The polarization of identity

6 views
Skip to first unread message

Joseph McCard

unread,
Jun 25, 2017, 8:42:53 PM6/25/17
to Sadhu-Sanga Under the holy association of Spd. B.M. Puri Maharaja, Ph.D.
How do you define yourself? Through your intellectual orientation, beliefs, through your desires, your nationality, religion, culture, social standing, economic state, religion, or scientific stance, vocation, avocation... Some identities lend then selves to compromise. Some do not allow for compromise. If a politician wants to spend 100 million dollars on a weapons system, and his opposite does not want to spend 1 dollar, 50 million dollars, somewhere in the middle, there is a workable compromise. The same with tax cuts. But, for example, for Sunnis and Shiites, there are uncompromisable moral issues. 

it has been my experience that Forum politics is like middle eastern politics where there is no middle ground. There is some discussion about substance, but a lot of the practice of exclusion, subtle ad hominem arguments. 

I recently read a comment by Stuart Hameroff, "The notion that consciousness emerged from complex brain computation is belied by the increasing number of mainstream scientists and philosophers who resort to panpsychism, not to mention Eastern philosophers and quantum consciousness enthusiast who all agree, in various ways, that qualia and feelings existed before life." Does he think that now? I thought he advocated a conception of consciousness related to cellular mitochondria, or some such thing. Did I misunderstand what he wrote. Was I wrong to think that? Did he change his mind? Did he compromise his values? What about others here. 

What is going on here, on this forum? I am, so far, for just one week, having a rather positive experience. Is there a consensus. Have you compromised your identity? Are you compromised? 

What's going on? (Marvin Gaye) 

 

Tusar Nath Mohapatra

unread,
Jun 26, 2017, 6:34:39 AM6/26/17
to Online_Sa...@googlegroups.com

Dear Joseph,

Study of consciousness should be segregated into at least three different sectors:

1. One's professional life involves a set of skills and values. Those have a bearing on one's conception of consciousness. Those engaged in science are the most affected.

2. As social beings, a practical level of understanding of consciousness is assumed. It needn't interfere with 1. and 3.

3. At the purely personal level, the responsibility of finding what is true is paramount and should be pursued disregarding 1. and 2. Many feel they can search for the truth on their own but tell things that are imperfectly plagiarised versions of earlier propositions.

A main problem in this Forum is people generally conflate the three whereas distinct routes can lead to more honest discoveries.

Thanks,
Tusar (b.1955)
http://feelphilosophy.blogspot.in/2017/04/in-struggles-we-can-very-well-come.html


--
----------------------------
Fifth International Conference
Science and Scientist - 2017
August 18—19, 2017
Nepal Pragya Pratisthan, Kathmandu, Nepal
http://scsiscs.org/conference/scienceandscientist/2017
 
Send a Donation to Support Our Services: http://scienceandscientist.org/donate
(All Indian residents are eligible for tax benefits for their contributions under section 80G of the Income Tax Act)
 
Report Archives: http://bviscs.org/reports
 
Why Biology is Beyond Physical Sciences?: http://dx.doi.org/10.5923/j.als.20160601.03
 
Life and consciousness – The Vedāntic view: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19420889.2015.1085138
 
Harmonizer: http://scienceandscientist.org/harmonizer
 
Darwin Under Siege: http://scienceandscientist.org/Darwin
 
Princeton Bhakti Vedanta Institute: http://bviscs.org
 
Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Institute: http://scsiscs.org
 
Sadhu-Sanga Blog: http://mahaprabhu.net/satsanga
 
Contact Us: http://scsiscs.org/contact
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sadhu-Sanga Under the holy association of Spd. B.M. Puri Maharaja, Ph.D." group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to Online_Sadhu_Sanga+unsub...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to Online_Sadhu_Sanga@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/Online_Sadhu_Sanga.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/Online_Sadhu_Sanga/075d5cf1-d5ac-447f-a11e-c237e3172d14%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Serge Patlavskiy

unread,
Jun 26, 2017, 9:43:09 AM6/26/17
to Online_Sa...@googlegroups.com
-
Joseph McCard <joseph....@gmail.com> on June 26, 2017 wrote:
> I recently read a comment by Stuart Hameroff ...
.
[S.P.] Then, of your interest may also be my reply to Stuart Hameroff's post. In case you have missed it, I attach it below for your convenience.
.
Best,
Serge Patlavskiy


