However the story seems much more problematic when we talk about retrieving memories, accessing word meanings, dreaming and having ideas. Who is accessing this mental content and from where? — Andrew4Handel

The brain retrieves relational memories as needed, via some very fast lookup process, which is amazing in itself, and perhaps our conscious glimpses into these imaginings are dimmed qualia, as a good shortcut, these memory images having 90% transparency so as not to interfere with the direct qualia reality currently present.

The subject would ever be the brain itself, perceiving itself, as kind of a higher sense than our regular senses. Yes, we are ever trapped in the 'mind' (it is the brain, too). The brain's own evolved scheme of more and more symbolic language becoming through higher and higher modules is so unique and extra amazing that we can hardly believe that it is the brain's doing, and, yet, where else would it be happening.

Chalmers posits that information can be represented in two ways, physical and mental, where the mental is just as fundamental as something like mass.

High Noon at the Club – Part 2a — Moving Pictures

My old friend, Iam Cayenne, approaches and says, “How do the skies and water currents move in those Jewett images?”

“By magic.”

“C’mon!”

“I add a special ink to selected areas that stays wet and rolls around.”

“No way!”

“They are done via my secret formula”

“But the people don’t move.”

“That would harder to do, but I’ve accomplished it using actual magic.”

“I doubt it.”

“OK, here’s a painting I made out in our Cemetery yesterday of Omar and his beloved.”

“Ha, it’s not moving.”

I wave it around in the air and say, “See, everything is moving, and if you put your ear closer to it you can hear them talking.”

“Get out! No way! And the people aren’t walking around in the scene. You’re just shaking the whole painting. And there’s no speaking or any sounds coming out of it.”



(Seriously, to make still images move, add them to Final Cut Pro, as many as you like, then copy them and place them in a layer underneath, so, now we there are two layers the same. In the top layer, blue and green will be made transparent and in the bottom layer everything will be in motion, but this movement will only show through where the top layer is transparent. Thus, one will see green leaves, green grass, and green bushes moving, and blue water and blue skies moving. Or even clothes patterns moving and other surprise items moving, such as bird feathers.

When applying a color key to the top layer, select just one still image, because trying to do them all at once won't work, one with both blue and green, for then blue and green can be keyed in one go. Then, use 'copy' and 'paste attributes' to copy the key to all the images. In the bottom layer, select just one image, and apply the 'underwater' filter to it, lowering the parameters way, way down. Then 'copy' and 'paste attributes' to all the images. This method will work on videos, too.)

we have the ability to freely choose — RogueAI

We have the ability to sensibly choose, according to how much sense we have in our will. Some do it better; some worse; some are naturals; some struggle. We end up, hopefully, in professions we are good at.

Evil is a problem for God — TheMadFool

One would think so, yet 'God', whether the invented one or a 'good' one, lets evil spirits run free, blah, blah, blah.

It seems disproportionate and excessive - do we beat our children senseless to make them understand a point? — TheMadFool

Or do we torture them with flame? There goes the believers' unequal argument comparing God's discipline, and as such to be allowed, blah, blah, blah.

No need to be greatly annoyed, for the believers, as all of us, have to do what we do, whether silly or intelligent, as l luck would have us. Learning is out for the deeply indoctrinated, and so any progress is out, they being stuck.

I wonder how one would explain the process of education’s influence on a ‘fixed will’ in anything other than metaphorical language, though. — Possibility

Memory:

The past is never past, at least while we’re alive.
Memories, while re-cognized and ephemeral,
Still have a very basic core of persistence.
 
How does this past remain,
and what kind of substance
Could there be that lives
so completely outside time?
What makes it so strong that it can ever survive
The merciless climate of the well trafficked brain?
 
In what storm’s eye does it reside, in the center
Of the maelstrom of the change and growth of cells?
What are these indestructible grains that persist
Among the shifting sands of time, bare and alone?
  
A memory returns from a taste of butterscotch,
From which Grandma’s olden day’s home
then arises,
And then related connections further become.
 
Reminiscence stirs connections within the mind,
Each little germ of recollection ballooning
Into a wondrous and glorious revelation.
  
How do such apparitions reappear, sink and swell,
Float and change,
withering the acids of time’s reflux?

