How could you tell the difference, scientifically or otherwise, between Angel tongue and dysarthria syndrome, or just plain babbling? How can an objective observer distinguish "Myths and Rationalizations" from sincere-but-private divine channels of communication? — Gnomon

LOL I certainly have the vision quest end of the spectrum going on at the moment, my dreams are off the chain lately.

What's the name of your Storm God? — Gnomon

He hasn't said his name to me, but told folks "He has served me well" and that I'm an "incarnation". He gives the county quite a shock once in awhile.

I haven't heard of that new synthesis of worldviews. Does it have a common name yet? — Gnomon

I don't believe the genre has a distinct name, but a good representative of the style I have in mind is Reading the Rocks: How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life. Its about how the juggernaut of evolutionary science started with a few aristocrats poking around the English countryside in suits and dresses using a few picks and shovels. Amazing true story and an easy read with a coherent, accessible message. I think books like this could actually build a utopia if they were available for everyone to casually enjoy and discuss.

Ultramodernism : "A primitive futurist scream for change . . . A movement seeking to provide an alternative to societies retrospective tendanices, especially in the fields of popular culture (art, music, fashion)" — Gnomon

I drew my use from the urbane John Deely, mentioned in the article you linked to, rather than the urban dictionary.

But my own interpretation of such psychological phenomena as prostrating Worship (motivated by fear of god) and Glossolalia (motivated by felt need to communicate with god), are real human behaviors that should be understood, not simply ridiculed. I don't personally feel those hedonic urges, but I want to relate to those who do. — Gnomon

It's funny that science describes the desire to communicate with God using what almost seems like a medical term, as if a syndrome. And its strange how some religiosity talks about the "fear of the Lord" and some that "God is love", etc. etc., so contradictory and anthrocentric, as if God revolves around the foibles of human nature. You can tell that the stuff is in large measure humans confabulating myths and rationalizations for aesthetic purposes or in support of authority structures.

But I know from personal experience that once in awhile God reveals himself directly to humans: the wind starts whipping around, sometimes with lightning, and a voice speaks that is uncanny and powerful enough to inspire millennia of monument-building.

In my humble opinion, God is not a deistic watchmaker letting stuff run entirely on its own, nor a supernatural entity, but a part of nature, and every force God exerts has a natural explanation regardless of how rare or miraculous, so spirituality is intrinsically compatible with scientific theory. I don't consider it necessary for human beings to prostrate themselves before God unless they have a good reason to do so or it helps them somehow, and we seem to have acquired the habit of explaining much of what God does using models of the supposedly inanimate, but when God fully reveals Himself, ideological hubris becomes meaningless.

I think a panprotopsychist facet within quantum physics and neuroscience may enable research to deeply explain consciousness as a natural phenomenon, but that is far from implying God isn't influencing it, so the so-called preternatural is perhaps an enigmatic aspect of nature.

modern philosophy, which has two main divisions : Empirical Analytics of Modernism, and Intuitive Deconstruction of Postmodernism. Neither of which will accept the other's solutions to metaphysical problems. — Gnomon

I think empirical analytics and intuitive deconstruction are easy to synthesize: it is simply a matter of intellectual respect for the most plausible order in fact-gathering, a causal accuracy in narrative. The historical literature I've read recently does an impeccable job of rationalizing event sequences on many fronts, so I think any methodological clash between modernism and postmodernism has been resolved by a new genre of analytical historicity that is emerging, but ethical and cultural concerns still loom large, basically the issue of who gets to access the books and for what purposes.

Regard for the implication of memes in power relations has been drawn from a literary movement of cultural criticism into the literature itself as a latent tension. Its fascinating to see the messy war of values going on within all this pristine factual prose, amounting to dissonance between the tone of various authors who are all employing essentially the same expository template, and even sometimes within a single book.

Seems to me that what some philosophers might call true postmodernism as opposed to ultramodernism is a movement that is struggling mightily to conceptualize humanity in an increasingly mechanistic and authoritarian world.