From: Joseph McCard <joseph....@gmail.com>
To: "Sadhu-Sanga Under the holy association of Spd. B.M. Puri Maharaja, Ph.D." <Online_Sa...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, June 26, 2017 3:42 AM
Subject: [Sadhu Sanga] The polarization of identity
Sadhu_Sanga-post_22-06-2017.txt

Srikanth R.

unread,
Jun 26, 2017, 6:34:20 PM6/26/17
to Online_Sa...@googlegroups.com
Dear Joseph,

On Mon, Jun 26, 2017 at 4:12 AM, Joseph McCard <joseph....@gmail.com> wrote:
How do you define yourself? Through your intellectual orientation, beliefs, through your desires, your nationality, religion, culture, social standing, economic state, religion, or scientific stance, vocation, avocation...

All such characterizations pertain to one's epistemological (epistemic) identity. But intuition suggests that the core "I" that you are is fundamentally an ontological (ontic) entity, a meta-I if you like, that stands outside of-- and can't be captured by-- these epistemological labels. 

I have an idea (not yet worked out fully) for showing that this ontic identity of individuals is undefinable at the epistemological level in the same self-referential way as Tarski's proof that arithmetic truth is undefinable in arithmetic. Informally, this says that the witnessing first-person consciousness stands beyond the witnessed phenomenological world. 

But this is not all. One can turn one's cognitive searchlight inward on this "meta-I" to gather knowledge of it (equivalent to an attempt at a meta-theoretic characterization of one's own identity), only to discern that there is a yet deeper witness (meta-meta-I) that supplies the identity to the meta-I, by the same self-referential process. 
And so on ad infinitum, which generates this haze of "infinitely recursive self-referentiality", behind which our elusive core identity irreducibly hides (from our normal waking viewpoint). 

Perhaps this infinitude of self-referential recursion itself can be mapped into Cantor's transfinite numbers to obtain a hierarchy of ever deeper identities, culminating in the concept of God as the fundamental Engine That supplies the identities to all individuals!

Not only would this give a nice unification of god (with "small g") and God ("capital G"), but it would make mathematically precise the sense in which concepts such as God and consciousness, would be undefinable.

As some others on this forum would know, Advaita Vedanta philosophy acknowledges this situation and asserts that the Ultimate Reality of the self can't be reached by a train of cognitive processes and that the only way to get to deepest level is to take a quantum plunge with the help of sharpened and purified Intuition to the ("super-conscious") state where the witness and witnessee merge, so that the Knowing one's core identity is more a Being-like "action". (Brahmavit brahmaiva bhavati ("The knower of Brahman becomes Brahman") -- Mundaka Upanishad).

Best,
Srik

Some identities lend then selves to compromise. Some do not allow for compromise. If a politician wants to spend 100 million dollars on a weapons system, and his opposite does not want to spend 1 dollar, 50 million dollars, somewhere in the middle, there is a workable compromise. The same with tax cuts. But, for example, for Sunnis and Shiites, there are uncompromisable moral issues. 

it has been my experience that Forum politics is like middle eastern politics where there is no middle ground. There is some discussion about substance, but a lot of the practice of exclusion, subtle ad hominem arguments. 

I recently read a comment by Stuart Hameroff, "The notion that consciousness emerged from complex brain computation is belied by the increasing number of mainstream scientists and philosophers who resort to panpsychism, not to mention Eastern philosophers and quantum consciousness enthusiast who all agree, in various ways, that qualia and feelings existed before life." Does he think that now? I thought he advocated a conception of consciousness related to cellular mitochondria, or some such thing. Did I misunderstand what he wrote. Was I wrong to think that? Did he change his mind? Did he compromise his values? What about others here. 

What is going on here, on this forum? I am, so far, for just one week, having a rather positive experience. Is there a consensus. Have you compromised your identity? Are you compromised? 

