You all just need to go read C.S. Pierce's “Immortality in the Light of Synechism” (1893) and understand it.

Then come back and explain it to me like I'm your child (that you love unconditionally because I'm somehow continuous with... yourself?).

The elephant in the room is the New Age using The Secret to deny fundamental reality. Omg the elephant is taking a dump

I might just be relatively new to this forum or something, but I have been through quite a lot of of threads...

What is it with this particular thread and people just saying that "read or hear this and then you will understand". That is not an argument. That is not discussion. That is just promotion. Please stop promoting and start doing what this forum is about. Arguments and discussion.

It is your job to make your sources easy enough for people in the forum to go through. And if your sources are too complex to simplify - too bad. You have to make a simpler thread or figure something else out. All the world would believe in my next level +12 magic of the Chaos Serpent if I got an infinitely long attention from everyone. There is a reason no ones attention is free and the more you want it, the more you have to demonstrate first - not afterwards.

If you are not here to discuss anything with other people unless they have gone through the things you are promoting, no one here will probably find you interesting enough to listen to.

Unless that person is here to promote something.

Just trying to help the guy in the improbable case he is actually not just promoting and actually interested in discussion since the topic isn't completely useless... foolish hope, I guess.

Probably should stop replying since the potential promoter seems to no longer be active and we shouldn't make his promotion more visible.

Perhaps it would be better if I were specifically told what it is I am requested to define. What precisely is it in my responses that is not understood?Highlight the word or phrase you do not understand. Not from my starting post, but from my response. ... I don't have time for bring toyed with. I am not leaving the forum, but I am leaving this thread.

Mapping the medium seems to be a podcast run by Catherine Tyrrell. I'm happy to be corrected.

Freudian slip

Perhaps it would be better if I were specifically told what it is I am requested to define. — Mapping the Medium

I think maybe you don't have a lot of experience with internet forums. I looked at your homepage and am quite well-disposed to your general philosophy, but joining up and then saying 'hey everyone, just read/listen to all my lectures' does seem a lot like self-promotion.

I can see you're presenting ideas that require quite a bit of context or background to interpret. But trying to get a bunch of contrarians to absorb all that background is a stretch, in this type of medium.

What I suggest is, spend a bit of time lurking about - if it interests you, anyway - and then find some specific points or arguments that you can see relate to the kind of themes you're interested in. Everything here has to generally sound-byte size, i.e. snippets, sentences, short paragraphs. People are OK with being given references which illustrate specific points - I do that all the time - but 'unless you're thoroughly familiar with C. S. Peirce' is something else.

Hang in - well, as I said, if you're interested. But also learn to interact in this kind of medium, that's part of the challenge.

You all just need to go read C.S. Pierce's “Immortality in the Light of Synechism” (1893) and understand it. — Nils Loc

Sounds a fascinating read. Is that one of his articles for 'The Monist'? He published a lot of his more mystical stuff there, and it's a really interesting journal. It's still online.

Personally, I think Peirce's theism is important to understanding his work. He didn't labour it and he was certainly no evangelical, but I think it formed part of what he would consider the 'assumed background' of his ideas, in the broader cultural sense. If you read his work on 'agape-ism' he was plainly concerned with 'spiritual consciousness' but again, was by no stretch any kind of Christian apologist. But like his contemporaries William James, Josiah Royce, and Borden Parker Bowne, he was a kind of 'idealist-perennialist', in some ways closer to the German idealists (Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling) than many of his modern interpreters would be comfortable with. (Interesting footnote: 'semiotics' proper is said to have begun with Bonaventura, who, of course, saw it terms of 'signs of the divine intelligence'.)

Regarding the question in the OP: 'the individual mind' is in some sense contiguous with ego, the self's idea of itself. And of course there's much more to 'consciousness' than that - both in the sense of the unconscious and subconscious, as disclosed by Freud and jung, but also in the sense that there is cultural consciousness, and species consciousness, not to mention the various 'stations of consciousness' that are understood by spiritual adepts. But as we live in a primarily ego-centred and individualist culture, then all such questions are refracted through the prism of individuality, which tends to render them unintelligible.

There is a world of difference between German romanticism and New Age. The subconscious is the medium between our biology and the conscious agent. But we don't all share one body. And even though there is much power in belief, and Buddhism says to take responsible for your birth, the reality is that you can't reverse the path. You have to amend the past. There is no other way. If a band of cannibals formed a fuzzy united ball together, the new "reality" doesn't change.what they did.

You haven’t responded yet. Now you’re bailing from the thread? People are posting out of interest here so it wouldn’t hurt to answer the question. If the answer is too embarrassing or something PM me and I’ll keep it to myself.

