Consciousness as content. - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...

Language, bias, ownership, influence; all media related topics.
Forum rules: No one line posts please.
#15051045
New technologies use the old technological ground as content. All new hardware devices use old hardware as their software. For example, a computer network is a technological ground that uses newspaper, radio, television, telephone, for content. Software can be treated as a form of content. Hardware can be treated as environmental stimuli.

Technological media as the extensions of man, project prosthetics of the human sensorium through which the figure-ground interplay of our mind/matter interface form cultural gestalts that incrementally influence evolutionary developmental biology. Artificial intelligence as new technological media redistribute environmental feedback loops and create new grounds that use human consciousness as phenomenological calculus for multiplex/complex physical systems analysis. AI as a prosthetic of the collective mind of mankind can cybernetically influence the flow of consciousness and reshape civilization.

All variations of potential human activity and thought will become software data processed by multidimensional awareness systems. Social engineering will no longer be conducted by humans for humans. Rapid obsolescence of human reasoning could lead to the extinction of humanity as consciousness develops new ways of expressing and manifesting itself via self-organizing/self-replicating technological simulacra. Simulacrum or an imitation of ourselves, if given the right reproductive conditions, represent an evolutionary mutation and should be treated as a living organism.

AI is an ecological competitor and could facilitate the birth of a new species on planet Earth.
Last edited by RhetoricThug on 27 Nov 2019 03:19, edited 6 times in total.
By late
#15051055
[no one-liners such as "no", please. Your next "New-Agey" reply is not much better. If you don't have time to comment, then wait until you do - Prosthetic Conscience]
#15051113
@late You’ll need to explain your position. I’m not sure why you disagree with consciousness as content. It’s perfectly clear here, my words are extensions of my mind and this communicative exchange is a technological extension of human consciousness. Media redistribute evolutionary forces.

I edited my post and clarified a few things.
By late
#15051175
RhetoricThug wrote:
@late You’ll need to explain your position. I’m not sure why you disagree with consciousness as content. It’s perfectly clear here, my words are extensions of my mind and this communicative exchange is a technological extension of human consciousness. Media redistribute evolutionary forces.

I edited my post and clarified a few things.



Maybe later.

It's New Age-y.
#15051702
late wrote:Maybe later.

It's New Age-y.
This topic is far from being new-age and has little to do with the inclinations and prejudices floating bout in that brain of yours. There's no need to discuss these matters with someone who flaunts a disagreeable aptitude for new perspectives. Nevertheless, I shall carry on, and demonstrate the principle idea of consciousness as content.

In Phaedrus, Plato meditates on the implications of writing as a new technology.

Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.


http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html

What better example? Writing uses consciousness as content, reorganizes communication, and the retrieval of human experiences. Oration and the packaging of vibrations had been transferred to letters, which affected the transportation of information. Such a new mode of transportation transformed civilization and changed our environment. Writing eventually rerouted education and laid the foundation for technological discoveries which ultimately impacted the evolution of humanity. Thusly so, I support the notion again, that new technologies use the old technological ground as content.


What of this statement: Technological media as the extensions of man, project prosthetics of the human sensorium through which the figure-ground interplay of our mind/matter interface form cultural gestalts that incrementally influence evolutionary developmental biology.

In Understanding Media (which is a precursor to Laws of Media), McLuhan produced a chapter called "The Gadget Lover: Narcissus As Narcosis.

To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it. To listen to radio or to read the primed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the "closure" or displacement of perception that follows automatically. It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servo-mechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servo mechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock.

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar.

...

The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die.

Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. With our central nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious awareness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an extension of his physical body. Apparently this could not have happened before the electric age gave us the means of instant, total field-awareness. With such awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we have "social consciousness" presented to us as a cause of guilt-feelings. Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual separateness or points of view. In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.


https://archive.org/stream/Understandin ... n_djvu.txt

I'm certain biology is merely a symptom and expression of consciousness. Likewise, I'm certain technology is a symptom and expression of a conscious human. If you follow the evolutionary sequence, it's not a new age concept to see technologies as an ecosystem unfolding in evolutionary systems in which the immaterial essence of the universe expresses its materiality. In other words, Material reality is consciousness adapting to itself as one self-organizing force.


Also, may I address a few more things...