What's going on? (Marvin Gaye) 

 

--
----------------------------
Fifth International Conference
Science and Scientist - 2017
August 18—19, 2017
Nepal Pragya Pratisthan, Kathmandu, Nepal
http://scsiscs.org/conference/scienceandscientist/2017
 
Send a Donation to Support Our Services: http://scienceandscientist.org/donate
(All Indian residents are eligible for tax benefits for their contributions under section 80G of the Income Tax Act)
 
Report Archives: http://bviscs.org/reports
 
Why Biology is Beyond Physical Sciences?: http://dx.doi.org/10.5923/j.als.20160601.03
 
Life and consciousness – The Vedāntic view: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19420889.2015.1085138
 
Harmonizer: http://scienceandscientist.org/harmonizer
 
Darwin Under Siege: http://scienceandscientist.org/Darwin
 
Princeton Bhakti Vedanta Institute: http://bviscs.org
 
Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Institute: http://scsiscs.org
 
Sadhu-Sanga Blog: http://mahaprabhu.net/satsanga
 
Contact Us: http://scsiscs.org/contact
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sadhu-Sanga Under the holy association of Spd. B.M. Puri Maharaja, Ph.D." group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to Online_Sadhu_Sanga+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.



--


Dr. R. Srikanth
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Theoretical Sciences
Poornaprajna Institute of Scientific Research
Bangalore- 560 080, Karnataka, India.

Vashishtha Jha

unread,
Jun 29, 2017, 4:25:50 AM6/29/17
to Online_Sa...@googlegroups.com
Dear Srikanth,
I read the response whenever I find time. It appears to me that no one is paying any attention to language. Is language so insignificant ? The Nyaya-Vaisesika school of Indian Philosophy looked at the universe of our experience at Sum total of Referents of language. Is there any other way other than language to get access to others' mind ? Whatever we know clearly we know only through language. Thus what should be the Referent of the personal pronoun "I" ?
We say " I am conscious " and never " I am consciousness". I possess consciousness and hence I am conscious. Therefore, the locus of consciousness is 'I' and not the consciousness itself. The word 'conscious' is an adjective and the word 'consciousness' is a noun. The Sanskrit word cetana is an adjective and it means 'conscious' and the word caitanya is a noun and it means 'consciousness'. This is the method of analysis developed by Indian Realists( Nyaya-Vaisesika system ). A sentence is treated in this system as 'an encoded thought'. Thus language analysis amounts to the analysis of human thought. Should you ignore this ?
I brought to your notice another method of talking about Reality independent of any background developed by Indians thousands of years before. 
 Srikanth , you may consider this also if it is worth-considering.

VNJha
 
Prof. V. N. Jha, Former Director, Centre of Advanced Study in Sanskrit, University of Pune, Pune-411007. Residence : C-3, 402 Kunal Icon, Pimple Saudagar, Pune-411027 . India. Phone : 0091-20-27201458 (R) Mobile : 09890215441 E-Mail : vnj...@yahoo.co.in vnjha1946@gmail. com


To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to Online_Sadhu_Sa...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to Online_Sa...@googlegroups.com.

Joseph McCard

unread,
Jun 29, 2017, 12:44:36 PM6/29/17
to Sadhu-Sanga Under the holy association of Spd. B.M. Puri Maharaja, Ph.D.
VNJha,

My apologies, but I read your comments and cannot just let them go. (only meant in a good way : ) And there is so much great stuff being posted here, but I am a newcomer to this forum.

"It appears to me that no one is paying any attention to language. Is language so insignificant ? The Nyaya-Vaisesika school of Indian Philosophy looked at the universe of our experience at Sum total of Referents of language. Is there any other way other than language to get access to others' mind ? Whatever we know clearly we know only through language."

In the spirit of a respectful and sincere exchange of ideas, I offer the following:

First, let's exchange the word "language" with the word "communication". It is a much better word, a much fuller more accurate one. When we speak to each other, we are immediately constricted by the unbelievable limitation of words. I suggest that we communicate with our inner reality, our inner selves, and most critically with our creator. The Lutherans have an expression, "God is talking to us. But do you listen." 

Communication from inner sources is through your feelings. Feelings are the language of the soul. If you want to know what is true for you, look to how your feeling about it. Do you think that's true? Certainly you feel what I am saying : ) Feelings are sometimes difficult to discover -and even more difficult to acknowledge. yet hidden in your deepest feeling is your highest truth.

