises from knowledge,
• Knowledge is made possible by our capacity for imagination,
• And our imagination depends on the extent of how conscious we are of ourselves and everything else via our sense organs reacting to our present environment.

There's a place for Soul here somewhere; perhaps it's woven within each category, giving color to them all, so to speak. Defined more as ones "personality." Some cats have even a phobia for water, others will jump right in; some cats love their belly rubbed, others will claw and bite at you for going anywhere near it, etc.

Sense Organs + Present Environment: It all begins with our sense organs reacting to whatever our present environment consists of. Without our sense organs, we humans (conscious capable beings on a planet) wouldn't be able to be as aware as we sure seem to be to whatever our present environment is made up of; no sense organs, no degree of consciousness. However, without an environment for our sense organs to react to, what good would they be? What would be the outcome of a human that was born into and lived in nothing but a small, empty room? Nothing; it wouldn't know squat and wouldn't grow to be anywhere near as conscious as you and I sure seem to be — knowledge being what governs over ones level of consciousness. As we age and gather more knowledge of the experience or simply information for example, the more and more conscious we become; I wouldn't be anywhere near as conscious or aware of the vastness of the universe without gaining that knowledge first, for example. Unfortunately, there's living proof of exactly this — a poor little girl was locked up in a cellar by her father at twenty months old until she was thirteen: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/14/genie-feral-child-los-angeles-researchers

Consciousness: With sense organs reacting to an environment comes the ability to be conscious or aware of either oneself, or anything else; consciousness can be divided into two — the extent of how much more conscious or aware we are of ourselves, and the extent of how much more conscious we are of everything else. An awareness that gives birth to any degree of selfish awareness or what we call today — "selfishness" and selfless awareness or "selflessness," therefore. Without our ability to be as conscious as we sure seem to be in contrast to any other living thing that's supposedly ever existed, there can't be any knowing of anything. No consciousness, no knowledge; consciousness is what gives life, so to speak, to any degree of knowledge on a planet, and what keeps it living. Even the knowledge that instinct reveals to both something capable of acknowledging its own instinct, and something not capable of coming anywhere close of being able to do so.

Imagination: Consciousness may be what gives life to any degree of knowledge, but its our imaginations that truly make it possible. With no imagination comes the inability to shape knowledge; knowledge needs to be given the form of something to be given life, so to speak. How would we ever be able to reason that combing two things with another two things makes four things without being able to first give those thoughts shape via our imaginations? Would we even be able to reason at all to begin with? Things like Philosophy simply wouldn't exist. Would any knowing of anything exist?

"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination." - Albert Einstein

One's imagination and how "big" or detailed it is, is on a spectrum, akin to what we're presently referring to as "Autism Spectrum Disorder." There's what's called "Hyperphantasia," which is the term used to categorize a human with an above average detailed or "big" imagination, "Aphantasia," to categorize those with little to even non-existent detailed imaginations, and of course average imaginations that can be referred to as simply "Phantasia," this being the ancient Greek word for "imagination." The extent of one's inner dialogue or inner thoughts are governed by how detailed ones imagination is, as well as one's ability to empathize — to imagine in our heads the perspectives of other things and subsequently feel its feelings for ourselves; one of our many more profound and unique abilities we humans posses so much more capacity for in contrast to nature.

Knowledge: This one is the most important in my opinion. Our knowledge of anything — morality, time, the experience, science, history, philosophy, math, and even the influence of the divine to whatever extent that we keep alive or "living" via our unique and profound ability to retain and transfer knowledge in contrast to nature, is a consequence of being as conscious to both ourselves and everything else as we humans sure seem to be. Knowledge is what separates us the most from nature. Yes, we may be mammals, but its our unique and profound ability for knowledge — to retain and transfer it — that allows us to take what our instincts would demand of us otherwise, inherently, and not only deny the more barbaric thoughts and behaviors that are born out of instinct, but even "suffer" to pierce past them, in favor of where a knowledge takes us. There's nothing that comes anywhere close to this unique and profound ability we humans posses; to not only be able to acknowledge our instincts and any more "barbaric" thoughts and subsequent behaviors born out of it, but to even consider, not to mention the great lengths we can push past ourselves in favor of the exact opposite. Instincts (selfishness) demand retaliation, knowledge (selflessness) reveals alternatives that we wouldn't be able to even begin to consider being otherwise absent knowledge. Without knowledge, instincts would completely rule over us as it does lesser conscious, capable beings; knowledge is what makes us free — free from the government of instinct, that is.

