Questioning Consciousness

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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby LilyPatToo » Sat Dec 12, 2015 4:41 pm

Sounder » 11 Dec 2015 16:45 wrote:Lily Pat Too wrote...
I would love to see the board return to that discussion. When I first began to post here, it was such a relief to find an intelligent and discerning group of people with an interest in the odd things that fascinated me. Not True Believers, but questioners whose minds were as open and inquiring as Jeff's. But then there definitely was a shift. And not in a good direction. It's not just that I had a personal reason to want to know more about the true nature of consciousness, but also I wanted to be able to understand the adamant, don't-need-to-look-at-the-evidence pseudo skeptics' stance better too. And that isn't going to happen if the group dynamics includes too many of those voices and they're dismissive in a sufficiently authoritative way.


It does seem that there was a shift, however it’s understandable given most folk avoid liminal states if they can, preferring the dominant narrative as that does provide many certainties and social benefits.

I also want to be able to understand the adamant, don't-need-to-look-at-the-evidence pseudo skeptics' stance better so I put up with the rudeness by repeating in my head; they are good people, they have simply chosen the wrong imperative by which to judge other people. It seems like the flak will always be there so maybe it's better to see it as a challenge rather than as an imposition. Showing in a clear way the manner in which a certain thing is propaganda and social engineering material can turn an effective technique into a farce.

Then the group dynamics can change some more.


Sounder, that was very useful to me. I do the "they are good people, they have simply chosen the wrong imperative by which to judge other people" routine in my head a lot too, being married to a contemptuous, dismissive pseudo-skeptic and having a bunch of them as friends. That "dominant narrative" is damned compelling to them and it seems to be much more important to them to support it than to venture any dissenting views that might erode their perceived personal credibility. It's looking a lot like a self-esteem problem and while Jeff was treating the subject matter evenhandedly, people here tended to do the same without hesitation. But to me, it's just too damned important to leave it at the mercy of people who've been socially engineered to knee-jerk disparage it as "woo." Where else will the discussion happen if not here?

What's interesting too is that they're blind to the ways they've been influenced...even RIers with access to the vast amount of discussion onsite on how that manipulation is done. Those "social benefits" must really rock...I wouldn't know, myself :eeyaa

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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Elvis » Sat Dec 12, 2015 5:57 pm

LilyPatToo wrote: That "dominant narrative" is damned compelling to them and it seems to be much more important to them to support it than to venture any dissenting views that might erode their perceived personal credibility. It's looking a lot like a self-esteem problem and while Jeff was treating the subject matter evenhandedly, people here tended to do the same without hesitation. But to me, it's just too damned important to leave it at the mercy of people who've been socially engineered to knee-jerk disparage it as "woo." Where else will the discussion happen if not here?



This is so right on, and it's good to see you posting, Lily. I've described some of my own past kneejerk disparagements of woo-ish topics, and the funny, ironic thing about it is that I was preaching from ignorance—not from any superior understanding, as I imagined. On that basis, pseudo-skepticism is more of a "lifestyle" choice—the self-esteem problem you mentioned.

Awhile back, a friend of mine in his 60s suddenly reversed his opinions about some 'woo' topics and I asked why: did he he read a book, or an article, or learn about some new information that changed his views? No. He said, "As I get older, I just tend to see things in a less conspiratorial or supernatural way." It's his way of seeing himself as a "mature" individual who has settled into a comforting 'wisdom', who doesn't want to be associated—by others or himself—with kooky, irrational ideas.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby DrEvil » Sat Dec 12, 2015 6:35 pm

PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness

It’s Saturday night. I could be drinking now. I should be drinking now; a friend of mine has been liberated from his wife and larva for the weekend— a greater cause for celebration than he’ll admit publicly— and I should be out there helping him kill brain cells. And yet I have chosen to stay home, so that I may plough through a couple of technical papers by some Yale egghead with the unlikely name of Ezequiel Morsella, and bring his words down from the mountaintop1.

It is not often I choose to be such a wet blanket. (Usually it’s an autonomic reflex.) But this Morsella guy has come up with an intriguing theory about consciousness, and I think he might really be on to something. I noticed a couple of New Scientist-type headlines on an in-press paper that takes a stab at empirically testing this theory, but I gotta give a nod to Nick Nimchuk for pointing me at the original 2005 paper.