The inner self and our creator also communicate with thought (images and pictures), and experience. Feelings and experience are not the same as thought. 

Words are really the least effective communicator, they are most open to misinterpretation, most often misunderstood. And why is that? It is because of what words are. Words are utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thought, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing. 

The irony is that you have placed so much importance on words and so little on experience. You place so little value on experience, then when what you experience differs from what you have heard, you automatically discard the experience and own the words.

Your experience and your feelings about a thing represent what you factually and intuitively know. Words can only seek to symbolize what you know and can often confuse what you know. 

"Thus what should be the Referent of the personal pronoun "I" ? We say " I am conscious " and never " I am consciousness". 

A reasonable observation, unless you are composed of consciousness. You are conscious, because you are composed of consciousness, as I see it. What do YOU think you are, and, what IS consciousness, such that you are confident of your claim? That is, how do you feel about it? 

"I possess consciousness and hence I am conscious. Therefore, the locus of consciousness is 'I' and not the consciousness itself."

Yes, if that is how you see it. There is another way to see it. The locus of your different states of consciousness, including body consciousness, ego consciousness (the "I"), and inner consciousness, is your soul, a pattern of consciousness.   

"The word 'conscious' is an adjective and the word 'consciousness' is a noun.

I have no doubt you believe that, and it is not my intention to try to dissuade you, but there is a different way to see it. "Conscious" is an adjective, but "consciousness" is a verb, a verb that has been nominalized, as I see it.  

"The Sanskrit word cetana is an adjective and it means 'conscious' and the word caitanya is a noun and it means 'consciousness'. This is the method of analysis developed by Indian Realists( Nyaya-Vaisesika system ). A sentence is treated in this system as 'an encoded thought'. 

Yes, as I said above, words are utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thought, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing. I hope you understand how this follows from what I have been using words to say (given that words are most open to misinterpretation, most often misunderstood). So, for example, it may be suggested on how to mediate, but actually meditating is quite different. 

"Thus language analysis amounts to the analysis of human thought. Should you ignore this ?"

One only needs to explore analytic philosophy over the last 100 years or so, to recognize that that approach has been less than successful in answering some of the issues on this forum. 

"I brought to your notice another method of talking about Reality independent of any background developed by Indians thousands of years before.  Srikanth , you may consider this also if it is worth-considering."

Mutual, I'm sure 

Joseph


Sungchul Ji

unread,
Jun 29, 2017, 4:13:36 PM6/29/17
to Online_Sa...@googlegroups.com
Hi Joseph and list,

(1)  Joseph said

" . . . , words are utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thought, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing. ... "

This statement is  consistent with the principle of the arbitrariness of signs in Saussurean linguistics as well as with the irreducible triadic definition of signs and communication in Peircean semiotics.


                         f                      g
         Object ------->  Sign ------> Interpretant
        (Source)       (Channel)         (Receiver)
             |                                                 ^
             |                                                  |
             |                                                  |
             |_________________________|
                                     h

Figure 1.  The irreducibly triadic definitions of the sign according to Pierce (11839-1914) and of the communciation system of Shannon. 
      f = sign production; g = sign interpretaion; h = information flow/grounding.  

Please note that Peirce often replaces "sign" in Figure 1 with "representamen" and uses the word "sign" to represent the 3-node network as a whole (which would be synonymous with communication, semiosis, or sign process), in contrast to "representamen" which is one of the three nodes in the triadic network.  I have the feeling that some of the philosophical and religious debates in history may have resulted from conflating these two kinds of signs. 

(2)  Just as vision is species-specific (we can't see infrared nor ultraviolet lights, without artificial devices, of course, but some other organisms do), our ability to communicate using languages may be culture-specific.  I have the suspicion that the concepts of Absolute Consciousness and the Tao are, respectively, Hindi- and Chinese-specific and thus not identical, although they share some common features, which are the object of the study in semiotics (in contrast to in linguistics).  This is why it is imperative for us to use the principles of semiotics (which are more general than the principles of linguistics, see (3) below) to communicate with one another in order to avoid culture-specific biases.