"Knowledge is just that: knowledge, no matter its source and no matter what we've rendered it ever since it's been revealed and labeled." - Codrus

The greatest of any knowing is knowing the extent of how little you truly know about anything, or anyone. Of course ignorance (lack of knowledge) would come along with our ability to know anything to begin with, especially of the experience — the experience of being poor, starved, collectively despised, or of death, as a few examples. Ignorance is neither an insult, nor is it insulting, it's nothing but an adjective. It's a consequence of consciousness; to know is to not know. Lack of knowledge is at the core of instinct, and instinct is what's at the core of selfishness, and selfishness is what's at the core of all the fear, thus, anger, hate, and suffering in the world; all the "evils" mankind has ever known, and will ever know.

Reason: With this unique and profound capacity for knowledge comes our ability to reason with it; to weigh it; quantify (measure) it; to choose it. Reason takes the knowledge we form or shape via our imaginations and rounds it out, so to speak. We may be able to imagine knowledge, but its reason that gives us the ability to take these more simple shapes and make them into triangles and on to decagons; to evolve two plus two is four into rocket science; to take knowledge and turn it into a book, even of our knowledge of morality; to lead one to stop and think when met with someone who offers their other cheek in return after slapping them accross the other. It's the very creator of what we now call "logic." With our ability to reason comes the ability to take knowledge and shape it into letters and create words thus, speech and language.

Logos: The ancient Greek word being — incorrectly, in my opinion — translated as "the word" in John 1. It's our unique and profound ability to make symbols into what we now call "letters," and to combine these symbols together in various ways to make what we now call "words," and subsequently speech and language. What would reason be without words to give life to it? What would thoughts be without words to give life to them? But not all knowledge requires words to be given life. Instinct is a great example of this. It's a knowledge we'd be able to recognize without the need of a single word to do so.

Words are indeed suppositions — the word "red" that we've invented to describe and label the color red isn't absolute, it's just the present combination of what we now call "letters" we're using to give that knowledge life and definition. Imagine everything you're presently surrounded with not having a dedicated "word" we've invented for it at some point in the past. This is why I like to say "what we now call" things like religion, for example. Because at one point in time that combination of symbols and it's stigma didn't exist, it was just what knowledge is despite the stigma that man surrounds it with ever since its conception.

But what simply comes as a consequence of a conscious, capable species' capacity for words, thus, knowledge? Our incredibly unique and profound ability for divine revelation to any degree. Everything from God is a paperclip to it's "our Father" and it can't help but love us as much as it loves itself. It's the stigma of what we now call religion that's given this unique and profound ability a bad rap. If it wasn't for this Everest sized stigma that's surrounded our ability for logos then we'd be seeing and believing in the divine influence in a similar way people like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and even Albert Einstein did.

"I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal god is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth." - Albert Einstein

But what would logos be without the overwhelming influence of other people? Rounding out our capacity for logos into what we as a species know to be true to whatever degree today. We wouldn't even be able to communicate without all the knowledge of the influence of all those that have come before us, that we presently take wildly for granted.

Influence: Would you know all that you know now without the knowledge of the influence of all those that have ever surrounded you? What would you know of even tying your shoes? Without influence, well, there wouldn't be a whole lot to know would there? If you were the only human on Earth that's ever existed, you'd be absent the knowledge of all that we presently know and have ever presently known, you and I presently at the pinnacle of the "present."