Morsella has gone back to basics. Forget art, symphonies, science. Forget the step-by-step learning of complex tasks. Those may be some of the things we use consciousness for now but that doesn’t mean that’s what it evolved for, any more than the cones in our eyes evolved to give kaleidoscope makers something to do. What’s the primitive, bare-bones, nuts-and-bolts thing that consciousness does once we’ve stripped away all the self-aggrandizing bombast?

Morsella’s answer is delightfully mundane: it mediates conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles.

It’s a revelation, watching this dude whittle away at the options. Consciousness isn’t just about motor commands: we snatch our hand back from a hot stove, play arpeggios far faster than the conscious mind can keep up, and those are all “voluntary” motor actions.

It’s not just about puzzle-solving, or reconciling conflicting inputs, either: look at all the illusions and mind tricks that depend on the brain performing exactly those kinds of operations unconsciously. Binocular rivalry, inattentional blindness, ventriloquism: incompatible views shown to each eye, buildings appearing and disappearing from our field of view, the mouth moving here but the sound coming from over there: somehow the brain puts all those conflicting inputs together and serves up the final product without any sense of conscious conflict. The speaker mouths “ga”; the sound hitting the observer’s ear is “ba”; but the observer hears “ga”, an intermediate sound, without ever being aware of a conflict in need of sophisticated and complex resolution.

Not problem solving, then. Not motor commands. Or rather, not just those things in isolation. But when you snatch your hand from a flame faster than the conscious mind can act, there’s no other agenda to keep your hand where it is, is there? What if there were? Morsella asks. What about the person carrying the scorching plate from kitchen to dining room? Part of him says drop that fucker, it’s burning my fingers, but some other part is saying No, you have guests to feed, you don’t want to clean up the mess, suffer just a little longer and everything will be okay. Or let’s move all the way up to life and death: what about the person trapped beneath the ice, one part burning with the need to inhale, another terrified of drowning should that actually happen?

Not just conflict, or problems to be solved. Not just motor commands to carry out. Rather, conflicting motor commands: competing agendas, both involving voluntary motion. That‘s when you wake up.

Morsella sees us as a series of systems, each with its own agenda: feeding, predator avoidance, injury prevention, and so on. Mostly these systems operate on their own, independently. We can’t voluntarily dilate our eyes, for example. We can’t consciously control our digestive processes, nor are we even generally aware of them — peristalsis, like the pupil reflex, is the purview of the smooth muscles (and no, gas production by gut bacteria is not the same thing). But when digestion is finished — when the rectum is full, and you’re ready to take the mother of all dumps, but you’re on the in-laws good living-room carpet and your incontinent uncle is hogging the toilet — then, sure as shit, you become conscious of the process. There’s a sphincter under voluntary control that’s just urging you to let go. There are other agendas suggesting that that would be a really bad idea. And I would challenge anyone who has ever been in that position to tell me that that situation is not one in which conscious awareness of one’s predicament is, to put it mildly, heightened.

So most of our activities — somatic and cognitive — operate under the purview of these various systems, and as long as they don’t come into conflict we’re not aware of them. But when there is conflict — when SubSystem A tells the body to do this and SubSystem B says no, do that — then we’ve got a problem. Then, the competing agendas enter the arena to do battle. Consciousness, according to Morsella, is a forum for crosstalk between different systems, the only forum in which these systems can communicate when in conflict. He describes it as “a senate, in which representatives from different provinces are always in attendance, regardless of whether they should sit quietly or debate.”2 I myself prefer the Thunderdome For Subroutines metaphor, in which competing agendas duke it out for dominance. The urge to inhale, the fear of drowning. The need to defecate, the price of carpet cleaner. Two plans enter: one plan leaves, and runs down the motor nerves, and is put into action.

Morsella calls it PRISM: the Principle of Parallel Responses Into Skeletal Muscle. He claims the acronym works conceptually, “for just as a prism can combine different colors to yield a single hue, phenomenal states cull simultaneously activated response tendencies to yield a single, adaptive skeletomotor action.” Yeah, right. I bet the dude spent as long playing with Scrabble tiles to come up with a cool-sounding name as he did writing the actual paper, but we’ll let that slide.

I find PRISM appealing on a number of fronts: it resonates both with the latest MRI findings and with ancient insights from the 19th century (“Thinking is for doing”, Morsella quotes from 1890). It explains Blindsight, Alien Hand Syndrome, any number of Sacksian neurological disorders as a loss of integration, the result of inadequate crosstalk between systems. It makes me look at mirror neurons in a whole new way. It’s a testable hypothesis, falsifiable, predictive.

