Hi all

I begin to wonder again - Has Actualism offered
an existential solution to the ills of human existence and if it has , then why would you go ahead
with Buddhism and want to "get out" of rounds and rounds of existence(assuming that you do
believe in rebirth) ? Buddhism is about not wanting to be here while Actualism is the opposite
of that.

Or is it that AFers are unable to see something ? maybe a subtle craving / ignorance that the
Buddha knew ? From the claims of AF people, it appears that they are free from stress/suffering/unease.

Is it that by coming out of rounds and rounds of birth one is becoming free of
possibility of physical suffering also ?
Is this the crucial point that AFers are missing ? because even if you are an AFer , you would have
to go through the physical suffering of ageing , illness , heat , cold etc ? How about the physical
suffering of anal electrocution or gas chambers or other forms of torturous and slow deaths ?
The probability of these events might be low but is it that Buddhism is aiming for the fail-safe
i.e utter extinction of birth ?

It is utterly important to know an answer to this as this will dictate one's practise. Without
knowing an answer to this(and being sincere about the answer), one cannot have a dedicated
effort..without dedicated efforts , results will obviously not follow.

I met a theravada teacher monk and he said that you would not want to keep coming
back if you were utterly satisfied..its because you are unsatisfied( aka have craving) that
you would want to keep coming back. However , I find that AFers are totally satisfied
and enjoy being here. Who among the two of these is deluded then ?

any thoughts ?

- Shashank

I have always had a very simple view of this:

HAITMOBA = Vipassana.

At their core, both involve paying close and continuous attention to the present moment. At some point there's a dis-identification from the objects of mind and body, resulting in permanent bliss and the end of suffering. Check out Linda Claire on youtube - she's enlightened.

I suspect the end point is exactly the same. I know there's lots and lots of argument against that, but Richard for one gets lost in wordplay, imo. I think others do too.

Terrified of returning again and again-- mental proliferation of fearful thoughts on the topic of rebirth
Desirous of returning again and again-- mental proliferation of desirous thoughts on the topic of rebirth
Are these that different? Releasing proliferation here and now, letting the timeless clarity of this moment shine, relaxing body mind and energy and living one's life in the light of empty impermanence and compassion... would it matter much what happens at physical death?

What difference does a speculative view about the nature of reality make? Well, it can motivate one to practice, sure. And yet, when it is merely a *speculative* view about 'Reality' can one count on it to motivate one consistently? Or might it be an unstable, unreliable motivator? Might one then vacillate in one's practice as one's belief in various constructs waxes and wanes?

If belief in a particular narrative comes and goes with conditions, and this is the basis of motivation for one's practice, how consistent will one's practice be?

If there is anything in one's practice experience that has the flavor of the timeless and the true, reliable, a refuge, directly in one's experience, then wouldn't it be wise to return to and investigate that again and again? And investigate that which (seemingly) obscures and/or distorts that? And make that experiential insight the basic motivator of one's practice of investigation and mind training rather than speculative views?

Hey, Shashank,

From what I've seen from you around these forums, it seems you've been trapped in this internal debate for a long time, and that you are expending a lot of energy in trying to contrast and compare two completely different methods.

I suppose you began your practice with Buddhism. If that's the case, it seems that you then encountered actualism and you found something meaningful in it, but, for some reason, you are having a difficult time to stick to it completely. A lot of us were at your position and refused to leave buddhist practices, maybe because of fear of change, maybe because of not wanting to throw away years of spiritual effort, or because plain adherence to dogma. I can think of about eight people around here that made the decision of leaving the spiritual practices behind and give the actualism method a chance wholeheartedly. I say this because it was only after that decision that they saw the difference between both methods and discarded these kinds of questions you are asking {which don't make any sense from the actualist perspective}.

It also seems you are waiting for some intellectual answer to justify your efforts towards some practice, when the only answer that is going to really push you on that road is an existential one. So, IF you want to have an experiential rather than a theoretical answer to them the actualist way, I would suggest you ask yourself the following questions...

- Why do I have this cynic view that this present life on earth is painful?
- What are the beliefs and feelings behind that cynicism?
- What role does the spirituality's and real world's 'wisdom' is having here?
- Am I in Buddhism for Buddhism's sake or am I in it in order eliminate psychological and psychic suffering and have a better life? If it's for the second reason... Am I willing to take a different route if such route seems better at achieving that goal?
- What is behind all the philosophizing, theorizing, intellectualizing? Why am I trying to get an intellectual or intuitive answer instead of an existential/down-to-earth one?
- How all the preview points are a defense mechanism from from my self/Self?

Obviously, feel free to ignore them if you're not that interested in pursuing an actual freedom from the human condition based on the actualism method.

Regards,

Felipe

I don't suffer any existential angst or anything like that now which I used to before which has gone away after I started Buddhist practices. I don't think that Buddhism is about not wanting to be here. I don't subscribe to rebirth philosophy and it doesn't have any effect on me.

You wouldn't...


Right. The idea with Buddhism is that anything one can experience in this life is not ultimately satisfying, so the best thing to do is make sure you never get born again. The idea with actualism is that life is inherently enjoyable and meaningful if only one can extirpate one's affective faculty entirely.


Actual freedom is definitely an ignorant way of being/a delusional way of being, in Buddhist terms.


True, if you are alive then you will feel pain, and if you are dead/non-existent then you won't. But is it worth dying to avoid pain, to give up the inherent enjoyability of being alive?


Tru dat


If you are utterly satisfied why wouldn't you prefer to enjoy that as much as possible?

Simple views are nice if they are correct, but not so nice when they are wrong.


What makes you think the actualism method is about disidentifying from the objects of mind and body?


It's not that Richard gets lost in wordplay, it's that those who converse with him on the internet get sidetracked into wordplay instead of addressing the meat of what he is saying.

Extinction of birth occurs in both Actualism and Buddhism.

The end goals of the two are the same. Actualism is about going into oblivion. Oblivion is the same as nirvana (they are synonymous). The below describes oblivion/nirvana.



(If re-birth is true) then actualism would end re-birth. In fact, actualism may be an even stronger reassurance of not being re-born since there is no cycling and sleep is oblivion(nirvana) only (assuming the state Richard has obtained/describes).

You gotta understand homey. The problem with AF is the same problem with all things in life. PCE's and even AF are impermanent. You think you will be born in your next life with AF? No.

Keep in mind anyone who believes in sila has to believe in rebirth. Rebirth is not such a crazy idea and is actually a much more mathematically elegant idea explaining phenomena in the universe than a single life.



It sounds to me like you already know the answer to this and already know the counter reply to your own question. So follow it.


-d

(Note: I am not an "AFer")

If someone attains AF (exactly as Richard describes) they will not be re-born. "Birth is destroyed, the spiritual life has been lived, what had to be done has been done; there is no more coming back to any state of being."

On the other hand, if someone attains 1st-4th path as described here and in MCTB there is a good chance they may still be re-born (assuming re-birth is true) since there is still asavas/becoming/being. (Though according to the Buddha such people are destined for final nirvana in 7 lifetimes/embodiments or less).

On the other hand, Buddhism and other traditions also state that you can attain parinirvana/moksha at the moment of death without having any paths at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asava

I would say go for AF. And once you get it look into the Buddhist 2-fold emptiness teachings rather than accepting all of the AF views as reality.

The advantage is you loosen your attachment to both AF and Buddhism.

Beo, I've made an effort to see the difference, but all I see is similarity. This is happening a lot lately. Everything I read and watch matches up; it's like i can see they are all saying the same thing in their own language. And it's the language that creates the problems of disagreement. Person A uses the word "love", and person B superimposes his own meaning onto person A's word, missing the point entirely. Similarly person A has no idea what person B means when she uses the word "love", despite it being explained in detail. Other than fundamentalist views, nothing I have ever read sits outside the Perennial Philosophy. It all looks the same to me once the words are understood in the way the author intended.

I don't think actualism promotes the practice as a process of disidentifying from the objects of mind and body, but I think this happens as a result. By asking HAIETMOBA, one must necessarily adopt the position of the Witness, just as vipassana forces you to do the same. What philosophy or religion dos not have witnessing as the core of its practice?

Indeed, both have an investigative as well as staying as much as possible in the present moment aspect to the
practise however actualism doesn't sound like it leads to dis-identification with mind and body..they clearly say
that its not a dissociative practise.

can you please clarify what you mean by compassion here ? does it mean to suffer when another one suffers ?

I

This is a good pointer thanks.

-

You're right about me coming from the Buddhist framework into Actualism and I had totally
left Buddhism for a year or so until I hit the bottleneck - I simply cannot consider universe
to be benevolent..can you and in what way ? Apart from that , there are other things
such as infinity and eternality which bother me and remember that Richard
will not consider you AF if you disagree.

I think its all boiling down to the question of whether Buddhism is
aiming for the fail-safe i.e to never come back and thus never having to go through ageing, illness, heat, cold
and countless other uncertainties

yeah , its all boiling down to this one question now - whether I will trade in physical suffering for the sheer enjoyability of being alive ? something that I need to ponder more..



Indeed, thats what I'm also thinking..

This sounds paradoxical to the goal of Actualism...its like you get into the groove in a party and its right then
when the party ends...what I mean is that if rebirth is true and Actualists have finally landed into freedom and
destroyed rebirth, then after so many births they just get to enjoy a few years in their last birth

hmm I'm not sure if thats the case..can you please explain a bit more

can you please explain more when you say that Buddism is not about not wanting to be here ?

Post SE , I never had existential angst either but I do want to settle for what is better and I dunno with 100% clarity
which is the better among the two..

You aren't understanding Richard, Vineeto, Peter, my, etc., words in the way the authors are intending them to. I agree that most religions and philosophies essentially say the same thing in different ways - I see that even more so now than before - but actualism does not fit into all of that. It does if you interpret it as a philosophy/religion, which is what you are doing, but that is not what it is really about.


No, when you practice actualism, you don't adopt the position of a disembodied witness that is separate from the mind and body. The actualism method is to enjoy being alive, period. Asking HAIETMOBA is only a tool to help you be aware when you're not enjoying yourself, so you can start enjoying yourself sooner rather than later. The end result is not that you are a witness disidentified from the mind and body, but rather, that you *are* your mind and your body - that you are not separate from those. How is that the same?

Have you had a PCE? That's all the existential solution that you need.

With the PCE as an anchor on the side of benevolence and deep negative emotions as an anchor on the side of cynicism and pessimism, one can diagnose himself on how much 'me' is present at the moment. The more 'me' present, the more problems and cynical interpretations. Realizing that makes all the difference when one feels that existence on earth is this or that.

I say this because is difficult to explain the benevolence of the universe intellectually, as one can only perceive it when is in a PCE or closer to the PCE. I think you've been full of 'you' all this time, and that's why is difficult to experientially see such benevolence. And also, perhaps, you have forgotten the marvel of previous peak experiences and came back to the cynic buddhist and real world views.

I can attest this personally. For example, I've been diagnosed with two chronic diseases. When I received the news months ago, life on earth seemed like a hell full of pains and problems {actually, at that moment, I felt and comprehend the need for universal compassion and the seed of god in 'me', but that's another topic}. Now that I've seen through some illusions and I've dismantled a lot of my identity, and therefore am closer to EEs and PCEs, I perceive the same 'hell' from a completely different perspective. The 'hell' part was only an input of 'me'. As the universe has proved to be friendly to me in many other ways, I'm confident that even in sickness I can enjoy my time here on earth, until I die.

I agree with you that sickness is a pretty challenging issue but, I insist, is only experientially -and never intellectually- that you're going to experience the benevolence that completely destroys the resentment of being here, now.

My advice will be to try to get into a PCE or try to dismantle the identity for a couple of years while savoring the differences between 'me' and 'absent-me' states. If you get into a PCE, marvel at the marvel, wonder at the wonderment, enjoy the enjoyment of that moment. You need to experientially know and take notes of those aspects in order to get into the pure intent thing, too.

Perhaps you experienced perfection and benevolence at some point in your actualist practice but the good old buddhist dissociation provoked you to miss {and, therefore, not remember} their greatness.

Richard states that his condition is beyond normal nirvana and is actually an embodied state of parinirvana (the final end of all re-birth).



Source: http://actualfreedom.com.au/richard/listafcorrespondence/listaf16.htm

The Buddha also describes an apperceptive state (only oblivion):



Richard is not saying there is no afterlife, he is saying there is no afterlife in actuality. However, the Buddha rejects the notion of annihilation (simply language that Richard uses) because there is no "being" or entity or inherently existing person/thing here ever in the first place.



The Buddha would say it is not annihilation because there was never an "ego, soul, self, or Self" in the first place. It was a delusion/illusion that was causing the process called re-birth (assuming this re-birth is true in such a condition).

I've seen a lot of crazy things and have experienced a lot of crazy Siddhis but I think this is my favorite one tom lol. I am humbled and did not know dhamma and attainments were so powerful.

No it doesn't. We've been through this before I think on these fora. It's not hard to do a little research and find out what different schools of Buddhism say about this, and if you don't cherry pick quotes which reinforce Actualist fundamentalism, you will quickly see there are a variety of descriptions of 'compassion' or better karuna which have nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with suffering when another suffers. Dude, that is a Christian notion lol and maybe not even that. Seriously, practice is definitely important, but so is study, and today that means having some anthropological and historical and philosophical awareness. It will innoculate you from falling for something so ridiculous as Richard's worldview. (Now if you enjoy the fruits of actualist practice, well that's fine and your choice; but seriously, buying into his worldview is just embarrassing at this point-- in some ways more embarrassing than a person in traditional society buying into a given mythic worldview, simply because there is little excuse nowadays for buying into *any* worldview.)

The traditions I resonate with differentiate between love and compassion in this way:

love is wishing others well, or intending to benefit others,

while compassion is wishing others freedom from suffering, or intending/acting in order to reduce others suffering.

The latter generally has two forms: reducing/eliminating relative suffering (giving a homeless person five bucks, maybe) and then guiding others in practice, i.e., showing someone how suffering originates in their attitudes and mental behaviors rather than in their circumstances-- helping others develop insight, in other words. Either of these things could be accompanied by any affect or none at all; totally beside the point imo.







Sure, you're welcome.
I would elaborate a bit by distinguishing between view and method. A method like 'enjoying this moment' and the auxiliary methods of investigating and deconstructing the way we actively interrupt/disrupt/distort natural joy and clarity and freedom might produce very different results based on whether we harbor views about the nature of existence which suggest that experience if fundamentally flawed and in need of fixing or not, for example. Traditions like Taoist Zuowong and Dzogchen and Chan are pretty clear that our natural state is perfectly good. Illusory lack of perfect goodness is imaginary. The ramifications of not noticing that this imaginary stuff is imaginary are all manner of emotional reactions. Therefore our overt suffering obviously depends on the presence of feeling and imagination. Yet according to these traditions this is not the essence of the matter. Rather, simply failing to see the imaginary as imaginary is the root issue which leads to these disturbed emotional dramas. When seeing imagination as imagination ones feelings (energy) will not be distorted and disrupted by that ignorance and suffering abates. Obviously if you eliminate imagination and feeling (AF) you will also eliminate suffering. Also if you eliminate existence or conscious experience altogether (paranirvana) you will eliminate suffering.

It doesn't follow in either case that eliminating these factors is necessary for eliminating suffering. In each case these goals are the output of a conceptual view that is dualistic. In the ancient Indian idea, there is a fundamental dualism of the unconditioned and conditions. The goal is elimination of conditions. In fundamentalist actualism, the dualism is between the 'real' and the 'actual', and the goal is the elimination of the 'real' or psychic.

There are all manner of such dualisms in various traditions. For instance in dzogchen there is a tendency to dualize conceptual states and nonconceptualize states and thus a false goal of eliminating all conceptuality may arise. And so on...

So methods may be applied in lieu of conceptual views which dualize experience and create a project of experience management in which 'you' need to accomplish some project of fixing experience.

The outcomes of applying methods of whatever kind in lieu of such dualizing views which support a mechanistic and manipulative application of said methods may be very different than when employing such methods in dualistic manipulative ways right? Perhaps this is worth exploring?

Thanks Tom
It is pretty evident when reading Richard's writings that he is highly ambivalent and sophistical in the distinction of the 'real' and the 'actual'.

While his materialist followers are happy to reduce the actualist discourse to a materialist one in which everything but the 'physical' is 'merely' imaginary, Richard seems to believe in psychic phenomena and that AF is the actual (hehehe) elimination of the psychic. It is very tricky because he also says that the psychic entity, or 'me', never was. However he in many places speaks of the psychic effects of his attaining AF and the ways in which VF folks affect the psychic web.

I submit this is what happens when a cultivator does not understand the relationship between his/her views and methods, and employs methods in the context of a highly dualized view (real vs. actual, unconditioned vs conditioned, or what have you).

The important question we can explore as a community of mature and dedicated practitioners is:

what can be accomplished in terms of reduction of suffering/enhancement of enjoyment (for all, not just for 'me' OR for me as this flesh and blood body) outside of the context of dualistic presuppositions and experience management, self manipulation, self destructive subtle contemplative violence????

I think that will be a good outcome, leaving both boats at the shore.

Can you first explain how you got the idea that Buddhism is about not wanting to be here?

Don't the Buddhists want to end the cycle of birth and death and thus implying that they do not
want to be here ? I myself incline towards not wanting to be here because of the possibility of physical suffering
again and again...
no wonder the Buddha mentioned this in the very beginning of the First NT...birth , old age, sickness
and death - these are all related to physical suffering and the only fail safe way to end this forever
is to not have a birth in the first place..

Hi Claudiu,

ok, thanks.

Is the practice of Actualism about noticing you don't feel good and then deciding to feel good?

Also, what would you say is Richard's motivation for action - any action. For me it's desire. Anything I do, from the mundane to the complicated is motivated by the desire to be happy. Is the idea to bypass the need for an external outcome in order to feel happy?

If so, how does one "just be happy"?

It doesn't matter. By "being" "here" (now) you transcend the notion of "being" and "here." It is the false notion of "I" "being" "here" that is (theoretically) creating the cycle of birth and death in the first place (as well as the non-theoretical/experimentally verified craving/aversion). "Here" (samsara) is being generated from not wanting to be "there/here" (nirvana/oblivion/now). Therefore, by being here (now), you are already "being" "there/here" (nirvana/oblivion/now). Nirvana is always already the case (found in now and always "here"). This is why Richard states that anything other than now is 180 degrees from oblivion/nirvana. The cycles rotate around the edge of now/oblivion/nirvana and continuously converge to a point/singularity(fruitions), like in a black hole (yes, a black hole has everything to do with it). Actual Freedom goes straight into the singularity and bypasses the rotation around the outside (this is also done by Bahiya in the Bahiya sutta). This is the only difference between Buddhism and Actualism.

Hi CCC,



Perhaps the following posting by Trent is helpful. I found the message compelling even if I don't practice actualism.

http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/2733454#_19_message_3330281

Metta,
Simon

just so that it is clear, here is something by the Buddha from the Cula-sihananda sutra :-

The way I understand it is that if you cling to any view, then you are given to favoring and opposing and so on up to the point that it can cause some suffering.

Now that I clearly understand that this causes suffering, I'm not clinging to any idea and hence not given to favoring and opposing whether Buddhism is about not being here or not.

My only reason to have started Buddhist practices was aimed at reducing suffering in this very life. I didn't start it to be known as a scholar of Buddhism or to have a better life in the next one. To that end, it has helped me tremendously. But then I don't cling to any view!

You might consider D Z's advice regarding how to approach Buddhism and Actualism.

I think that simplification misses an important point. The method is not to decide to feel good, thus ignoring whatever it is that makes you feel bad. Pretending you aren't angry won't stop you from being angry. The method is doing whatever you can to feel good. Maybe if you're angry you go calm yourself down somehow, because reasoning yourself out of being angry while you're angry rarely works, then you later reflect on what it is that made you angry so you don't have such a reaction again. When it becomes obvious how good it feels to feel good, then you have more and more motivation to never feel bad again, so you set out to make that possible.


I don't think everything you do is *directly* motivated by the desire to be happy. Maybe if you follow a few chains of spurious logic, you can always say "right, but I was angry because ultimately I want to be happy". But no, more likely you were angry because something triggered off an ancient and primitive fight response in you and you were just acting it out exactly in the manner evolution has shaped your genes to do.

When you are already in a good mood, though, isn't there a tendency to want to seek the best in life? There is little reason to antagonize others if you're feeling good yourself. Doing anything becomes fun, and your intelligence can operate more freely, so you're constantly finding better ways to do whatever it is you are doing. If you cook an omelette 12 times and you're in the least bit interested in what you're doing, the 12th will taste better than the 1st. Feeling good provides a hint of what actual freedom is like as it's somewhat an imitation of it.

I wouldn't say Richard is motivated in the usual sense, in the emotional one, but he still has a preference of pleasure over pain, of well-made croissants over poorly-made ones, of good coffee vs. bad, of having his fellow humans enjoy themselves vs. not. So, from a position of already being utterly and completely satisfied with life regardless of what happens, he simply lives his life in whatever way he wants to.

Tom, the oblivion Richard is talking about is an oblivion (annihilation of self and Self) *as a flesh and blood body*. It's only the oblivion of the identity, not of *everything*. In such a state one still experiences sights, sounds, tastes, etc., and that *is* the final goal. And when Richard says there is no afterlife in actuality, he means that there actually isn't an afterlife, period, as "actuality" refers to this universe the way it really/actually is:
So the point isn't to become actually free and then die, it's to live while actually free.

On the other hand, as you said, Buddha's oblivion consists of the oblivion of *everything*. It's where "water, earth, fire & wind have no footing". There are no stars shining there, no sun, no moon, and no darkness, paradoxically. It's a freedom from form and formlessness, from bliss and pain... which is quite different from continuing to exist as a body, seeing the sun and the moon and darkness and having form, feeling pleasure and pain, etc. True release only occurs for an Arahat where he dies. If the end goal was to be enlightened and alive, then why all the fuss about Paranirvana?

Which is I think the point Richard was making. Buddhism's Paranirvana only occurs after you die (the reward is after death), but actual freedom is sort of the equivalent except you still get to be alive.

Source: http://dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3311808

The above statement shows that Richard does not actually know whether re-birth is true or not.

Richard could be making such statements of strong assurance/belief in the falsity of re-birth as a way to motivate people to go all the way with the Actualist method. Otherwise, the illusory "self" may hold onto the belief in re-birth and not dedicate "itself" to going all the way into oblivion. If people are convinced that there is no afterlife (for every living creature), they will be significantly more motivated to do this.

Claudiu,

You say: "The method is doing whatever you can to feel good".

This sounds like what I already do. My method is to ask myself "How can i feel better than this?"...and then "How can I feel even better again?". Then I do something, i act, or i change my thoughts from negative to neutral. I think this is how happy people go through life, having observed a few.

So for example: "How can i feel better than this?" I feel hungry, so i get a sandwich and I notice I feel better. "How can i feel even better?" I notice I'm bored, so I switch the computer on and notice I feel a bit better. "how can I feel better again?"...I notice I'm cold, so i put the heater on and notice I feel better. "How can I feel better again?" I notice my body feels tense, so I change my thoughts to something more neutral......and so on.

This is the life of noticing what's wrong and fixing it, or the life of a "normal person"!! But what if you're in a prisoner of war, trapped in some dungeon for god knows how long, maybe till you die? How would you practice then? Continually changing your thoughts won't work for too long.

Perhaps Richard has mastered the art of living in the Zone/Flow state? If so, that sounds good. What do you think?

All that sounds reasonable, except potentially the "change my thoughts to something more neutral"... what do you mean by that, exactly?

But yes, the idea is to enjoy your life as much as possible, be it affectively (felicitous feelings) or apperceptively (which is intrinsically enjoyable).


I don't know, but neither you nor I are in that position so it's not really relevant to us is it? However, to keep it a bit more relevant, sometimes things happen that you can't fix by changing the environment around you. Even in those situations, it's not worth it to feel bad. But you do feel bad about it! What to do? The only way is to change who you are.

But if you're trapped in a dungeon, probably the best thing to do first is to try to escape...


Potentially. I was just reading the wikipedia article on Flow and noticed it had a lot of qualities that apperception does. But they're not necessarily the same thing.

First of all, that isn't a quote of Richard, that's a quote of Justine quoting Richard, which might not be verbatim or might be misremembered. Secondly, even if he did say something along those lines (which I think I remember reading on the AFT, but can't find now), it doesn't mean he doesn't know whether re-birth is true, it means that he's asking you to consider the hypothetical: even if it were, this life would still be your first & last, so it's still worth it to live it as well as possible.


Richard doesn't say things that are false/not necessarily true/that he doesn't know in an effort to motivate people. He is entirely self-consistent. He also doesn't appeal to people's "selves", despite many asking him to do so. This whole notion of adopting whatever view suits you so long as it gets you "there" has nothing to do with actualism and more to do with the nature of that spiritual "there".

The assurance that there is no re-birth comes from his knowing that he is just a flesh and blood body. A 'soul' is just a product of a flesh & blood body's brain operating with an identity present. It can't escape the body and be re-born into another one because it is a product of the body. Thus any notion of rebirth is just wishful thinking. When the body dies so too does the 'soul'. The 'soul' is not a separate thing.

I mean, change from negative-flavoured thoughts to neutral-flavoured thoughts. I notice that negative-flavoured thoughts make me feel bad so I change them to ones that don't. It sounds like the idea is to train your mind out of negativity, as CBT does. Or take some sort of action that creates a solution. If one was to go to a psychologist, they would use CBT and action-oriented solutions with most people I'd expect. But I wouldn't expect many patients to become blissfully happy - at least I've never heard of that. I think if CBT + action-based strategies caused bliss and complete freedom, the media would be all over it.

Regarding the dungeon and a possible solution, you say "The only way is to change who you are". What does that mean? What am I at the moment?

Can you give an example? Why are you having the negative-flavoured thoughts? What do you make yourself think instead? How does that change the underlying feeling that was making you think those thoughts in the first place?


Forget the dungeon and let's just talk about normal life. It's who, not what, you are. When a situation makes you upset or angry, then who you are is someone who gets angry at that situation. Who you want to be is someone that feels good despite the situation being what it is. So, you have to change. This doesn't mean not preferring that the situation were different or taking steps to change it, it just means that you're not feeling bad while you are taking steps to change it (if that's what you decide to do).

Negative thought might be something like "the neighbour is driving me crazy with that noise. He's always doing this, despite my complaints" Neutral would be thinking about my breathing for a while.. Why am i having the negative thought? It just happens - so i don't know "why" as such. Probably links in to some memory of the past. It changes the feeling I am experiencing because thoughts create feelings. Is that what you mean?

Becoming a different person - one who is always happy. Is that it? I have heard people say "just be happy" and "don't worry be happy" and "happiness is a choice". Is it just that simple?

Yeah that's what I was trying to get at. Investigate the relation between thought & feeling some more. It's not the thought that creates the feeling, the feeling comes first. The thoughts just let you know that you are feeling bad about something. Changing your thoughts (like thinking about the breath, instead) is just ignoring the underlying feeling without changing it, which will just let it sit there, unnoticed.


Basically, yeah. But you won't get there by thinking about something else whenever you realize you are unhappy. That will just ensure those things that make you unhappy will continue to make you unhappy on some level.

Feeling comes first you say. So all I have to do when the neighbour is noisy is change the feeling. The feeling is in my body and consists of tension. All I have to do is relax the body? By extension, all i have to do to become ecstatic and blissful is relax all the time. Is that what you're saying?

Hi, C C C,

This quote always come in handy when the kind of question you are asking arises...



This is one example of how the actualist method differs vastly from some vipassana practices of attending to bodily sensations. In actualism, the tension is just a symptom of 'me' reacting some way. Becoming aware of the tension and then relaxing without questioning why the tension arises implies missing a great opportunity of dismantling the feeling that is causing the tension in the first place.

Again, just noting here what the Buddha had said on this and also rejected this view as unconducive to the goal :-

From the Brahmajala sutra :-

Yes, but it's not like the feeling is an enemy that you have to conquer. It is part of who you are. It's just you.


No not at all. The feeling causes bodily tensions, yeah, but trying to 'fix' the bodily tension is trying to fix the symptom, not the cause. It's like if you have an illness that makes you cough, so you take a drug that makes your lungs so relaxed they cannot cough anymore. Yes, you're not coughing, but you still have the illness.

You have to understand that, along with thoughts and bodily sensations, there's also emotions, and the emotions are something else. The emotions make up who you are, and they are what you have to address if you want to feel consistently happy.

So, relaxing the body won't do anything. You just have to ask yourself what is bothering you, and why. Then you have to decide whether it's worth it to keep feeling that way. If the answer is 'no', then you have to figure out why you are continuing to feel that way even though you don't want to. It means you are split - part of you doesn't want to feel bad, but another part of you is feeling bad (the bad feeling itself). So, why does that part of you keep wanting to feel bad? Don't treat yourself like an enemy or you will make it impossible to figure yourself out.

I am the emotion that happens in the body. My identity...me...equals emotion. Is that what you're saying? What if there's no emotion? Do I cease to exist?

Why does part of me want to keep feeling bad? To stimulate action of course. If no one ever felt bad about not having a relationship and not having money and not having a house, etc, then nothing in the world would ever happen. Desire drives the whole world. No one would get out of bed if they didn't first make themselves feel bad about not having what they want.

That's the gist of it! Though really, you can have no egoic identity but still have emotions - this is what the Divine Love-style enlightenment is all about (not what people on the DhO/KFD are doing).


That's the gist of it! Identity is formed from emotion, so no emotion means no identity. But there's still the flesh & blood body, which is what you actually are. That won't go away, you'll just be that and nothing else.

But take note that you might feel there's no emotion if you manage to suppress it well enough. But if you have a habit of suppressing emotions until there's just flat affect, you will still be with an affective faculty and with an identity, it'll just be a flat (probably rather boring) one. You can't eliminate the affective faculty by suppressing emotions, although you can hallucinate pretty vividly if you take that approach.


Hmm you might want to re-examine that. Why would someone who doesn't feel bad at all spend hours and hours creating a website to help other people no longer feel bad at all? Why would two people who don't feel bad at all not only get out of bed but also accept my request to go visit them, and then entertain me as their guest for a week?

So the ego is the emotion and what i really am is the body? But I can observe my body (and emotions). If I am capable of observing the body and emotions, then i can't also be them at the same time. I can't be what I observe. I think therefore 'I' exists.

Why would two people have you stay with them? To feel good. Feeling good is the same as avoiding feeling bad. One can't exist without the other.

Basically. More like, the ego (who you think you are) is formed from the emotion, then there's the emotion (who you feel you are), but what you really are is the body.


Not so. That's the wonder of reflexivity. You are the body and you can reflect on that at the same time. One of the many benefits of being a sophisticated enough consciousness. (Not all animals can do that.)


What law of the universe prevents you from feeling good without also feeling bad?

It's more a theory than a law, but yin-yang or duality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang

Claudiu, have you become happy or happier by practising AF? What has has AF given you that vipassana hasn't?

Hi Claudiu:
Just a technical point here: this statement is subjective judgement that depends on imposed personal beliefs. Unless one is an amoeba or cow or other non-human animal, a human cannot know another animal's range of subjective experience (or maybe you attest to supernormal experience (aka: siddhi)?)

To me, what is useful here is a reminder and caution that a person may feel a need to presume to know the minds of others' and such a need confuses presumption and/or need to conclude with what is actual in observation and experience and this need may even conflate "presumption" with "inference". Perhaps that need to presume and assert baseless conclusion is a sign of deep dissatisfaction or a creativity that depends upon a conclusive story?

To me, it is a red flag to accept as a guide or teacher such a person who presumes to know that which they cannot actually, unless one is asking for a guide in "how to presume".

I would not have posted here if you had left out your parenthetical comment "(Not all animals can do that.)" and I am wondering why you assert that when it is not only surfeit but points to your mind/way of experiencing life.

To me, it is relevant to point this out to you as you are speaking to others about ego. And since you add conclusions that you cannot have experienced (the experience of other animals), then this must be related to another of your parenthetical statements: "(who you feel you are)"


[edits]

Hi Katy,



The above statement made me curious, could you explain in more detail the reasoning behind it?

Simon

I get the idea. It does apply to many things and is certainly appealing. But I'd re-examine why it is you think that feeling good is the same as avoiding feeling bad. I wouldn't say happiness is the absence of sadness. You can be neither sad nor happy, for example, just neutral. Human emotions are a lot more varied than just being on a binary scale.

If happiness and sadness were a yin/yang thing, wouldn't they be about 50/50? Half the time you'd feel generally bad, while half the time you'd feel generally good. What if you can do a practice which makes you happier more often? Then maybe it goes up to 60/40. What if it keeps working? Then you can inch your way up to 70/30, 80/20, etc. The goal is 100% happy all the time. Even if you only make it to 90/10 or 99/1 (if you assume you can't do it 100%), that's still pretty good, no?


I am indeed a lot happier now than when I was practicing vipassana. Vipassana was not leading to more enjoyment of life, whereas "actualism" is. And I put it in quotes because it's not really a practice and it's not a belief system you have to adopt which you believe in more and more and thus it works more and more. It's really just the process of figuring out what makes you feel bad and why, and how not to feel bad instead. It is very simple & straightforward.

Katy, amoeba aren't animals. They are in the Kingdom Protista, not Animalia. I don't need to be an amoeba to know that an amoeba cannot think. They are single-celled organisms and have no central nervous system.

My teacher once said "instead of trying to figure out what the meaning of life is, try asking yourself "why am I asking the question [of what the meaning of life is], and, once you answer that then maybe you can ask what the meaning of life is."

I'm happy you are thinking of all these things, but Buddhism is simply to turn around 180 degrees from the world ABOUT what we are experiencing, to the world we are actually in. Mature practice mindfully stands under (understands) any and every arising experience, and in so doing frees one from samsara. Whether or not there is rebirth, you're freed from it (and happy about that), and you are also satisfied in this very life.

What is your deepest intention?

very nice M B

If you believe in sila... you believe in karma... if you believe in karma you believe in heaven and hell.

Sila, through the law of karma, makes you happy and prevents bad things from happening to you. By maintaining good sila you are literally generating happiness vibrations. This happiness is essential as it allows you to reduce your ties to sense pleasures*. If you look at pictures of poor people in other countries, South America, Asia, you can see a layer of peace and contentment that they have. They have little in terms of sense pleasures but because they are live a pure, peaceful, simple life they are content


It is not just bad actions being returned to you through karma that is simply the problem. What if I told you that a large portion of your seemingly "bad moods" for no reason stem from bad karma. You gotta see what I mean.. a nice sized bad karma will result in an action done to you. However, little mini karmas simply accumulate and then the consequence can literally be just a bad mood.


*Note. A lot of people get freaked out about the idea of losing sense pleasures. There is absolutely no reason to be afraid. No matter how far you go you will still enjoy the things you like, it is just that a certain energetic layer of enjoyment from the pleasure is gone from before.

Hi Simon,



Sure.

When someone such as Claudiu makes unfounded presumptions like the following (presumptions italicized):



and


...they show a willingness to embellish a story peppered with facts or to use facts peppered with unfounded embellishment.

Since the DhO is some kind of meditative/lifestyle/ontological/[your thoughts here] forum, we are openly putting our efforts out and about here. If this were a golf forum, I might be positing some other query for Claudiu.

Needlessnessly adding "Not all animals can do that" or "amoeba cannot think" is not needless at all: the person adding this needs to do it or they would stop. And it is a natural way to live merging personal belief with fact---I've got no beef with that. We're hopefully free to live relatively as we choose. Only Claudiu knows why he takes facts and embellishes them with his beliefs. Maybe creativity? Maybe dissatisfied? Maybe anxious? I don't know.

But I wonder why sometimes. To move from meditation to actualism and still need to assert unfounded beliefs --- and then assert them as factual --- suggests there will be another new frame to house the needs of personal belief and another and another...or maybe just a reified personal reality to avoid having to learn other person's methods and lexicons, etc.

But why sacrifice so much openness for no obvious gain? Well, if a person is experiencing misery or aversion or dissatisfaction, I definitely can see why they'd want to create a personal reality--- I would --- anything to get away from the misery, aversion or dissatisfaction.

But I am so grateful for this adequately functioning mind I've got here at the moment. I love knowing and also not knowing and knowing their fluidity: I feel very lucky to be curious, vibrant, engaged. My god, I watched a Daddy Longlegs eat a cheese cake crumb on the kitchen floor last winter. I gave it water and it went between cheese cake crumb and water for 45 minutes, maybe more, but I went to bed. I LOVED laying on the kitchen floor just observing it. How the heck would I know if it's self-aware or not? Why would I assert anything here? Watching and engaging were very nice. So, too, with friends and walking and so on.

My point comes down to something like "scientism" versus "science". Science---it's open exploration, curiosity, questioning, not assuming, not asserting belief into fact, really cleanly distinguishing evidence from assumption. Whereas "Scientism" is more like a self-limiting orthodoxy.

Anyway, what do you think Simon?

Well, Claudiu, that's the thing: they weren't always in the Protista Kingdom. We humans invented both the "Animal Kingdom" and the "Protista Kingdom" for practical effect of categorization, and so Protista came along a little later. Clearly, Protista came about as our human study expanded and we started to challenge our own notion of "what's Animalia?" and this exploration continues to expand.

Anyway, I'm trying to understand how you make the leap from being human and asserting that you know that amoeba do not think and why you need to assert this unknown?

So how is it that you could actually honestly know "amoeba cannot think" and "not all animals can do that"?

it seems to me there are these presumptions:
[indent]1) that self-reflectiveness will occur through mechanisms like whatever gives rise to your own self-reflectiveness (do you actually know all that gives rise to your self-reflective ability?), and/or
2) that you have the senses to detect self-reflectiveness in other species (I think we all know that we can't see like insects, so we really don't know what they see, but we try to form educated, limited understanding), and
3) that you can somehow recognize self-reflectiveness in another species---indeed that you can address "not all animals can do [self-reflectiveness]?", which is to assert a knowledge of all animals such that you can assert the knowledge that not all animals possess self-reflection, and
4) that you know all animals and thus have determined that "not all can do [self-reflection]"[/indent]

Without meaning to offend, I don't think you can assert this in all honesty.

If it unknowable to you, why assert a conclusive view based on thin air, or are these sorts of conclusions personal need? I could understand that.

Why does this matter?
If it does matter, it may be because small acts tend to build into habit. So larger habits of baseless presumption can come from these personal, "little" presumptions.

What underlies the need to assert these? This was not a matter of "being practical" in speech, because what you asserted was surfeit to your reply (to C C C), so those phrases were deliberate additions.

So I also wonder if your practice is still a learned actualism, or if it is becoming more personal, something that maintains your own beliefs and feelings.


[edits for clarity and re-edited and re-posted to shorten up a grande postaccino]

It's not quite so complicated as you make it out. It's pretty clear that my brain gives rise to my self-reflective ability, along with my ability to think. This is easily demonstrated via people getting brain damage, which severely impairs their cognitive functioning. Without a brain, by exactly which mechanism do you propose a life form would form thoughts?

In terms of detecting self-reflectiveness in other animals, you can simply observe their behavior. Moving and reacting to stimulus is one thing - even amoeba can do that - but can they act in ways which indicates they are aware of their existence? I had a fighting fish as a kid, for example, and whenever it saw its reflection in our tank it would attack itself, thinking it was a rival fish. It could not figure out that the reflection was itself. I'd say that's a good indication that my fighting fish is not self-reflective... and it's a far more complicated organism than an amoeba. Note that this is actually a well-known test, the Mirror test. Interestingly, human children don't pass it until they are around 18 months old or so.

I don't know all animals, but a bit of a logic lesson: I didn't say that no animals can self-reflect. I said not all animals can self-reflect, which is equivalent to saying that some animals cannot self-reflect. I only need to give one example for that to be a true statement.

It was enjoyable to read your account of watching and helping a Daddy Longlegs. Clearly the spider has some ability to sense its environment and respond to it. Now think about how a spider-sized human would act in the same situation and you might start to accept the notion that humans are simply smarter than spiders.


It's an important point which follows naturally from understanding that you are a flesh and blood body and that that body being alive is what creates the conditions for your consciousness and self-awareness and capacity for thinking and self-reflection. Awareness is not a mystical force imbued on things in some inexplicable way/arising out of some mystical field which contains all awareness or something of the sort.

So, what belief of yours, Katy, makes you think it is unknowable whether an amoeba can think?

I haven't really read this thread thoroughly, but I thought I would offer my opinion on Richard from a Buddhist standpoint. He sounds very much like an annihilationist teacher. In fact, he would likely fall into the category of a teacher that propounds "wrong view" in Buddhist terms. Not much else to say besides that, but in Buddhism wrong-view treated very strongly as a big no no.

As such I reject pretty much everything he says, his technique is no different from mindfulness of vedana. Yet he identifies the kaya with vedana, and the conceit mana is engendered in his view. Thus he cannot even be free from so called: "identity view".

Hi Roger that,



As my pali is very weak I attempted to 'decode' you message as a learning experience:



I'm not really understanding how this adds up with the actualism method which is described as being "the ongoing enjoyment and appreciation of this moment of being alive".

Metta,
Simon

Hello friend,

Yes, sorry about that. What I meant to say was:



Richard touts the saying: I am my feelings and my feelings are me. He thus already disqualifies himself from any Buddhist attainments. Furthermore he answers the fourteen unanswerable questions, which the Buddha remained silent in regards too, a further disqualification.

Claudiu:
The accurate answer is: it is simply unknown whether or not such species think and how.

For a long time, it was presumed that humans in apparent "vegetative" coma were "brain dead". In actuality, our medical and scientific communities were just "test-dead". We had yet to discover the "Jennifer Aniston" and tennis recognition in the brain, for example. Now, we can easily test apparently vegetative persons for their level of consciousness and communicate basically. It turns out quite a few people are fully aware and not brain dead, though apparently so by our earlier testing knowledge.

So, Claudiu, if you have never experienced amoeba-ness, how do you actually know they think or do not think?
Not having personal experience of amoeba-ness or as a keen and long-engaged observer, how can you measure their thinking if you, too, are "test-dead"?

If you need to make this sort of judgement without actually knowing, how does that need to assert a baseless conclusion affect/deliberately embellish your experience of being alive?

Ah, if you meant that some animals cannot know their own reflection, we easily agree. However, you did not mean this, Claudiu: did you not assert a human "[sophisticated consciousness]" and then you assert that some animals lack sophisticated consciousness to affect self-reflection? You made an example of one knowing what one's body is doing while one is doing it, and a common definition refers to introspective capacity.

A mirror test tests mental recognition of self in a mirror. Obviously, inability to recognize self in a mirror makes no statement whatsoever about self-reflective capacity, else humans without the ability to recognize faces (including their own) would lack self-reflection. Since you and I have met such a person in person, you clearly know your correlation is false, OR you might just be understanding this point right now.

When we test for something we have to make sure we clearly delineate what the results of the test are: mirror tests only test for recognition of self in a mirror image. They do not test for introspection/self-reflective ability. Do you follow this?

Yes, it was fun! And still I am not so brazen to assume what a human-sized spider would do in role-reversal. A crow caretakes a kitten according to youtube video; I never could have imagined that, but I'd feel like a conceited nincompoop now if I'd arrogated something conclusive about crows and an inability to care for stray kittens before-hand. So I do wonder what you get out of arrogating what some animals cannot do.


I don't think it's possible nor impossible to know the mind of amoeba, generally. Let me ask you: have you directly experienced amoeba-ness (or another animal)?

The only way I think a person can affirm this is if they assert siddhic (supernormal) knowledge and this I can just read or hear without judgement. So do you actually know what it is to be amoeba?

If you do not, why arrogate?

Your argument that you have to be something in order to know whether it thinks doesn't hold water. I have never been a rock, yet I know that a rock cannot think. I have never been my friend Max, yet I know that my friend Max can think.

Would you say it's impossible to know whether a rock thinks? What about a virus? What about a bacterium? What about Archaea (formerly known as Archaebacteria)? Next up is protists and we already know your answer to that. So, where do you draw the line, and why do you draw it there?

Note that I don't particularly care whether they do think or not. If there was some stunning experiment wherein we figured out how to talk to amoeba and we taught them english and were then able to converse with them, that would indeed be fascinating. I don't think that will ever happen, though.


I am fairly certain that a person with prosopagnosia would be able to recognize themselves in a mirror, perhaps by moving an arm or two and seeing which mirrored figure's movements correspond perfectly. That's intelligence in action, for you. This is something cats are apparently incapable of doing. Do you really think that says nothing at all about a difference of levels of intelligence between cats and humans?

I think it's implausible that failing a mirror test says nothing whatsoever about a creature's ability to think about its own existence. You brought up science in an earlier post. I think the men and women of science would disagree with you. Wikipedia: "[The mirror test] is the primary indicator of self-awareness in non-human animals and marks entrance to the mirror stage by human children in developmental psychology." Indeed, the Wikipedia article goes further to mention that some scientists are not even certain passing the mirror test constitutes full self-awareness: "On a more general level, it remains debatable whether recognition of one's mirror image can be properly construed to imply full self-awareness."


There are indeed some adorable videos online with animals interacting in interesting ways. I think there was one about an orangutan caring for a duck. There's also one where a female goose becomes totally infatuated with a regular park goer. It is indeed fun to observe all these things. But I do wonder why you get so riled up when I talk about the fact that animals are in general less intelligent than humans. I don't get anything out of it in particular, I'm just sharing how I make sense of the world, the same as I would if I were talking about how computers work.


Hah, are you saying that if I told you I meditated and had a profound experience wherein I grasped the mind of an amoeba and I described what it was like floating around and I told you that there were no thoughts, just this 'squishy awareness', you would accept that as proof that amoeba don't think?

Have you found some physical properties of "pure intent"?

Claudiu,
The above is not something I engaged with you about. I continue to engage with you about your presumptions:



and



because these presumptions (unless you attest to supernormal skills) telegraph your thinking and feeling: a need to presume conclusions and/or knowledge for unknowns.




Do I need to "draw a line", as you say, anywhere? Does open curiosity, observation, study need to be conclusive at the outset or ever? I do say it's impossible to know whether a rock thinks: I am not rock-enough to know this. I simply have some minerals apparently in common with some rocks.

I'm comfortable with the not knowing: that is the actuality of this situation.

The point you are not yet getting: is there any need to make any conclusion in any way here? And what is your need to do this? And is that being alive or pretending to be being alive in an insular, conclusive, pretentious personal reality?

I think you might understand the point here about your presumptions and your actuality if you stick with your sentences which I've excerpted a few times now.

Well, Claudiu, do you think humans are more or less likely to detect human-like thought in amoeba (or all the other animals you presume to know the capacity of their sophisticated consciousness) by starting out with a confident presumption like yours --- "to know that an amoeba cannot think" --- or to start out just not knowing?

Do you think that lacking echolocation says something about human intelligence versus bats?

I don't make conclusions about which I can't know or I correct myself when I see myself assuming. So your question there is silly to me: I wouldn't even compare "intelligence" in a cat and human. If I want a non-invasive means for detecting cancer or imminent death, maybe I'll seek out a cat from such a lineage. If I want surgery, I'll seek out a qualified human.

Mirror tests speak to types of knowledge intra- and interspecies, but levels of intelligence? Levels of intelligence depend on context. Ah, the nasal passages of long-nosed mammals! What do they know??? My word, how can you know if a dog is self-reflective about smells, when you can't know a dog's sense of smell, any dog? Unless you have supernormal.... you know.

Well, this can be anyone's thought; it is recruiting a quiescent, imaginary and vast team ("the mean and women of science") to agree with you in your disagreement with me. Your brain can actually do so much better and actually stand so well on its own and magnificently and brilliantly open and observant without this sort of imaginary team to back you (and without forcing conclusions where there are none actually). That is a potential of a basically healthy human mind like yours.

Oh, Claudiu, use your actual observation and skill! Not a single man or woman of science footnoted that comment. For something so vital, there is no footnote.

Further, there is much debate about the skill of individual scientists and their motivations and how personalities and society drive conclusions. What of the scientists that used to measure racial features and deem "levels of intelligence", to use your words? Does science change magically out of the blue (Yay, one day there simply was no more racist science!), or is scientific understanding a dynamic process which is completely arising from humans and their minds and motivations?

Have you ever seen the men and women of science agree on any one point? I have never heard of this group of people and I would be humbled if they all disagreed with me; I'd stand by my questions to you, but be amazed that they all turned their attention to me.

Claudiu, we're in a chat forum for practical dharma/mental/behavioural/[your words here] practices. If you're in the forum to just air your beliefs, okay. But you seem interactive with others. If you don't like to be queried, okay. But you seem to like to query others.

When people presume to know the minds of other species I love to ask these people (like you) about that when the occasion apt (as it is here on a chat forum of living). It fascinates me that a basically healthy, relatively free person would so easily give up their human mind's capacity for curiosity and wonder and investigation and friendly engagement for no gain but to be symbolically conclusive or self-righteous. It just fascinates me.

But when you make any presumption, I think to engage you. It happens you have spoken conclusively about the minds of animals before. The questions is why do you like to assert your human intelligence above animals? That seems like a buffer to this insecurity, "At least, I'm better than them." Is it?

Don't worry: you are the third person in 12 months I've queried about this. The other two were open, curious and inconclusive by the end as well as well-trained in scientific method and peer review. So I enjoy watching the dynamism and actual open-minded curiosity occurring in many today. But, surely, I love that you have the right to your views and conclusions and to express them no matter what they are.

Nope, and you can re-read what I wrote. There are ten common words included in your except that you might not have observed for reasons I don't know. It baffles me to watch a person exchange a great mind for some small arrogation.

But that's life and you get to choose this, to choose to be blinkered if one wants, and that's quite cool in its own way.

Hey Katy,

It's not a matter of me feeling superior to animals in order to feel better about myself. Though you seem to have quite the air of superiority over me when you write your replies to me.

Take my cat, for example. She is deaf and she is adorable. And I have enjoyed observing her and finding out the amount of intelligence she does show. A few things, for example:
- She recognizes me & all my room-mates
- She misses us if any one of us is gone for a few days
- She's deaf, but she still knows when we get home based on vibrations in the ground & lights turning on.
- She remembers where food bowl & water bowl & kitty litter are & goes to those if she wants to use either one
- She knows that if she wants food, she can come to one of us & meow & we will feed her
- She obviously has likes & dislikes. Like, she prefers certain kinds of food (generally seafood). And she loves to just sit in your lap & be petted. She gets this look of pleasure on her face that, combined with the softness of her fur, is sure to put a smile on anyone's face.

I know that I don't fully understand her. Sometimes I just won't get why she is behaving in a certain way, and I could just dismiss her and say "well she's a cat, she's acting 'crazy'". But, I think there is a reason behind it and I just haven't understood it yet. So, I keep trying to find out so that I may better live with her & have her be happier. Yet, I can show that level of caring while still understanding that I (along with most people) am more intelligent than she is. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm not putting her on a worse slot in some sort of moral scale. It's just that... well, she's a cat. It doesn't make me feel better about myself, it's just the facts of the situation. If an adult human acted on the same intellectual level as my cat does, he would be considered mentally retarded.

Back to amoeba and animal self-reflection. You ask if there is any need to make a conclusion about whether amoeba can think or animals can self-reflect. I say, if you want to be actually free from the human condition, then yes, there is. And I mentioned this before but you did not address that part of my reply. What's important to be actually free is to understand that you are a flesh and blood body, and that the body is the primary thing which leads to awareness/consciousness, not the other way around - that awareness/consciousness leads to the body, as it does in Buddhism where avidya (ignorance) leads to re-birth after the physical body dies. And this, I suspect, is why you assert that it's impossible to know whether rocks think, because for you, awareness in essence is unrelated to anything physical, so nothing in particular would preclude a rock from being conscious on some level and perhaps being able to think.

Once you understand that awareness is a product of the flesh and blood body being alive, then you will see that what I am saying is not part of an insular, conclusive, pretentious reality, but that it makes sense in light of that fact, given what we know today. Take rocks, for example. They are not alive, so as awareness and thinking depend on being alive[1], then they are not aware nor do they think. Unless, that is, there is another as-yet-undiscovered mechanism whereby rocks are aware in some other manner. Though that is unlikely, if the evidence points to that fact then that would be fascinating and I'm certainly not one to deny facts. To say that the actuality of the situation is that it's completely unknown whether rocks can think, though (as in there's a 50% chance they can, and a 50% chance they can't), is to be wrong. It is far more likely that they cannot.

About other forms of life. Since it's the physical structure of the human body that allows awareness, consciousness, thinking, intelligence, etc., to occur, it follows that animals with different physical structures would have different properties. An amoeba does not have a brain, for example, so it could hardly be said to think - though that's not to say it can't react to its environment and even have some sort of short-term memory stored in its single cell. It's simply a matter of a scale. You have rocks on one end, humans on the other, and everything in-between. Personally, I think our efforts to communicate with another animal species as well as we do with each other would be better spent on dolphins or great apes than they would be on amoebas or rocks.

Fair point about my appeal to the "men and women of science", that was an example of the logical fallacy of appealing to authority.

I still don't understand what you meant by asserting siddhic knowledge. Did you mean that, if instead of using intelligence and reasoning to come to the conclusion that not all animals can self-reflect, I said that I had siddhic knowledge of other animal's states of mind and knew, from first-hand experience, that certain animals cannot self-reflect, that you would not have started this conversation with me nor would you be judging me for thinking that not all animals can self-reflect?

Regards,
- Claudiu

---
[1] At least, for now, it does. But one thing that does interest me quite a bit is the notion of machine sentience. Will we be able to build artificial life, out of rocks, essentially, that, as a whole, is self-aware? But our technology is not quite there yet. Maybe in 50 years or so when computers are 33 million times more powerful than they are today, if Moore's Law continues to hold.

This is correct.

I think the use of the word thought is a bit confusing. There is something it is like to experience the world as human (this goes beyond thought / emotion) right down to bare sensory perception.

In philosophy this is called thehard problem of consciousness.

Dogs have 2 type of photo-receptors cells, Humans have 3 types of photo receptors in our eyes (red,blue,green), a butterfly as 5, and a mantis shrimp has 16 kinds of photo-receptor cells.

How is a butterfly or a mantis shrimp experiencing this moment of being alive in terms of their visual sense ? Are they even experiencing this moment of being alive ?

Now even among humans there are people who are color blind, unenlightened, enlightened, actually free, depressed, deaf, extra-sensitive to taste, etc. I don't understand why it is necessary to assert the 'actuality' of one way of experiencing over another.

Hi D Z,


Yeah, for a lot of people there is no necessity to assert a hierarchy or superior levels, because people tend to know that is a trap of conceit (willfully blinding and blinkered).

So when I read or meet people who do --- especially in this DhO forum wherein we're invited to share and query and observe, I love to ask, "Why are you doing that?"

I love to ask myself that when I detect it in me!!! To arrogate is a lose-lose-lose situation in my experience, except that the "ker-pow" moment, the "aye karumba" is often very freeing and a neat sensation to the brain. And it's tremendous to see things in the "new" light without the presumption.

The words refreshing and gratitude come to mind to describe the mental feelings that arise when I see through a presumption I've had.

If a person asserts having seen pink elephants walking through walls, I'm fine with that and no judgement nor need to place nor conclude (i.e., believe nor disbelieve); I take them at their word; I used to run rescue and one hears/sees/ does lots of interesting things during emergency response. People have perceptions and personal experiences; there's very seldom a need for me to judge that. I basically may have to adjudicate if a potential for harm is approaching/increasing because of a person's presumptions. Other than that (pending harm) I can't think of why I wouldn't just listen and appreciate learning how another is perceiving their moment of being alive/life.

But when someone starts to presume, especially myself, I see a so-called red flag: that teacher should not be followed as their practice is fabricating baselessly and is probably insecure in some way. I waited a few years to see a well-known meditation teacher and on the first day this person demoted a school of a certain tradition; at that moment I decided to stay for one week to enjoy extensive sitting and to hear their evening lectures, but I asked myself if a teacher with unchecked conceit was possibly not right for me at that time. I enjoyed the week though and learned some history incidentals from that teacher.

I know the dissatisfaction of conceit myself (and surely will continue to enjoy (?) learning more about this personally), so I doubt that teacher will leave arrogation unchecked for long. Only they know

Wow! May I say, "That's all you" and be taken at my word? That's your creation. I could ask, "Why are you creating that? How does that help you? What do you gain?" For example, maybe one person doesn't like another person so they could villianize the other person to render their dislike quasi-okay or not their own fault. Or maybe you love the way that presumption looks on a lady and you're dolling me up in what would be more lovely to you? I dunno. Anyway, I think that presumption of superiority is yours.

When I ask you about your words and expressions on the DhO it is because
a) it's a chat forum and yer sharin',
b) I assume you're up for bilateral exchange (by virtue of you're being here exchanging), and
c) I'll learn something about you, me, us, is-ness.

If you say, "Enough, already! No more chatting with you, Katy." Okay. That's the new actuality and I'll just go on living until I don't. (And this freedom is not available world over...so it's pretty stellar and I wish everyone freedom to create friendly life conditions).

I don't tend to think in terms of superiority/inferiority. I do tend to think, "What works here to effect xyz? What would help here? What's the effect of... What would be long-term and/or short-term good here and for just me or others" and that's just if I'm planning or shaping something. A lot of times there's just action. Like, I have sh*tload of work to do today and the planning is done and now there's just taking helpful action on those plans and not being too lazy as to ruin/thwart the work.

Yes, no one here has said there's anything wrong with your superior self-regard and your presumption of your view that your cat has a lower intelligence than you. But it's plain to see that no one actually needs to make such a statement, that such a conclusion comes from your mind and its affective need to make that up. For example, we know some cats and dogs can detect and pinpoint cancer well before the doctor, and we humans apparently lack that native intelligence. So what else don't we know about cats because we never thought of ways to engage and we would start, like you, by presuming?

In computer analogy, Claudiu, it looks to me that you add code that is not needed and actually gunks up actuality. But, because you add that extra, I know that affectively you do need that code to be there. So it's kind of like a client saying, "Can you just have that screen pop-up twice?" Okie dokie... Yep, that is okay. It's extra and there's a personal need underlying.



In your experience, what is the human condition?
In your experience, are you free from that same human condition?

Huh? I don't understand what you're saying, what you mean by awareness and you are presuming some unfamiliar things about me when you could make life simpler for yourself and read what I said: I don't know about rocks thinking because I just don't know. I can say I've not seen evidence of human-like thought in rocks, but I'd have to caveat that with I've never checked. I think that's just being candid.

So it seems like you need to see "katy" and "amoeba" and your cat and all animals in some certain light and so you just presume and embellish them to suit affective need. Otherwise, you'd just read what I'm writing, no?

You'd also just know that you don't know about some beings/things/conditions, no? There'd be no need to play omniscient, "Not all animals can do that", "amoeba cannot think" and so on.

You're actually spending mental energy creating extra reality because I guess the actuality of people and others before you are inadequate and need embellishing? It's like a fashion show and you're adding affective boas that make objects suit you.

This I don't know and I so I don't force this kind of personal reality. Maybe awareness precedes bodies, maybe not. You need to presume knowledge of this; me, that's energy I will spend if I want to ponder ontology, but I have no conclusions nor need them.

You're having some trouble sticking with what I say for myself, but can you speak for yourself about how you know "awareness is a product of the flesh and blood body being alive?" and how the converse is not true?

I have no conclusion on this point, but some people just feel more comfortable if they make up a conclusion to ontological questions like this. Are you just making up an answer here that suits you intellectually, or do you actually know?

For practical purposes, I tend to agree with this; so my mind sees "rocks" and generally also colors this with "not-sentient". But, at the end of the day, I'm aware rocks exist much longer than my life and my parents and grandparents and apparently for many, many human generation, so I know that I don't know their actuality. I just don't know nor does anything in me compel me to make a decision here.


For me, it has been a wonder, a source of unexpected energy and something like steady mental enjoyment-engagement to start experiencing conditions/things without presumption. But I see that I do continue to presume quite a bit too. So it's just a steady process of letting the mind just experience versus occluding experience with habitual presumption.

Nothing about this is special or mystic: I've met so many people who just don't presume to know what they don't know, just regular people who are fine with seeing things as they are and doing their lives in a friendly way.

Yeah, well, I've done the exact same thing, Claudiu We can "Live and learn", as the adage goes. It's an incredibly nice capacity and freedom.

Okay. Well, if you had said, "I have supernatural powers and I know that of all animals not all have self-reflective capacity," I would just read that for what it is. You'd be claiming some personal direct, experiential knowledge. I've got no truck with that. I'm only me and so I can just hear people share their actual direct experience of life, siddhic-reality or not.

What judgment has been made of you in our exchange?

I will say I queried you on your words, because my previous experiences with you have been that you seem to me often open and courteous, curious, stable and available to this. I don't assume any outcome with you. I don't ask everyone I meet about their views --- either the context is not apt or it seems that the person would not likely like an investigative exchange of views. So when something like this comes up with you, I tend to look forward to learning something with you. I never know what will happen, but I don't think we harm each other. It seems practical and useful. I trust you would tell me directly and otherwise if this exchange were harming you or were a waste to you, and we could just stop. Cheers.

Haha about the "dolling you up" notion, that's an amusing mental picture, but not quite. Here is my reasoning for saying that you seem to be acting like your way of seeing the world is superior to mine, that you think I am wrong for thinking the way I do, and that you want to change the way I think.

In this thread you have:
- Asserted that my conclusions were baseless in your very first post without asking me why I came to that conclusion (thus showing that from the outset you were not being open-minded as you say you value being)
- Hinted that I am deeply dissatisfied, anxious, miserable, aversive, and dissatisfied again
- Hinted that I have habits of baseless presumption and that I need to assert baseless conclusions
- Hinted that I am insecure and that I get some benefit out of asserting human superiority to animals in certain respects
- Hinted that I live in insular, conclusive, pretentious reality of my own making
- Said that I have some deep-seated need to to embellish facts with made-up stories and that I have a self-limiting orthodoxy
- Hinted that I forsake curiosity and openness in order to be self-righteous
- Hinted that I am conceited and willfully blind and blinkered
- Said that I have superior self-regard and a personal need for that

That's quite a lot of things you are supposing about me, and all because I pointed out that not all animals have the capacity for self-reflection. Further, I get the notion you are doing this in order to 'fix me' because of something you said after the end of our latest exchange:

There you compare your interaction with me as of one with an animal you are training to behave in the way you want them to. Further you said you pursued this topic with two others in the past 12 months and that they came around to your way of thinking, which you praised, contrasting it to what I have been doing (not coming around to your way of thinking).

So, perhaps superiority is not the right term, but how would you describe the way you've been approaching this conversation with me thus far? What do you see if you self-reflect and you ask yourself why you've said all those things about me that I pointed out?

Note that I don't take it personally, and I'm not chiding you or anything of the sort. But you asked why I saw your way of engaging with me as having an air of superiority, and that was my reasoning (though not so fleshed out in a point-by-point manner until I fleshed it out just now). I would not engage with you if I wasn't willing to do so or if I thought there couldn't be some benefit.

---


To presume means to assume something is true without any proof. That is not what I am doing. Do you not agree that if an adult human were to demonstrate exactly the same level of mental proficiency as an adult cat, and no more or no less, he would be considered severely deficient? I didn't say that cats and dogs cannot do anything better than humans can. I certainly can't catch a rat with my bare hands and eat it. My cat far outshines me in that ability.

As for no one needing to make that statement, I don't walk around all day reveling in the fact that my cat, at the end of the day, can't quite match wits with humans in general. But we were talking about it so that's why I mentioned it. Nobody has to sit and communicate on internet forums. It's not 'extra', it's just another fact, like the fact that I can eat cooked chicken and shouldn't try to eat rocks I find on the street.


By human condition I mean the fact that, although most everybody is well-meaning and generally wants life to be as good as possible, still yet there is theft, war, poverty, starvation, rape, violence, etc., among us humans. Why is that? And no, I am not free from it yet, but it's a wonderful process on the way there.


I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, I'm suggesting a reason that you might think the way you do about rocks.

Do you think that everything is equally likely? Is it equally likely that my keyboard will start floating on its own accord and fly out my window vs. it simply sitting on my desk? If yes, then we best end our conversation here. If not, then what is it that makes you think it is equally likely that rocks can think vs. not? Does not all evidence currently known to man point to the fact that rocks can't think? Why do you think that evidence offers zero information as to the nature of rocks' ability to think?


I don't think that I know everything, no. I'm hardly playing omniscient.


Show me an awareness that occurs outside of a living flesh and bloody body. People say they can talk to God and to spirits, true - but is there any proof that is occurring anywhere outside of their own subjective experiences? If there hasn't been any proof to that effect in all of known recorded history, does that not provide some evidence that there can be no awareness outside of a living flesh and blood body?

I also find it interesting that you have no issue with people hallucinating pink elephants, but you do have issue with someone saying they thought about life for a bit and concluded that rocks can't think. The former seems like something that should be far, far more alarming than the latter.

Regards,
Claudiu

Claudiu, how do you actually know these statements you make? (italicized emphasis is added)



and



Your awareness is occurring to me through the internet and our shared written language at the moment.

I don't have an issue with either unless harm comes up and then I need to determine if it would be useful to help abate that harm.

But if a person tells me they see pink elephants, okay. No problem: they are telling me that is their direct experience, that is what and how they know for themselves. Nothing compels me to do anything more than listen to their experience so far.

When I ask you to back up how you "know an amoeba cannot think" or "not all animals can do that", you have yet to answer with evidence of your purported knowledge. To say "I've never seen a amoeba think" is only knowledge of not having seen a amoeba think. Your non-knowledge is not conclusive of anything but that. You could infer, "I don't think amoeba think" and that'd just be your inference.

So how do you directly know anything else?

But why do you not only limit the information your mind has, but also render that lack of knowledge into conclusive knowledge?

People also say that there is such a physical thing as "pure intent".

Also, you have said "You can't eliminate the affective faculty by suppressing emotions, although you can hallucinate pretty vividly if you take that approach."

To me, saying that there is such a physical thing as "pure intent" is hallucinating enough.

Hi,


The men at the root of the two -isms about which you wonder again, both attested that they made effortful long-term commitments to various studies and teachers before they just sat down with their own minds and bodily experience. So they did not, in the end choose any -ism; they eventually committed to a singular, intent self-observation.

I think you probably know this, but sometimes it helps me to have something basic pointed out to me again as I may have glossed over it because it is so simple.

Best wishes.

Some light might be shed on that statement if you consider that by "think" I meant thinking very much the same way humans do, putting together word-symbols in a chain of thought in order to reason about one's environment. That level of thought requires a rather sophisticated brain, which single-celled organisms do not have by virtue of being only a single cell. (Here I am supposing that in order to think verbally, a life form has to have a brain, not to mention a language.)


The statement "not all animals can do that" and "some animals cannot do that" are logically equivalent. Thus, here is one example of an animal that is not currently known to be able to self-reflect: jellyfish, which have no central nervous system. (Here I am supposing that to demonstrate self-reflection an animal has to at least have a central nervous system.)


Yes, but I'm a flesh and blood body over here.


So what harm have you determined it would be useful to help abate when you saw me writing "(Not all animals can do that.)"?


Here you are setting up something impossible to do. You are implying that in order to say that amoeba cannot think, one would have to observe every single amoeba on the planet and conclude that none of them think. Yet that is simply unreasonable. I can say, for example, that there is a porcelain teapot orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars. Yet I would not expect anyone to agree that they have to consider there is a teapot there unless they've checked out all that interplanetary space and found no teapot. I would rather expect that I'd have to prove there is a teapot there.


The world could hardly function if humans were incapable of making inferences based on limited information.

Thanks Katy and best wishes to you as well.

Hi Claudiu,

Claudiu:

If you were making inferences, it would be a different dialog between us or no dialog about your words.

Your comments here are arrogation, not inference.

Claudiu:



and
Claudiu


Inference requires actual experience upon which to base a related, practical conclusion.
Examples:
[indent]1a. when ships arrive from across the sea they become visible as first sail peaks, then sails, then as the ship; a little ship does not appear on the horizon growing continuously bigger; the inference is the ship is traveling on a curved surface, not a flat one.
1b. After seeing this a few times, the inference is only that the surface under the ship has some curvature. (This is incredible hard to conclude given what a person experiences at the shore edge and in water and seeing water level in pots! How can water be existing on a convex curve???)
1c. But this small bit of self-honest awareness in the one standing at the shore everyday wondering openly (despite an abundance of Flat Earth societal conviction) contributed to forming a round earth understanding. Is round earth the whole story? I doubt it just by looking at what I don't know (immeasurable) to what I do know (expanding and contracting).

Or

2a. when phenomena fall and fall and fall and their speed is seemingly only influenced by size and shape (feather versus anvil) not objects' weight, we get to slowly learn about something we name gravity, gravitas-- that which for practical purpose draws/pushes objects back to the earth if they have no shape that can cause a temporary glide or lift.
2b. So we can infer that there exists something influencing this, but if we were to arrogate that "Gravity exists and is constant everywhere"-- well, lots of wondrous phenomena of our lives today would never have come into being. [/indent]

So what you could say -- if you wanted to be actual and in wonder of existing and to be actually capable of learning versus needing to occlude actuality (and I feel that there are sound reason for this blocking off of actuality, I think, and chief among them is need to control/dominate based on some insecurity and these naturally insecure feelings may have contributed to species' survival and our existence... ) in baseless conclusion -- "I don't need to be an amoeba to infer that, practically, they do not seem to write on paper," or some such thing you've repeatedly looked for and can practically determine.

So do you see what is inference and what is arrogation now?

There are sound reasons for anyone to limit their experience of actuality-- being alive can be overwhelming or bizarre or deperessing or astounding or wondrous or joyful depending on the actual environment and community members and one's own experience of being alive (healthy? in pain? content? dissatisfied? insecure? secure?), just as there are sound reasons for being open and candid to actuality, what I, for example, can know and can't seem to know. And then I think that my experience of actuality is limited inherently; I am not omniscient and I can only know what senses detect, and I include the mind in the senses. But on this, even I don't know, so I leave that open, too. There's no reason for me to think on that nor to make any baseless conclusion. Meh.

So some of the scientific community-- and I think this is excellent having been trained in physical and biological sciences-- has begun backing off some arrogation about former conclusions and a conclusive attitude where it is baseless; and so too seem to have some religious persons, and so too even some corporate folk that would presume to know what's best. What is the gain of pretending to know what one does not know other than a threadbare sense of temporary control and all the energy that goes into clinging to and asserting it, plus having a self-limiting view?

If there is a benefit to increasing human populations, one benefit would be that each new generation knows-- regardless of arrogation in your generation or mine-- that there is something else to discover, lots more to re-consider, re-wonder, expand on or utterly outlearn prior so-called conclusions.

So I wonder why you assert conclusions that don't tie to any observation you claim to have made. And what do you gain/protect against?

Katy, what do you mean by "arrogation"? The word means "taking something which is not yours/which you have no right to". You are misapplying it.

---

Is this really a matter of phrasing? What if I instead put it like this:

- From observing a fighting fish attacking its reflection in a mirror when I was a kid, I infer that that fighting fish could not self-reflect.

And:

- From my understanding of what human thinking entails (multitudinous neurons firing in a remarkably complex pattern) and the fact that amoeba have only a single cell, I infer that amoeba cannot think in the same way humans do.

Regards,
- Claudiu

Arrogation : to make undue claims to having : assume

Yours is arrogation of knowledge where you have none. As noted before, you presume to have complete knowledge where you have none and you do not back up your opinions with any substance.

Do you understand now what is inference and what is arrogation?

Inference has an observable basis; arrogation is undue, lacks basis, assumes.

So when you write statements, such as the following:
Claudiu:


It shows that you are willing to make conclusions to establish some reality no matter what actuality is-- where actuality may simply be not knowing.

So why do you that? What to you gain/protect against?

Where others have arrogated in this way, there is often insecurity or the need to look like the so-called sage on the stage (and there can be useful, self-preservationist reasons to do this, so I personally could not say this kind of action is inferior absolutely).

I still don't think you're using the word properly. It refers to making claims to having/assuming the rights to something that is not yours, as in, something that belongs to someone else, for example: rights, property, power, etc. Knowledge does not belong to anybody, so you cannot arrogate it. The "assume" in the definition you gave likely refers to this definition of "assume": "seize, usurp <assume control>".

It sounds like you just mean assume, as in "to take as granted or true : suppose <I assume he'll be there>". Why do I assume knowledge where I have none? Arrogate has such nastier connotations, though, that I'm not surprised you are trying to use it to describe what I'm doing.

Your question now looks like this:

I understand that inference is putting facts together to come to a conclusion, and that assumption is making conclusions without referring to any facts.

I also understand that I have not assumed that amoeba cannot think - I have mentioned multiple times my reasons for coming to that conclusion. I have also not assumed that there exists at least one type of animal that cannot self-reflect - I have mentioned multiple times my reasons for coming to that conclusion, as well. Did you at all read the post that you just replied to? How about addressing my points instead of continuing to repeat yourself? That way we can actually have a conversation that moves forward.

- Claudiu

Claudiu:

Yes.

Please just list below how you actually can know what I've italicized in your words below (letters added for convenience):

Claudiu:

A and B are both reasonable conclusions I've come to due to my experience. What if I put it this way?

A: From my understanding of what human thinking entails (multitudinous neurons firing in a remarkably complex pattern) and the fact that amoeba have only a single cell, I infer that amoeba cannot think in the same way humans do.

B: From observing a fighting fish attacking its reflection in a mirror when I was a kid, I infer that that fighting fish could not self-reflect.

Claudiu
So in your definition of self-reflection:
[indent]1a. a person who has a face-transplate or is severely disfigured or has a stroke leaving them with mirror agnosia --- by your reasoning, you would judge that they, too, lack self-reflection?

1b. Sticking with fish, you believe that self-reflection (the ability to be introspective on one's existence --- we clarified your meaning above) is determined by recognizing oneself in mirrors?

1c. Do your thoughts in 1a and 1b reconcile logically? That you have evidence that people who cannot recognize themselves in a mirror --- both psychologically (visage change) and technically (neurological change) --- lack introspection?

1d. If you learn that human animals who cannot recognize themselves in mirrors do have introspective ability, are you able to see that mirror images do not say anything regarding your fish being introspective or non-introspective about their existence?[/indent]

Claudiu:

This is a substanstially different statement, Claudiu. Now you are qualifying yourself. Still, logically, you cannot conclude anything that you've written (unless you want to chalk up your words to a personal belief and I respect personal beliefs and am grateful people can have them in many parts of the world).


[indent]2a. What is the "way humans do [think]"?
2b. On what structures does human thinking arise and depend?[/indent]

Also, back to B:
Claudiu:


Do you know what all animals can do?
Would you need to know what all animals are capable of in order to declare what some animals cannot do?

Great! Now you're actually reading what I'm writing, and we can actually discuss these things. Thanks for that.


Someone with a face transplant or who is disfigured might not recognize their face in a reflection, but they would soon be able to figure out it is their reflection. So, they can still recognize themselves in a mirror.

As for stroke patients with mirror agnosia, I don't know much about it. Shall we stick to healthy subjects of whatever species we're talking about to keep it simple, for now? It's a fact that the vast majority of adult humans don't have any problem with noticing their reflection.


I think that whether an animal has the ability to recognize itself in a mirror does provide good evidence for whether that animal can self-reflect, yes. I wouldn't say it is 100% but it goes a long way.


Do you have any evidence of a stroke leading a human to being unable to recognize him- or herself in a mirror? I see that mirror agnosia is an actual condition but don't know much about it, and the little skimming I just did seems to indicate tests with various objects, not with trouble recognizing one's own reflection.


No, that wouldn't mean they don't say *anything* about the fish. Isn't it telling that you'd have to (hypothetically) cause a human brain damage in order to remove that human's ability to do something the fish cannot do in the first place?

But certainly we could go on to reason about other aspects of a fish's existence. Does it demonstrate any behavior at all that points to introspection? Those hypothetical humans of yours would surely act in a way in accordance with them being introspective in other ways.


And yet if you were reading what I've been writing all along you'll see that that's what I was getting at.


I don't know exactly, but I'm pretty sure any form of verbal thinking heavily involves at least one brain cell or cell that is part of the human nervous system. You can even stick someone in an MRI and see which areas of the brain start activating based on what the person is thinking/feeling.


No.

No, I would only need to know what some animals cannot do in order to be able to declare what some animals cannot do. For example, I do not know what all animals can do, yet I know that some animals cannot see.

It's much more fun to actually exchange ideas, isn't it?
- Claudiu

it goes directly to the point; maybe you should think about it a bit?

?


No, this point actuality refutes your arrogation, your claim to know that "Not all animals can do [introspection]" To reject clear examples which show your presumptions of knowledge is to humor your personal world when

...in your words,


And your personal carve-outs from actuality in this way again is probably useful to document what your method accomplishes: personal blinders to actuality (and, again, I think there are natural, useful reasons any person would narrow the mind in different circumstances).



1. How does seeing one's external image result in introspective capacity, the ability to self-reflect?


There is mirror blindness, Claudiu, and you needn't skim Internet headings. For example:

2. Do blind people have introspective capacity in your logic, Claudiu?

3. Are human infants who do not yet recognize themselves in a mirror not introspective?


In your presumptions, the above persons lack introspection.

What does conveniently parsing actuality into only those beliefs you like get you?

I have. See my answer to 1d.

You actually addressed the points I made in my "4/19/13 2:36 PM" post. I made those exact same points on my "4/19/13 10:17 AM" post but instead of addressing them, you ignored them and repeated the same things that you have been since we started this interaction. I was glad that you actually addressed my points instead of continuing to not add anything new to the conversation.


What you just wrote here does absolutely nothing to further our conversation. Could you simply not type it out next time and save both of us some trouble? Let's instead focus on the facts that we are actually discussing instead of making ad hominem attacks.


Ok, see my answer to #2 further below. Replace 'blind' with 'can see but has mirror agnosia'. Take note that I basically said the same thing in my answer to 1d, before.


It's not seeing one's external image that's the important part. It's the ability to recognize that image as being yourself. That indicates that you have enough of a concept of the world and of yourself to know that you exist. Do you at least agree that passing the mirror test - being able to recognize that that thing in the mirror is you - is an indicator of the ability to introspect?


Some of them surely do. The test doesn't really apply to them, given that they can't see. As I said in my answer to 1d, then we would look at other indicators of introspection. With humans, it is easy - they can simply talk about themselves. With blind animals that we can't talk to, it is a bit more difficult.


That's a good question! I'm not sure. I would say a sperm and an egg, when they have not yet been combined, lack introspection - why, they don't even exist as a single entity yet. Further I'd say just at the moment they are joined, that fertilized egg lacks introspective capabilities. On the other end, a 13 year old (and far younger) certainly has introspection. So that ability must develop somewhere along the way from being conceived to being 13 years old (as the two extremes). Does that make sense?

Again, this does nothing to promote the free exchange of ideas. Why don't you wait until the issue is resolved until you conclude that I am parsing actuality to suit my beliefs?

Considering that throughout history people have attributed a lack of certain "human" qualities to other members of their own species perhaps it deserves deeper thought especially when wondering about possible experiential qualities of actual other species. You dont know whether different physical structures could correlate to similar experiential modes. Observations of behavior are difficult to separate from presuppositions. The point is why do you feel the need to represent your lack of knowledge as knowledge?

Why do we feel the need to say anything? I was just sharing my understanding of the world with CCC, which led to me talking about what it means to be a human. The topic of self-reflection came up, and I pointed out my understanding of that topic.

My current understanding of the world is that it would be incredibly unlikely that every single animal on this planet has the capacity for self-reflection. I agree that we don't know for sure which ones do and don't, sure, but to me there is obviously a spectrum from 'lump of rock' to 'adult human being', and I don't think the cut-off for 'capacity to self-reflect' is at exactly the spot of 'it is now considered a form of life'. Does that seem that unreasonable to you? That doesn't sound like representing lack of knowledge as knowledge, to me, it sounds like I am making an inference based on my experience so far.

Jake:


Claudiu:

Claudiu:


In consideration of some of your other presumptions ("Not all animals can do [self-reflection, introspection]",etc), yes: why do you feel the need to presume, to add pat answers where there are none? There is no ruling/conclusion anywhere that says a central nervous system is the sole means of self-reflection nor is the human means of self-reflection. Can you show me such a conclusion if you believe that is the case?

So why do you insert conclusions where there are fine unknowns? Are unknowns wrong for you to have?

Claudiu:
You have presumption --- a belief --- so far. That's totally fine.

Inference is an action taken by people who are testing specific scenarios again and again and coming to directly related, limited practical (not absolute) conclusions.

I'd like to point out that for someone who says they value open exploration, curiosity, questioning, not assuming, observation, study, etc., you have done almost nothing of the sort in your conversation with me. From the get-go, you did not even consider asking why I think about the world the way I do. You started off with: "this statement is subjective judgement that depends on imposed personal beliefs". That is, instead of wondering about my judgement and prodding to see if there are any facts or sound reasoning behind it, you assumed that there was no sound basis at all, and then spent a good amount of time making me out to be a person with some very negative qualities indeed.

So, when you finally ask me why I think the way I do on a matter - like why I think self-reflection likely requires having a central nervous system - I am glad, because some exchange of ideas can actually go on! Can I ask that we have more of this kind of exchange than you telling me just how closed-minded I am? Although maybe if you repeat saying that with another set of leading questions just once more, I'll get it that time! (Hint: that was a joke.)

Back to your question. Here is my reasoning. With regards to humans, there have been humans without their left arm, right arm, either leg, without both legs. Humans that have gone blind, couldn't hear, couldn't speak, couldn't taste, couldn't smell, and couldn't feel pain (a very dangerous condition). Humans have had their hearts transplanted, lungs, liver, kidneys, pieces of their intestine removed, and sex change operations. Yet those humans could still self-reflect. Yet as soon as you get into the realm of brain damage, people quickly lose cognitive capabilities or begin to be unable to reason about the world properly. You yourself brought up the matter of a stroke causing mirror agnosia. Thus I think it is a reasonable conclusion (and not a presumption) that the brain is intimately related with a human's capability to think and to reflect on his or herself.

Maybe there are other structures in other animals, perhaps. I did bring up the notion of machine intelligence, which would be another structure besides a biological central nervous system that would give rise to self-reflective capability, though that's still a hypothetical. But I think, given how related our brain is to our ability to think and reflect, that a creature not having one, and not having any comparable equivalent system, is a good indicator that that creature cannot think/self-reflect. Does that make sense? Care to address any of that reasoning, or will you instead vilify me some more?


Aw, you didn't get too far before asking another set of leading questions. Ah well. Should I answer, I wonder? Should I point out how just in the post before I said that there are some things we don't know about the topic at hand?


Now you are just redefining words. Inference is the process of drawing a conclusion from a set of facts. It does not necessarily entail experimentation.

Where is your set of facts leading up to "Not all animals can do [introspection]"
Where do a set of facts come from, Claudiu? Thin air? Or repeated trial and error?

To have a fact, the evidence for it must be shown: in your presumption you would need to have inventoried all animals, and that in this complete animal inventory you would then point out those you've tested to be incapable of self-reflection. And that's if you can know "What are all forms and modes of self-reflection?" and test those.

Can you do that? Otherwise you want ideas you like, that form you somehow such that you cannot release them, but you do not have inference, the "ferrying in" of information. You have adference: ferrying out your personal beliefs.

Are you familiar with Karl Popper? To me, he brought a lot of clean-up into the philosophy of science. One can only conclude what one can conclude, not more.

And through out time, we see that we humans routinely break through that which was previously presumed: one generation says a type of human merits 3/5 vote, another generation says that presumption is ridiculous, grotesque. One generation says the earth is flat, another generation says, "Okay, we can admit there seems to be curvature." One generation says, "Retardation is limited and should be institutionalize"; another generation gets to meet the mega-savant and joyously engaging Kim Peek.

Frankly, no one knows what makes awareness nor self-reflection, where it abides, if it continues without the body or not. Places like the University of Virginia and other institutions attempt to study rigorously the matter of awareness, how it may present and exist and so on.

So for you, what is self-reflection? And what evidence can you show that introspection capacity is exclusively happening in a central nervous system? What do you actually know, Claudiu, about ganglia and central nervous systems?



Do you know some humans live without brains and think and feel and engage? You can google that. Where is awareness there? Where is the self-reflection housed? Is that ganglia or brain? Is it either?

You can see that you may be able to practically infer that the human brain may be "related" to some human ability to think and reflect, but you cannot conclude this nor that this is the whole works, unless you just want to rest in the infirmity of presumption. To live like that would be stiffling to me.


Would you really rather spend your time presuming to actually know what you don't and to make myriad presumptions about the lives of others, or would you rather completely dedicate yourself to being in the honest wonder and in practical actuality of being alive, with all your senses, including your mind, unfettered by presumption? Perhaps including and "adfering" felicity and open curiosity...

Well, that is the type of communication that I really think can lead to something, Katy. Thanks. First I want to address this issue and I will get to the others later.


This is not so. I don't see how I can explain what you're missing. Let me take another phrase: "Not all animals can see." Do you have to inventory all animals and then point out which ones can't see to say that is a correct phrase? No, you only need to find one species of animal that can't see, and then you're done. Here is an article on blind animals. Do you agree that the statement "not all animals can see" is a correct one? If not, why not?

AF is simply a permanent PCE. It is a PCE that's on a "do loop" in the mind and nothing more. It has absolutely nothing to do with progress along the Buddhist path. That being said PCE's are very beautiful (and in fact one of my favorite things) and will often come naturally as you get purer and purer.

Claudiu,

I would not have replied to your posts if you had said this. What you have claimed to know is that "Not all animals can do [introspection]".

You assert that mirrors go a long way to determine introspection, that if someone cannot recognize themselves in a mirror then they do not have introspection, and you're not sure what to do with cases of human blindness, children and persons who've had strokes.

As you encounter the limits of your reliance on single mirror test, you drift to speech, that speech would suggest capacity self-reflection.

Further, Bassler at Princeton shows how single-celled organisms talk to each other in an "esperanto" and that they also have species specific speech. Here is Nova http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/bassler-bacteria.html and here this researcher who has knowledge of what she speaks is quoted in bold print "It's incorrect to think of bacteria as these asocial, single cells." So now your amoeba that you say you know do not think --- apparently people who reflect upon them have learned that they talk and they socialize. Can you present evidence that they don't self-reflect?

So as speech and mirrors fail as supports to your beliefs regarding introspective capacity, again, can you share what test you know of that determines, "Here there is no introspective capacity"?

For example, what evidence do you have that your fighting fish is not self-reflecting?

So far you've only said it attacks it's mirror image. As we've already shown with humans that mirrors do not establish self-reflection, what tests do you have that can help everyone infer that fish do not think about themselves, their living?

(Replying to Shashank to reduce the nesting level of our thread.)


Yes, I figured as much. And thanks for your post, again, that style of communicating is far more likely to lead to something productive.

First I want to resolve a point about how logic works. I get the impression you don't understand what I mean when I say "not all animals", because you keep talking about having to inventory *all* animals to say something about *some* ("not all") animals. Then I will address other points in your post (and the one before). I'm doing this because things seem to get lost if we don't proceed point-by-point. This is the 3rd or 4th time I'm talking about what "not all animals" means.

Let me take a neutral example. Say you have a bag with 100 balls, and there are only blue and red balls in the bag, but you don't know how many of each color there are. You can't see the balls, so you have to take them out of the bag to look at their color. So, you start pulling balls out of the bag.

1) How many balls and of which colors would you have to draw to be able to say with 100% certainty that "all balls in the bag are blue"?
2) How many balls and of which colors would you have to draw to be able to say with 100% certainty that "not all balls in the bag are blue"?
3) How many balls and of which colors would you have to draw to be able to say with 100% certainty that "some balls in the bag are not blue"?
4) How many balls and of which colors would you have to draw to be able to say with 100% certainty that "at least one ball in the bag is not blue"?

I hope you see the relevance here with regards to you claiming I'd have to inventory *all* animals to say something about *some* animals ("not all animals").

Regards,
- Claudiu

This is incorrect. A pure consciousness experience still contains a lingering sense of reality. Actual freedom is absent of this reality along with any psychic and psychological "you". The total extinction of "you" creates a much purer and immediate experience that surpasses the pce.

I would posit (something I'm figuring out now) that a consistent, continuous PCE 24/7, more or less, is a virtual freedom. PCE's are the way to experience actual perfection and training your brain to function without an identity leading to the identity's extinction, af and all its boons. As a side note, the perfection inherent within the experience of pure consciousness is enough to keep one satisfied until af. There is no reason to settle for less than the experience of perfection.

Are you claiming AF? It sounds like at the least you've got a virtual freedom going. Can you give any tips on how to get a PCE going? Anything in particular you discovered that worked? Other than "How am I experiencing this moment of being alive"? (HAIETMOBA).

Hi, Tom,

Are you subscribed to the Actual Freedom Yahoo! Group? There are useful and focused discussions, including recent ones on pure intent.

Just in case you didn't know.

No, I am not AF and am not sure if I am VF but I understand and live the af method. Apperception is the mind's perception of itself. This is so simple that one thinks one is not doing it correctly. All you have to do is perceive your own mind. This doesn't mean your a watcher but conscious of consciousness. From this strict vantage point, you are not feeding the "thinker" or the "feeler" and are able to engage in pure contemplation of what is actual.

You are able to witness the heat on your skin, you are able to watch solely with your eyes, hear solely through your ears. Most important is to learn to enjoy doing so and the more you can be engaged with this kind of perception, the more sensuous and sensate experience is. You want to go for a direct immediacy with actual sensation, (anything not thinker, or feeling coming from the gut). Edit: what is actual is extremely satisfying, pleasurable, enjoyable, and makes life easy to live and fascinating to watch.

One beneficial way of witnessing what is actual is going for clarity. Going for extreme clarity in what you see, hear, or the air on your skin. You want to experience the immediacy of sensate experience and enjoy whatever there is to enjoy.

Engaged in apperception, you can become aware of how to let awareness happen by itself. Also, you want to make it easy. You want life to be easy, you want everything to be easy, joyous, carefree. Pure intent is the connection to the purity of the actual universe, no matter how strong the connection. Purity is like the glittery magical clarity seeing/experiencing the actual world takes on. In this, there is a direct immediacy to whats sensate, and an inherent perfection.

When there is no person thinking, and you are aware of your own mind, you can take that as apperception and then move to the immediacy of sensation with a focus on clarity and enjoyment. You may begin to notice a purity as well as perfection.

Do not get hung up on what is and what is not a PCE but rather if your engaged in apperception. From this vantage point, you can start going for things such as purity, perfection, clarity of the senses, etc. Enjoy it no matter what. With apperception, you can also watch the identity slip in and out of your mind. It kind of swoops in like an eagle. Apperception is like cleaning yourself up and the actual world does its magic. Purity may become apparent, or perfection. You gain greater clarity in seeing, hearing etc. You become engaged directly with sensation. In this way, all the worries of reality fade away for the pleasure and interest of enjoying direct sensation.

In conclusion, I am so happy and feel so lucky to have found the af method. It is 100% working. The only errors and issues are "my" errors and issues that the actual world has no part of. One of the definite experiences of the af method for me was having a glimpse into an actual freedom. PCE's are a glimpse into the actual world but I think that you can also have a glimpse or a few into what an actual freedom is like. Peter talks about this in his VF.

What happened to me was that I was in a park and lost focus in being content and all of a sudden Adam disappeared completely. All that was left was an unquestionable stillness as palpable as anything material. Located in this stillness, was all the things of existence just there, standing there. On top of that, things were all happening to witness like birds, animals, people, all in this complete stillness that was there without my doing at all. I really was just a body and was watching and admiring what is actual. At the same time sensations like the wind, one after another, were giving this body pleasure. It was the best experience I've ever had bar none.

Then when it ended after about 10-20 minutes, I saw that I was in some psychic bubble called reality and there was seemingly no way out. I, as this body, through direct intimacy, am getting closer and closer, which is how i know its working. I also know its working through PCE's, apperception, the purity and perfection apparent, and also very much from the lessening of all that is malice and sorrow. This experience happened about a year and a half into being full committed to the af method. I have been doing the AF method for 2 years and 2 months. I don't know if i am VF but am not concentrating on that. I am concentrating more on experiencing perfection and purity, a direct intimacy with actual sensation, and making life fun and easy.

Could you elaborate on this? I personally find physical hindrances harder to overcome, mostly because practicing requires a certain amount of physical energy. If the energy is not available then practice becomes that much harder.

The mind seems to mirror the state of the body, so if the body is fatigued the mind wants to follow. See also Daniel's thread on his sickness, which relates to this.

How did you manage to change your perspective? How are you able to be happy when the body is not?

Thanks. It can be annoying to have to scroll around...

So if someone says,
a) "Not all pizzas are red-, white- and tan-colored,"

and

someone else says,
b) "some pizzas are not red-, white- and tan-colored,"

do you see a difference in the proof that each statement needs --- if the speaker wants to base their statement in evidence?


For a)
To say, "Not all pizzas are red-, white- and tan-colored," is a statement that presents one as having knowledge of an "all" in order to speak conclusively for the "not all". But, funnily enough, that sweeping statement only requires the speaker to produce evidence of one non-red-white-and-tan-colored pizza.

So by simply producing one piece of actual evidence, the speaker can avoid actually knowing "all" while asserting an air of authority --- knowing"all". However, if that speaker of "a)" scenario cannot produce one pizza as evidence of their statement, then they've spoken about all, but then are unable to produce even one in support of the authoritative statement regarding "not all".


For b)
To say, "Some pizzas are not red-, white- and tan-colored" is a statement that refers to some amount, presents knowledge of just "some", but --- even though its scope is smaller than "all" --- speaker of "b)" would need to provide plural proof: a minimum of two pizzas that are not red-, white- and tan-colored to show that the speaker actually has evidence of the "some" (plural) about which they speak authoritatively.

Ah, pizza... Drooling. Gah, side tracked! Sorry.

Anyway, so I'm wondering if there is evidence of even one single anything (your fighting fish, amoeba, etc) lacking self-reflection, introspective capacity? Is there any test that we as humans have that can actually rule out introspective capacity in anything at all?

The above could seem like absurd and/or impractical wordplay, but I think to recognize where we may be asserting knowledge --- insisting that we have actual knowledge --- where we actually have none, where there may be simply an unknown -- I think is very useful, that this mental tone relates to very regular dialogs every day.

What do you think?



[also, just a brief (? or not...)reply to one of your previous lines: I did not convince anyone to 'my way of thinking' in the past twelve months ..the conversation was broader but included some things that have been brought up in this thread between you and I, and I think we all came around to seeing that we were asserting knowledge in different ways where we actually had none or where we thought we were inferring but were not. Anyway, to me, this "What do I actually know" reconciliation thingy has been building very slowly over a decade (and probably more, but my memory is iffy after a while) when I gave public talks and one day I just realized that I was making a mistake to assert some scientific information as "facts". It was really relaxing to let go of some of that or speak about those ideas in the theoretical context or the dynamic context in which they seem to exist... That's probably a bit hard to read, no? Sorry if I'm not clear. I think you've told me that you've found me hard to read, before...]

Hey Katy,

Thanks for addressing this some/not all issue. It seems we do indeed understand the phrase "not all" differently, and now we have an opportunity to both realize that! This can surely only lead to improved communication.

I notice you say that, when someone says "not all X", you take it as "a statement that presents one as having knowledge of an 'all' in order to speak conclusively for the 'not all'". However, as you rightly point out, that statement "only requires the speaker to produce evidence of one non-[X]". To me, since I am a very logical-minded person, I look at a statement as only saying as much as would be required to prove it true. Thus, personally, if I were to say a statement like "not all pizzas are red-, white- and tan-colored", I would *not* be presenting myself as having knowledge of *all* pizzas. I would say that with the assumption that the listener would understand it to mean that I have at least *one* example of a pizza that is otherwise colored. That is, the minimum knowledge I'd need to have for me to say that statement comfortably is knowledge of one (particularly colored) pizza. It's not an avoidance tactic - presuming knowledge of "all" while only having knowledge of "one" - it's asserting knowledge of precisely one (particular example of a) pizza. Others might use it in different ways, of course, but that is how I use it, and in mathematical logic that is how everybody uses it as that is the definition of negating a universal quantifier (a bit mathy notation, sorry).

It is needless say at this point that pizza is indeed delicious!

So do you at least see, going back to my statement "not all animals can self-reflect", that I was not asserting myself as having knowledge of *all* animals? That would be impossible - from what I understand, there are new animal species being discovered every day. I was not asserting myself as having any more knowledge than if I had said "some animals cannot self-reflect".

I actually agree quite a bit with you on the "What do I actually know" approach. I have been taking that general approach to life more and more lately and it has been useful in dispelling beliefs. It seems that we just disagree on what we can actually know about the capacity to self-reflect/introspect. So this is where we can exchange our ideas, hopefully without insulting each other as an insult is never an exchange of an idea, and see if we can't learn something from each other.

You asked "What do you think?" I think this would be a useful exchange - to determine if I am asserting knowledge where there is unknown, or conversely if you are asserting unknown where there is indeed knowledge (which I think is equally silly) - if we can have it amiably and amicably, and that this would be an almost certainly useless exchange if we cannot. Hostile communication hardly leads to anything, I find, and it's usually best not to pursue topics if the discussion gets heated, at least if one has any hope of actually exchanging information...

I have to go for now, but in my next post I'll start to address your questions about point "B", which you phrased as follows: "[...] I'm wondering if there is evidence of even one single anything (your fighting fish, amoeba, etc) lacking self-reflection, introspective capacity? Is there any test that we as humans have that can actually rule out introspective capacity in anything at all?"

Great. And to be clear I am asking this of you. For me, I see here so far that there are only unknowns and an inability at present to confirm a lack of introspective capacity in someone/thing else (unless someone is claiming siddhis... which I do not, but I bring them up because that sort of phenomena would be an apt exception here in a vedic-roots forum, I think). I'm not setting you up to have to convince me of anything or vice versa, but am interested in your thoughts about this. based on the above thread and amoeba and your thoughts on introspective capacity.

In the meantime, here is comedian Demetri Martin on the arrogance of building birdhouses.

link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaK-VDAQ2T8

Yeah, I agree.

Hehe nice. For some reason, reminded me of this Eddie Izzard clip about claiming countries with flags...


Okay. I'll endeavor to explain why I think that not all animals can self-reflect. What I'm going to do is explain my thought process, and you can point out where you disagree - as you clearly disagree on some fundamental level. No convincing, sure, but you will have to do some evaluating to understand where I'm coming from, even if you still disagree after you understand my points.

I'll try to get right to the crux of the matter. I think our difference in opinion essentially lies on whether self-awareness/thinking/consciousness has a physical basis or not. Let me elaborate by analogy.

It's pretty clear that vision relies on physical structures, correct? If you take someone's eyes out, they will tell you that they can no longer see. Likewise if you mess up part of the brain that processes visual signals enough, a person will also stop being able to see. Animals without eyes at all can't see (though they may have other abilities like echolocation). So there's no issue in stating that "not all animals can see". Do we agree on this point about vision (understanding that that agreement about vision does not mean you agree about anything regarding awareness, necessarily)?

Can we say the same about smell? The condition for not being able to smell is called Anosmia. The Wikipedia article says "Anosmia is due to an inflammation of the nasal mucosa; blockage of nasal passages or a destruction of one temporal lobe". So there we obviously have a physical mechanism - the whole nose-smelling apparatus - which, if it is damaged somehow, stops working. So if an animal (or a person) doesn't have a nose or equivalent apparatus then we can say he/she/it can't smell. Do we agree on that point?

Going back to the capacity to think and self-reflect, can we agree that:
a) *If* the capacity to think and self-reflect ultimately has a physical basis/is ultimately dependent on the animal's body, then it readily follows that not all animals can self-reflect?
b) *If the capacity to think and self-reflect does *not* ultimately have a physical basis/it has some other basis not dependent upon the animal's body, then we really cannot say whether or not all animals can self-reflect, and indeed, maybe rocks can do it too?

Note that agreeing on those points doesn't mean you agree with the statement "not all animals can self-reflect". I'm just trying to boil this down to the essentials. If you agree then I'll try to make the case for awareness being dependent on a body. If you disagree then - where is the disagreement? Let me know if you'd just like me to elaborate a bit on point a).

I liked that Izzard clip! the royal golem... the flag... lots of funny bits about big picture stuff. Thanks : )



Cool. What I'd like to hear more about from you are the bases on which your mind asserts these certainties:
[indent]a. how you "know that an amoeba cannot think", and
b. that "not all animals can do that" [self-reflection/introspection] [1] [/indent]

I don't have a feeling of agreeing or disagreeing with you.

What I have is wondering how you can make the above statements and why you would make them.
(And the DhO is a forum which includes these sorts of queries, just like other hobby forums include their own pertinent fine points!)

Since you've stated that you're using "inference" to come to your conclusions I think Wikipedia has a useful, more inclusive first-line definition:
[indent]"Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true."[/indent]
(Underline emphasis ("or") added.)

So using Wikipedia's definition, "inference" arises when one derives a logical conclusion from either a statement of knowledge or a statement of assumption.


Yeah, so I am not thinking about whether "awareness/thinking/consciousness has a physical basis or not": I'm trying to understand how you make the leap from being human and asserting that you know that amoeba do not think and why you need to assert this unknown?

The reason I am not opining on "whether self-awareness/thinking/consciousness has a physical basis or not" is because I seem to be, at least in part, a being with properties we call physical (body and some of the sensory function). So, having at least some physicality, I cannot speak to the experience of being without physical basis. I can speak from being what I am. I could speculate or presume about what I'm not, but why?

So, to be clear, I am not at all opining "on whether self-awareness/thinking/consciousness has a physical basis or not."
Again, I am wondering how you make these statements and why.

So the wikipedia definition talks about the "how": that an inference (a type of statement) can be made from knowledge-basis or assumption-basis.

To me, to make an assumption-based inference would be to hold a baseless, conclusive view and to block the mind that is otherwise open, curious, attending what is; to keep an assumption-basis of mind gives up that wonder in exchange for some blocked-view mind. I do think there are a few reasons for doing just that: security/protection, closure, power, psychologically creating a location for oneself in the infinity of unknownness (if only via a narrative presumption), etc.

Whereas a knowledge-based inference is always dynamic, always working with changing phenomena. Knowledge is always changing...so to infer on the basis of knowledge is to admit, "We know this right now, but this premise will change as we learn more." So, again, a good portion of what we as a society thought were brain-dead folks are people in the presence of doctors who were "test-dead".

So even a knowledge-based premise --- one that is constantly exposed to change and dynamism --- is exposed to human fatigue in its bearer (perhaps due to the relentless pace of flux in actuality, the constant change), and thus could settle into an assumption-based premise, stopping knowledge at some place in time and roosting in what will become a dated, static assumption as long as the person wants information to "freeze" -- a resting place for a mind that is disturbed/averse to the actuality of change and not-finally-knowing anything ultimately except to attend exactly now, this "moment". The premise of brain death has made big changes over 60 years, but 60 years is on the edge-limit of what one career can presently span. One would need to have been a bright researcher at age 20 to be an 80-year old in neurology today to take in the changes in brain-death premise professionally; and the researcher would have needed to be comfortable as a knowledge-based 'inferer' (keeping/setting pace with constant change) versus resting in a static assumption-basis that lasts as long as they need that immobility.

