On Mar 8, 9:21*am, Mahipal wrote:
On Mar 7, 6:59*pm, " wrote:

On Feb 23, 8:51*pm, Mahipal wrote:

On Feb 22, 5:29*pm, " wrote:

On Feb 22, 8:57*am, Immortalist wrote:

On Feb 22, 7:00 am, Dare wrote:

On 2/21/2013 7:36 PM, Immortalist wrote:

On Feb 21, 4:29 pm, Howard Brazee wrote:
On Thu, 21 Feb 2013 12:45:13 -0800 (PST), casey

wrote:
Something that would be good for science to answer.

If you found yourself in heaven with a heavenly body
how would you know if it was you who lived that
physical life on Earth or if you simply had the
memories of that now dead human?

If you assume that the 5 year old version of you was "you", despite
you being very, very different now - we need to determine what "you"
means.

If the self is a series of clones throughout life, then there may be
no "version" of your self but instead just a "range" of neural
activities that are a sense of your self.

* I concur on the (implied potential) range of activities meme. The
series of clones thing I disagree with- it implies that all cells (as
mentioned elsethread) in a tissue (and by implication the whole body)
get "turned over" every so many years *all at the same time* which is
unreasonable.

* We are about process, not state. A so-called state of mind is not a
photograph, it's a three-panel cartoon. Perception, "filter",
reaction. "filter" = particular set of "neural activities" in that
range.

Once those activities go
outside the range of your -selfing- you are not cloned during those
successions of neural events.

* Well, a clone is (loosely speaking) an exact replica, but me right
now is not an exact replica of me ten, twenty etc. years ago. What
continues as "I"? I think it's just a particular constellation of
"things I'm good at" and "things I'm bad at" due to brain structure/
disposition(s) from genetics modulo diet, environment, socialization,
yada yada.

* I agree with my pal Mahipal- "me" always changes.

I will cherish that sentence construct until like forever.

You are too kind Mark! Still, you turn me on... do you want to be
poet?

* A poet writes poetry. Who writes doggerel?

As physicists study cysts? Just humor. Comics write doggerel.

"You see it really doesn't matter
When you're buried in disguise
By the dark glass on your eyes
Though your flesh has crystallised
Still...you turn me on"

Ergo I Mahipal am me on... me_on... meon, rhymes with neon.
If you can't laugh, then you can't grasp... so I have learned.

* I ain't no poet but I knows it when I sees it.

Too many claim to be writing poetry, just as every drink is somehow
named a martini.

That's stirring but paradoxically I am shaken...

* This here is some damnfine poetry:

* "Aye an' a bit of Mackeral settler rack and ruin
ran it doon by the haim, 'ma place
well I slapped me and I slapped it doon in the side
and I cried, cried, cried.

* "The fear a fallen down taken never back the raize and then Craig
Marion,
get out wi' ye Claymore out mi pocket a' ran doon, doon the middin
stain
picking the fiery horde that was fallen around ma feet.
Never he cried, never shall it ye get me alive
ye rotten hound of the burnie crew. Well I snatched fer the blade O my
Claymore cut and thrust and I fell doon before him round his feet.

* "Aye! A roar he cried frae the bottom of his heart that I would nay
fall
but as dead, dead as 'a can be by his feet; de ya ken?

...and the wind cried Mary."

* Also, note that Umma rhymes with Gumma.

Pink Flyod are amazing! Their "Astronomy Domine"... heaven.

I found this todayhttp://www.rdio.com/artist/Pink_Floyd/albums/

Oh. Wow. Thank you.

Um, how do you feel about Jimi Hendrix?

* As for "activities outside the range of [one's] -selfing-, I refer
you to Lovecraft's _At The Mountains Of Madness_.

* BTW _Call Of Cthulhu_ is a better example of extra-self activities,
what with M. C. Escher the likeliest suspect for master architect of
R'lyeh.

I am not familiar with Lovecraft's works. Horror scares me, so I shy
away.

I mentioned him because his theme was that what scares us most is
not adrenaline-rush terrifying 3D SFX-heavy Texas Power Tool Massacre
*events*, but when we notice that the presumed bases of normality
either ain't what we thought they were or don't exist at`all
*conditions*.

He builds from a sniff of something slightly off to whole-body DREAD
of something that just won't fit inside our consciousness, something
that you can't quite remember afterward (if you survive it), because
as Immortalist put it

"Once those activities go outside the range of your -selfing- you
are not cloned during those successions of neural events."