We know why—prions. …

It's bullshit — darthbarracuda

In the new dictionary-thesaurus:

Bullshit: transcendence, intangible, immaterial, spirit, 'God', supernatural, beyond-physics, etc.

Omar-inspired:

When Allah mixed my clay He knew full well
My future acts, and could each one foretell;
Without His will no act of mine was wrought;
Is it then just to punish me in Hell?

The idol house is as the mosque, a shrine.
And chime of striking bells service divine;
Gueber’s belt, church and rosary and cross,
Each is in truth of worshiping a sign.

Why would the All Knowing, Loving Expert
Compose with Power His designed Concert,
Then decompose His meant Magnificat?
Because there’s none Such beyond the turret.

The sky, a vault, spans our worn lives below;
Jihun a course from our strained eyes aflow;
Hell is a spark struck by our vain distress;
Heaven but an instant when content we know.

How long of temple-incense, mosque-lamp tell?
How long of Heaven’s rewards or pains of Hell?
See, from all time ‘What is to be, will be!’
The Lord of Fate did on the Tablet spell!

I drown in sin—show me Thy clemency!
My soul is dark—make me Thy light to see!
A heaven that must be earned by painful works,
I call a wage, not a gift fair and free.

In Heaven, they say, dwell dark-eyed Houris fair,
And that pure wine and honey will be there;
If wine and woman we love here, ’tis right
Since all the same’s the end of the affair.

In Paradise, they tell us, Houris dwell,
And fountains run with wine and oxymel:
If these be lawful in the world to come,
Surely ‘tis right to love them here as well.

To add to the confusion, consider what (if any) difference there is between ontology and metaphysics. Both pertain to what exists. — Relativist

Yes, so there is but ontology; so long metaphysics; all is physical.

So long; enjoy the babble of Babel.

Um, global warming is bringing the floods back, along with horrible heat. This is the end. Bye.

TOE — Steven Twentyman

So, you see from the video that the information content of Everything is zero—random—the TOE, or, in other words:

The Fundamental Eterne of the causeless,
Whose state cannot have inputs to its mess,
Dooms ‘God’, along with any specifics—
The bedrock of All must be randomness.

Of the random base, some small parts endure,
And code as quarks, which code for atoms pure,
As at each new realm new laws determine—
But for when bedrock’s touched—effects for sure.

so anything that COULD have happened already has. — Steven Twentyman

And will again and again. Luckily we have all of it in the Library of Babel:

where do we go from here — Steven Twentyman

What is the gist of the equations?

Nice to have, although we already know the truth.

Peer pressure — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Big indoctrination, from which not so many can recover.

Life’s cruelty satisfies all repentance,
So this credit give me when Thy sentence,
While here, too, I sin to cancel Your debt,
And away from the holy mosque jump the fence.

The Christian God is vengeful, demands of,
And tortures us with threats of Hellish shove.
Well, if I were a God and ruled above,
You could remove all my powers but love.

There’s no external creative deity.
Don’t worry, this verse has no impiety,
For we are the creative principle;
Intuitive strength is our propriety.

What if it was a mathematical proof that eternity exists as . TRUE ? As in a fully logical irrefutable proof that all there is is eternity ? — Steven Twentyman

The Fundamental Eterne has to exist, as ever, for there is something existent for sure and it cannot have come from nonexistence. Thus, there is no alternative to existence.

rue but he can make moral people call his immoral ass good. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Believers tremble in fear of the Big Bad Boss,
His immorality untrusted not to cause loss—
Insanity hidden in ‘mysterious ways’;
They accept, so He them into Hell doesn’t toss.

True, but I don't see how it's relevant to the discussion. — T Clark

I was trying to say that I don't think science needs determinism as defined in the OP conceptually in order continue successfully. — T Clark

That's not what I meant. I was trying to say that I don't think science needs determinism as defined in the OP conceptually in order continue successfully. — T Clark

Quantum Mechanics' probabilistic outputs are used to build many great devices that work.

High Noon at the OK Corral – Part 2 — Toasting Death

Chrysanthemums drink the mellow day;
Falling petals carry the light away.
The autumn fog enswirls, the mist upcurls;
Into nothingness the wisp slow unfurls.

I see Danton walking by, but I remain quiet, for he is not exactly acting exuberant.