Without influence, Plato wouldn't ever have known all that he knew; he wouldn't have possessed the knowledge to express what he knew and he wouldn't ever have gained the knowledge of what Socrates had to share without his influence; Peter or Mary Magdalene would've just kept living their lives without the influence of Jesus. Would we know all that we know now of the relevance and logic of loves ability to overcome hate if it wasn't for people like Socrates, Jesus, or Gandhi going to the great lengths they did to point it out? If someone hadn't pointed out and yelled "watch out!" How would the group of people be aware of what's about to fall on to them and destroy them? How would they be able to save themselves therefore? From their inherency to themselves in Jesus' or Gandhi's case. To become a "sign" (Luke 11:29) or an influence upon their contemporaries for them to even be able to consider love and selflessness over hate and selfishness; to walk the more difficult, less convenient, narrower path that knowledge reveals to us over the more inherent, far easier and more convenient, wider path that instinct demands of us, that we're otherwise more inherently drawn to. Without the influence of your parents for example, would you value what you presently do as much as you would without their influence? Would one simply become a racist along with their families and/or contemporaries as another example? How could one know of the woes of racism and the woes of not questioning or wrestling with the truth as its presented to them via the overwhelming influence of our contemporaries, without knowing of the value of doing so beforehand?

Desire: Without the influence of knowledge to whatever degree, what would we desire? How can one desire ice cream without first gaining the knowledge of the experience of its profound taste? Way back when we weren't aware of sex, to what degree did we desire it? If the influence of our contemporaries didn't consist of sex in any way whatsoever, would we desire it as much as we do today? Obviously, instinct would say the desire would still persist, but to what degree in this context in contrast to our present conditions? Where sex is not only encouraged, but it's even "cool" and culturally "adults" participate in it in droves, so therefore, you being an adult too means that of course you should desire it to the same degrees right? Wrong. We may very well be what we've been surrounded with, but of course we are also what we repeatedly choose to think and therefore, do.

"If one, Ponders on objects of the sense, there springs Attraction; from attraction grows Desire, desire flames to fierce Passion, passion breeds Recklessness; then the memory — all betrayed — let's noble purpose go, and saps the mind, till purpose, mind, and man are all undone." - The Bhagavad Gita

Desire stems from our sense organs reacting to our environment; without this reaction, what would sex be but simply procreation? If sex didn't feel as good as it does, would anyone even desire to procreate? Or would it fade away as walking to our destinations has in favor of vehicles today for example?

It's desire that leads one to will and act for the sake of itself (selfishness), or anything else (selflessness), and potentially leads to a level of passion that holds the capacity to undo or "defile" a humans mind, to the point of even murder or suicide, via the passions that are flamed by our knowledge of both hate and love.

Morality: With desire comes our inherency to measure the good or evil; right or wrong; the truthfulness or falsehood within any doing born out of desire. Morality may be subjective, but just like our knowledge of time for example, via our ability to acknowledge, measure, and organize it, we've always been able to find degrees of objectivity within our knowing of anything, like the laws of physics for example, we've come to find this "law of love" - Tolstoy, or whatever any group of humans have come up with to measure and organize our knowledge of things like time, morality, or the experience as a few examples, at any point throughout mankind’s history. By our inherency for reason and to subsequently empathize, (the law and the prophets as a whole that were meant to be fulfilled, in my opinion of course - Matt 5:17, 7:12, 22:40), we're able to make the most accurate — though far from perfect measurement to determine what most people would agree to be "good" or "bad," just as we're able to determine what time it presently is for most people. Of course it would still be very circumstantial and dependent on the situation, person, culture, day in age, etc, but generally, using the most accurate tool at our disposal, we can find degrees of objectivity within the sea of subjectivity that is our knowledge of morality.

Any vanity born out of desire — by considering its origins, or what’s at the core of it — can be categorized as a doing for the sake of oneself (selfishness), or for the sake of anything else (selflessness). P.S. subjective morality wouldn't exist if morality was a "spoof" or didn't exist due to its subjectivity; no morality, no subjective morality.