I think I've mentioned before that I used to think I was a psycopath
because I didn't respond emotionally to many stimuli the way "normal"
people did. I eventually came to grok my borderline Asperger state
about the time I figured out that "normal" was defined by marketers.

Horror movies don't scare me mostly because of the pandemic of Idiot
Plot Syndrome among them (if the major characters didn't behave like
idiots there'd be no plot). Monster movies? Mummies are flammable, my
three-year-old granddaughter could outrun Frankenstein's Monster, yada
yada.

Lovecraft's description of the very geometry of 3D objects (and/or
the spacetime containing them) being "optional" intrigued me greatly.

from A Treatise of Human Nature Book I, Part 4, Section 6

SECTION VI: OF PERSONAL IDENTITY

There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately
conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and its
continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a
demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. The
strongest sensation, the most violent passion, say they, instead of
distracting us from this view, only fix it the more intensely, and
make us consider their influence on self either by their pain or
pleasure. To attempt a further proof of this were to weaken its
evidence; since no proof can be derived from any fact of which we are
so intimately conscious; nor is there any thing of which we can be
certain if we doubt of this.

Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very
experience which is pleaded for them; nor have we any idea of self,
after the manner it is here explained. For, from what impression could
this idea be derived? This question it is impossible to answer without
a manifest contradiction and absurdity; and yet it is a question which
must necessarily be answered, if we would have the idea of self pass
for clear and intelligible. It must be some one impression that gives
rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any one impression,
but that to which our several impressions and ideas are supposed to
have a reference. If any impression gives rise to the idea of self,
that impression must continue invariably the same, through the whole
course of our lives; since self is supposed to exist after that
manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and
pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other,
and never all exist at the same time. It cannot therefore be from any
of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is
derived; and consequently there is no such idea.

* Well yeah, self-examination on the fly is difficult.

* That's why we study other people.

Without other people, we -- especially me, myself, or I -- are
nothing.

* Hm. In my experience sociability is not stereotypical all-or-
nothing- there's a continuum from Drama Queen to Rugged Individualist.

We also behave differently depending on those who surround us. Yet
They all are quick to judge you in a nanoflash. It is by these
judgements I know what my age is, else I'd be forever young. O darn...
there... Rod Stewart... I said it. Still friends? Must wash hands now.

Early Stewart was passable, but after he was "processed" by the
marketing team (the hair, the whisky-cocaine voice)... I suspect they
told him "welcome... to the machine".

[trim]

If there is one thing that seems certain about consciousness it is
that it is immediate. We are aware of life's passing parade of
sensations — and of our own thoughts, feelings and impulses — at the
instant they happen. Yet as soon as it is accepted that the mind is
the product of processes taking place within the brain, we introduce
the possibility of delay. It must take time for nerve traffic to
travel from the sense organs to the mapping areas of the brain.

* It also takes different amounts of time for each module to process
its allotment of data.

* Worse, some data goes through more than one module, in series and or
parallel, introducing more delays.

Life and mind really cannot be about its mechanics, down deep.

* You seem to think I'm claiming souls don't exist. I have never said
that, because I have no incontrovertible evidence of it. I also have
no evidence supporting them either, but absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence. I prefer to table the question until some
evidence becomes available.

I try not presume what others think. Hell, I'm not so sure of what I
think I think.

Soul is consciousness? These two are considered as forbidden topics in
the physics community. That kind of explains why they've neither soul
nor the infamous "C"-word.

I've often marveled at the blatant hedging in the use of the term
"observer" in Quantum Mechanics. In the usual interpretation of the
Schrodinger's possibly unfortunate gedankencat, *the* observer is a
conscious human.

Well, what defines a consciousness in context- what are its
necessary *and* sufficient parameters? Is the cat an observer? Why
not- with every breath it "opens the box" containing the radioactive
"timer" and detector/trigger/poison mechanism. How about the detector/
trigger? It "opens the box" containing the "timer". Must not the
radioactive "timer" be self-aware of its own undecayed/decayed status
in order to communicate the transition to the outside universe? If so,
it's Wigner's friends all the way up from there.

