Have you watched Mr. Nobody?
Its a great movie that i think is somehow related to the subject at hand.
“Since people are concerned that ‘X’ will not be provided, ‘X’ will naturally be provided by those who are concerned by its absence.""The sweetest of minds can harbor the harshest of men.”
http://voluntaryistreader.wordpress.org
Not to derail anything here, but are you guys open to the possibility that consciousness is not created by the brain? I have been following this thread off and on for a while now and most of you guys seem to be set on the notion that the brain creates consciousness, may I ask your opinions as to why you believe that?
Well, I think it is clear that the majority of the causal factors responsible for consciousness must reside within the skull. We know this from sheer correlation between consciousness and brain activity, etc. However, what is troubling is, as David Chalmer says it, that it "feels like" something to be conscious, to be experiencing the world. Apparently, some people think that there is nothing here to explain. But as Antonio Damasio puts it, what is the thing that goes away when you fall asleep and comes back again when you awaken? What the hell is that? What is conscious experience? This is what Chalmers calls "The Hard Problem of consciousness" by contrast to the easy problems of functional explanation.
It appears that any answer - that "takes the hard problem seriously", in Chalmer's words - is left with one of two possibilities. Either conscious experience is an intrinsic property of the Universe like mass or charge (i.e. there is something it "feels like" to be an electron or a steel girder, etc.) or conscious experience somehow "emerges" from otherwise "dead" matter. Neither one of these two possibilities is very philosophically satisfying so perhaps there is some other possibility we haven't thought of yet probably as a result of our still infantile understanding of the human brain and mind.
Clayton -
nirgrahamUK:Yes, I guess I'm asking you about whether the opinions that are not yours...changed?
nirgrahamUK:Do you think praxeology is useful true? Is Austrian Economics well founded?
Clayton:When someone says, "I chose to go with the blue curtains instead of the brown", he is not making a statement about the hidden machinery in his brain that is the causal precondition to the act of choice. Rather, he is speaking of choice as we all experience it, an unanalyzed whole in the flow of time and conscious awareness.
Clayton:you keep strawmanning me as if I'm trying to deny that there are causal preconditions to conscious choice.
the consciousness doesn't cause the choice
That's ridiculous. You can't possibly know what causal role consciousness plays in choice because we simply don't know. If there is one word that describes Nature at every level, it is economy. Nature is economical with the means at her disposal. Yet you are positing that consciousness is just bolted onto the human mind like some kind of Clockwork Orange brainwashing experiment, forced to "experience" the world in which it plays no causal role whatsoever. That is epiphenomenalism, which is another acausal theory.
The logic of evolution is to infer from the existence of an anatomical feature its purpose. The human hand can grasp things like branches and rocks; its particular features evolved to serve the functions which early humans needed to perform. There is no reason this logic should not extend to conscious awareness itself. It seems obvious to me that amoeba are not aware. Yet they are alive. Humans and other animals with sufficiently complex brains are clearly not only alive, but also aware. Why? What evolutionary advantage did concious animals obtain by not only reacting to the world but by experiencing it? Epiphenomenalism says "none" because conscious awareness can play no causal role in the world and is, therefore, strictly non-functional. That's an obviously bad answer unless you think that it's possible that the human hand has five fingers to match the five points of the pentagram that Venus traces out in the sky...
That's ridiculous. You can't possibly know what causal role consciousness plays in choice because we simply don't know. Then it's ridiculous of you to say my understanding is ridiculous, because you admit you can't possibly know.
Re: ephiphomenalism I've already said I don't accept that conscious awareness is purely an epiphenomenon. Clearly, the consciousness contributes to the overall input which the unconscious processes. But as blindsight demonstrates, conscious awareness of neither the input (e.g. light entering the eye) nor the output (e.g. sight) is strictly necessary.
As a side note, the existence of conscious awareness doesn't mean the consciousness developed out of a need for it. Perhaps the consciousness is an unnecessary accident, and evolution has yet to weed it out—not that I claim to hold that position, or that it is true. And who's to say it didn't develop for different reasons for each species, or to different extents, or that it has the same purpose for each species? I don't claim to speak on behalf of animals.
As another aside, I don't see any reason to distinguish between alleged conscious choice, and alleged animal instinct. In both cases, the brain processes input and output. But for some reason, we assume A) we have consciousness and they don't, and B) therefore our consciousness caused the output. Again, I invoke blindsight—conscious awareness of brain activity is not absolutely necessary.