So a knowledge-based inference is constantly in flux and people who form knowledge-based premises (claims) are entering a world of flux, a never-ending study of new information, and they will continually need to update their premises or re-write them entirely. So in knowledge one cannot rest on laurels nor get too proud for too long nor rest in stagnancy while making knowledge-based inferences. Frankly, knowledge has limits as a noun; it is perhaps a gerund ("knowing"), but maybe best limited as an expectant gerund phrase that never completes: "coming to know"

What do you think?



Anyway, one of your premises in this thread is:
A. You "know that an amoeba cannot think"
Could you provide one piece of evidence of one amoeba that it cannot think?

Lacking any evidence [2] of one amoeba not thinking, that premise would be based in assumption versus knowledge.


And another one of your premises in this thread (modified, [1]) is:
B. "some animals cannot self-reflect"
Could you provide evidence of just two animals who cannot self-reflect?

Again, lacking any evidence of at least two animals not self-reflecting, that premise would be based in assumption, not a knowledge-basis.



_____________________
[1]I read that you intend "some animals cannot do [self-reflection/introspection]" and I think you read my point about how the evidence one needs to supply for your two statements is different:
i. "some animals cannot do [self-reflection/introspection]": needs >1 piece of evidence
ii. "not all animals can do [self-reflection/introspection]": needs just one piece of evidence.


[2] Again, if you claimed a supernatural knowledge here I might ask about your experience of that, but I would not believe or disbelieve it; that information can just be heard as the basis for your knowledge on your matter. If I needed to take some practical action --- like repair a concrete bridge --- then I'd have to start making some practical decisions about that information.

Indeed! He's got some good stuff. I can highly recommend him. Mitch Hedberg is another great one, totally different style but really entertaining.


Yep, that makes sense.


I agree that assuming something is true without any knowledge of it being true and without realizing that that is what one is doing does lock up the mind and prevent sensibility. Some things can be assumed to be true without any apparent harm, so long as one knows that is what one is doing. For example, I have just looked it up and it seems the distance from the Sun to the Earth is about 93 million miles. Adding a bit more knowledge to the mix, I have also learned that the Earth has an elliptical orbit, thus this number must be an average of some sort. However, I have never personally verified that the Sun is indeed about 93 million miles away, so I take this as an ongoing assumption. But I also know that this is what I am doing. In some situations that might become a relevant assumption to verify or at least to look up how it has been measured before. There was actually a science fiction book I read recently that was dependent on this very assumption being wrong! The society thought they were on the planet Venus, and everyone assumed this to be so, but the main character managed to figure out they were being fooled and were actually on Earth by measuring the angles of the shadows of two vertical structures several miles apart (or something along those lines).

After thinking about it for a bit, I also agree with what you're saying, although perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, about knowledge constantly being in flux. For example, I could say right now that even though I don't see or hear her at the moment, I know my cat is in my apartment somewhere. That conclusion is based on some knowledge - I saw her at 4:30am, our front door is usually closed during the night, if someone does open it and they see the kitty they don't let her stay out of the apartment - and some assumptions - there wasn't an exception of someone coming in and leaving the door open. But that knowledge of my cat being in the apartment is subject to change. If I don't see her for a while and my roommates haven't seen her for a while and we look around the apartment and don't find her, then it will indeed turn out that she wasn't in the apartment.

When you said "a resting place for a mind that is disturbed/averse to the actuality of change and not-finally-knowing anything ultimately except to attend exactly now, this "moment"", were you implying that nothing can finally be known except that which is being attended to right now? If so - and that seemed to be the direction you were going in, so correct me if I'm wrong - then I do disagree. Memory serves a very useful purpose in this case. I know that I went skiing even without having to experience something in this exact moment which is proof of that. It is true that memory is not always reliable but it generally is. Without memory we wouldn't really be able to have the civilization that we do.

Maybe an issue is that we aren't using a sophisticated enough framework for dealing with uncertainty? You seem to be dividing things into two categories - assumption and knowledge - without any gray area. That is, either you don't know at all that something is true, or you do know that it is true (at least for the time being). I think there is definitely a gray area and a good way to think about that is with probability. If you have a binary fact - something that can either be true or false - then if you know nothing about that fact at all, you can say there's a 50% chance it is true. This is acknowledging a total lack of knowledge about the topic. Complete certainty would be saying there's either a 0% or a 100% chance for it to be true. Assumption would be saying there's a non-50% chance for it to be true, but with no facts or reasoning to back that up.

However, there can be a gray area, and that's the interesting part, I think, because it allows you to express how certain you are about something, implicitly allowing for the fact that that might change. For example, I have never seen Mount Everest, but I am 99.99% certain (or even more) that it does exist. This is because of all the pictures I've seen and all the articles I've read about people's experiences of it over the course of my life. It just seems so unlikely that there's a huge conspiracy to make up a mountain where there isn't one - what would be the point? - that I place a very high degree of certainty on it existing. To put it in perspective, a 99.99% certainty means I'd allow a 1 in 10,000 chance that the mountain does not exist. So actually it would be a lot more than that. But, if I go and visit where everybody says it is, and I just see a huge crater, instead, then... well actually I'd then assume that I went to the wrong place. But if I kept looking at it and was unable to find it, then I'd do some more investigating, and maybe it would turn out that it doesn't exist. Then I would revise that certainty. Until then, though, I am comfortable with colloquially saying that "I know Mount Everest exists" - this shows a high degree of certainty - because saying "I assume it exists" doesn't quite seem like enough. Taking the wiktionary definition of assume: "to suppose to be true, especially without proof" - well I do have some proof, all the pictures and articles.

I think the only time that problems arise is when someone has a current state of knowledge - some degree of certainty about a fact - and they simply don't update that knowledge when presented with new information. This is what happens when someone has a belief about something and they refuse to let it go. In the face of more and more factual information contradicting that belief, instead of simply updating their view on the world they get defensive and, often enough, quite emotional, angry, aggressive, etc. It's generally a good indication that you have touched upon a belief when someone starts getting very worked up over an issue with you - because with a belief, there is something personal at stake in ensuring that that belief is true. If there were nothing personal at stake then there would be no getting worked up and instead there would just be an exchange of ideas.

In light of the above, re: amoeba not being able to think and some animals not being able to self-reflect, I place a very high degree of certainty on those being the case. As I've said earlier in the thread, if presented with facts showing otherwise, then I would revise those statements. Thus I would not say I am blocking off my mind with regard to these premises, just that I haven't seen any facts that would contradict either of those statements, so far, and based on my reasoning I think they are far more likely to be factual than not. To say that these things cannot be known - that based on the sum total of human knowledge thus far, there is a 50% chance that amoeba can think and a 50% they cannot; that there is a 50% chance that all animals can self-reflect and a 50% chance that not all animals can self-reflect - is to be ignoring a very large amount of evidence... as I said earlier (and what you agreed was silly), to be asserting unknown where there is indeed knowledge. Again, this doesn't mean either one is 100% known to be true or false, but I think the evidence weighs in favor of amoeba not thinking and some animals not being able to self-reflect[1].

I think that's a good amount of writing for now. What do you think about all that? Particularly the point about thinking in terms of constantly-updated probabilities instead of only either totally sure (100%) or totally unsure (50%). Do you think re: amoeba and animals, that it is 50-50 - these things cannot be known at all - or do you lean more towards one way or another (either towards thinking amoebas or not, towards all animals self-reflecting or not)?

[1] I realize I haven't gone into what I think the evidence is, in this post, but I'm curious to hear your reply first. I will go into it later.

This gets to
how do we "know"?

To put the computer's blinking cursor on a blank sheet or in a reply field, one can set the eye gaze there, then concentrate the hearing faculty for five timed minutes. What happens to seeing and the eyes? What does the brain do with seeing? What types of mental movements are happing during the timed period which is dedicated to focusing on hearing?


In a more familiar, daily sense of experience, there's knowing lots of rapid-fire mental activity, like ignition firing: the brain can do a lot of this rapid-firing, reflexive attention and quickly. Much mental activity can be assumed, static, pattern-following formed on a previous knowledge-study dynamic basis.

This is the old "walk and chew gum" line, and all those months of intense effort to stand up as an infant pay off for decades to come.

So, yes, we often develop the ability to walk and chew gum and text and emote and think and plan and so on... and the mind is maintaining at least one now-assumed, rote process (the voluntary act of walking) while it is either dabbling in ignition-style dilettante knowing or ignition-style assuming (like repeating loops of habitual thinking pathways, such as how one habitually feels about oneself/work/family/existing/so on).

Technically, though in a given moment, I think that five minute test above can show anyone what happens when we place the mind on one sense base and the related phenomena. Here there is the chance for the mind to keep honing in on knowing about something singularly.

In meditation, this singular attention is called single-pointedness and often takes practice; in any skill, this singular attention is often called mastery, and is apparently a by-product of many attentive hours in (10,000?).

So knowing and assuming have uses. I am still curious about why you assume to know about the lives you are not and their capacities and their limits.

You presented these certainties of yours...
[indent]That you know amoeba, for example, can't think
and
That you know some animals cannot self-reflect.
[/indent]

...and I asked how you found certainty here, how you can possibly know such things, and if you do not know them, why do you assert them certainly.

So who is presenting black and white, Claudiu.



Okay. And what is this:



Again, you not knowing what it is to actually be an amoeba or some other animal, why do you need to assert any certain knowledge about others' introspective (in)capacities? In this case, lacking evidence, assumption is.

Here no one needs to present anything (i.e., "facts showing otherwise") to affect that assumption is happening; one creates for themselves in statements of certainty an opportunity to show that one has either knowledge or baseless assumption.


Why sustain assumption? Is there something unsatisfactory in the "gray area" of not actually knowing?

He had a joke about the entrance to Target that makes laugh still. Anyway, I ended up watching "Los Enchiladas!" when you brought him up; the scenes with Chef reading at a menu poetry gathering... You guys share(d) hair resemblance, I think.

You are, when you continue to assume that I have a black and white view on this issue despite everything I have been writing in our conversation thus far.

This conversation does seem to be going in circles, and there's only so long that I can go responding to the same points over and over again before I lose interest. I don't think we'll get much out of continuing to talk using this medium. Besides which we have been shamelessly hijacking Shashank's thread. If you want to keep talking about this then maybe we should Skype? Otherwise, time to let it lie here.

Regards,
Claudiu

Claudiu:
I don't assume that. Shashank seems able to write and express for Shashank.

When Shashank askes:



we are certainly offering "any thoughts" and if Shashank is still drawn to querying who is deluded, they we've put ourselves "out there" to be judged in anyway someone would judge

Claudiu:
Ah?



To Shashank,
I have a sense of where you live based on other posts you've contributed (when you've specifically pointed to your part of the world) and it seems to me that our environments, communities and families enormously influence how and what we think, and the the "how and what" of which we think re-enters our families, communities and environments.

You raised a physically painful, fearsome scenario in your opening post and that you are considering that scenario I think points to something essential about our being alive: what do we do to feel safe? And what makes us feel unsafe? What we try to do to resolve threats to our well-being, how pleasure may become manipulated into something that's not.

Since you are weighing buddhist theory, there is in the Dhammapada the verses on "Choices":
[indent]We are what we think
with our thoughts we create the world.[/indent]

Here are some kids learning to think and act based on the "kick-off" fact that
[indent][indent]PETER HILL:(emphasis added) =][/indent][/indent]



Claudiu, I appreciate the opportunity to discuss this with you. talk to you soon.

Hey Claudiu and Katy

I was following what both of you wrote initially until it went of to somewhat teleological matters which I am increasingly abandoning in favour of being happy. In the meanwhile, it does seem like I've finally found the answer I had been looking for..and the answers basically boil down to this :-

If you want to be here and appreciate being alive , *no matter what happens*, then go for Actualism
If you dont want to be here because you are seeking a failsafe such that suffering(physical,mental,emotional) can *never* arise again, then go for Buddhism.

However, it is increasingly becoming clear to me that Actualism offers an existential solution, which if examined closely is to
experience peace on earth.
Also , another point of clarity that arose recently is that as an actualist one does not see the actual world as the dead, passive, meaningless, selfless , impersonal, inert, cold , material world...as an actualist one sees the vital , dynamic , not-inert world...as if its alive. Its a matter of change in perspective.

As for my own position , I am now again inclining towards Actualism as it does seem to offer an existential solution. Why not
go for an existential solution when its on offer ?

- Shashank

Yes, and that solution probably looks different to each person.


And this...

belongs to no "practice" or method; it could arise from any mind capable of orienting itself to experience in this way and for which surrounding conditions are unable to obstruct that orientation.


Thanks for thread-hosting, Shashank, and starting it off.

Cheers, Claudiu. It's nice to catch up with you via skype and talk about these things in what is maybe a more natural medium. Your cat is TOTALLY self-reflecting. I could feel it ;)

Hehe. I had fun chatting! I will definitely explore that option sooner next time. It's too easy to miss things when there's such an involved conversation going on via text-only.

Yes and it appears that its because of some dominating affective feeling.

Sounds like you got the basic idea! Here are some words of encouragement: **words of encouragement**. =).

Yeah, definitely! This is certainly why I found and started to participate on the DhO.

So sometimes I've heard people say, "Stick with one practice" --- and I get the value in that, but I cannot say that's what I did, so I tend to say "use both", because I did. So if there are parts of each "practice" that cause you to want to "practice" (versus perseverate on doctrinal or website words and debate), then I hope you can go with those practices wholeheartedly, sincerely without being impeded by environment, without creating intellectual impediments/procrastination either.

You know, the way actualism was imported and shared on the DhO was incredibly useful to me in developing equanimity. There were conversations between Bruno and Claudiu, for instance, that I followed closely and appreciated them a lot. They helped me make use of lots of tools, but chiefly everyone was focused on "practice" -- the emphasis of Daniel's website. The actualistic practice does having going for it that it can seem more straight-forward and accessible --- lacks association with a massive body of writings over hundreds of years (but actualism still has its own massive writings contributing to much reactivity, too) unlike a mindulfness practice which is often explained and immersed in historic dharma and this history inspires its own share of intellectual reaction --- and so actualism as it was imported here certainly helped me develop an excellent equanimity (without my knowing that development was happening), which in turn allowed meditation to be for me just sitting, just pleasant attention. And then doing something without expectation and with pleasant attention became natural curiosity and that became single-pointed concentration --- all entirely without my direct planning. And then before I knew it I had to look up what the hell had just happened in a sit and it happened that the Theravadan system at least had some writings on just that kind of mental experience. So that's all. Useful.

More than a year later, I really don't care which system people use, but I do anticipate that there will be a confrontation with dissatisfaction and frustration and desire for some kind of freedom and that at some point a person must commit to making sincere practice efforts or nothing will change for them. Intellectual perseveration will naturally build more of itself; sincere practice will cause more of itself.

Best wishes!