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The Brain, The Mind and Neuroscience (& maybe more)

Oh, yeah yeah.. Nice ^ :)

I mentioned him earlier in this thread, Fascinating reads - although complex.

Look up the Signposter and Troy of Is (a friend of mine, Jordan Flesher), on a rainy day :)
The Signposter (his mentor), discusses this ^ in the later part of his book, The Delusion of Being Human. Just got it, but only read bits and pieces.
He restates and amplifies Korzbyski's The Map is not the Territory, in the later Dialogical Enquiry sections of the book.
 
So this 'Signposter' is Clair? Who was the original Signposter in the cabin? Did Jordan ever meet him? For that matter is The Hermit still alive or around those parts? This is Ontario?

Got me curious I must admit - for an ebook it is a bit expensive for me (on limited income) but I will see if I can find excerpts and see if it worth saving up for.

*grins* Or I could miss a night at the pub next week... I only get one. :D
 
OK, that's odd... I saw a site where the publisher said it was an ebook and if interest was high they'd do a print, so when I saw the Amazon price I assumed it was for the ebook - but Amazon says paperback and only PB. Any link for the ebook version?
 
Hi, good questions.

The Signposter's name is David Wolfe. He is a psychologist, teacher. Or was.. at one point. He is very old now. He met the Hermit and his 2 dogs in Canada. I believe it might have been Ontario.

The original Signposter (Hermit), doesn't disclose his name.
In the Dialogical Inquiries he is referred to as " Mr " or just " Signposter " by his students - and in the book itself.
This is somewhat the norm in these settings. Referring to the body/mind/organism in the 3rd person… describing the birth self given name, from another given or made up name one uses for enquiry. As some of the eastern gurus do. Troy of Is, for example.

That's how they communicate in some of these esoteric circles, or meet ups, non duality satsangs…. or dialogical inquiries. My friend Paul does them here in Sf, but have not gone to see him in a few years, nor been in those circles for a while.

The Hermit, " Mr " is probably deceased, and Jordan is a a little younger than me so he never met Mr, the Original Signposter.

--
Unfortunately there is no ebook version from what I'm aware. It is expensive, I almost didn't get it myself. :\
 
I'll just have to keep an eye out for it. Given it is so recent it probably won't be in Australia for a while and we have expensive books anyway, so you could pretty much double the price you paid for us to buy it here.

If you have any 'IN' with them, suggest they make an ebook version. Please... :D While ebooks are much cheaper the chances are they will outsell the paperback 100:1 or better.
 
These days this is so true ^ as far as outselling.

I'll send Jordan a message… The book is interesting thus far, but lengthy :)
 
Swenyway... back to the fray...

I mentioned Fields earlier in relation to who humans are as well as what might replace the idea of a God cell that initiates things we do. That's not just reasoning based on the limitations of the physical model of who we are, there is some evidence to consider.

Bruce Lipton started in Biology, Medical Biology IIRC. He noticed some strange things to do with transplants. Not every time but often enough he could rule out coincidence, a recipient of a transplant would start behaving differently to how they had behaved all their lives. In a number of cases, where the donor was completely unknown to the recipient and often dead, the new characteristics reflect those of the donor.

This seemed a bit 'out there' to him so he went looking. What he found was fields. He now is an 'alternative' type and so many might view him as 'out there' himself, but his work was solid. Something in the new organ or limb was transferring traits from one person to another and there was no orthodox explanation for it. Nothing in normal Biology could account for such things and many in the field kinda shuffled it under a carpet.

Rupert Sheldrake was also a Biologist and he also noticed strange things going on. For example he noticed plants reacting not just to violence being done to them (cutting branches etc) but 'intended' violence towards some experimental shrimp that had been stored next to the plants. By 'reacting' I mean he had a plant hooked up to a meter, testing electrical properties and he noticed the needle slam over when he approached the plant to cut a piece off. He also saw reactions from the plant when he went to get the test shrimp with the firm intention of destroying them as part of an experiment.