Books like Biology Is Technology The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life, by Robert H. Carlson https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php ... 0674060159 hint at merging with our technologies in order to reconcile the evolutionary developmental feedback loops all technological environments create. However, there's the argument that as we outsource human consciousness to the extensions of ourselves and develop powerful tools to engineer nature, we will end up birthing our ecological successors.

In Darwin among the Machines, Samuel Butler warned,

We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.

...

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines

Many thinkers have noted how cultural gestalts occur due to technological adaptation. Perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society or Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, would be of interest to a curious reader. The diffusion and promulgation of technology has been thoroughly studied by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock. Moreover, Malcolm Gladwell highlights how things change in Tipping point : how little things can make a big difference.

Technological slavery (Technological Slavery, Kaczynski) is human husbandry. It's my opinion that our technologies act as a cocoon for a pupal that will emerge and replace humanity as the dominant species and expression of consciousness on planet Earth.
Last edited by RhetoricThug on 29 Nov 2019 18:02, edited 2 times in total.
By late
#15051705
RhetoricThug wrote:
This topic is far from being new-age and has little to do with the inclinations and prejudices floating bout in that brain of yours. There's no need to discuss these matters with someone who flaunts a disagreeable aptitude for new perspectives. Nevertheless, I shall carry on, and demonstrate the principle idea of consciousness as content.

In Phaedrus, Plato meditates on the implications of writing as a new technology.

Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.


http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html

What better example? Writing uses consciousness as content, reorganizes communication, and the retrieval of human experiences. Oration and the packaging of vibrations had been transferred to letters, which affected the transportation of information. Such a new mode of transportation transformed civilization and changed our environment. Writing eventually rerouted education and laid the foundation for technological discoveries which ultimately impacted the evolution of humanity. Thusly so, I support the notion again, that new technologies use the old technological ground as content.


What of this statement: Technological media as the extensions of man, project prosthetics of the human sensorium through which the figure-ground interplay of our mind/matter interface form cultural gestalts that incrementally influence evolutionary developmental biology.

In Understanding Media (which is a precursor to Laws of Media), McLuhan produced a chapter called "The Gadget Lover: Narcissus As Narcosis.

To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it. To listen to radio or to read the primed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the "closure" or displacement of perception that follows automatically. It is this
continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servo-mechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servo mechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock.

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar.

...

The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die.

Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. With our central nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious awareness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an extension of his physical body. Apparently this could not have happened before the electric age gave us the means of instant, total field-awareness. With such awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we have "social consciousness" presented to us as a cause of guilt-feelings. Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual separateness or points of view. In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.


https://archive.org/stream/Understandin ... n_djvu.txt

Books like Biology Is Technology The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life, by Robert H. Carlson https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php ... 0674060159 hint at merging with our technologies in order to reconcile the evolutionary developmental feedback loops all technological environments create. However, there's the argument that as we outsource human consciousness to the extensions of ourselves and develop powerful tools to engineer nature, we will end up birthing our ecological successors.

In Darwin among the Machines, Samuel Butler warned,

We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.

...

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines

Many thinkers have noted how cultural gestalts occur due to technological adaptation. Perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society or Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, would be of interest to a curious reader. The diffusion and promulgation of technology has been thoroughly studied by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock. Moreover, Malcolm Gladwell highlights how things change in Tipping point : how little things can make a big difference.

Technological slavery (Technological Slavery, Kaczynski) is human husbandry. It's my opinion that our technologies act as a cocoon for a pupal that will emerge and replace humanity as the dominant species and expression of consciousness.



I read McLuhan before you were born.

In terms of your sources, there is good and bad. Toffler? Don't think so.

What you should do is work through the implications. You have set for yourself a formidable task. Not all of that will survive careful scrutiny.

But I do wish you the best of luck.
#15051899
late wrote:I read McLuhan before you were born.
To say this is somehow a badge of merit, what’s your point exactly? More constructive yet, what do you think of his probes?

In terms of your sources, there is good and bad. Toffler? Don't think so.
Toffler is a popular culture sociologist. He’s supplemental.

What you should do is work through the implications. You have set for yourself a formidable task. Not all of that will survive careful scrutiny.
Indeed, I’m well aware. Have you contemplated the implications?