* See, in my version of the scientific method, no wild-assed idea is a
priori excluded unless it defies thermo 3 or conservation of momentum
or something. There is undeniably a physical layer to consciousness-
an "unphysical" layer is IMO impossible. For a thing to interact with
matter the way souls allegedly do there must be a set of rules. That's
physics, dammit. If somebody reduced prayers to partial differential
equations, would you cry "meta-heresy!" or would you celebrate?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...the-controvers....

This scientificamerican article is a rather scary twisted reality of
meanings beings ascribed to the scientific method. Consensus is the
same peer review, for instance.

What ****ES ME OFF about crap like that is the presumption of two-
party polarization. There is only "us, us, us, and them, them, them";
that there might be some other tenable position not confined solely to
that coordinate axis is UNTHINKABLE. That allegedly educated,
thoughtful people so easily descend to "if ye ain't fur us yer agin
us" is depressing.

PDEs as prayers, that's funny! Should be rather easy to get them to
rhyme.

Often one reads, if you can't observe or measure it, then it isn't
science. Or of the limitations of scientific method way. So when
atoms, or quarks, were not measured by experiment then does that mean
they did not exist?! Or, before gravity was formulated, no apples fell
to Earth?! A lot of absurdity and confusion inevitably follows.

Naw, even superstitions assume rules to their "spooky actions at a
distance"- proposing rule sets from observations, then looking for
confirmations/exceptions to those rules is the core of the scientific
method. I think that sort of behavior is wetwired into us- it's common
to pretty much any lifeform with three or more neurons, isn't it?

It must then take more time for thoughts and feelings about these
messages to propagate through the brain's maze of circuitry. If the
processing is complex — as it certainly must be in humans — then these
delays ought to measurable, and even noticeable with careful
introspection.

* It's worse- the delays can be negative. There's experimental
evidence that we start to perform physical responses based on sensory
inputs *before* the parts of the brain allegedly responsible for
mediating decisions do their thing. Clearly all our attempts at
modeling the mind are flawed.

* Mark L. Fergerson

I really am still reading Immortalist's response. Wish he would IRL
name himself.

* I wouldn't poke too hard; it may be a pen name he uses to avoid
losing his day job.

I asked twice or 4 times! I do make fun of Immortalist, like when he
thinks someone's posts are too long and they should quickly cut to the
chase. What kind of time limits do Immortals have to yawn about!?
What's their rush?

Or, it's just him trying to avoid what he considers thread drift (he
did start the thread).

When one writes on one's own time, from one's own hardware, never uses
a corporate CPU, one should be allowed to be him or herself. What kind
of society holds us hostage to our free thoughts by threatening us
with loss of wages?! O yeah, US of America and the rest of the ****ed
up world. Explains why I may not be cashing in on my recent background
checks! O well, I've been myself on www since forever, I mean 1994. No
changing that I write to communicate with like minded people. Fire me!
O wait... I am already free for now...

Hard to accept one can actually hide behind an alias in these
technocratic times.

We also market ourselves voluntarily you know; Immortalist presents
his public face the same way we all choose wardrobe, hairstyle, and so
on.

We're all "stylized" to some extent we pick and choose from elements
of the culture we're immersed in, patchwork them together as we see
fit with our personal spins, and then pretend we're "being ourselves".

* Per your mention elsethread of birthplacing philosophy:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opi...14142638797542....

Excellent article though I am tired of the ethnohuman ... ethnophysics

Ethnophysics! I wonder how Warhol feels about Iran's claim to have
put a monkey into space.

bent. Seems the article also has been updated after months old
comments already posted.

I stand by my comment therein. Scinetific ability, spiritualism,
clannishness, brutality- none of these are "race"-specific. Race is
about politics, not biology.

Only things static in the written realm appear to be poems.

I wish Arnold Schwarzenegger had done _Gilgamesh_ instead of
_Conan_.

You know, movies and TV shows are often "rebooted/reimagined" these
days. Why can't poetry, music or song lyrics similarly be updated? I
don't mean "repurposing" like the day I first officially Felt Old,
when I heard a Musak-ized string rendition of "Nights In White Satin"
in an elevator, more like PDQ Bach or ELP's "Pictures At An
Exhibition"...

Ooh, music appropriate to read Lovecraft by:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYN4OI4fTdE

though my crappy little laptop headset is no match for the
kilowatt's-worth of Klipschorns I originally experienced it through,
entraining my heartbeat and other biorhythms, it's an hour well spent.


* Mark L. Fergerson