To repeat, what do you mean by ‘consciousness existing beyond the individual mind’? Please note that the ‘collective unconscious’ is unconscious not ‘conscious’ - it is in this area that care is needed as the term ‘consciousness’ can often be mis/taken to mean ‘conscious awareness’.

Jung’s definition of this is often used by New Age types to promote woo woo, as I’m sure you’ve found, so take that on the chin and continue. I’m not interested enough to listen to your podcast yet - better things to listen to (so sell it by answer the repeated request).

All I can do is invite you, and I have.

I no longer debate these things. I don't have to, or need to. — Mapping the Medium

Then why are you here? Just to plug your podcast? This is a place for discussion. If you are not interested in discussion, then go away before you are banned for spamming.

I've wanted to look more into Peirce (having read only a few pragmatist essays), but his home-grown terminology has always made that difficult. I did look up synechism.
http://www.digitalpeirce.fee.unicamp.br/p-synesp.htm

Peirce claimed that "[a]ll communication from mind to mind is through continuity of being." (CP 7.572) With this insight "the barbaric conception of personal identity must be broadened" to include a dimension of social mind and social consciousness. Philosophy cannot start with a cogito or with sense impressions. It starts with a recognition that sensation is judgment; judgment is generalization, and generalization requires generality. The next step is to link generality with significance: — link

<and then this quote follows>

ll regularity affords scope for any multitude of variant particulars; so that the idea [of] continuity is an extension of the idea of regularity. Regularity implies generality; and generality is an intellectual relation essentially the same as significance, as is shown by the contention of the nominalists that all generals are names. Even if generals have a being independent of actual thought, their being consists in their being possible objects of thought whereby particulars can be thought. Now that which brings another thing before the mind is a representation; so that generality and regularity are essentially the same as significance. Thus, continuity, regularity, and significance are essentially the same idea with merely subsidiary differences. (CP 7.535) — Peirce

This reminds me of Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida. We we initially perceive is objects in a social context. I see perhaps a broom, which I know as 'something one sweeps the floor with.' And then regularity reminds me of iterability as ideality. Language is conventional. To speak or write intelligibly is to employ a code using words that can always be repeated and re-contextualized. They can function in my absence, and the letter I write may never arrive. So neither the sender or receiver grounds the meaning of the letter. One understands the letter. And one is anyone --a kind of structural unconscious that results from successful linguistic-cultural training. Drop a baby human in a community, and it will somehow absorb this 'structural unconscious.'
Then there's this:

There is a famous saying of Parmenides {esti gar einai, méden d' ouk einai}, "being is, and not_being is nothing." This sounds plausible; yet synechism flatly denies it, declaring that being is a matter of more or less, so as to merge insensibly into nothing. How this can be appears when we consider that to say that a thing is is to say that in the upshot of intellectual progress it will attain a permanent status in the realm of ideas. Now, as no experiential question can be answered with absolute certainty, so we never can have reason to think that any given idea will either become unshakably established or be forever exploded. But to say that neither of these two events will come to pass definitively is to say that the object has an imperfect and qualified existence. Surely, no reader will suppose that this principle is intended to apply only to some phenomena and not to others, __ only, for instance, to the little province of matter and not to the rest of the great empire of ideas. Nor must it be understood only of phenomena to the exclusion of their underlying substrates. Synechism certainly has no concern with any incognizable; but it will not admit a sharp sundering of phenomena from substrates. That which underlies a phenomenon and determines it, thereby is, itself, in a measure, a phenomenon.(CP 7.569) — Peirce

This reminds me of Hegel's phenomenology. The notion of the substrate is unstable. And 'no concern with any incognizable' is an abandonment of the thing-in-itself as a kind of useless appendix. FWIW, I've been admiring Locke lately. For those interested in Locke versus Kant, I recently found this by Tomida and was quite impressed: https://sites.google.com/site/diogenesphil/lk

One last point is the 'point at infinity' implied by Peirce, which is some ideal end of inquiry that never arrives. This infects being with time, in a good way. 'No finite thing has genuine existence.' Also, 'the truth is the whole.' So Peirce is like an American twist on Hegel in some ways.

Synechism, as a metaphysical theory, is the view that the universe exists as a continuous whole of all of its parts, with no part being fully separate, determined or determinate, and continues to increase in complexity and connectedness through semiosis and the operation of an irreducible and ubiquitous power of relational generality to mediate and unify substrates. — link

Granting some kind of truth to this, it doesn't free us from requiring more sober modes of thought. What we have here is perhaps a rationalizing articulation of the oceanic feeling. The increase in complexity suggests a kind of infinite progress. Instead of an end of history, we get endless ascension. Is this optimism a product of its time?