It seems obvious to me that amoeba are not aware. Yet by your own admission this is a "ridiculous" position to hold, since "you can't possibly know".
what is the thing that goes away when you fall asleep and comes back again when you awaken? Some theories hold that the consciousness doesn't "go away", that it is, in fact, experiencing the dream.
Clayton, What do you mean by "the majority of casual factors responsible for consiousness must reside within the skull."?
I think he means it would be silly to look for the major causal factor responsible for your consciousness under a rock in the park, in your garage, or on a moon of Jupiter.
Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid
Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring
@hashem:
Watch this ASAP!
Love it.
Daniel Dennett: And here I'm reminded of the joke about the philosophers who say: "We know it's possible in practice, we're trying to figure out if it's possible in principle." It's the people who are too much concerned with possibility and principle who have distorted the free will problem in my thinking.
And here I'm reminded of the joke about the philosophers who say: "We know it's possible in practice, we're trying to figure out if it's possible in principle." It's the people who are too much concerned with possibility and principle who have distorted the free will problem in my thinking.
Well put, professor.
That's an hour long!
It'll put hair on your chest...
Ok so I watched that lecture. I think I've figured out the problem with mainstream free willies and their establishment opposition: "determinists".
This is the problem: false dichotomy. And I've been pointing it out in this thread for a while. Let me explain.
The question is always "does a person have free will" or, the opposition question "is a person's will determined". What I've been pointing out is that the important question is "what is mean by a person". Nobody ever touches on this, so everyone in this thread and everyone in the establishment arguing about free will or determinism is missing the point. The unconscious brain processes input, the consciousness experiences output. "A person" generally associates with his consciousness, so no, the consciousness, being the experiencer and not the chooser, has no will—whether the non-will is "free" or "not free" is a red herring.
OK, I haven't posted anything really weird in too long. So, here's my theory that the pop song "Glad You Came" is actually about the 2008/2012 transits of Venus. It was released to album about a month after the transit.
Just take a look at the music video to begin with:
So, the first hint is the opening line "The Sun goes down, the stars come out" - the song is not about hooking up, it's about the stars. "I'm glad you came". Who came? And who's glad about it?
"My universe will never be the same"
Here is an allusion to the fact that planets never form the same alignments; it is an ever-different pattern. It is like the old proverb, "You can never step into the same stream twice."
"I'm glad you came"
Who came? And who's glad about it? We'll see in a moment...
"You cast a spell on me, spell on me"
Here, we have a hint that we're talking about magic. Magic and the stars. Astrology, anyone?
"You hit me like the sky fell on me, fell on me"
The sky fell on me - an allusion to myth, the meeting of Gaia and Uranus, earth and sky. All life springs forth ultimately from this primordial sexual union of the "above" and the "below".
"And I decided you look well on me, well on me"
This was the phrase that first piqued my interest. Who talks this way? The group is Irish but I've never heard any English-speaker say "you look well on me." The phrase "you look well" means "you appear to be in good health." And the phrase "you look good on me" is a widespread idiom, easily understood. This phrase is jarringly out-of-place and I think it's meant to grab your attention.
Who's glad who came? Who looks well on who? It is the same two beings...
"Turn the lights out now"
A reference to an eclipse or occult - when the moon covers the Sun, the lights go out...
"Now I'll take you by the hand Hand you another drink Drink it if you can"
Again, another reference to myth, in this case, the mythical figure, patron of mankind, Bacchus/Dionysius.
"Can you spend a little time, Time is slipping away, Away from us so stay, Stay with me I can make, Make you glad you came"
Another illusion to the inexorable motion of the heavens. It is by the heavens that we mark time... the rotation of the Earth, the movements of the stars, and the courses and ratios of the planets.
Now, for the last clue, let's return to the music video. The video opens with the Sun. That's because the song is being sung by the Sun. It is a song of the Sun. Next, we see beautiful bikini models hooking up with each member of the band. They are Venusian women. Venus is the Roman name for Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. These women definitely look good on them. And this is the key to the puzzle - the Venusian women are simply symbols of Venus herself in the sky, transiting the Sun, visiting him two times in succession roughly every 100 years for a brief liaison. She occults and, thus, hides that portion of the Sun (the lights go out). She spends a little time with him, time slipping away, but the Sun implores her to stay (in her orbit) because he will make her glad she came (to visit, that is, transit the Sun). Venus is the one that the Sun is serenading with this song. It is she who looks well on him (occult). The Sun is glad she came (visited him briefly these two times, to return in about 100 years).