Truth: To be capable of reasoning with morality is to be able to comprehend what's presently revealing itself to be more or less rational and thus, what's subjectively "right" or "wrong" and with that, true or false. It's by this ability that allows us to take the shapes of knowledge we conjure via our imaginations and ability to reason and turn them into a truth; the truth of wearing clothes for example. It's our ability to reason or "wrestle" with truth and subsequently live by or deny the outcomes that determines who or what we ultimately become the product or reflection of. We are what we've been surrounded with; we're all products of our contemporaries, however, we are also what we repeatedly choose to think, and therefore, do. If I either knowingly or unknowingly decide that becoming a manager of a clothes store is what's presently revealing itself to be the most rational decision, and subsequently live by it, I will ultimately become a product or a reflection of that doing; of that knowledge.

It's truth to whatever degree (questionable or unquestionable; absolutely or not so absolutely true) that's always guided mankind throughout the ages and into our present as we know it.

"The Spirit of truth." - John 16:13 (the will that comes from our unique and profound ability for truth.)

Spirit: With our ability to acknowledge, measure, and give life to knowledge of morality and therefore, truth on an Earth comes the doing of any desire, thus, the vanity, spirit, or will of it; if we didn't desire anything, what would we aspire to do? If nothing was good or bad, right — and therefore rational — or wrong, good or evil, true or false, then why desire anything? Is it, what we call today, "instinct" that demands we quench our thirst when suffering from the lack of it? Or is it that inherent demand for ourselves born out of consciousness and our knowing of morality coupled with our inherency to measure it in relation to ourselves specifically? A knowledge, therefore; an awareness. Just as most nature is conscious enough to share that inherent demand for itself, so we humans just can't help but possess the same. The difference being of how much more conscious we are of ourselves and morality in contrast, hence the extent of how much more angry we become (its very difficult to lead a pet to gain a grudge towards its owner), or sad, to the point of even "crippling" ourselves.

It's our capacity for consciousness; imagination; knowledge; reason; logos; truth, spirit (will; vanity) that leads us to posses an ability no other species comes anywhere close to being able to parallel, born out of our unique and profound ability for divine revelation to whatever degree: To aim and even be willing to consider subjectively "suffering" to push past our instinct in favor of where a knowledge takes us, and to even be willing to give ones life for something that isn't itself; for even the smallest, most insignificant, or most hated of creatures. Also known as, the "Holy Spirit", or, the Holy 𝘞𝘪𝘭𝘭. Provided of course your knowing of God(s) doesn't point you back to selfish thoughts and behaviors, as most of what we now call "religions" do today.

With desire comes the ability to aspire to act; to will; to do for the sake of oneself (selfishness), or anything else (selflessness). Upon this inevitable choice, made knowingly or unknowingly, lays the foundation of human behavior and subsequently the extent we've ever and presently manipulated our environment and organized ourselves up until now as a species, and what will, objectively — God or not, forever govern over the future of the tomorrow of the most conscious, capable species on this planet; the ones who posses objectively the most potential for either itself, or anything else.

"Know thyself." - The first of three Ancient Greek maxims chosen to be inscribed into the Temple of Apollo where the Oracle of Delphi resided in Ancient Greece

"When you can understand everything [things] you can forgive anything [things]." - Leo Tolstoy

An Allegorical, More Philosophical Interpretation of the Story of the Garden of Eden: https://lemmy.world/post/44870805

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/6127422

PsychonautWiki (PW) is a community-driven online encyclopedia that aims to document the field of psychonautics (i.e. the exploration of altered states of consciousness) in a comprehensive and scientifically-grounded manner.

Our documentation includes an extensive content collection covering the scientific research and harm reduction practices relevant to hallucinogen and general psychoactive substance experimentation as well as other methods of exploring consciousness such as meditation, lucid dreaming, and sensory deprivation.