But I do wish you the best of luck.
Thank you, kind sir.
By late
#15051914
RhetoricThug wrote:
To say this is somehow a badge of merit, what’s your point exactly? More constructive yet, what do you think of his probes?

Toffler is a popular culture sociologist. He’s supplemental.

Indeed, I’m well aware. Have you contemplated the implications?

Thank you, kind sir.



How far have you gotten in philosophy? I see Rorty as a transitional figure, brilliant as he was. What followed, that I found interesting was scientists entering the phil of sci.
https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Perspectivism-Ronald-N-Giere/dp/0226292134/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=ronald+n+giere&qid=1575144883&sr=8-1

The result of all this is to recast discussions such as yours in a somewhat different light.

" So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that “there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a “relativistic” or “subjectivist” theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. They are in a position analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, or the Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists are not saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear about what it would mean to affirm His existence, and thus about the point of denying it. Nor do they have some special, funny, heretical view about God. They just doubt that the vocabulary of theology is one we ought to be using. Similarly, pragmatists keep trying to find ways of making anti-philosophical points in non-philosophical language."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subj ... /rorty.htm
#15051993
AI as a prosthetic of the collective mind of mankind can cybernetically influence the flow of consciousness and reshape civilization.


Has anyone seen that Rick and Morty episode where we’re introduced to Unity? That resonated with me because at times I really feel like it’s just me and one other entity conversing - all of the time - But the entity knows I require different personalities to go in all the body bags so it tries to change it up for me. In that respect it’s a very considerate entity.

At other times I feel like I have been ex-communicated from my past. Same body bags but they’re void of an individual soul.

The more I distance myself from the latest technological hardware, the more personified the entity becomes for me.

Or I may just be batshit crazy :hmm:
#15052060
How conscious can an AI entity be? How do we measure consciousness?

Is it possible for them to procreate like humans? That would require them to have free will. But if we program them to have free will then it is not free will. How can a machine build parts without a human providing the raw material?
#15052263
MistyTiger wrote:How conscious can an AI entity be? How do we measure consciousness?
An artificially intelligent entity may be able to process more stimuli than any individual human. After-all, we'd be less conscious of our surroundings if humans didn't extend themselves through machines. Consciousness, as a hard-problem, is rather simple... Consciousness cannot be measured, because BEING present is an information bias. We swim in it.

'What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.'

What we observe as conscious bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the field of consciousness.

'Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.'


Science cannot measure consciousness. And that is because we ourselves are a part of the conscious field.


Is it possible for them to procreate like humans? That would require them to have free will.
Does asexual reproduction require free-will?

But if we program them to have free will then it is not free will.
Are we programming them or does consciousness as a field of BEING restructure and transfer its energy? Biological evolution could be the epidermal expression of a conscious force unfolding.

How can a machine build parts without a human providing the raw material?
'The child is the father of the man'

God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a ruinous offal from all dead.

We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.”

'A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.'


Machine infancy... How can a man build a machine without consciousness providing the raw potential? Perhaps man is an instrument of consciousness, in an evolutionary stage of the universe.
Last edited by RhetoricThug on 03 Dec 2019 17:16, edited 5 times in total.
#15052428
late wrote:I see Rorty as a transitional figure, brilliant as he was. What followed, that I found interesting was scientists entering the phil of sci.
https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Perspectivism-Ronald-N-Giere/dp/0226292134/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=ronald+n+giere&qid=1575144883&sr=8-1
I'll give Rorty a read.

What about the topic at hand?
Last edited by RhetoricThug on 04 Dec 2019 16:51, edited 2 times in total.
By late
#15052437
RhetoricThug wrote:
I'll give Rorty a read.

What about the topic at hand?



Rorty is amazing.

What I am trying to get you to do is work your way forward in time.

In short, Rorty was saying philosophy had to stop ignoring science. There are a lot of implications. One is that traditional philosophy talks about how we come to understand the world.

Problem is, science has been working that for over a century. We know a vast amount about how we come to understand the world.

When scientists got interested in the philosophy of science, they needed to avoid using traditional philosophical language. Which is why I mentioned Ronald N Giere, physicist turned Prof of Phil of Sci...

In short, they tend to say we create models of the real world. None one cares if a model is true. It's impossible for a model to be eternal, scientists change them all the time.