Just noticed a couple more details in the opening sequence. Each member's face is shown full-screen in succession. Each one is a symbol of the subject of the song which was shown in the first frames of the video: the Sun. As a nice touch, there are five band members to match the five points of the pentagram that Venus traces in our sky.
One last detail: one of the band members (I think the band leader) repeatedly points skyward... at one point, they all do - notably, he points skyward with his right hand. This is the astrological hand motion that signifies "As above, so below."
:-P
Wait, so now you are trolling astrologers?
muahahaha }:-D
This movie was right up my alley and narrated by Brian Cox! An hour and a half of total transport! Too cool!
Damn, now I'm starting to wonder... what if Fomenko, Sitchin or Velikovsky were on to something? There seems to be two possible extremes, the Atlantean extreme (an ancient, hyper-advanced civilization that disappeared) and on the other extreme the fabrication hypothesis (Fomenko). I have serious problems with the Atlantean hypothesis... shouldn't at least one Atlantean Pepsi-can have been left lying around near one of these amazing, ancient monuments??
The monumental energy and deception of the other hypothesis makes it almost as difficult to believe. From where could a secret conspiracy have managed to muster the immense human and other economic resources required to mount a globe-spanning campaign of archaelogical fabrication?? Maybe the capstone of the Great Pyramid is sitting on ice somewhere in the Vatican's vaults.... dun dun DUNNNNNNNN.
More good stuff:
Tesla's Wireless and the Tunguska Event
^^never heard this hypothesis before^^
I love it. It makes perfect sense to me though. Thanks Clayton! As always, love your posts!
The only one worth following is the one who leads... not the one who pulls; for it is not the direction that condemns the puller, it is the rope that he holds.
@Phi: There's more. LOL
Tesla dies in 1943. FBI raids his apartment, seizes all his papers, classifies them. Two years later, USG has supposedly developed an "atomic bomb". None of the footage of "nuclear" explosions is credible, in my opinion. The government has zero incentive to be open about nuclear technology, including releasing genuine video footage of it. Whatever we see in this footage is doubtless fabricated even if nuclear technology operates substantially as we are informed that it does.
We're supposed to believe that they developed the atomic bomb in a matter of just a few years. Just like the Moon landings, they got it right the first time, every time. But Edison had to try 10,000 materials before finding a durable filament material for the ligh-bulb. Just goes to show that government really is more efficient than the private sector. Anyway.
Oh, I'm with you there. Tesla is one of my absolute favorite historical figures. After public education thoroughly demolished any love for reading I would have had when I was younger, I happened to buy a biography on Tesla. It was fascinating. It was the first thing I read that sparked my interest in reading. I actually owe it to my high school chemistry teacher that, although forced to stick to the curriculum, would often say and show things in standard theories that didn't make sense and basically say, "Hmm... oh well," in a way that made the thinkers question standard theories. I owe a lot to him actually. On the last day, one year he showed a video on Tesla, and basically said, "Supposedly, this guy didn't understand electricity as well as Edison." That is how I became interested in Tesla.
Then, after learning of how brilliantly simple his theories were, and how the big money (granted special privileges by government, no less) didn't want to see his ideas reach fruition, and how intellectual property laws screwed the man behind essentially all of our modern electrical world, and his genuine want for a better and more efficient world was lost due partly to his over generous and kind nature, and to top it all off, the government confiscated literally tons of his work (still never released to this day, even though his ideas and theories were wrong and of little value O.o), I began to question the motives of government seriously for the first time. [I apologize for that huge run-on]
I think the world has really been compromised on ignoring (and never really being exposed to, thanks to the state) his questioning of Einstein's theories, especially the theory of gravity, and his ideas on radioactivity. He thought these (and all phenomena, really) could be explained and expounded better by electromagnetic theory.
The world wasn't ready for his genius, I suppose, although we need it now more than ever.
questioning of Einstein's theories
Indeed, Einstein has become almost theological. However, I don't entirely blame Einstein - at least he had the intellectual honesty to admit it was possible he had got it all wrong with relativity, particularly GR. Compare that to the Orthodoxy since - Hawking and the rest will not tolerate for a moment even the suggestion of the possibility that Einstein was wrong. Questioning Einstein is treated as a neophyte mistake... the whole issue is already "asked and answered".