This information is presented alongside an integrated descriptive subjective effects index which is designed to facilitate analysis and sharing of non-ordinary states of consciousness via easily readable terminologies, descriptions, leveling systems, and example images (replications).

In 1998, at the conference of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC), the neuroscientist Christof Koch made a bet with the philosopher David Chalmers: by 2023, science would be able to explain how the brain’s tangle of neurons gives rise to the phenomenon we call consciousness. The winner would get a case of wine.

Koch was a professor of cognitive biology who helped pioneer the mechanistic study of the “neural correlates of consciousness,” which maps the relationship between brain activity and subjective experiences. He believed that consciousness was fundamentally measurable and that it was only a matter of time before science identified how it arose in the brain.

Chalmers was both a philosopher and cognitive scientist who was skeptical that science would be able to build explanatory bridges between neural correlates in the brain and the subjective experience of consciousness. Famously, he called consciousness “the hard problem,” which he believed was sufficiently challenging to keep any explanation of consciousness at bay for at least a quarter of a century.

At the 26th ASSC conference this past weekend, 25 years after the initial wager, the results were declared: Koch lost. Despite years of scientific effort — a time during which the science of consciousness shifted from the fringe to a mainstream, reputable, even exciting area of study — we still can’t say how or why the experience of consciousness arises. Galileo split consciousness away from science 400 years ago

While the Western science of consciousness only grew into a reputable field over the past few decades, part of the reason answers remain so elusive may be buried in the deep structure of scientific inquiry itself, reaching back to the 1600s.

The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei is widely credited with inventing the scientific method. As the philosopher Philip Goff recounts in his 2019 book Galileo’s Error, in order to formalize the study of objective qualities like size, shape, location, and motion, Galileo bracketed out the fuzzier domain of conscious experiences. The modern scientific endeavor he helped create is a study of the universe shorn of what Galileo called the soul, and what we today might call sensory qualities, the gestalt of what consciousness feels like. The scientific method can explain the electrical activity that sparks in the brain when you jump into a freezing lake, but it can’t explain why a subjective experience of invigoration comes along with it.

“Those sensory qualities have come back to bite us,” Goff writes. “Galileo’s error was to commit us to a theory of nature which entailed that consciousness was essentially and inevitably mysterious.”

In other words, Galileo’s scientific method required walling off the study of consciousness itself, which is why it’s perhaps not surprising that even centuries later, his method’s inheritors still struggle to explain it. New avenues in the science of consciousness

As the years passed, Chalmers and Koch forgot about their bet, but in 2018, the science journalist Per Snaprud brought it back to their attention. A few years later, as part of a $20 million project supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, a series of “adversarial experiments” were designed to pit theories of consciousness against each other, including global workspace theory (GWT) and integrated information theory (IIT).

GWT imagines consciousness as a theater: The brain is populated by a crowd of local information streams, but only what gets broadcast to the whole crowd — put onstage — becomes conscious. IIT identifies consciousness with the degree of, yes, integrated information, represented by the Greek character phi (Φ). The more phi, the more consciousness.

Preliminary findings from one Templeton-sponsored gauntlet comparing GWT and IIT were presented at the recent ASSC conference and ultimately used to settle the Koch/Chalmers bet. Six independent laboratories followed a shared protocol designed to test how well each theory could predict brain activity. IIT fared slightly better than GWT, but neither made entirely accurate predictions. This uncertainty was enough to make Chalmers the victor, while scattering researchers off to update the theories or consider new ones altogether.

Goff’s preferred resolution is to reintroduce consciousness into our understanding of nature by way of a secular version of panpsychism, the theory that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous element of the physical world. In this view, physical sciences à la Galileo describe matter from “the outside.” Consciousness is also a property of matter, but matter as experienced from the inside.