Enformationism is necessarily Holistic, which results in some departure from typical Reductive interpretations of physical and metaphysical phenomena. — Gnomon

I've read so much incisive critique of metaphysics that I don't really view the field as having more than historical significance. For me, structural modeling is all epistemology, philosophy of mind, logic and science. If math or anything else is called metaphysical, that seems superfluous to me. Counterarguments welcome!

But, so far, mainstream Science has not "assimilated" any of those metaphysical phenomena...my worldview is neither Spiritual nor Material, but a consilient combination of both. — Gnomon

Its interesting you brought in the hedonic psychology angle, because most such pleasure/pain theorists incline to assert that experiences of the preternatural phenomena I mentioned are delusions, induced by pleasurable autostimulation within the nervous system. This makes a convenient companion to the reductionist physicalism that approaches an explanation of most phenomena, certainly including hedonic pleasure and pain, as produced by properties describable according to the standard atomic model, with the preternatural entirely excluded from consideration.

I gather that your Enformation thesis wants to translate the preternatural into an idiosyncratic conceptual framework that is compatible with both materialism and a sort of Platonic mathematical philosophy which I admit not fully grasping.

My angle wants to synthesize quantum physics with biochemistry and neuroscience to aim for a model of the mind/body interface that is based on wavicle mechanics, hopefully including within its scope preternatural phenomena such as nonlocal effects.

Your philosophy seems to be based around deriving a holistic language and structure encompassing all of existence, including the preternaturally quantumlike. My tinkering is motivated towards construction of hypotheses that are verifiable by experiment, platforming progression to theory and technology that can observe the preternaturally quantumlike as palpably and precisely as we observed chemical reactions in a 20th century lab. But regardless of what ultimately turns out to be possible and where knowledge goes, I think we can agree that for most phenomena, the assumption they are "delusions" to reject must be discarded in favor of an effort to arrive at "better explanations", and this is what will allow the next age of scientific humanism to happen, in my opinion as an alternative to spiritual collapse, dystopia, ecological disasters, and the catastrophe of failing to competently incorporate AI.

It seems to me that in my conversations with you and additional posters at this site, the "better explanations" challenge itself has been met. We solved the mind/body problem, explained the compatibility of spiritualism with materialism, and though we disagree on minor conceptual details, everyone knows what everyone is saying in its essentials and agrees with everyone once exposed to the ideas, though we still argue for the hell of it.

Why does this seem to make such minimal impact? Is the "inaccurate viewpoint as delusion" perspective so integral to modernity that we don't even note real progress, instinctively acting as if knowledge is some sort of arbitrarily held personal property rather than practical truth we have a collective responsibility to advance? Are changes happening I don't know about, or are we so stagnated in the hedonic materialist paradigm that serious commitment to anything outside the mainstream is condemned? The consciousness theory currently being developed is beyond standard reductionism, more of a panpsychism-styled paradigm, but is anyone taking it seriously?

I have been forced, by the philosophical implications of modern science, to accept "some form of Panpsychism", and the necessity for a creation act, which entails some form of Creator. — Gnomon

I'll get all wild and crazy because I can't resist lol A lot more phenomena exist than the materialistic paradigm in science has explained, but if you give physical knowledge a panprotopsychist dimension along the lines of my theory in the OP, this might change. For instance:

Auras: fields of additive superposition amongst entangled matter that extend beyond the body, a supraphysiological qualia.

Meaningful dreams and visions: inducement of qualia in the mind via panpsychical mechanisms, with panpsychism being an emergent property of panprotopsychism.

Synchronicity: nonlocal perturbation of panprotopsychical coherence fields.

Spirits: qualitatively experiencing beings that can be sentient, composed of substances transcending the sense-perceptual spectrum, but which typically perturb it.

God: an extremely powerful sentient spirit with massive form-giving force.

Spells: a cognitive/behavioral act of perturbing panprotopsychical fields.

And this is only scratching the surface, it of course gets more preternatural than that. Science might be able to assimilate this preternaturality as an expansion of our present mechanistic framework, describing it in terms of physics, chemistry, biology and psychology, if the quantumlike foundations of qualia and nonlocal causality are rationalized with theoretical modeling and rendered observable using technological instrumentation. What do you think?