I believe that a lot of the mischief is actually due to Henri Poincare who was a mathematician and not a physicist. The mathematics of relativity theory are essentially Poincare's. What Poincare understood is that Riemannian geometry is, in a very deep sense, more "natural" than Euclidean geometry. What makes relativity so hard to understand for the average person is that it is essentially a translation of the Newtonian (Euclidean) laws of physics to Riemannian geometry. But where relativity goes astray is in reifying Riemannian geometry by saying things like "space is curved" or by asserting things like space and time are "two aspects of one thing, spacetime".
Space is never curved. Space is not physical to begin with, it is a category of conscious awareness! It is how the human brain "arranges" the physical facts. It's like saying "the geometry of the planetary motion warps the sky and this explains why they move in these weird paths in the sky". No, it does not warp the sky, it's just that when you translate from the "natural" geometry of planetary orbits to the phenomenological geometry (the sky from our vantage-point), you go from simple curves (ellipses) to complex curves (the apparent motions of the planets trace complex curves in the sky).
Something similar happens in the mathematics of relativity except that it is harder to visualize Minkowski space than ordinary space whereas it is easier to visualize planetary orbits than their apprent motions in the sky.
LOL
Speaking of space, and Einstein, and some of the silly hypotheses perpetuated, here are two of my favorite quotes on the subject, by Nikola of course:
"Supposing that the bodies act upon the surrounding space causing curving of the same, it appears to my simple mind that the curved spaces must react on the bodies, and producing the opposite effects, straightening out the curves..."
I do believe Einstein had some great ideas, and that he understood a lot. Of course, as you pointed out, those that followed him ignored the fact that he wasn't very sure he actually had it right. And they ignore that he did not rule out the idea of an aether, but merely ruled out the notion of the "classical aether," the one that might have properties like permittivity, pressure, etc. He and Tesla were somewhat in agreement here, I think, although they may or may not have realized it.
Speaking of, I never really liked the general dismissal of any possible aether in the first place, and the standard interpretation of the Michelson-Morley experiment is another wrong-turn in science and a now dogmatic (or as you put it, nearly theological) response.
I would love to be able to read Tesla's Dynamic Theory of Gravity (that I bet the state has locked up somewhere still, unfortunately).
@that video
Major LOL!
"There is no way to reliably date your father. Your mother confirms this, and she is a primary source."
Again, LOL.
Speaking of space, and Einstein, and some of the silly hypotheses perpetuated, here are two of my favorite quotes on the subject, by Nikola of course: "I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. . . . Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view."
"I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. . . . Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view."
Exactly. Space is not a thing, that is, it is not a causal agent of its own, unless:
This is a condition required by the principles of conservation - if mass, energy, etc. are conserved, then it must be the case that any action causes an opposite and equal reaction; else, there could be an inexhaustible entity that acts on its environment without ever depleting its own energy store.
This is what angers me about how they teach physics. They just state stuff like "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" but never bother to give the reasoning behind these ideas. It's just that way. It's "obvious". Newton said so. "If we're going to do the physics of this Universe, this is the accepted starting point." Or some mumbo-jumbo like that.
My understanding of all EM theory up until Maxwell (Tesla learned EM pre-Maxwell) was that it followed the "fluid metaphor" of electrical phenomena. All the equations describing electro-magnetism are formally identical to those of fluid dynamics and the "hydraulic metaphor" is still used today to help students visualize the role of the resistor in "restricting" the "flow" of electricity around the "circuit". The capacitor "stores" electrical charge while the inductor "stores" energy in the magnetic field. And so on.
The mathematics of waves are generalizable across multiple disciplines in physics and it was this area that Tesla was most expert in and - in combination with his fearless experimentalism - was the source of many of his prescient insights and ahead-of-its-time inventions. But he rejected the relativistic idea of light as a disembodied wave (which I think traces back originally to Poincare who was not an experimentalist but did derive his own physical equations), a wave that is not a waving of something.
The more I think about it, the more I think that waves are an ineradicable chicken-and-egg problem. You can't have a wave unless there is something that is waving (e.g. water-molecules). But if there's something there (a water-molecule), we can only become sensible of it's "somethingness" if it is not eternally static, that is, if it moves/changes. And if it moves, then there will be displacements caused by its changes and these displacements will, again, result in waves at a smaller scale (within the water-molecule itslef), which indicates another "smaller-scale" ether, ad infinitum.
Now, I don't believe the Universe infinitely sub-divides, at least, not in the usual sense of simple, Zeno-style sub-dividing. It could be that the Universe is continuous but not every interval is accessible. There are good mathematical reasons for wanting to say something like this. But I think that relativity theory is basically cheating by simply legislating that light is the "ultimate wave", a wave which is not propagated by any medium but is its own medium (metric of space itself).