Danton O’Day had been using our quantum tunnel portal chamber to transport himself into the rare book rooms of our Partner Libraries, some of which had over 4000 Rubaiyats, in order to hopefully quickly finish his search for a few missing artists of the Rubaiyat for his next series, covering thee illustrations from 1914-1929, by checking there personally in the rare book rooms if perhaps the cataloging had been wrong or incomplete, with the book actually sitting there on the shelves somewhere, or behind, or even lying on the floor.

If not, then the only hope was the posted appeal to the public, especially to collectors, in case they had a copy.

If still not, then some of the illustrator samples might have to be left out, after some reasonable waiting time had expired, which, for those impatient like me, would be about a week or less, for I really want to read his next series, even if it only 99.9% covers the period.

I’m not about to tell Danton to publish right away just what he has, lest he suggest in return that I cut a lot of my art from my big fat 14x11 400 page edition of The Ultimate Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that hit a wall when the PrestoPhoto book making place informed me that the binding might not hold up beyond 275 pages, and, to boot, that it would cost $420 to print 400 pages. Oh well, I guess a lot of ink has to be consumed.

There is still my potentially endless Apple ibook edition, now at 589 pages, which is logically even more than that, given that some of its landscape view pages contain two facing portrait style images.

Ima Beloved, my elfin muse, reappears and proposes a toast for All Soul’s Day:

A Toast to Death

Time, death, and stardust duly
Made for our birthright fully.

Death chose the useful from the useless
And the pointed from the pointless,
But it took the long of time of yore,
Since Death was the only evaluator.

Eons and ages passed in time’s acumen
For us to evolve from stardust into humans.

Time, death, and stardust’s paths
Write our epitaphs as well, just
As they writ our birthright past.

When our time expires, of the cleft,
Death will come, our living bereft,
And only our dust will be left.

She adds, “I know the poem needs to be worked on some more, plus having quatrains derive from it.” and continues…

Our minds,
Like Shelley’s prisms of many-colored glass,
Strain the white Radiance of Eternity into our lives—
Until Death tramples us—
And then back we go to stardust
After relentless time has wasted us away.

We are devoured us in order to return
That life-dream which was lent to us.

I reply, “I’ll see what I can do with it. Your musings always build into something useful. The themes are great, of course, but they have some repetition and perhaps they explain too much, one stanza might still stand alone for a quatrain, and some rhymes are too forced, plus we probably don’t really need to borrow Shelly’s interpretation, although it’s memorable in his original terms.”

She wanders off, happy to have planted another seed.

I take a short nap outside.


(Click to run.)

“I’ve got something, Ima, three quatrains. You can fiddle with them some more. I’m not completely satisfied with them, but they’re good enough for now.”

Heaven’s stars spread the primeval dust eterne;
Time’s deep seas to evolve the species in turn.
From time, death, and dust we at last became,
And to this, thus, and that we must return.

Time and stardust made us Earth’s living guest,
For quick death sifted the rest from the best.
Those, our birthright, wrote our epitaph, too:
RIP; time expired, death came, dust was left.

Death, evolution’s lone selector,
Stalked the sillier from the wise of yore,
Preserved the more useful from the useless,
And favored the pointed o’er the pointless.

You have to yield, for there is a yield sign there to you.

Grand Unified Theory — Steven Twentyman

Then all the forces would be unified, even gravity, and then our species would continue on just about as it does now. A Theory of Everything, though, would shock the world.

The best responses to theism are materialist (physicalist) metaphysics and cosmology. Every argument I've seen for God are based on arguments from ignorance or based on unstated metaphysical assumptions. — Relativist

Ah, good, and on topic.

(No "slime", apart from that we evolved from it.)

Without you being who and what you are, the future causal chain (your output) would be different. — Relativist

And, yet, the actuality of one being in the chain trumps the "if's" and "could haves" of not being there.

Freedom and Determinism — ho ching leung

Excellent essay.

In this lost haunt, out on the Orion arm
Of the Milky Way—where safe from the core’s harm;
The philosophers gather in the forum,
As new Sherlocks unweaving the Cosmic yarn.

‘Magic’ has fallen by the wayside, it
As trancendence an intangible writ,
Unable to be distinct from matter,
Having to talk/walk the talk/walk of it.