And most importantly, for me — speaking as someone who built a book predicated on the subject — it recognizes its limits. It presents the conscious arena as a necessary place for deliberation, but it doesn’t even try to explain why Thunderdome should have an audience (or rather, why Thunderdome should be its own audience). These are the things that happen in the conscious arena, and only here, as far as we know— but Morsella admits explicitly that it’s easy to imagine another system that does the same thing, more efficiently, without conscious involvement. He leaves the door open for scramblers.

“…this does not mean that current models of nervous activity or
other contraptions are incapable of achieving what phenomenal
states achieve; it means only that, in the course of human evolution,
these physical events happened to be what were selected to solve
certain computational challenges … while intersystem integration
could conceivably occur without something like phenomenal states
(as in an automaton or in an elegant “blackboard” neural network
with all of its modules nicely interconnected), such a solution was not
selected in our evolutionary history.”


Even cooler, he goes on to postulate a whole new system, something that is facultatively conscious, and which I can pretty much guarantee is gonna show up in Dumbspeech if that book ever gets a publisher:

“Although one could easily imagine more efficient arrangements
that invoke phenomenal states only under conditions of conflict,
chronic engagement happens to be a rather parsimonious and, in
some sense, efficient evolutionary solution to the problem of
intersystem interaction. Just as traffic lights, pool filters, and
ball-return machines at bowling alleys operate and expend energy
continuously (regardless of whether their function is presently
needed), chronic engagement is “efficiently inefficient” in the
sense that it does not require additional mechanisms to determine
whether channels of cross-talk should be open or closed.”


And further:

“…One could imagine a conscious nervous system that
operates as humans do but does not suffer any internal strife. In
such a system, knowledge guiding skeletomotor action would be
isomorphic to, and never at odds with, the nature of the phenomenal state
— running across the hot desert sand in order to reach water
would actually feel good, because performing the action is
deemed adaptive. Why our nervous system does not operate with
such harmony is perhaps a question that only evolutionary biology
can answer. Certainly one can imagine such integration occurring
without anything like phenomenal states, but from the present
standpoint, this reflects more one’s powers of imagination than
what has occurred in the course of evolutionary history.”


This guy is pointing out the way to whole new forms of consciousness, utterly alien and yet completely plausible. This would be a terrific and uplifting point upon which to end; but because “Peter Watts” and “uplifting” are two terms that do not belong in the same sentence, I think I’ll wind this up on a more somber note. Once again, Ezequiel Morsella:

“It is reasonable to assume that, early in development, skeletomotor
behavior openly reflects the (unchecked and unsuppressed)
tendencies of the response systems. There is no question that an
infant or toddler would immediately drop a plate that was a bit too
hot. But as development unfolds, behavior begins to reflect the
collective development of the quasi-independent learning histories
of the response systems.”


What he is saying here is, the more cognitively sophisticated you become, the more able you are to suppress hardwired aversion responses in favor of long-term agendas. The more sublime your awareness, the more pain you can withstand. And is anyone here not thinking of the Bene Gesserit and their gom jabbar, from Dune? Herbert, once again, had it right. His simple device reduced Voight-Kampf to its essence: testing for humanity through torture.

If Morsella is right, consciousness scales with conflict: the greater the discord between systems, the higher the level of awareness. You are never more alive, more awake, more conscious, than when in excruciating conflict with yourself. If self-awareness is the hallmark of humanity, then Sophie’s Choice may be its most mind-expanding exemplar.

Abu Ghraib was not just a torture chamber. It was a transcendence machine.

Postscript, 11/10/09: Pointing out an obvious religious angle that I missed completely, Caitlin Sweet asks rhetorically, “Why do you think monks whipped themselves until they bled? Transcendence, baby.”


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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby guruilla » Sat Dec 12, 2015 6:45 pm

Peter Watts (^^^) discusses the question of consciousness on Liminalist podcast

eg:
the hope for higher intelligence, determinism vs. transcendence, rejecting the duality of spiritual-material, how neurons are purely reactive, fizzy meat, the psychology of determinism, response vs. reaction, selective perception, truth and survival, depression’s correlation (or equivalence) with reality-perception, God and the anti-predator response, three men in a jungle, how natural selection shapes us to be paranoid, how anxiety allows us to see patterns, the many doings of paranoia, shaping the outside to match the inside (the devil made me do it), seeking the perks of depression, how depression fuels creativity, a thought experiment, is removing the lows desirable, depression as a new stage in human development, the difference between biology and psychology, the psyche and Behemoth, the pointlessness of survival, he who dies with most kid wins, what science is missing, the hard problem of consciousness, the difference between intelligence and consciousness, nipples on men, the best kind of mystery, the language variable, what if consciousness is mal-adaptive?
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby guruilla » Sat Dec 12, 2015 9:41 pm

Elvis » Sat Dec 12, 2015 5:57 pm wrote:
LilyPatToo wrote: That "dominant narrative" is damned compelling to them and it seems to be much more important to them to support it than to venture any dissenting views that might erode their perceived personal credibility. It's looking a lot like a self-esteem problem and while Jeff was treating the subject matter evenhandedly, people here tended to do the same without hesitation. But to me, it's just too damned important to leave it at the mercy of people who've been socially engineered to knee-jerk disparage it as "woo." Where else will the discussion happen if not here?



This is so right on, and it's good to see you posting, Lily. I've described some of my own past kneejerk disparagements of woo-ish topics, and the funny, ironic thing about it is that I was preaching from ignorance—not from any superior understanding, as I imagined. On that basis, pseudo-skepticism is more of a "lifestyle" choice—the self-esteem problem you mentioned.

Awhile back, a friend of mine in his 60s suddenly reversed his opinions about some 'woo' topics and I asked why: did he he read a book, or an article, or learn about some new information that changed his views? No. He said, "As I get older, I just tend to see things in a less conspiratorial or supernatural way." It's his way of seeing himself as a "mature" individual who has settled into a comforting 'wisdom', who doesn't want to be associated—by others or himself—with kooky, irrational ideas.

I had a conversation with James Kunstler recently: Kunstler is quite a rationalist. As a nonfiction writer and polemicist, he is anti-religious and doesn’t have much time for conspiratorial perspective, much less “woo” ones. Yet he also writes fiction that is full of magical phenomena and he writes about it well, not so much as a believer but one who knows. I asked him about it and he said that, though he didn’t believe in the supernatural, he knew that psychological transformations are so strange and profound that they often defy understanding. I countered by improvising a variation on Arthur C’ Clarke’s famous dictum about technology: “Any psychological experience that is sufficiently profound would be indistinguishable to us from magic.” He agreed.

I also mentioned Paul Bowles, the author, who once said in an interview that he couldn’t possibly believe in witchcraft because he was raised in the west. Yet he knew that it was real, because he lived in North Africa.

I know it’s become a cliché to talk about not believing anything that you don’t know, but I think it’s also an essential part of maturation. The problem with these sorts of experiences isn’t so much that we don’t have language for them but we have been given a set of terms and meanings that belong to the same rationalist systems of understanding which they supposedly transcend and to a degree invalidate. This means that they invalidate the very terms we are using to describe them ~ just as a comment such as "I was Hitler in a past life" invalidates itself by being oxymoronic. This may be why rationalism seems to be winning the battle, while the subtler, more magical aspects of our existence are being more and more woo-ified (even conspiracy research is getting woo-ified).

For me the only working bridge is psychology. Of course psychology is being more and more confined to the margins these days too, so . . .

I think there's opportunity in what seems like closing in or shutting down of the conversation. We are forced to refine our understanding and come up with new descriptions in order to move at all.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Elvis » Sat Dec 12, 2015 11:12 pm

guruilla wrote:I think there's opportunity in what seems like closing in or shutting down of the conversation. We are forced to refine our understanding and come up with new descriptions in order to move at all.


I see what you mean, though in my friend's case he wasn't looking for any more answers or descriptions, he was retreating to a comfort zone where he could feel good about himself. This partly came from his 35 years of Peace Corps work and teaching (Western values) in third world countries; now back in the U.S., he tends to talk to everyone like they're dumbells. (There's a 7% chance he's CIA fwiw LOL) I could go on. Our friendship actually pretty much ended over this.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby guruilla » Sat Dec 12, 2015 11:16 pm

I can well imagine. I don't think the above optimistic principle would work so well in a two-way exchange.

:wallhead:
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby DrEvil » Sat Dec 12, 2015 11:21 pm

I asked him about it and he said that, though he didn’t believe in the supernatural, he knew that psychological transformations are so strange and profound that they often defy understanding. I countered by improvising a variation on Arthur C’ Clarke’s famous dictum about technology: “Any psychological experience that is sufficiently profound would be indistinguishable to us from magic.” He agreed.


This is pretty much my view too. I don't believe there's any distinction between supernatural and natural, only between what we understand and what we don't, and there's definitely a lot we don't understand about consciousness (and reality) and its capabilities.

One thing I am pretty convinced of is that time is not as rigid as we think and that the mind can sometimes see in the temporal dimension.

My mother's ex had what we call 'vardøger' (the fact that it is common enough to have its own name is in itself telling), or premonition.
We could hear him come home about 15 minutes before he actually did, every day. We heard the car pull up, the door open and him walking up the stairs, but there was no one there.

Whether this was something to do with him specifically, or if it was reality somehow becoming accustomed to his routine to the point where it would mirror him (almost as if he created a groove in reality) I don't know, but something weird was going on.

Btw: My favorite version of that Clarke quote is "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature."
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby tapitsbo » Sat Dec 12, 2015 11:25 pm

When you're talking about a shutdown, guruilla, are you maybe thinking of things like the challenge posed by chump's excellent thread in the Lounge? (All Time Crisis Actors' Academy Awards)

I don't believe this kind of information makes research/discussions/explorations impossible, but it does force a shift, usually. It's difficult to unsee this sort of thing, even if defense mechanisms come into play.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby guruilla » Sun Dec 13, 2015 3:19 pm

tapitsbo » Sat Dec 12, 2015 11:25 pm wrote:When you're talking about a shutdown, guruilla, are you maybe thinking of things like the challenge posed by chump's excellent thread in the Lounge? (All Time Crisis Actors' Academy Awards)

I don't believe this kind of information makes research/discussions/explorations impossible, but it does force a shift, usually. It's difficult to unsee this sort of thing, even if defense mechanisms come into play.

I was thinking more of the difficulty some of us have encountered, and will continue to encounter, challenging dominant ideologies that, in my view, are essentially incompatible with a thorough parapolitical or psychological exploration of the data, ideologies such as liberal feminism, or the whole notion of "freedom of choice" that seems to come down to a belief in the Pursuit of Happiness as the basis for a meaningful value system.

Slomo mentioned how a Christian value-set wouldn't be received well at this board; yet for me, the current neo-liberal ideological mindset is perhaps even more alienating than the Christian one. In fact, I have begun to feel as if Christians are among the sanest groups in the west now! (This is not based on direct experience, since I still steer clear of Christian engagement and find it really off-putting; but in relation to the ideas being put forth by neo-liberals, they seem as crazy to me as the loopiest Christian beliefs at this point.)

With Crisis Actors, there may be something similar, in that one of the arguments against suggesting there are crisis actors is that it is insensitive to the actual victims of real state-perpetrated crimes. This is circular logic, hence illogic, because if an event has been faked, then there are no actual victims to be sensitive towards. And yet there is no way around this, except by challenging the sacred notion of supposed "empathy" for imagined (and possibly imaginary) victims, empathy which, as I said elsewhere, could really just be a sort of remote narcissism.

Everyone is so afraid of appearing to be a bad person that there is this constant need to reassure others that they are not bad people, by these (to me shallow) expressions of concern and sympathy towards "victims" and their "rights." Some people seem to feel the need to stress that their main interest in discussing these subjects is in reducing the suffering of people "out there" by improving the conditions in the world. That's not my main interest, my main interest is in connecting to others at this forum and understanding our own predicament, here and now.

Many of the ways in which explorations are shut down (here or anywhere) I think has to do with an insistence on certain unquestionable values or truths; yet these are generally the very values and truths which most need to be questioned, and they do lead, finally, to the question of consciousness itself.

Somebody over there (I just looked in at the thread, I don't follow it) made the comment that "Crisis Actors is naive critical media studies, much like Lizard People is naive class analysis." This is a clever comment but it is only meaningful at a certain level of discussion, one at which it is already agreed that we know for sure that Lizard People and Crisis Actors do not exist, in any sense besides metaphorical. While I personally think Icke and many researchers go too far with literalizing what does not need to be literalized, I also know, beyond all doubt, that I do NOT know for certain that Lizard People or Crisis Actors do not exist.

Now that I write it down, it's disingenuous for Joao to put LPs in the same breath as CAs, because there's significant evidence for Crisis Actors existing (and why wouldn't they?), whereas the evidence for the existence of Lizard People (i.e., nonhuman, interdimensional beings that can appear human) is a lot less reliable (mostly testimonial), so to talk about them as a possibility requires going down to deeper levels of psychology and consciousness, to see the ways in which they might exist at some level, less literal than Donald Trump, maybe, but still not entirely metaphorical.

RI isn't really geared towards this dropping down a level. It has laid down certain rules against it, in fact, in order to prevent a certain class of conspiracy theorists (and probably paid trolls) from messing up the board with their unfounded (and often ideologically unsound, if that is not a tautology) opinions. (As everyone knows, I once got threatened with banning for defending the right to talk about the No Planes theory of 9/11, for the same reason I want to be able to talk about Lizard People if it seems relevant.) So at RI, the discussion is geared towards rigor and away from intuition, I think that's plain for anyone to see. Mostly I don't see this as a problem; where it becomes a problem for me is when the "rigor" is clearly in service to a personal agenda, which usually comes down to an ideology.

LilyPat, if I can speak for her, no longer feels comfortable talking about her more unusual experiences because they are seen as a threat to the rigorousness of the board. Plutonia got shut down for the same reason, when she brought up entities some time back. It's as if anomalous or "paranormal" experiences somehow undermine the arguments and descriptions being worked out here. They are Charles Fort's "damned" material; because, if Lizard people or whatever are part of the picture, the context changes and things that seemed reliable and fixed, suddenly aren't. Things get liminal, people panic and polarize.

For me, since I am mostly content not talking about "woo" material right now, it's more a matter of how my own experiences have led to a certain understanding of things which may be perceived as equally incompatible with the general mood of the board ~ not as woo but as ideologically unsound. I came from a leftist, progressive background, so I know from experience, not only how counterproductive such progressive politics and social activism can be, but, having done the research now, how so much of it appears to have been shaped by the ruling class to serve their own long-term interests: in other words, how this liberal ideology is really a bunch of sheep's clothing for wolves to get around more efficiently inside.

So my worldview is as different from that of many people at this board as the one LilyPat maybe wishes to express. Or at least, that's my experience, reading many of the posts here, which is that it's easier simply not to comment than to try and build a bridge across such a gulf (or shout loud enough to be heard on the other side).
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby slomo » Sun Dec 13, 2015 3:59 pm

Slomo mentioned how a Christian value-set wouldn't be received well at this board; yet for me, the current neo-liberal ideological mindset is perhaps even more alienating than the Christian one. In fact, I have begun to feel as if Christians are among the sanest groups in the west now! (This is not based on direct experience, since I still steer clear of Christian engagement and find it really off-putting; but in relation to the ideas being put forth by neo-liberals, they seem as crazy to me as the loopiest Christian beliefs at this point.)


On this point: when I mentioned Christian Values, I was just trying to provide a quick example of a set of conflicting values that irreducibly conflict with ones that might be commonly held here. This was a little bit sloppy of me, but at the time, I was focusing on an issue other than Christianity, and to go into depth would have been a distraction.

In fact, there is great heterogeneity among value sets that could be clustered under the very large tent labeled "Christian Values". Like the multiple feminisms, there are multiple "Christianities". And some of them indeed reflect some of the more saner positions one could take in the west. To use another personal anecdote, my MIL/FIL are pretty devout Christians, and yet they are probably the sanest people I know. It is to their credit that their son (my partner) is so very well grounded.

I don't want to infect this thread with the stuff that's been going on in other threads, but my reaction against various isms, reaction that disturbs some members of this board because it seems to contradict my demographics, is very related to the observation that neo-liberalism begets monsters in a way that some Christianities do not.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby guruilla » Sun Dec 20, 2015 9:56 pm

Just to say that the question of consciousness is also being discussed in relation to the question of culture, at this thread on the members notice board, in case anyone who might be interested missed it: viewtopic.php?f=45&t=38620&p=583904#p583904culture
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby chump » Tue Mar 15, 2016 11:19 am



---------------------


https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2016 ... onspiracy/
The Matrix of technocracy: the roots of the conspiracy
by Jon Rappoport
March 15, 2016

“The cartels of the world become the cartels of the mind.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

“If you are nothing more than a biological machine, then what you think doesn’t matter. There is no you. Confirming this, deciding this, is the technocrat’s wet dream.” (The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport)

Many independent researchers, writers, and broadcasters have exposed the operation called technocracy. I want to give particular thanks to Patrick Wood, whose investigations are essential. His most recent book is Technocracy Rising.

Consider the term “scientific humanism.” The Oxford Dictionary offers this definition: “A form of humanist theory and practice that is based on the principles and methods of science; specifically the doctrine that human beings should employ scientific methods in studying human life and behaviour, in order to direct the welfare and future of mankind in a rational and beneficial manner…Origin mid-19th century.”

Two items jump out from the page: “…in order to direct the welfare and future of mankind,” and “Origin mid-19th century.”

The first phrase obviously refers to a plan. And the plan emerges from being able to study, at a great height, populations and nations—in order to direct their behavior, in order to place them and move them on a chessboard. “Scientifically.”

Free will? Not important. Free exchange of goods and services? Not important. The unique vision and desire of the individual? Not important. Only science is important—whatever that means.

Science/rule by technology/technocracy becomes the justification for control.

For example: “We have studied the amount of energy that can be utilized by humans on planet Earth. Given the results, we will plan how to distribute it most humanely and rationally.”

That’s not science. That’s fake science. Whoever determines what is “humane” isn’t doing science. Whoever presumes to know how much usable energy exists on Earth, despite ongoing technological breakthroughs, isn’t doing science. But no matter. Pronouncements can be made to look like science. On behalf of top-down control.

As the Oxford Dictionary mentions, this kind of program had its roots in the mid-19th century.

Well, Darwin published his hypothesis about evolution in 1859. Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848.

Let me now try to summarize thousands of pages of scholarship in a few paragraphs.

Prior to Marx, Engels, and Darwin, the word “humanism” referred to a tradition of philosophy, knowledge, culture, education, and art birthed by the ancient Greeks—coming forward through Rome to the European Renaissance. It elevated human beings. It tended toward greater freedom, less Church repression.

But then, in the mid-19th century, humanism took a sharp turn. It became identified with “the march of science,” the triumph of philosophic materialism (Darwin), and the complete restructuring of nations and societies according to a social, economic, and political plan that would “benefit all” (Marx, Engels).

Humanism was stripped down to “scientific humanism.”

In succeeding generations, all the way up to today, intellectuals and scientists and technologists have adopted the viewpoint that, since they can see the whole of society from above, and since they can understand its workings in clearer and evermore specific terms, and since they understand the vast field of natural resources, they can and should, quite naturally, and as a matter of course, plan and plot the future of humanity.

Their impulse was, behind the scenes, aided and abetted by a quite different cast of characters, who wanted a new world order, a political and economic management system for the entire planet (now known as Globalism).

This is, in effect, a two-tier operation. At the top are the Rockefeller Globalists; and under them, millions of useful high-IQ idiots who love to play chess with the world population.

The propaganda wing of this operation insists, at every turn: the only “solution” for planet Earth is the group solution. The group, the mass, the collective.

It is unthinkable that The Individual would have anything to contribute.

Well, when you stop and consider it, this is the mantra of today’s collective society: the individual is extinct.

The staging of civilization’s ebbs and flows, victories and defeats, always has the aim of discounting and reducing the role of the individual. Whatever else is intended, that is intended.

I’m not trying to discourage any and every group response—but I am saying, without question, that every major covert op is played in order to eradicate the idea of the individual. This is basic mind control. This is the reason mind control exists: to elevate “group” over “individual.”

Mind control tries to make individuals think of themselves as helpless pieces on the chessboard. Mind control tries to make individuals surrender their free will. Mind control tries to make individuals believe they have no place in the modern world. Rather, they must be part of a group; otherwise, they’re invisible.

If you could walk into a person’s mind, as if it were a post office, and if you could get rid of every letter and package that extolled, or surrendered to, The Group, you would see that person rise to a new height. You would see a renewal on a grand scale.

But introduce a fact or idea that challenges The Group and alarms go off. “Reject that fact! Reject it! It’s false! It has to be false! Maintain stability!”

“Stability being restored. The structure is intact. Standards are being rebooted. Normality is being reasserted. Resume standard operations.”

In Adjustment Team (1954), Philip K Dick wrote:

“You were supposed to have been in the Sector when the [mind control] adjustment began. Because of an error you were not. You came into the Sector late — during the adjustment itself. You fled, and when you returned it was over. You saw, and you should not have seen. Instead of a witness you should have been part of the adjustment. Like the others, you should have undergone changes…something went wrong. An error occurred. And now a serious problem exists. You have seen these things. You know a great deal. And you are not coordinated with the new configuration.“

What I call the Reality Manufacturing Company wants everyone to have the same inner configuration.

That is the basis of collectivism at the deepest level.

At the outbreak of World War 2, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) began making plans for the post-war world.

The question it posed was this: could America exist as a self-sufficient nation, or would it have to go outside its borders for vital resources?

Predictably, the answer was: imperial empire.

The US would not only need to obtain natural resources abroad, it would have to embark on endless conquest to assure continued access.

The CFR, of course, wasn’t just some think tank. It was connected to the highest levels of US government, through the State Department. A front for Rockefeller interests, it actually stood above the government.

Behind all its machinations was the presumption that planned societies were the future of the planet. Not open societies. (And “the interests of the US” would ultimately be subordinated to the domination of one-planet, new-world-order Globalists.)

Through wars, clandestine operations, legislation, treaties, manipulation of nations’ debt, control of banks and money supplies, countries could be turned into “managed units.”

Increasingly, the populations of countries would be regulated and directed and held in thrall to the State.

And the individual? He would go the way of other extinct species.

Nowhere in these formulas was the individual protected. He was considered a wild card, a loose cannon, and he needed to be demeaned, made an outsider, and characterized as a criminal who opposed the needs of the collective.

As the years and decades passed, this notion of the collective and its requirements, in a “humane civilization,” expanded.

On every level of society, people were urged to think of themselves as part of a greater group. The individual and his hopes, his unique dreams, his desires and energies, his determination and will power…all these were portrayed as relics of an unworkable and deluded past.

In the planned society, no one rises above the mass, except those men who run and operate and propagandize the mass.

The onrush of technocracy gears its wild promises to genetic manipulation, brain-machine interfaces, and other automatic downloads assuring “greater life.” No effort required. Plug in, and ascend to new heights.

Freedom? Independence? Old flickering dreams vicariously viewed on a screen.

Individual greatness, natural imagination, natural creative power? A sunken galleon loaded with treasure that, upon closer investigation, was never there to begin with.

The Plan is all that is important. The plan involves universal surveillance, in order to map the lives of billions of people, move by move, in order to design systems of control within which those billions live, day to day.

But the worst outcome of all is: the individual cannot even conceive of his own life and future in large terms. The individual responds to tighter and control with a shrug, as if to say, “What difference does it make?”

He has bought the collectivist package. His own uniqueness and inner resources are submerged under layers of passive acceptance of the consensus.

And make no mistake about it, this consensus reality, for all its exaltation of the group, is not heraldic in any sense. The propagandized veneer covers a cynical exploitation of every man, woman, and child.

Strapped by an amnesia about his own freedom and what it can truly mean, the individual opts for a place in the collective gloom. He may grumble and complain, but he fits in.

He can’t remember another possibility.

Every enterprise in which he finds himself turns out to be a pale copy of the real thing.

The deep energies and power and desire for freedom remain untapped.

—Yet a struggle continues to live.

It lives in the hidden places of every individual who wants out, who wants to come back to himself, who wants to stride out on a stage.

Freedom and power again. The shattering of amnesia.

In this stolen world.

A new stage play, titled:

The Extinct Individual Returns.

In this new play, dominoes of the collective begin to fall. The stinking structure collapses, a wing here and a wing there.

The vast sticky web called “the people” begins to disintegrate.

A new instructive message appears on screens: “The Collective=Crazy.”

The pseudo-scientific plot to make humans pieces on the grand chessboard, biological machines to manipulate at will, with “inputs” that “elicit predictable responses”—this great plan and great deception eventually becomes a burnt cinder in the annals of failed histories.

Jon Rappoport
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Sounder » Tue Mar 22, 2016 10:55 am

Our psychical expressions are major determining factors in the ongoing expression of events, both individually and collectively.

Unfortunately there is a dominant strain within modern thinking that believes it to be their duty to ‘design’ proper expressions of being for the masses in the hope of controlling and directing the flow of psychical expressions.

But this is backward thinking, as dissatisfaction is the only thing created in volume (albeit sub and/or unconscious for most folk) by a system that is attempting to social engineer a person against their own best interests.

Consider the term “scientific humanism.” The Oxford Dictionary offers this definition: “A form of humanist theory and practice that is based on the principles and methods of science; specifically the doctrine that human beings should employ scientific methods in studying human life and behaviour, in order to direct the welfare and future of mankind in a rational and beneficial manner…Origin mid-19th century.”


Many, many experts are book smart yet seem to have no clue as to what they are contributing too.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby tapitsbo » Tue Mar 22, 2016 3:41 pm

The term "consciousness" itself refers to something that some say can never really get a grip on itself...

Not that I am really inclined to believe those who say consciousness "doesn't exist"

Proper expressions of being come to hold their sway over the masses whether anyone designs them or not.
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