Personally, I'm not religious, but I am philosophical. And, unlike most people, I have a well-thought-out thesis to backup my personal belief system. So, based on a detailed & documented chain of reasoning, I do think that our world necessarily had an outside Cause of some sort. However, I've had no personal "experience" of divinity. Hence, I am not "awe-inspired", and have no motivation to worship the abstract hypothetical First Cause of my worldview. — Gnomon

You seem to accept some form of panpsychism and consider God the creator, meaning I presume that He is an extremely powerful entity while permeating everything that exists. I have my own experiences and reasons, but don't want to get ultraspiritual and start analyzing this or that doctrine-laden idea unless you're into that. Anyways, it might be interesting to make some specifications as to what this panpsychism actually consists in. In what sense do you regard God as preternatural or observable? A first cause could be anything, but you call it God, so it can't be a complete mystery. You must think of the natural world as to some degree having an intrinsic motivational force with palpable effects, and this implies that it is possible to engage in a factual description, though maybe not permissible?

I realize the discourse for this topic can incline towards the bizarre, but I'm nonetheless curious to find out where you're coming from if you can describe it further. I've had preternatural experiences myself that could be fulfilling for me to consider in light of your point of view. You probably know much more than me about concepts of God and gods in an academic sense, while my ideas of God come from a more personal source, not academic at all.

Since our world had a beginning, it's hard to deny the concept of creation — Gnomon

How do you know an absolute beginning exists? Why couldn't substance be inanimately eternal, with all psychical phenomena an emergent property and no fundamental creation necessary?

(I should say that I'm not trying to be irreligious, because if you've experienced God this makes Him no less awe-inspiring, but seems to me we shouldn't base belief in God on fallacious ideas, so that's what motivates my challenge.)

So you think the parameters of final causality which are present while form is given to the world intrinsically arise as a product of mind, in essence psychical? Is the essence itself psychical, or only guided at a fundamental level by some kind of psychical entity? Trying to know the mind of God lol I find it hard to accept that the world is essentially amenable to rationality or Formed. Seems to me that even a sixth sense of Reason or whatever it might be is ultimately a cognition, not of necessity with access to fundamental principles.

What is your information exactly? Can you even broach the subject of what this basic information or Enformation consists of in terms of a causality between palpable substances? Could we observe it by instrumentation or experiment, as a new form of mass or energy perhaps?

What do you mean by saying that the metaphysical mind is the function or purpose of the physical brain? Does a universal mind create the brain, during which new mind stuff generated in association with the brain merges with it somehow?

Looks like no one is pursuing my entangled superposition theory, but though I'm changing the subject, if anyone still wants to ponder that, backtrack and go for it!

Since Gnomon and I agreed in principle so quickly, maybe for fun we can categorize the precise ways in which agreement happens. What core facets does modeling an intersection between the conscious mind and physical body entail? This is my extemporaneous view.

Modeling implies causality in space, a mode of thinking recently well-represented by Roger Penrose, who was one of the first to postulate the relationship between quantum reality and consciousness. These thinkers come up with dimensional imagery that structurally integrates observations.

Modeling implies causality in time, a mode of thinking fostered by Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, who theorized temporality in the natural, sociopolitical and memetic spheres respectively. This evolutionary paradigm explains phenomena in terms of the way that, regardless of causal distribution within dimensional substrates, some must occur irreversibly first in a sequence, such as with hereditary descent, pioneering technologies and institutions, or seminal concepts and worldviews.

Modeling implies mathematical description, a mode of thinking represented by Claude Shannon's information theory. From this basic perspective, everything that exists can be described with some collection of quantitative expressions, which map onto causality in space and time such that deducing correlations is more intuitive. Quantified processing is greatly assisted by algorithms, but we have to be somewhat cautious that computation remains our tool rather than enslaving humanity.

Modeling implies verbal description, a mode of thinking represented by effective communicators such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and most professors, who can initiate or demolish movements with a mere keyboard.