I'm here for discussion and dialogue, not debate. I love learning from others through reasonable dialogue. I wasn't trying to plug my website. If we are not allowed to mention our own website, why is it asked for in our profile? The topics involved are complex, and because of that I point to experts. But now I'm told that pointing to anything outside of this forum can be cause for removal. If that is the case, then all that is left is heated opinions and confrontations. I see no progress or learning in that, especially when I'm asked to explain something, then I do, but my response isn't even read, and I only receive more badgering. I'm not understanding the logic in that.

Thank you!
You are the first person here to logically and intelligently open a thoughtful and potentially fruitful discussion!
Your points are good ones, and I want to address them properly. Let me respond appropriately when the day finally dawns here and I am at my computer instead of my phone. Again, thank you.

The only way to get closer to a shared understanding is through dialogue. — Mapping the Medium

Do you like Gadamer? This is a key idea in Truth and Method.

The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows that from the forgetfulness of language that its real being consists in what is said in it. What is said in it constitutes the common world in which we live. … The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it — what is said.
...
In fact history does not belong to us but rather we to it. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self awareness of the Individual is only a flickering in the closed circuit of historical life. That is why the prejudices of an individual are — much more than that individual's judgments — the historical reality of his being.
...
We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said. It would be an inadmissible abstraction to contend that we must first have achieved a contemporaneousness with the author or the original reader by means of a reconstruction of his historical horizon before we could begin to grasp the meaning of what is said. A kind of anticipation of meaning guides the effort to understand from the very beginning. — Gadamer

Thank you!
You are the first person here to logically and intelligently open a thoughtful and potentially fruitful discussion!
Your points are good ones, and I want to address them properly. Let me respond appropriately when the day finally dawns here and I am at my computer instead of my phone. Again, thank you. — Mapping the Medium

My pleasure. I like all of these issues, so it should be fun.

Our genes are influenced by our environment, or Medium, per epigenetics, and expressed as creative diversity manifested over and above genetic copies. — Mapping the Medium

Epigenetics involves genes being turned on or off, right?

Are you saying that primal imagery is turned on and off by some mechanism?

Imagery, smell, etc.
For instance, there is one prominent study showing that when mice are taught to fear a particular smell, their offspring, and the subsequent offspring are born fearing that smell.

I found the study here

Thank you for posting it, as I will be avoiding link postings.

Your OP was pretty empty of substance, and you haven't added much to it in the follow-up, instead directing us to your website and podcast for details. This is the problem, not the fact that you have links in your profile.

If you want to engage with other members, then don't count on them listening to your podcast or reading your off-site posts. You are not my guru - you are some random stranger from the 'net. If you don't post anything of substance, then I am not going to chase after your teachings elsewhere.

(From what little you have revealed here, it looks like you are of those... impressionable individuals who got too enthusiastic about the ever-fashionable epigenetics. That's not as original as you might think. Geneticists who give popular talks dread the inevitable questions about epigenetics that they always receive, no matter the actual topic of their presentation.)

I especially like a video and books by Nessa Carey. Her video explains it so well that I added it to my educational playlist. Just search for her name on YouTube. It's great!

Consciousness is not only inside an individual brain, and this relationship explains the transition of life when the body dies.

Consciousness extends beyond the brain but not past the surface of the skin. It’s a 1-to-1 ratio with the body, and is in fact the same thing. When we speak of consciousness we are speaking of the body in abatracto.

There is definitely consciousness beyond the individual mind. — Mapping the Medium

Does this belief stem directly from Pierce's metaphysics (Syncheism)? Why would biological mechanisms of behavioral inheritance, namely epigentics, provide any more support for this metaphysical theory? It seems like cultural evolution (memetics) is a far greater means of transmitting "what it is like to be" human between individuals.

Morphic resonance, biocentrism, panpsychism, god… do we know yet what are we talking about here? Can someone sum up in a sentence exactly what new thing is being proposed, or what is the central claim that is supposed to explain or justify the statement in the title of this thread?

I'm a materialist and very opposed to New Age Ken Wilbur "we are all one" stuff. If you commit a crime, that doesn't make me do it or have done it. Belief is powerful but it doesn't trump the universe. Once someone has done their full measure of evil, they.have nothing to do but wait for hell. There is no consciousness after death, but during death there <a href="http://can.be.an" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">can.be.an</a> eternity. Paradoxes

How about shared hallucinations? — Athena

Is it conceivable that there is only a limited number of hallucinations a person can experience?

Hallucinations limited? Out with the afterlife being eternal then. That's fine. Maybe consciousness can't sustain eternity.