The Fundamental Eterne of the causeless,
Whose state cannot have inputs to its mess,
Dooms ‘God’, along with any specifics—
The bedrock of All must be randomness.

Of the random base, some small parts endure,
And code as quarks, which code for atoms pure,
As at each new realm new laws determine—
But for when bedrock’s touched—effects for sure.

Conscious qualia reflect the just past,
Decisions and thoughts produced, though it’s fast,
The mechanizations not apparent,
Their constancy such that on Earth we’ll last.

So, then, now Purple Pond is well on his way to dealing with the believers.

This link speak to theistic evolution.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/pope-would-you-accept-evolution-and-big-bang-180953166/?no-ist

If theistic evolution is true, then the myth of Eden should be read as a myth and there is not really any original sin. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

"God is not a magician" is the beginning of the downfall of 'God' for the Catholics, it demonstrating that the Bible contains fairytales.

High Noon at the OK Club — Part 1 — Obits


(Men on the menus!)

Should we call the above ‘Womenus’, to whet women’s appetites?

From the Halloween lunch buffet I grab some Lady Fingers, Jello worms, and then stare back at the eyeball pasta, but then choose dog Kibbles instead.

I ponder Ima’s ‘Smoothly Rolling Now’ notion that makes for our extended present and ever continuing stream of consciousness… I realize that the basis of it must be of short term memories seamlessly stitched together.

Whens
Life is a web, of whos, whys, whats, and hows
Stretched in time between eternal boughs.
Gossamer threads bear the beads that glisten,
Each moment a sequence of instant nows.

I now head to step out a back exit of the Club for a bit, with a different drink in each hand and goodies in my pockets, and pass through our Obituarium, which displays in posters our lives’ full and spirited doings, with even the future parts included of all that we’ll thereby have to live up to.

At the end of the room, there is an ornate, otherworldly type door, with a sign written in gold above that reads:

The Great Equalizer stalks all creatures made,
Lying ever just ‘round the corner in the shade,
Taking both human and the beetle as one,
After their lives are spent from rolling some dung.

The door creaks as I pass through its way and into our cemetery to look about the souls’ resting places.


(Click to run.)

A brand new inscription appears on the main stone:

Summer passed away in his sleep last night,
Autumn, sweet and plump, carries his offspring.
The year dies in the night, ghostly winter comes—
Yet spring’s flower is already in the seed.

We’d just had our first frost, but the sun has melted it.

The smile meets the tear—
Fall’s embers last through December.

I look into the distance, noting the endless rows of tombstones in this ‘Land of Epitaphs’. I tilt my drink to pour a few drops into the grass,

Here, a few drops I pour onto the ground,
That precious drink of the quatrains profound.
It through the soil trickles and seeps…
And to his thirsty lips the way it found.

…and lift the drinks to my lips, Sipping From The Rubaiyat’s Chalice (Book by Martin Kimeldorf), then drink Mehdi Aminrazivi’s The Wine of Wisdom from my other hand.

Another epitaph catches my eye:

The Last Remembrance
Engraved is ‘The End’ of your Earthly sigh;
Six sides surround: five are dirt, one is sky.
Shov’ling, Death speaks to you at last, and says,
“What were you doing during all of nigh?”

I sit on a stone bench and paint a cemetery scene that I’ll need for another post.

Back inside, I obtain another drink and turn to the next page of the Jewett Illustrated Rubaiyat, savoring the details, it filling my entire table in its 8K 3D resolution, but I can only show it as a smaller 2D image here:


(Click to run.)

We are all dominoes forever falling into each other and constantly reshaping each other's velocities and directions of travel. — rlclauer

In learning this, our fixed will expands to grant us the peace of less worthy blame and shame, although, too, less worthy fame, plus more compassion for those who are really stuck because they can't learn well. Now that the horror of randomness drops as the other shoe, we can better embrace the unliked original shoe of the fixed will's consistency, and because that's, well, how it is, and so it shall be, plus whatever will be will be, pending whatnot, which we could put on statues everywhere.

Fixed unfree will is probably the greatest revelation ever to humankind, if they came to realize it; much of the nonsense would fall.