(I wonder how many vegetarians are now feeling a bit off about their decision to not eat meat based on cruelty... :D)

Sheldrake had some more oddities. There were some blackbirds in Holland before World War 2 that learned to peck holes in the foil tops of milk bottles and drink the milk. Then came the war and milk deliveries stopped for something like 7 years.

After the war, when the deliveries started again, the birds were almost instantly back at the bottles, getting their free feed. It had originally taken them quite a long time to learn about the bottles, but after the war there was almost no delay.

Sounds normal, but...

Those birds only live a year or two at the MOST. So how did the knowledge that milk bottles were a source of food along with how to get at it get passed across at least 3 generations of bird? Short of hypothesizing a bird school where each generation drew on the blackbirdboard :D a schematic of what bottles look like along with detailed instructions on how to get into one, how can we explain the transmission of this?

Sheldrake also came to the conclusion there are field involved. In his view, there is a field for a species and THAT was where the information about bottles and milk was stored. The 100th monkey can be explained in similar fashion - it wasn't really a monkey but a chimp female who discovered that washing her mussels in the water removed all the grit, making it more pleasant to eat.

The idea that species are fields with multiple supporting bodies is a fascinating one and opens up all kinds of isuues we have been questioning for decades or longer.

More soon... :D
 
Fascinating phenomenons - Thank you for sharing. I just saw an episode recently on Criminal Minds, or maybe it was House. I don't know which, watch Netflix ... don't have a TV, but someone received a limb from a sociopath (that iirc was a murderer with the same arm that killed someone). He began to manifest the psychological symptoms from this person and had to have the arm removed. He went into a panic having another's arm.
I just concluded that he knew who's arm he was given (he wasn't supposed to know), thus it was a placebo fear type effect. Perhaps I am wrong. :)

I just got the chills writing as the Golden Arm story also came to mind my grandmama used to tell me. I used to have nightmares about it :\

My mother had a liver transplant and I think of her having this mans liver that died in her body when I see her sometimes…. it has crossed my mind about her adapting similar behaviors to the donor. Anything is possible. Her friend on the liver transplant waiting list, also received a liver and became very very depressed like the doner was and died. But then again, one can never know…

Interesting stuff, bordering on bizarre, but I can't rule out anything honestly. We have a long way to go with the unknown in these areas.
 
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Something I have thought about for some time now…

Imagine if there were two mirrors and they face each other... walk between them and it opens the vista of infinite numbers of selves, receding off into the distance. If the mirrors are only very slightly imperfect, then every copy of Self is slightly changed and we'd need to add together all the copies to make the original Beingness.

What if each image seen in either mirror is actually Self in a Reality? We could have no way of knowing which is the real Self until we can see them all - when we turn one way, every self turns as well, so every self would see itself as the largest copy and think, 'I am Self' and when it turns the other way, seeing again itself as the largest copy, it would decide it IS Self.

Maybe if we add that perspective ( : - sorry, but I like puns) to the possibility that The ALL 'sees' us into a coherence with an underlying BOSE-Condensate state we can see a view of how we may have come to Be? (have a read of Creative Physics - it begins about page 7 of the thread.)

The Illusion may be necessary to have a Reality at all, but also maybe we don't get to transcend it until we can see it... or perhaps 'perceive' it might be a better word. The Octaves analogy seems to hold a lot of promise.

I see the Original Self has to be The ALL...? It was strange but I began using 'The ALL' as an alternate to God or any other loaded term back in the early naughties - several years later I got informed it is a concept or term from Hermetics - something I STILL haven't got to but keep promising myself... le sigh. :D

In the scenario above, the 'others' who reflect back to us are simply reflections of Self to begin with. The more unlike 'my' self they are, the further along the chain of reflections they might be. The ALL would not be able to 'perceive' Self without creating another PoV to look from. It follows as a chain of logic that to know Self completely The ALL would create a myriad PoV's to view Self.

So, if each reflection of Self is in a Reality, and each reflection of Self can learn and grow, albeit in a more limited sense than can The ALL, then perhaps the only way we can achieve the goal of total self-awareness for The ALL is to learn to perfectly communicate between our selves. Once we can achieve that, The ALL can finally 'see' all sides of Self at once.

Perhaps, once we begin to see the other self's as Self, and learn to Be with each other, we might finally be able to 'see' our self in both mirrors simultaneously...
 
I often get into... um... 'discussions' because of my views about Consciousness and how i see it as something different from the brain. It is a view informed by years of reading and thinking about what Science is doing and watching psychology and psychiatry struggle to develop workable ideas about humans. (In the last 150 years we have gone from horseback and carriages to rockets to Mars and beyond and routinely travel across the world in hours. The psychs still use ECT and drug suppression therapies to deal with ever-increasing numbers of psychological issues.

For those interested, the following video summarises (& adds to) the ideas that have led me to my views. It's 1:24 long but is worth it.

 
Name any aspect of consciousness, and I'll show you how selective destruction of specific nuclei in the brain will abolish that aspect. If we can remove every aspect of consciousness by destroying certain parts of the brain, what can consciousness not produced by the brain possibly contribute?
 
endotropic said:
Name any aspect of consciousness, and I'll show you how selective destruction of specific nuclei in the brain will abolish that aspect. If we can remove every aspect of consciousness by destroying certain parts of the brain, what can consciousness not produced by the brain possibly contribute?
Click to expand...
So... someone didn't actually watch the video, did they?

Imagination... :D
 
Journyman16 said:
Imagination... :D
Click to expand...

Pre-frontal cortex


Regarding the video - it's personally comforting for a lot of people to believe in a dualism based persistence of consciousness after death. So comforting that some people will spend a whole career bending over backwards trying to provide some evidence for said phenomena.

"We cannot assume from the fact that electrical stimulation of the brain can induce OBE-like illusions that all OBEs are therefore illusions," replied University of Virginia neurologist Dr. Bruce Greyson.

Really? You can produce out of body experiences by stimulating the brain but the brain doesn't produce out of body experiences? If you want to believe these sorts of ideas based on personal faith by all means don't let evidence dissuade you, just don't dress it up and call it (neuro)science.
 
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So the people who are living normal lives with little or no brain are just lies made up to... what? Fool people? And yes, stimulus can produce feelings like OBE or even a presence many call God, but that doesn't answer the questions that it brings about WHY the brain might have such reactions and functions, does it? Can you think of a possible reason why evolution would find the ability to fool ourselves into thinking we are out of our body a survival trait?

And Greyson is, in a true Science sense, exactly right. Assumptions can kill. Assuming one has the only explanation for an event is the height of hubris. Electrical stimulation can produce the OBE feeling, but that falls short of an explanation as to how people have such events WITHOUT the electric current.

There is also a qualitative difference between an OBE and what they talk about in the lab. The electric effect has the person feeling they are not where their body is. In many OBE's we can FEEL ourselves leaving the body, in some cases peeling out of it like you'd get out of a small car. I didn't read of any of the subjects describing such a sensation, just that they were suddenly convinced they were not where their body was.

You may want to hold back on the comments about evidence until you have looked at such things yourself.
 
God in the gaps fallacy. Just because you can't answer a question doesn't mean it has to have a supernatural explanation. And don't make assumptions about what evidence I have and haven't seen. What experiment would you conduct, and what outcome would convince you that a soul was the only reasonable explanation for some natural phenomena?
 
You really should watch the video. Perhaps once you have done so you might have more pertinent questions to ask... :D There is a howling comment to be made about your 'god in the gaps' but I will leave it for you to find. :D

And just because you can ask a question doesn't mean there aren't answers easily available for you to personally try.
 
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