(3) As is well known (at least in the Western intellectual communities), Peirce  divides signs (i.e., anything that stands for something other than itself) into three (and only three) classes  - icons (signs that are related to their objects by similarity), indexes (signs that are related to their objects by causality) and symbols (signs that are related to their objects by habits or social conventions). According to Peirce, the perfect sign (i.e., the perfect way of communicating) has all these three aspects.  If he is right, depending solely on languages (i.e., symbols), as we do everyday on this forum, would limit our ability to communicate most effectively, resulting frequent misunderstandings and confusions.

(4)  Again, according to Peirce, we think in signs.  To prove the validity of this statement, just think about an elephant.  Do you have an elephant in your head?  Your answer would obviously be no, but what you have in your head or mind when you think about an elephant is the sign of the elephant, which consists of some "conserved neural firing patterns underlying a sign" (CoNFPUS). The ConFPUS would correspond to the modern-day equivalent of what Peirce called "interpretant"

(5)  We can analyze any words, including Brahma, God, the Tao, Consciousness, etc., based on the principles of semiotics explored in depth by the American chemist-logician-philosopher Peirce about a century ago.  What is common to all these words is that they are merely symbolic signs that would have different effects on the minds of culture-specific community of truth-seekers.

(6) There is no doubt that there are (i) species-specific communication and (ii) language-specific communication, as pointed out above.  Being a "triadomaniac" (as Peirce once called himself), I am wondering if there is a third kind of communication which may be referred to as the universe-specific (or cosmic) communication, i.e., the communication throughout the Universe constrained by the physical and metaphysical characteristics of our Universe.  If so, this would be in agreement with my conclusions reached a while ago that there are three kinds of languages, (i) cell language (cellese) [1, 2], (ii) human language (humanese) [1, 2], and (iii) cosmological language (cosmese) [2, 3] and that  humanese was not derived from cellese (as might be thought) but rather they are the complementary aspects of cosmese [2, 3]. 

With all the best.

Sung

Refereneces:
   [1]  Ji, S. (1997). Isomorphism between cell and human languages: molecular biological, bioinformatic and linguistic implications. BioSystems 44:17-39. PDF at http://www.conformon.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Isomorphism1.pdf
   [2] Ji, S. (2012).  Molecular Theory of the Living Cell: Concepts, Molecular Mechanisms, and Biomedical Applications.  Springer, New York.  See Table 2.13 on p. 44.
   [3] Ji, S. (2017).  The Cell Language Theory: Connecting Mind and Matter.  World scientific, New Jersey (in press).






--
----------------------------
Fifth International Conference
Science and Scientist - 2017
August 18—19, 2017
Nepal Pragya Pratisthan, Kathmandu, Nepal
http://scsiscs.org/conference/scienceandscientist/2017
 
Send a Donation to Support Our Services: http://scienceandscientist.org/donate
(All Indian residents are eligible for tax benefits for their contributions under section 80G of the Income Tax Act)
 
Report Archives: http://bviscs.org/reports
 
Why Biology is Beyond Physical Sciences?: http://dx.doi.org/10.5923/j.als.20160601.03
 
Life and consciousness – The Vedāntic view: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19420889.2015.1085138
 
Harmonizer: http://scienceandscientist.org/harmonizer
 
Darwin Under Siege: http://scienceandscientist.org/Darwin
 
Princeton Bhakti Vedanta Institute: http://bviscs.org
 
Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Institute: http://scsiscs.org
 
Sadhu-Sanga Blog: http://mahaprabhu.net/satsanga
 
Contact Us: http://scsiscs.org/contact
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sadhu-Sanga Under the holy association of Spd. B.M. Puri Maharaja, Ph.D." group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to Online_Sadhu_Sanga+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

To post to this group, send email to Online_Sadhu_Sanga@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/Online_Sadhu_Sanga.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/Online_Sadhu_Sanga/f8187a15-dd10-4d19-a4c5-bae2042244b8%40googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.



--
Sungchul Ji, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology
Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology
Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy
Rutgers University
Piscataway, N.J. 08855
609-240-4833

www.conformon.net
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages