Questioning Consciousness

[minime]

thrulookingglass, you strike me as an ex-fundamentalist that still carries the scars of programmed beliefs.

If you were to realize that all those things said about God are reactions to the screeds of men (People who you, I and many others have taken seriously in the past.) making claims as to what God says, you will be better able to place blame where it belongs, that is with men and their blaspheming ways. Who would presume to speak for God, how absurd.

Of course, Man created God in his own image, why not speak for Him as well?

Which is not to say that there is no God.

How could we know?

But, back to the more pertinent question...

[dada]

To paraphrase "The Big Short" - poetry is like truth. No one wants to hear it.

I can understand the sentiment. Lot of shitty poetry out there, giving poets a bad name!

Every once in a while, a poem will impress me. It has to catch me by surprise, though. If I go searching for a good poem, I never seem to find one.

Come to think of it, maybe that's why Diogenes never found his "honest man." But I digress.

I do enjoy the process of making a poem. And a good poem to me is one that reveals some of that enjoyment. When looking at the finished poem, I can see that the poet was having way too much fun. I say "that looks like fun, I want to try that."

Of course you can't just 'try that.' Good poetry can't be forced. I know of a poet who decided to write a poem a day. smh. I wanted to explain that it doesn't work like that. But that's alright, they'll figure it out. Or they won't. It's fine; I mean it's poetry, for goodness sake.

From one perspective, the completion of the poem is when it dies. We're just reading the corpses.

[Belligerent Savant]

I can understand the sentiment. Lot of shitty poetry out there, giving poets a bad name!

Though warrior women

Bravely walk the walk,

Derivatives of disproportion

Draw heinous hypocrites

To their flock.

[….]

Where did all the laughs go?

Are you out there, Louis C.K.?

Once crucial conversations

Kept us on our toes;

Was it really in our interest

To trample Charlie Rose?

And what’s with this ‘Me Too’?

This infantilizing term of the day…

Is this a toddler’s crusade?

Reducing rape, slut-shaming, and suffrage to reckless child’s play?

A platform for accusation impunity?

Due process has lost its sheen?

But, fuck it, what me worry?

I’m a hero,

To Time Magazine!

- Sean Penn

[thrulookingglass]

I was going to write another long rant of mine in reply Sounder. Thanks for caring enough to respond. I wish I knew your God. Blaspheming, what's the point? They put Jesus to death for it. What crimes we make of words and what brutal retaliations in response. The only way I can take the sting out of that is to watch the stoning scene in Life of Brian. I was shoved into a wall in high school because someone thought I looked queer. Just looked gay. I swore to never discriminate against a homosexual ever again on that day. I was so glad when I watched my commonwealth of MA become the first state to legalize gay marriage. I watched as my dyed in the wool Catholic father felt it was the end of the world. Be careful what you believe in. I feel I've run a maze for a rat.

[minime]

Though warrior women

Bravely walk the walk,

Derivatives of disproportion

Draw heinous hypocrites

To their flock.

[….]

Where did all the laughs go?

Are you out there, Louis C.K.?

Once crucial conversations

Kept us on our toes;

Was it really in our interest

To trample Charlie Rose?

And what’s with this ‘Me Too’?

This infantilizing term of the day…

Is this a toddler’s crusade?

Reducing rape, slut-shaming, and suffrage to reckless child’s play?

A platform for accusation impunity?

Due process has lost its sheen?

But, fuck it, what me worry?

I’m a hero,

To Time Magazine!

- Sean Penn

They call the wind Mariah

- Pappy Pariah

[chump]

[Blue]

I feel I've run a maze for a rat.

Ain't that the truth. Sometimes, well, often lately I think we must be living on a controlled planet/plane of existence/matrix/whatever. Not a prison planet but more like an insane asylum planet. One of the theories astrophysicists have about why we haven't discovered any other life out there is because we are a zoo planet. Seriously, freaking rocket scientists are saying this, not just sci-fi writers. So the insanity could be driven by the unsuspecting captivity for other's amusement situation we happen to be in.

You've got some interesting things in your stream of consciousness posts, tlg, but it is a bit difficult to read in one large paragraph. It would be easier to read if you broke it into smaller ones. Just a suggestion, of course.

[thrulookingglass]

Thanks for listening. You all give me faith. Your not changing my writing! I'm a complete anarchist. I guess it's a little rude, but its my art! Beat poets wrote in stream of consciousness. I love deconstructionism. To my God I say, "Teach me to love more than you."

[DrEvil]

To paraphrase "The Big Short" - poetry is like truth. No one wants to hear it.

I can understand the sentiment. Lot of shitty poetry out there, giving poets a bad name!

Every once in a while, a poem will impress me. It has to catch me by surprise, though. If I go searching for a good poem, I never seem to find one.

Come to think of it, maybe that's why Diogenes never found his "honest man." But I digress.

I do enjoy the process of making a poem. And a good poem to me is one that reveals some of that enjoyment. When looking at the finished poem, I can see that the poet was having way too much fun. I say "that looks like fun, I want to try that."

Of course you can't just 'try that.' Good poetry can't be forced. I know of a poet who decided to write a poem a day. smh. I wanted to explain that it doesn't work like that. But that's alright, they'll figure it out. Or they won't. It's fine; I mean it's poetry, for goodness sake.

From one perspective, the completion of the poem is when it dies. We're just reading the corpses.

You son of a bitch!
a poet is low as a snitch
bottom of the rung
their necks should be wrung!

But I agree with you, there is some good poetry, I just never had much interest in it, but every now and then I will hear something that touches a nerve.

[minime]

Just as it is with God, the best part of poetry is inside you while you're experiencing it.

If you feel nothing, maybe it's because you feel nothing.

[dada]

You son of a bitch!
a poet is low as a snitch
bottom of the rung
their necks should be wrung!

But I agree with you, there is some good poetry, I just never had much interest in it, but every now and then I will hear something that touches a nerve.

Your poem mayn't have the secret name of god hidden within
It ain't winning you the Welsh Bardic Chair like Taliesin
It summoned no angels nor conjured a jinn
But take comfort in knowing, you're a better poet than Sean Penn

[dada]

I think religion is a product of consciousness, not the other way around. An accident waiting to happen.

Is this true for science, as well, I wonder? Science is a product of consciousness.

The rationalist needs to be careful not to fall into a kind of gnostic atheism. The mechanistic universe becomes the blind idiot god, minus the god part.

I'm not a fan of the gnostic worldview. It's romantic to think the manifest world is all dark and twisted, cold and soulless. It's comforting in a way. The world may suck, but at least we have a philosophical framework that explains it.

I think reality isn't that clear and certain. The truth is much, much more horrible than that.

[thrulookingglass]

"Be careful, you might hear something
You don't want to hear
Be careful you might say something
That you really mean" - Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Selfish

We find it in poetry, song, literature, comedy because it's the only realm for free thought anymore. "It's funny because it's true." rips into us a bit. Reading the story of Jesus being tempted by the devil, it's SO absurd. So Jesus fasts, 40 days even...Jeesh, I guess the starving children of Africa must be wicked holy! God's got a hard-on for that forty bullshit. I guess you have to choose not to eat, not be forced into starvation. Tempted by the devil. Who is the devil's manufacturer by the way? Oh, that's good 'ol YWHY himself? Jehovah? So Jesus, who is God, or not God, just his son, no wait God sends his son to be tempted by the devil, which is one of God's servants, the devil that is, but the devil does shit that God doesn't like, but God just lets him do it, which is kind of a tacit form of approval. Hey, isn't that kind of like how we allow the war machine to trample all over us? Forget that thought, lets just move on. Jeesh, this gets confusing. Jesus reported last words, well, before Jesus, the resurrection, or is that the second coming...this gets real confusing. Well, when he's dying on the cross he reportedly says, "Eli, Eli, why have you forsaken me?" Sounds like he felt he didn't get a fair shake. Elijah, I guess. For the record, fasting shows significant health benefits when done properly. Always take water. Letting your system clear out can be beneficial, not to mention your taking a little stress off 'ol mother nature. For I am the God of a thousand names. Doesn't sound deceptive, right? Thou shall not bear false witness. My cardinal rule for you, but not I. Isis must learn the secret/occulted name of Ra in order to gain power over mankind. "By the knowledge of his own name did Ra rule." Bite on that one for a while. Call all things by their true name. Do not bear false witness. Words, language. They were called 'spells' because it was thought that people who knew how to read and write held a special power. Which they did. In our ancient past, learning to read and write almost always started with studying scripture. Muslim children learn to write by reproducing the Quran. They are taught not to make a mistake. It's sacred text, change it not. The Hebrew, the same...change not a jot, not a tittle. This can be said of the Masons as well who knew ways of creating sound structures through the use of math, levels, squares, calipers. In order to know who was truly a Mason, those who were actually skilled in construction, they came up with a secret handshake so they would know their own kind. Occulted knowledge. They kept information apart from the masses so they alone could profit from it. Glad we've moved beyond that these days. Communications. It's not what you say, it's who listens. Einstein was a patent clerk. It's my idea. Closed architecture they call it in the computer world. Anyone seen the Soviet's Buran space shuttle? Wow, that's familiar looking. Dimensions are almost the same even. Standing on the shoulders of giants. NASA never made the plans top secret. Too many secrets. Who gains from occulted knowledge? Those that keep it. Share and share alike. We are all in this mess together. Those who create a heaven for themselves while others suffer dwell in hell as well. Moral lessons look good on paper, but their truth only shines when these ways are practiced. You might know right from wrong, better to act upon it rather than just know it. In these absurd rules humans make up as religious practice it was decided amongst the Hebrews that the sins of the child become those of the father until you were eight. Exactly eight by the way, so get your kicks in early. Honor thy mother, thy father...damn, got to read the fine print. Says nothing about the parent's honoring their children. I guess that's expected to be tacit. Whom shall I dishonor? Who's making these rules again? Exactly ten rules shall free you. Asimov cuts them down to three, three laws safe. There's a hilarious story of a child from This American Life, whom hearing this 'fact' decides to sin like a son of a bitch because he doesn't like his dad much. Sounds cold that way, but it's more the naivety of the child and the foolish thought of sin transference, he doesn't run out and murder, or spread agent orange on unsuspecting Vietnamese, he just breaks Jewish taboos. The Tulpa, the Golem, creatures willed in to existence. Thought. Willed into existence. I'm not sure whether it was me, or someone else I read of, but the grays once told someone, "life is God's dream." Does that mean it was something he thought up and decided to bring forth, or does it mean, we're stuck in his mind? That's right, I think it's a real simulation which is the stupidest way to describe it. As real as it gets, stuck in God's mind. Makes it sound like a computer, which is scary. That's how it is able to manipulate everything, to this being all exists as knowledge, not material. Knowledge is power. The mathematicians, physicists are persecuted by the church, the Earth is the center of all creation. Right but wrong, not the center of the universe, but the center of creation. Who knows the universe's center anyhow unless you've observed it all. Watching a special on PBS of physics, they kept asking, why does gravity work, how does it work? Waves, energy, particles. It works because it does. If it didn't work this way, well, it simply wouldn't work. Build from a sound foundation. In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was God. Sound, nothing but air moving in patterns. Language, communications, the first common ground. All is illusory, all is allowed as some brave soul on this board once stated. Matter falls apart when observed, there but not there. Life struggles I say, it changes, morphs, adapts, mutates, fights for survival. Brick by brick we build this world. "We are spirits in the material world," crones Sting. Spirit, will, drive, fight, strength of self, strength of others. Bertrand Russell, please take the stand..."As soon as we abandon our own reason and are content upon relying on authority, there is no end to our troubles." Shakespeare testify, "Only love heals. Anger, fear, and guilt can only destroy." William Blake, kick it to me one time, "Love seeketh not for itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives it's ease, and builds a heaven in hell's despair." The absence of love creates poverty in our souls. Only our compassion can save us from hate. What the fuck am I looking for anyhow? How to free myself from a world of war and depravity. Honestly, I was trying to free us all. All my life I've struggled with trying to understand our culture. So broken. Drop some knowledge Will i am Shakespeare,
"But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place'- some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it; who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection." - Williams, Henry V act 4 scene 1
Oh God, my king. He's called en satun himself often in the bible. There's literally two different passages, and God punished them, and Satan punished them. Same event, two separate names. Sometimes, it just means to take a contrarian opinion, to fight against something, to rebel. It's necessary sometimes to stand up for your rights. All I can think is, God needed to feel wanted too. So we tore each other apart, so that us and our creator could make amends. "Peace be with you...and also with you." Help me. God help me.

[DrEvil]

I think religion is a product of consciousness, not the other way around. An accident waiting to happen.

Is this true for science, as well, I wonder? Science is a product of consciousness.

The rationalist needs to be careful not to fall into a kind of gnostic atheism. The mechanistic universe becomes the blind idiot god, minus the god part.

I'm not a fan of the gnostic worldview. It's romantic to think the manifest world is all dark and twisted, cold and soulless. It's comforting in a way. The world may suck, but at least we have a philosophical framework that explains it.

I think reality isn't that clear and certain. The truth is much, much more horrible than that.

I was actually going to say "just as with science, art and almost everything we apes do to pass our time", but for some reason decided against it, so yes.

Of course that's just my opinion as I have no inkling about the true nature of reality, but I'm leaning heavily towards us being here by happy accident and the universe not giving a shit either way. I base that on the (so far) completely missing evidence to the contrary.

The big question in my opinion is if life is a rare freak accident or a natural consequence of the laws of nature.

https://www.livescience.com/60250-did-l ... -laws.html

Was the Origin of Life a Fluke? Or Was It Physics?
By Ian O'Neill, Live Science Contributor | August 28, 2017 02:24pm ET

Understanding the origin of life is arguably one of the most compelling quests for humanity. This quest has inevitably moved beyond the puzzle of life on Earth to whether there's life elsewhere in the universe. Is life on Earth a fluke? Or is life as natural as the universal laws of physics?

Jeremy England, a biophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to answer these profound questions. In 2013, he formulated a hypothesis that physics may spontaneously trigger chemicals to organize themselves in ways that seed "life-like" qualities.

Now, new research by England and a colleague suggests that physics may naturally produce self-replicating chemical reactions, one of the first steps toward creating life from inanimate substances.

This might be interpreted as life originating directly from the fundamental laws of nature, thereby removing luck from the equation. But that would be jumping the gun.

Life had to have come from something; there wasn't always biology. Biology is born from the raw and lifeless chemical components that somehow organized themselves into prebiotic compounds, created the building blocks of life, formed basic microbes and then eventually evolved into the spectacular array of creatures that exist on our planet today. [7 Theories on the Origin of Life]

"Abiogenesis" is when something nonbiological turns into something biological and England thinks thermodynamics might provide the framework that drives life-like behavior in otherwise lifeless chemicals. However, this research doesn't bridge life-like qualities of a physical system with the biological processes themselves, England said.

"I would not say I have done anything to investigate the 'origin of life' per se," England told Live Science. "I think what's interesting to me is the proof of principle – what are the physical requirements for the emergence of life-like behaviors?"

Self-organization in physical systems

When energy is applied to a system, the laws of physics dictate how that energy dissipates. If an external heat source is applied to that system, it will dissipate and reach thermal equilibrium with its surroundings, like a cooling cup of coffee left on a desk. Entropy, or the amount of disorder in the system, will increase as heat dissipates. But some physical systems may be sufficiently out of equilibrium that they "self-organize" to make best use of an external energy source, triggering interesting self-sustaining chemical reactions that prevent the system from reaching thermodynamic equilibrium and thus maintaining an out-of-equilibrium state, England speculates. (It's as if that cup of coffee spontaneously produces a chemical reaction that sustains a hotspot in the center of the fluid, preventing the coffee from cooling to an equilibrium state.) He calls this situation "dissipation-driven adaptation" and this mechanism is what drives life-like qualities in England’s otherwise lifeless physical system.

A key life-like behavior is self-replication, or (from a biological viewpoint) reproduction. This is the basis for all life: It starts simple, replicates, becomes more complex and replicates again. It just so happens that self-replication is also a very efficient way of dissipating heat and increasing entropy in that system.

In a study published July 18 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, England and co-author Jordan Horowitz tested their hypothesis. They carried out computer simulations on a closed system (or a system that doesn't exchange heat or matter with its surroundings) containing a "soup" of 25 chemicals. Although their setup is very simple, a similar type of soup may have pooled on the surface of a primordial and lifeless Earth. If, say, these chemicals are concentrated and heated by an external source – a hydrothermal vent, for example – the pool of chemicals would need to dissipate that heat in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics. Heat must dissipate and the entropy of the system will inevitably increase.

Under certain initial conditions, he found that these chemicals may optimize the energy applied to the system by self-organizing and undergoing intense reactions to self-replicate. The chemicals fine-tuned themselves naturally. These reactions generate heat that obeys the second law of thermodynamics; entropy will always increase in the system and the chemicals would self-organize and exhibit the life-like behavior of self-replication.

"Essentially, the system tries a bunch of things on a small scale, and once one of them starts experiencing positive feedback, it does not take that long for it to take over the character of organization in the system," England told Live Science.

This is a very simple model of what goes on in biology: chemical energy is burned in cells that are – by their nature – out of equilibrium, driving the metabolic processes that maintain life. But, as England admits, there's a big difference between finding life-like qualities in a virtual chemical soup and life itself.

Sara Imari Walker, a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University who was not involved in the current research, agrees.

"There’s a two-way bridge that needs to be crossed to try to bridge biology and physics; one is to understand how you get life-like qualities from simple physical systems and the other is to understand how physics can give rise to life," Imari Walker told Live Science. "You need to do both to really understand what properties are unique to life and what properties are characteristic of things that you consider to be almost alive […] like a prebiotic system."

Emergence of life beyond Earth?

Before we can even begin to answer the big question of whether these simple physical systems may influence the emergence of life elsewhere in the universe, it would be better to understand where these systems exist on Earth first.

"If, when you say 'life,' you mean stuff that is as stunningly impressive as a bacterium or anything else with polymerases and DNA, my work doesn't yet tell us anything about how easy or difficult it is to make something that complex, so I shouldn't speculate about what we'd be likely to find elsewhere than Earth," England said. (Polymerases are proteins that assemble DNA and RNA.)

This research doesn't specifically identify how biology emerges from nonbiological systems, only that in some complex chemical situations, surprising self-organization occurs. These simulations do not consider other life-like qualities – such as adaptation to environment or reaction to stimuli. Also, this thermodynamics test on a closed system does not consider the role of information reproduction in life's origins, said Michael Lässig, a statistical physicist and quantitative biologist at the University of Cologne in Germany.

"[This] work is indeed a fascinating result on non-equilibrium chemical networks but it is still a long way from a physics explanation of the origins of life, which requires the reproduction of information," Lässig, who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.

There’s a critical role for information in living systems, added Imari Walker. Just because there appears to be natural self-organization exhibited by a soup of chemicals, it doesn't necessarily mean living organization.

"I think there's a lot of intermediate stages that we have to get through to go from simple ordering to having a full-on information processing architecture like a living cell, which requires something like memory and hereditary," said Imari Walker. "We can clearly get order in physics and non-equilibrium systems, but that doesn't necessarily make it life."

To say England's work could be the "smoking gun" for the origin of life is premature, and there are many other hypotheses as to how life may have emerged from nothing, experts said. But it is a fascinating insight into how physical systems may self-organize in nature. Now that researchers have a general idea about how this thermodynamic system behaves, it would be a nice next step to identify sufficiently out-of-equilibrium physical systems that naturally occur on Earth, England said.

And while searching for the above story I came across this oddity:

https://www.space.com/38922-extraterres ... ation.html

Bacteria 'from Outer Space' Found on Space Station, Cosmonaut Says: Report
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | November 28, 2017 08:47pm ET

Scientists have detected living bacteria "from outer space" in samples collected from the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS) during spacewalks, cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov told Russia's state-owned TASS news agency.

These spacewalks were conducted by cosmonauts, who collected material from the Russian part of the ISS using cotton swabs, which were sent to Earth for analysis, Shkaplerov said.

"And now it turns out that somehow these swabs reveal bacteria that were absent during the launch of the ISS module," Shkaplerov told TASS. "That is, they have come from outer space and settled along the external surface. They are being studied so far, and it seems that they pose no danger."

In the brief TASS report, Shkaplerov does not elaborate on how the Russian researchers arrived at their extraterrestrial conclusion. As CNET notes, it seems like Earthly contamination would be tough to rule out, given how hardy many microorganisms tend to be. Some bacteria, and tiny micro-animals known as tardigrades, have demonstrated the ability to survive for extended periods in the harsh conditions of space.

And terrestrial organisms may have accidentally made their way to the ISS before, if a controversial 2014 claim by Russian space officials is to be believed. Back then, space station official Vladimir Solovyov announced, also via TASS, that sea plankton and other microorganisms had been spotted in cosmonauts' spacewalk samples.

The sea-plankton claim, and that of Shkaplerov, are based on Russian research, so NASA doesn't have much to say about them. Indeed, a NASA spokesman referred questions about Shkaplerov's space bacteria to Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency.

Shkaplerov has served two stints aboard the ISS and is set to launch on his third mission next month.

You can read the full TASS story here: http://tass.com/science/977591

[dada]

But "giving a shit" and "not giving a shit" are things that humans do. What the universe does might be beyond what the dualistic mind can conceive.

I agree that searching for a temporal explanation of life is an interesting exercise. I certainly find it fascinating. Although we have to place time before consciousness to do it. Yet time itself is a product of consciousness, possibly.

The universe may not function on dualistic principles, is what I'm trying to get at. We haven't yet found a way to bridge the gulf between relativity and quantum mechanics. Right now we have two ways of looking at the universe scientifically, both equally valid from their respective points of view. I hate to say it, but it's just as possible that instead of resolving this into one elegant theory, we'll end up discovering a third, equally valid theory. Instead of synthesis, the universe will just appear messier. It's enough to drive a scientist mad.