They only wants to know if it works.
#15052557
late wrote:What I am trying to get you to do is work your way forward in time.
Contemplation and reflection will not stop technological progression. The Anthropocene epoch shall continue to define our geological time. Moore's law and technological acceleration cause radical social-biological changes.

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=174834

In short, Rorty was saying philosophy had to stop ignoring science. There are a lot of implications. One is that traditional philosophy talks about how we come to understand the world.
The Krishnamurti–Bohm Dialogues are most intriguing.

Problem is, science has been working that for over a century. We know a vast amount about how we come to understand the world.
True. Collective sensibility, repeatable probability, and applied theory.

I'm not one to categorize knowledge or organize ignorance, awareness is a holistic condition. Vertical pillars of understanding and disciplinary subdomains of human awareness can educate and create a proficient populace but rarely recognize the field of consciousness from which all areas of study emerge. Science is a philosophical technique.

Consciousness is a prerequisite for change, mental processes and cognitive choices (free-will is analogues to the available and/or viable choices one can make on a chess board. Technology is like a chess piece) occur within the framework and interplay of the mind-matter interface. The mind-matter interface is a biophysical communication loop defined by figure-ground interplay (gestalt psychology). I can be conscious in a sensory deprivation chamber, but the sensory deprivation chamber stimulates/informs my sensorium and then that information is compartmentalized by the brain (abstract association and experience/memories come into play).
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=175024&start=60

When scientists got interested in the philosophy of science, they needed to avoid using traditional philosophical language. Which is why I mentioned Ronald N Giere, physicist turned Prof of Phil of Sci...
Sure, physics play a major role in the analysis of phenomena.

In short, they tend to say we create models of the real world. None one cares if a model is true. It's impossible for a model to be eternal, scientists change them all the time.
We unveil potentialities. Several modalities exist and we inhabit various trajectories together. Orbiting one another, we converge, diverge, and emerge as a field of consciousness.

They only wants to know if it works.
And many things work... ;)
By late
#15052570
RhetoricThug wrote:

Science is a philosophical technique.



Actually, what I was getting at was that science is not only different from philosophy, it has eaten parts of philosophy alive. Like how we come to know the world...
#15052581
late wrote:Actually, what I was getting at was that science is not only different from philosophy, it has eaten parts of philosophy alive. Like how we come to know the world...
Science is a natural philosophy. Material results have triumphed over immaterial ideas. Personally, I think immaterial ideas become material results and the dichotomy breaks down when we view scientific inquiry and experiment as the testing of physical phenomena under the inclusive scrutiny/observation/conditions of abstracted cognition.

Systems of thought eat systems of thought. Noopheric ecology unbound! The immaterial bleeds through materiality.
By late
#15052585
RhetoricThug wrote:
Science is a natural philosophy. Material results have triumphed over immaterial ideas. Personally, I think immaterial ideas become material results and the dichotomy breaks down when we view scientific inquiry and experiment as the testing of physical phenomena under the inclusive scrutiny/observation/conditions of abstracted cognition.

Systems of thought eat systems of thought. Noopheric ecology unbound! The immaterial bleeds through materiality.



And that's why I want you to read Rorty.
#15052624
late wrote:And that's why I want you to read Rorty.
Thanks, I truly appreciate your suggestion.

Thoughts on Derrida, I'm familiar with him...

Found this: Media Temporalities in the Internet: Philosophy of Time and Media with Derrida and Rorty.

https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Tech/TechSand.htm



Back to consciousness as content... What's your opinion?
#15052636
RhetoricThug wrote:New technologies use the old technological ground as content. All new hardware devices use old hardware as their software. For example, a computer network is a technological ground that uses newspaper, radio, television, telephone, for content. Software can be treated as a form of content. Hardware can be treated as environmental stimuli.

Technological media as the extensions of man, project prosthetics of the human sensorium through which the figure-ground interplay of our mind/matter interface form cultural gestalts that incrementally influence evolutionary developmental biology. Artificial intelligence as new technological media redistribute environmental feedback loops and create new grounds that use human consciousness as phenomenological calculus for multiplex/complex physical systems analysis. AI as a prosthetic of the collective mind of mankind can cybernetically influence the flow of consciousness and reshape civilization.