And last but not least, modeling implies introspection, a mode of thinking represented by spirituality and soul-searching of all types, holding a prominent place as the desiderata of feeling, religious inspiration, meditative states and free association. This allows humans to experience and comprehend in ways that are presently beyond the mechanistic domain, informing intuitions which transcend rationality. It consists in many of the phenomena that have most eluded Western theoretical frameworks and which panpsychism and panprotopsychism want to make inroads into.

These are complementary aspects of our mind/body picture of the world and will probably all be key in formulating every future model.

As for the total substance of existence, provided it is intelligible, I think it may manifest features from all categories because these are the parameters of current human cognition. I'd claim that form is one piece of a multifaceted puzzle, not fundamental, but to the extent that substance is conceived by human minds as we know them, the information processing of form will be key.

I'd be interested to read you theorize the interface between EnFormAction, form and introspection.

This is my conceptual theory in the absence of a comprehensive material explanation:


How did the type of cognitive activity we have termed ‘conception’ (reasoning mind) emerge? Demystifying the processes of evolutionary development that gave rise to it is uncharted territory, but its apparent locus in modules of the brain clearly indicates that it must have appeared as a sequence of accretions allowing for greater degrees of specialized association-making as well as structures providing executive control in order to sync the disparate facets of these expanding minds. Some of this enhanced association-making is what we call ‘thought’, and the executive metaorganization of proliferating modularity in cognition is what we refer to as ‘self’.

The process of thinking seems firmly attached to the nervous system and principally brain matter. Cognitive configuring involved enhances the mind’s representation of environments, increasing the quantity and duration of phenomenal and physiological particulars that stimulus/response can confect and coordinate amongst at a given time, essentially diversifying and prolonging memory and its utilization in conjunction with less hardwired, more rewritable neuromaterial types of tissue.

The mind evolved a means for exerting control over which of its brain regions and nervous system components are active at a given time, what is approximately referred to as the ‘self’. This is the source of basic intentionality, found throughout the animal kingdom. While lacking command of most mental activities, such as vision, hearing, startling or noticing, which are all mostly unconscious, we can rapidly bring collections of these unconscious factors into synchronous alignments at will, a sort of mode-selection phenomenon generating overall dispositions via executive mechanism. These amalgamating states of intentionality are not freely chosen to the point of independence from context, for they get sculpted over time with conditioning as well as directed by instantaneous cues from both environments and the unconscious mind itself, but we can readily carry out feats such as waking ourselves up, suppressing affect in order to focus while we reason, purposely blocking out external stimuli, as well as adopting various social and communicative strategies. Introspective meditators can even learn to radically regulate their states of awareness with experience, which shows up on an EEG machine as crisp transitions between brain wave shapes.

Whether association-making thought or a mode-selecting self were the originating feature that initialized evolution of the conscious mind is a bit of a chicken and egg problem; which came first? It is not clear at this stage of science if the question can even be answered, but defining ‘self’ in terms of its anthromorphic form, as a phenomenon of introspective reflection, leads us to suspect that at least from this perspective, associational thinking was egg to the self’s chicken, an incredibly ancient type of cognitive modulization which preceded humanlike self-awareness and contributed to its construction. Regardless, it is clear that the interaction of thinking with self tended towards synergy in many lineages over vast spans of time, hundreds of millions of years, built up into more elaborate forms of pattern processing and intentionality.

The main mutative innovation in the realm of intention was an ability to concentrate, sustaining attentive states for longer timespans, allowing keener observation of both environments as well as the organism’s own phenomenal mind, a selection mechanism for associational thinking to become more astute. Thought simultaneously evolved towards greater apprehension of order amongst patterns until protological awareness had developed, an intuitive knack for grasping some prevalent kinds of cause and effect, fitting phenomenal interactivities into a kind of conceptualizing chassis of which the simplest qualities are those enumerated as basics of formal logic: negation (not p), conjunction (both p and q), disjunction (either p or q), conditional (if p then q), and similar notions. Association-making aptitude as logic’s precursor, together with better focus, capacitated problem-solving creativity that is a hallmark of species with the most elite technical thinking, a suite of traits we single out as elementary intelligence.