Interesting. So you would see ideology as a rewiring of the brain, then? — thewonder

Yes, one can totally become what sees a lot. Be careful not to play too many video games, and especially don't get hooked on watching Wrestling Shows!

…there is no such thing as a "free will" or an "agent which causes." — rlclauer

All good stuff. Although reality isn't the way that some fantasize it to be, it appears to be the only way it could be and work (as a consolation prize), via the consistency of the fixed will (of the instant, which can ever progress to a new and better fixed will) helping us to survive.

The 'I' of the moment would be the part of the self currently in the mind and the whole repertoire of the brain would be the whole 'self', potentially, I guess.

Some people talk to themselves, which is perhaps a better fixed will talking to a previous lesser fixed will, or a higher self to a lower self, saying the likes of "What the Hell were you thinking when you did that!"

So I guess where you and I would have difference, is you believe there is some kind of meta phenomenon of the mind, some will, which affects reality — rlclauer

No, no differences, for the 'will' is merely some part of the brain, and the same for the 'mind'. No metaphysics here; all is physical. No supernatural, no intangible, no hocus-pocus. Those distinct realms fail because they'd still have to exchange energy in the materialistic way, and so they wouldn't be non physical. It's like that someone wants there to be 'free will' because we can pick up other people's brainwaves. Well, who knows if that is, but it doesn't matter, for it would just be another input for the fixed will to chew on. The wider the dynamically changing fixed will becomes, via learning and experience, the better its fixed results. We may do or think something tomorrow that we wouldn't have done today.

…Until, for some, informed by science, who realize that there is an opaque first storey of the neurological beneath our second story.

Could you elaborate on this? — rlclauer

'Storey' is like as used for the first storey of a house, while 'story', while having truth, has some illusion.

We don't see the subconscious brain gears of neuron connections firing, introspectively, nor do we realize (until informed by science) that these figurings took some time, 300-500 ms, all of this finished by the time our consciousness (also a brain process) always sequential to it receives the product of the figurings, this scene also taking time to get painted, unified, and integrated seamlessly with the previous.

We could have an executive function, but this is not a ghost in a machine, but rather, is itself another deterministic program which serves supervisory functions. — rlclauer

You hit on it well.

As so, other or higher brain areas can then access the global result/qualia produced and represented in consciousness, and go deeper with it, if need be, this being part of why the brain evolved consciousness as useful. The brain developed its own symbolic internal language, using qualia symbols (which is quite amazing), and so it could be that these are good shortcut notation for the brain to continue on with, and also, as another part of usefulness, would be good to put into memory as a whole, to have more quickness when referenced.

Ok, then it seems like we both agree, randomness does not generate free will. I had a very hard time understanding your poem, so take that for what it's worth. If you could speak less obscurely it might help my pea brain out. — rlclauer

Yes, and so it turn out that free will, as other than the will being free to operate when there is no coercion (which is trivial and not the same 'free'), has nothing to be free of—it just kind of sounds like a great thing to have.

The will is just as ‘free’ as random is.
(In other words, not free, for random harms.)
Though we’re determined to survive each quiz,
(The consistency of the will aims toward us having a future.)
A spanner sometimes gets thrown in the works,
(A tool falls into a machine, preventing from working as designed.)
Preventing the fixed will from being a wiz.
(The wizard of the will can not effectively collapse scenerios of consequence when disrupted.)

Yeah, it was a bit obscure, as 'spanner' is more used in England and a 'quiz' is our daily labyrinth to be navigated.)

Hence, why don't people just stop pretending that this idea of free will is even coherent? — rlclauer

Because… such as we want to say "I love you" to a lover rather than something literal along the lines of that our love has to be so because our bonding hormones match. although it is kind understood that there can be chemistry between lovers.

Seriously, though, it is that nature has led us into the illusion that when a thought comes along seemingly out of nowhere that we thought of it instantly in consciousness, thinking we have conscious agency.

…Until, for some, informed by science, who realize that there is an opaque first storey of the neurological beneath our second story.

Do you mean something like that Christians don't really believe in God, but, rather, that they believe in the desire for there to be a God? — thewonder

No, they believe because they so much want it that they suspend other thinking, unknowingly, as a kind of being in denial. Every time they look to their thoughts, 'God is' appears because their brain wires so often fired together that they became wired together.

Like I said, you can only ever suspend your disbelief to a certain extent, but it does get suspended. — thewonder

So then, getting back to the OP, might it be that believers so much want their belief that it becomes to them as real?

randomness = free — rlclauer

More like randomness = harm (to the will).

In order for the will to be free, it essentially must be able to manifest uncaused causes. — rlclauer

And even this hope falls apart, for the uncaused has no information going into it, making it to be random, which also dooms 'God'.

criminal justice — rlclauer

Justice of 'coercion' versus 'responsible' is fine for protecting society by holding one's unfree will responsible, the philosophers still knowing that the perpetrator had to do it, although the courts don't much get into that, for ‘determined vs undetermined’ is orthogonal. In the same way, we would wish to imprison hurricanes if we could.

randomness at best — rlclauer

Usually worst?

The will is just as ‘free’ as random is.
Though we’re determined to survive each quiz,
A spanner sometimes gets thrown in the works,
Preventing the fixed will from being a wiz.

'word magic' — fresco

FitzGerald the transmogrifier brought forth Omar's Arabic into Victorian English so exquisitely that most of the world had to obtain a copy of his version of the Rubaiyat, and over the other poets and literalists. His other works of literature paled in comparison to the magnificence of his book of quatrains.

— The Book of Quatrains —

Now, for the golden verse, as the first.

For its olden age, it is none the worse.

Although day-tide has just barely spoken,

I no less will open our precious token,

This mystery book of poetry sealed,

With waxen shield, it having been concealed

For hundreds of years in the secret chamber

Of the old library’s remainder.

Ope it as one would a tender lover.
A bottle’s encased inside the cover.

Its spirit’s mist apparently escaped

As our fuminous volume was undraped.

I’m captivated by the Persia fumes.
As I. It’s the perfume of ageless rhymes,

From those grand, learnéd Sufi looms of time.
We’ll have to learn how to read between the lines.

The tome is written in foreign language,

In fine verses of thirteen syllables,

Epigrammatic, in four-line stanzas,

It having many swirlas and circulas.

It’s written in middle Persian, I’ve looked,
Having handled many such foreign books—
My editor’s role in the abbey’s nooks;
I thought to hide it in one of the rooks.

The library’s most valuable book!

For I’ve illuminated and unhooked

Many of the monastery’s great books.
For it a long and joyous month I took.

It was the only writing I could save,

Yet it’s the only book we’ll ever crave.


— The Transmogrification —

They watch the book moving about, amazed;

Sparkles and twirls whirl out of the pages.


(Click to run the GIF)

It’s rising, breathing, and coming to life,
As husband in the presence of his wife.
Words bounce around; over the page they run,
They often changing into English ones.

Even whole verses are now roundly dancing—
Of the Arabic world—dervishes whirling.

They’re trying to settle from the struggle,
But the words do again jump and juggle,

Some hanging back, then ever surging forth,

Darting around through the poem’s long course,

Then make stanzas, to form a brighter source,

From aspects of the pervading concepts.

’Tis as if this transmogrification
Is trying to preserve all relation
Of the original schema throughout,
The whole translation process devout,

Including literal means, rhythm, rhyme,
Melody, syllable, meter, and time;
But this doesn’t seem to be workative,
And so it follows that something must give,

And this might well sadly be the ration
That is usually lost in translation.

See! Out of that desperation, uncaged,

The verses are jumping right off the page,

Splashing into the bottle of perfume,

Wherein they are redistilling, subsumed.

Now they’re leaping back out, onto the page,
Recomposing themselves, for this time—our age,

Whereupon they’re condensing, restaging,
Into Victorian verse, over paging—
Original concepts forming new quatrains
In which Omar’s meaning’s essence remains.

The lines are now ten English syllables,
Rather than the Arabic thirteen quills,
Yet holding even more related meanings,
Heretofore unnoted, yet the verses

Are still in groups of four lines per stanza,
And the correct lines still rhyme, per lingua,
Although some of the ending quatrain schemes
Don’t seem to have quite the same rhyming means.

Yes, only the unneeded has been lost;

A charm has been added, the good not tossed;

It is something somehow much better told,

Yet e’er within the spirit of the old.

Yes, random is the prime mover.