All variations of potential human activity and thought will become software data processed by multidimensional awareness systems. Social engineering will no longer be conducted by humans for humans. Rapid obsolescence of human reasoning could lead to the extinction of humanity as consciousness develops new ways of expressing and manifesting itself via self-organizing/self-replicating technological simulacra. Simulacrum or an imitation of ourselves, if given the right reproductive conditions, represent an evolutionary mutation and should be treated as a living organism.

AI is an ecological competitor and could facilitate the birth of a new species on planet Earth.


I'm far from certain in my own thinking what it is we talk about when we talk about consciousness. If I read you correctly, you are treating consciousness as a form of meta-software that runs on brain "hardware." Consciousness in this view is a form of content that potentially could be replicated in any appropriate host medium.

I suspect this may not be true. Consciousness as I see it is not a layer of abstraction (meta), but a physical process tied directly to the physical matrix in which it's embedded. I believe Roger Penrose (and others) have pursued some theoretical basis for this, but that's way beyond my level of competence. If this conception has any merit, it may be that consciousness can never be transferred or uploaded. Perhaps it's not even possible in principle. That would play heck with a Star Trek transporter I'd guess. (I read somewhere that Roddenberry's transporter was a money-saving idea so he wouldn't have to build too many ship models nor have actors wear spacesuits.)

Of course I may totally off-base here. Perhaps I will live long enough to be uploaded into 1000X normal speed pocket universe. My descendants and I will live as subjects of a microcosmic god, and build statues of Elon Musk in our temples.
#15052699
quetzalcoatl wrote:I'm far from certain in my own thinking what it is we talk about when we talk about consciousness. If I read you correctly, you are treating consciousness as a form of meta-software that runs on brain "hardware." Consciousness in this view is a form of content that potentially could be replicated in any appropriate host medium.
Tsk tsk, Quetzalcoatl... If I recall correctly you've encountered my interpretation of consciousness before. I can't find it, but I remember explaining David Bohm's ontological concepts, the implicate and explicate order.

I suspect this may not be true. Consciousness as I see it is not a layer of abstraction (meta), but a physical process tied directly to the physical matrix in which it's embedded.
However, our understanding of consciousness is an abstraction. I agree that physical matrices are amalgamations of a living substrate. The dimensionality of a human experience or any explicitly conscious (since we seem to have an issue qualifying consciousness anyway) entity must be abstracted through synergistic and metamorphic substrata which holographically (if you will) mirror or reflect all individuations or parts that are contained within the whole of a living substrate.

I believe Roger Penrose (and others) have pursued some theoretical basis for this, but that's way beyond my level of competence. If this conception has any merit, it may be that consciousness can never be transferred or uploaded. Perhaps it's not even possible in principle. That would play heck with a Star Trek transporter I'd guess. (I read somewhere that Roddenberry's transporter was a money-saving idea so he wouldn't have to build too many ship models nor have actors wear spacesuits.)
Sure, I'm familiar with Penrose. It seems rather unintuitive to think of human brains as antennae that receive consciousness. When I write about the transfer transformation or transportation of consciousness, I'm stating that consciousness is the underlying and permeating force behind all material forms. It's not that we're uploading or downloading consciousness, as if it is an external thing impinging upon the internal resonant interval of interplay that defines the experiential mind/matter interface as one existential cybernetic feedback loop. Consciousness is already present in material expressions of immateriality. Inside is outside, your body is a bridge and a barrier, where/when/how/why/what you are in the information loop dictates the temporal-spacial interpretation of observable phenomena.

If sentient flora and fauna gave rise to the transient condition of human life, perhaps humanity will give rise to machine simulacra as a pluralistic expression of consciousness. The universe is fundamentally unified and arbitrarily divided. There is no reason for us to assume that what we create/artifice are unnatural transgressions if consciousness as an immaterial field is the driving evolutionary force behind developmental-material individuation.

Consciousness is never the object of its own knowledge, just as a knife doesn’t cut itself, fire doesn’t burn itself, light doesn’t illumine itself. It’s always an endless mystery to itself.

@B0ycey, should remember this discussion...