So the persistence of basic identity or "self" from moment to moment functions as a binding agent coordinating and directing the mind's modules. If you want any of the peripheral ideas, give my blog a look at philosophyofhumanism.com . This quote is drawn from the post Humanity and the Evolutionary Phenomenology of Preanthromorphic Cognition. A few additional posts, particularly those pertaining to perception and conception, explain further phenomena of consciousness.

I agree with what you said in general. But when it comes to mental health, many people take medications because it would be like having a bullseye painted on their forehead without them, and I find that to be a serious problem. At that point outcomes all hinge on the competence of doctors, intimate social supports and the luck to avoid exploitation. I wish we could replace luck with communities that are close-knit enough to make exploitation a nonissue.

I agree that medication is a crucial aspect of most mental health treatment and patients should follow the directions given by their doctors, that is indisputable. But I think the medical profession and society in general need to do a better job of combating stigma so patients aren't overmedicated. Most of the medications that come out have significant side effects, and while the severity has reduced considerably, having to acquiesce to the wrong medication regimen can be as debilitating as no medication.

The doctor and patient have to experiment with various options over the course of months if not years in the context of effective social supports to find a working strategy. This is the ideal, but what usually happens is that if the patient admits a continuing problem, the doctor increases the riskiness of the treatment, perhaps trying an older medication with more side effects, hence the tendency for patients to stop taking the prescribed dose or attempting to go without, then in and out of the hospital. Because of stigma in the society at large, many treatments will be effective only until a patient's life circumstances change, perhaps a new job, a move or a lost social contact, at which time it can sometimes be back to the drawing board.

These mental health patients, a hefty proportion of the population when you take into account depression and mood, typically aren't so extremely ill that institutionalization is the only conceivable tactic, but a toxic culture pushes them into the medical sphere, swamping clinics and diminishing capacity to adequately deal with anyone's issues in the requisitely personalized way.

I think we've leaned too heavily on medication in mental health while neglecting community consciousness-raising, and that's the crux of the problem, not brain chemistry. The link with drug abuse is a derivative consequence of this fundamental problem.

the de-institutionalization that America went through in the 1960s — BitconnectCarlos

As long as we're elaborating, you should expand on this some. What do you mean by deinstitutionalization?

Could you go a little more into detail in terms of what you mean by authorities being irrational? Which authorities? Who are these exploiters and how do they exploit? — BitconnectCarlos

A lot of people in mental health treatment have an unusual cognitive profile that doesn't in principle preclude them from getting educated, working or forming normal relationships, but encounter a huge amount of stigma nonetheless that causes anger problems and paranoia, typically exacerbated by a traumatic background.

The mental health field is great when it gives these patients a legitimate social niche with the supports necessary to overcome their personal challenges, which frequently do not fit neatly into any particular category, so that providing the requisite help is an inexact science that requires much allowance for lapses in judgement on everyone's part and reworking the situation multiple times until a sufficing approach is found. Because of destructive stigma, dealing with mental health issues requires a team of not only well-trained but truly committed individuals, and this system is necessary since the inclination to stigmatize is so prevalent in modern society that everyone is going to be either a mental health mess or bully unless. Its the front line against the rampant prejudices in our culture that tend to be extremely psychological.

The field is terrible when it uses diagnostic categories to manipulate or "institutionalize" the stigmatized in order to turn a profit or tamper with personal prerogative in marginalized demographics, trying to get as many people as possible hooked on treatment or negligent of the true circumstances.

Mental health is a strange mixture of both dynamics, extremely difficult but indispensable to manage.

In any case I just believe any serious discussion about homeless in America needs to involve mental health. — BitconnectCarlos

I agree that mental health is an issue, but homelessness is more a function of authorities being irrational than ordinary citizens. I doubt enough people really comprehend mental health, the system is commonly used as a smokescreen for exploitation via irrational labeling, that's the problem, not the sufferers. Its the manipulation of ignorance by many but not all of those in charge, their professional hustling, that even makes mental health a serious dilemma.