Meanwhile, Karl Friston, the world’s most-cited living neuroscientist, has an idea called the free-energy principle. Stripped of all the math, it suggests that the behavior of all living systems follows a single principle: To remain alive, they try to minimize the difference between their expectations and incoming sensory input. (Other terms for that difference include surprise and free energy.) In this model, human brains minimize surprise by generating internal models that predict the outside world. Here, consciousness is basically the experience of an internally generative model complex enough to imagine states of the world that have not yet happened.

The process by which brains generate these internal models has a theory of its own, known as predictive processing, perhaps most associated with the philosopher Andy Clark. To grasp the idea, think of what’s happening during a dream. You’re lying in bed, eyes closed in a dark room, completely still. But your brain is generating a rich internal dream world that feels entirely convincing (lucid dreams aside). Well, predictive processing claims that the same sort of thing is happening during waking consciousness, with a few caveats.

In other words, the kind of world you’re experiencing when awake is basically the same kind of world you experience in a dream: a hallucination. The difference is that our brains are constantly comparing our waking hallucinations to the sensory input they receive from the outside, fine-tuning the waking dream to keep it in line with what the incoming sensory data suggests is going on beyond our skulls. That’s what the neuroscientist Anil Seth means when he calls consciousness a “controlled hallucination.”

Okay, so living systems want to minimize surprise, and predictive models help brainy creatures do so. But what makes consciousness feel the way it does? How can we explain why some states of consciousness feel so rich and alive while others feel so dreary? One interesting idea hovering on the periphery of consciousness science is the symmetry theory of valence (STV), first proposed by the independent philosopher Michael Johnson and his collaborators at the Qualia Research Institute, a nonprofit focused on the science of consciousness.

The STV starts with the idea that you can map every state of consciousness onto a perfect mathematical representation, like a unique objective signature for each subjective state (it shares this idea with IIT). Next, it claims that the valence, or positive/negative feeling of any given state of consciousness, depends on the symmetry of that representation. In practice, drawing on the work of neuroscientist Selen Atasoy, they use the underlying neural activity as that representation.

Every conscious state has an associated orchestra of neural activity that gives rise to harmonic patterns across the brain. QRI co-founder Andrés Gómez Emilsson figured out how to decompose that activity in a way that deciphers how much consonance exists across the brain harmonics, which works as a proxy for the symmetry. The more symmetry in the brain, the more positive the experience. Inversely, the more dissonance and less symmetry, the more negative the experience. While the STV hasn’t received much mainstream attention, its ideas are beginning to crawl their way into citations on papers at the forefront of the science of consciousness.

So we have a growing constellation of relevant theories, though as the result of the Koch/Chalmers bet suggests, we still lack a definitive, falsifiable explanation. We even lack consensus on whether one may ever exist. Toward a paradigm of consciousness science — or not

Still, some neuroscientists argue that we are living in the dawn before a theory of consciousness arises, like those who lived in the time shortly before Darwin’s theory of natural selection. This paints the current field as “pre-paradigmatic,” a term developed by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn to describe an immature science where competing schools of thought do not share the same basic understanding of their subject. Everything from methodologies to metaphysics can differ in a pre-paradigmatic science of consciousness.

Eventually, in this view, the field might coalesce around a unified theory and the first true paradigm of consciousness science would begin. This is the view Koch continues to hold (despite being down a case of fine Portuguese wine). He doubled down at the recent ASSC conference, renewing the bet on the same 25-year horizon. Chalmers, too, reports plenty of progress, telling Nature that the problem of consciousness “has gradually been transmuting into, if not a ‘scientific’ mystery, at least one that we can get a partial grip on scientifically.”

But there’s no guarantee that some critical mass of correlations between brain states and feelings can ever tell us how or why consciousness happens. Chalmers suspects that at the conclusion of their renewed bet in 2048, despite all the surrounding progress of insight that’s sure to unfold, the mystery may remain as perplexing as ever.

Source

Bach starts with a thermostat, then adds a system to model the thermostat, then a system to model the model... and so on. Is consciousness somewhere in that hierarchy of models modelling models?

Hossenfelder lines up pretty well with my position, but that always makes me suspicious...