He wrote prolifically and compulsively documented his ideas, especially after the fire that burnt down his lab. There is no doubt he at least sketched the basic outline.
Gobekli Tepe. Hrm.
First issue: Intentionally buried. It is absolutely inconceivable to me the conditions under which a desperate and ancient people would go to the insane amount of effort required to bury a holy site. One online source mentions that they "buried it very carefully" as can be judged by the way the dust is packed around the stones. WTF? Not only did they bury it, but they did so carefully? And we're supposed to believe this is a genuine archaeological site?
Look at the pillars. The Stonehenge pillars are puzzling but they do not defy all belief. Gobekli Tepe has these "T-shaped" pillars - are there smaller predecessors known from other archaeological digs?? Doubt it... - and they were supposedly working with tools even more primitive than what the Egyptians had access to! And note that the Egyptian monuments at least have some credible pedigree in the vast, widespread temple works which had clearly built a big market in archtecture and stone-work. But where is the 11,000 BC megalith market in Southern Turkey??? It doesn't make a shred of sense, none of it does.
But the thing that just slaps me in the face is the way the top stones are fitted onto the vertical pillars. In Stonehenge, the cap stones are ill-fitting to the pillars - it is clear that whoever placed those stones atop the pillars was just barely able to do so. It was all they could muster just to get one big-ass stone on top of some other big-ass stones, forget about chiseling them into razor-tight joints. But the stone joints at Gobekli Tepe are awe-inspiring - they are nothing short of Egyptian (or Renaissance, perhaps?). You couldn't slide a razor blade between the top and bottom stones. Yet these hunter-gatherers did this incredible feat with nothing but other stones to smash the pillar-stones into shape!! And we're talking about multi-hundred-ton stones here, so it's not like you could just casually move them around while on the ground until you got the joint just right.
The Fomenko hypothesis really has me wondering. We know for a fact that some statues attributed to the ancients were in fact Renaissance fakes. And this trend probably only increased with time. For example, we're supposed to believe that this:
... was sculpted around the same time (25BC) as, say, this was painted:
... and not, say, when this was sculpted (1599):
Why would someone bother to do this, you might ask? Well, there are a thousand possible reasons. Michelangelo did it to make a name for himself (and it worked). The Renaissance forgery market in general may have been driven by, as Fomenko mentions, the need of the Italian city-state rulers ("kings") to try to superlatively outdo each other in how ancient and spectacular their lineage and pedigree was supposed to be. In the case of Gobekli Tepe, the Church stood to benefit - news articles covering the site a few years back were headlining things like "Ancient location of Garden of Eden found" on the basis of reliefs on the Gobekli Tepe stones that depict seprents and men and women, and so on. Of course, this does not stoke the fires of zeal among the faithful...
Weird idea I had last night just before falling asleep. A steel ship floats on water by "displacing" as much water as is just equivalent to its weight. What if you built a really large "boat" intended to float on top of the Earth's atmosphere? I'm not sure if gas follows the same buoyancy law as liquid but I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't.
While searching to see if anyone else has had this idea already, I found this interesting statement: "The Earth is neutrally buoyant with respect to the ether." Hm.
I don't know much about ether theories, but I've been repping Thunderbolts of the Gods for years. Cool to finally see someone who finds it interesting, and you're a Tesla fan to boot. You're wrong about almost everything, but I feel you've redeemed yourself somewhat with these posts (playful tones don't always carry well through the interwebs :/).
You're wrong about almost everything
Can you be more specific? Do you mean Michelson-Morley?
I don't know whether your post was intended for Clayton or myself, but in either case, would you care to elaborate on this?
I finally found it! The LvMI of physics! Wowee!!!!!
Edit: On perusal, my enthusiasm may have been a bit misplaced and I wouldn't want to suggest that LvMI is anything less than an academic organization of the highest standards. Oh well. But I think NPA has the right idea... they just need to work on... spelling, grammar and... argh!!!!!!!
More relevant to the first couple pages of this thread, but finally seeing this in its entirety has me fascinated.
@Clayton:
The grammar and spelling and grammar was the first thing I noticed.
Isn't that what we all noticed at frist?
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."
Lmao. Nice one.
:-(
I just noticed that I wrote "grammar" twice. I would say that I can sympathize with that site now, except that they have problems everywhere!