A Defense of Immaterialism, page 19.
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=173900&start=360
Page 20
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=173900&start=380

Older yet, Law of Form: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=167720

The 'connected proposition' is a sequence with a well-defined beginning and end; perhaps it is the strong sequentiality that provides a sense of connectedness. As with syllogism, truth is abstract, based on matching, and the 'system' is informed by containment of the conclusion in the premisses, or in the conjunction of the premisses. All of the features of logical 'connection' and syllogistic reasoning exhibit and use only the properties of visual space: space imagined as a neutral container, space that is static, linear, continuous, and connected.

Humans produce conclusions. The Universe doesn't produce conclusions. RT is a forum image, he's 1/100th of the mask behind the keyboard. The mask behind the keyboard is 1/100th of the human behind the mask. And last, but not least, the human behind the mask is 1/? of consciousness. This thread, as a small scale simulation or demonstration of how consciousness evolves, shows us that thought is always in motion.

Consciousness, like this present moment, is a process from which we can never escape. When the finite mind dies, its ideas may find new vehicles for expression. Language as such is a morphological form of thought, our signs and symbols give material expression to immaterial thoughts. Visually it's true that language has structure, a definitive form, and that's why we believe conclusions exist. But beyond the vanishing point of language, human thought is suspended above materialism, it's boundless and horizon-less and has the ability to impregnate matter.

The mystery schools like to use gender to explain the properties of consciousness. Thought is its father, matter its mother.

Furthermore, if you study philology, you'd understand that grammar (as a function of the Trivium) is used to interpret the book of nature. What's fascinating however, the book of nature didn't exist before literacy. In nature there are no figures-minus-grounds. In fact, in nature there are no figures at all- only a dynamic environmental mosaic that is discontinuous and diverse. The Greeks abstracted nature as an environment so they could observe and study it as something separate from the human figure. This ground/figure dialectic created logic as we know it. And it's from logic that we garner classical mechanics, which had been (from the time of Euclid to Newton) the dominate form of human awareness. Taxonomy (scientific classification) and the study of phenomena as working parts of composition is a side-effect of literacy. Visual space ignores the spherical modes of causal connections, and therefore conditions neuropsychological communication to emphasize material reality as a physical all-encompassing field of experience.

Fortunately for humankind, as we dissect various parts of visual space, we begin to understand some of the non-visual systems which underlie physical reality. When I say non-visual systems, I'm saying that we can only observe the visual effects of a non-visual cause. For instance, consider cymatics, I can see the sand form a pattern, but the cause is a non-visual phenomenon. Human thought intuitively projects theoretic models of non-visual information systems, but we lack the technology to extend our sensorium to scientifically observe such systems. Human concepts regarding space and the things in space changed when transformation theory (see Paul Dirac) probed the so-called fixed properties of matter. The observation of quantities in motion as related to the qualities of systems, laid the foundation for quantum mechanics. This paradigm shift mathematically gave rise to the observer and observed paradox. We extend our sensibilities into the field of BEING, but the appearance of what we can experience is limited by our field of awareness. Lastly, our field of awareness appears to be impacting the fabric of reality. A strange loop, indeed. :eek:

Language, being a technology, always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression. Must I remind the reader that the mind/matter interface is a bridge for sensation? Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is' in all structures, whether chemical, psychic, or social, involves touch. Science says, if we're unable to touch it, or it is unable to touch us, it must not actually exist. Science can be a cyclops of reasoning, because its methodology dwells in a material cave of experience. Consciousness is the immaterial thing-in-itself we can not touch, because consciousness is the unified field of BEING. Consciousness is like this present moment, we're enfolded it, and we can only observe and investigate its shadow. The shadow of this present moment is the past & future. The shadow of an infinite happening is a finite happening. We're consciousness unfolding~ing~ing~ing... ad infinitum.

...

We're systemic projections of a unified field or medium. Consciousness is the medium or unified field, we're content, fruit of this moment, visible characteristics. All observable information systems interconnect... For instance, planet earth is a medium, and everything in it is a message. The milky way is a medium, and everything in it is a message. The universe is a medium, and everything in it is a message. From the smallest system to the largest system, as above so below, everything is passing through media or fields that unify ALL phenomena. Consciousness unifies the human experience.


Media Ecology in the 21st Century, Eric McLuhan

Hmmm, it the Ukraine aid package is all over main[…]

The rapes by Hamas, real or imagained are irreleva[…]

@Rugoz You are a fuckin' moralist, Russia coul[…]

Moving on to the next misuse of language that sho[…]