Been catching up on some bucket list "unread" emails, and Steve, this below email of yours is a real knockout - so many thought seeds, I'm reminded why I kept it it "unread" state since you posted it 3 years ago. Thank you. It's evident you really put some intention here and there on communicating as clearly as you can, and that, IMEHO is a valuable exercise/ contribution to grind mill of experience. I note you refer below to "E-Prime" variant of English. Are you familiar with this at all? If so, tl;dr ? On Wed, Sep 07, 2016 at 08:42:01AM -0400, Steve Kinney wrote:
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On 09/07/2016 02:50 AM, Georgi Guninski wrote:
On Tue, Sep 06, 2016 at 09:07:25PM -0400, Steve Kinney wrote:
A new Hilaritas Press print edition of RAW's Quantum Psychology just
Wikipedia has an article about "Quantum Mind", basically claiming that the mind heavily depends on quantum stuff. Pretty sure medical students don't study this.
Are the theories about quantum mind taken seriously?
Not by me. To grossly oversimplify:
1) Quantum physics is spooky and inexplicable. 2) Consciousness is spooky and inexplicable. 3) Therefore, quantum physics explains consciousness.
Maybe. But the missing link is evidence. Or even a clearly articulated model that can tell us where to look for evidence.
People who just "have to" explain everything in terms of concrete and familiar concepts have been known to assert that consciousness does not exist. Maybe they are right in a limited set of cases: The Gnostics maintained that most humans are born without souls. The Taoists and Sufis posit that the soul is a latent potential that remains dormant unless developed through self observation, and may be extinguished by the weight of neurotic compulsive attachments to "materialistic" motives and activities. By "soul" I think they mean consciousness exhibiting the ability to directly modify thought or behavior, and/or perceive something other than the activity of the nervous system, but that's a shot in the dark on my part.
Two questions at the opposite ends of scale sit there like bookends on the library of human knowledge: What is consciousness made of? What contains the Universe and enforces the laws of physics?
Again, those who simply "must know everything" assert that these are meaningless questions and/or that there is "nothing there at all." The scientific method addresses "how" but not "why" questions and to them, if it's not science it's not real.
Those with a more experiential / subjective frame of reference often arrive at the conclusion that consciousness and existence are manifestation of the same thing. Philosophers who tend toward rigorous argument assert that by definition consciousness and existence are the same thing for all practical purpose, and that this tells us almost nothing except to define the limits on what /can/ be known by human beings.
In Quantum Psychology, Wilson provides a guided tour of a lot of this landscape and presents some practical tools, like the E-Prime variant of English, for correcting some of the problems that arise from believing that we know things we can not know, and behaving accordingly.
A news headline like "5 yro savant boy from Uganda breaks root cert in his head for 42 kilograms of western chocolate" will make my day ;)
If he does, he will probably use a crystal ball, or dance until he drops while tripping balls on the best available local psychedelic. We have ways of getting at content that is "off limits" to normal waking consciousness. But he probably won't get the desired result because in these matters, the process very notoriously has its own agenda. By way of analogy, one does not interrupt a paramedics working at a disaster site with a request that she solve a crossword puzzle. You can try but she will ignore you or, if you continue pestering her, kick your ass.
:o)
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