What is the entitlement of the poor to relief for rent and food and other basics? — tim wood

Seems to me that the problem is not putting money in the hands of the individual, for it just gets cycled back into the system with spending, so relief makes sense, but we have to make sure that when the money does finally trickle up to the higher tiers of the economy, probably via bank, it is invested constructively. I'm not sure capitalism as it has thus far existed even possesses any machinery or ideology to make sure investment serves the long-term public welfare, and when you're talking about national governments you're just referring to what in the modern era is essentially a big bank, so the same dilemma applies.

I think the "solution" if there is one could be forcibly institutionalizing some of these people — BitconnectCarlos

Citizens should not be "institutionalized" in an attempt to corral them with a stereotype if that's what you mean, institutions should be designed to empower them to overcome their addiction, mental illness or whatever it might be, giving them legitimized social standing so they can maximize involvement in the community. Supporting those who are vulnerable but with good enough motives is not a detriment to social welfare, but should be accompanied by opportunity.

The Fields are merely mathematical concepts with no actual physical properties -- only the potential for real things to emerge when activated by a mysterious "disturbance". — Gnomon

Speaking of the line between virtual and physical instantiation, you guys should look into spinors. I've been tripping on them for days, apparently their mathematical form can be used to model orbital phenomena such as we find with electrons in atoms, but though the algebra works out perfectly, no one understands them structurally.

Its also interesting to consider that waves do not oscillate in two or three dimensions but up to sixteen or more dimensions. I wonder if an experiment can be designed to observe or explain the parameterization of supradimensional wave oscillation in nature, what kinds of field interactions generate which varieties of wave.

Helen Keller didn't even have a self until someone prompted her to conceptualize the sense of touch, and she became one of the most eloquent representatives for the disabled of anyone in history while totally transforming what society believed it was possible for cognition to do.

Think of everything we've learned about neuroscience from accidental deficits in particular regions of the brain that teach us the processes they perform. If we were all exactly the same, brain science probably would have made much slower initial progress because we would have only been seeing what we expected, with experiment mirroring our intuitions.

Its not just rare gifts but rarity in general that is key to support because some progress will be impossible any alternate way. The university system we take for granted began with Medieval universitas which were just a few students meeting with a single teacher at someone's house to read great books. By the
Early Modern period this was an institutional foundation of culture and became the entire world's template. Medicine developed by facing sickness and deformity head on rather than ostracizing it.

And yes, avant garde art scenes are an example of how rarity achieves a respected niche, not always immediately or obviously adaptive, but the principle of it is crucial. Of course civilization shouldn't wander off a cliff with experimentation, but that's probably impossible anyway if we also keep rationality in focus as we craft mainstream institutions.

Of course this or any principle is vulnerable to corruption in any particular case, as I'm sure you can imagine, but that shouldn't be seen to invalidate the principle itself, just as rationality can't be dismissed as an ideal by claiming humans are frequently irrational.

I think most of the experiences human beings are capable of are usually had in some form, so its rare for a completely unprecedented phenomenon to be noted. The exceptions are probably in quantum physics and astrophysics, where occurrences completely beyond the realm of typical perception are observed.

But there are tons of common phenomena that we don't know how to control or generate yet, and this is where mechanistic thinking that came to full fruition post-Scientific Revolution figures in. We are still only in the initial stages of actually predicting or recreating what we observe at will, which is what theory and modern technology are in the process of allowing humans to accomplish.

An additional area where much innovation needs to happen is in getting everyone cooperating, grasping and accepting the perspectives of fellow humans such that we have enough common knowledge and effective forums for collective action to optimize the rational efficiency of society, as well as making it possible for rare traits to get tolerant recognition and find a niche.

Seems to me we have been doing respectably well in the arena of technology since the European Enlightenment, but with recent declines in our promotion of rationality such that technological development may stagnate in some of the world's regions, and new cognitive traits may tend to be immediately choked out by prejudices and the requirement that human beings conform to stereotypes.

Making provision for rare traits is rational because that's where the most improbable advances usually come from.

The so-called center of mass, or center of gravity, does not represent any real feature of an object. It's just a principle applied for the sake of facilitating predictions. — Metaphysician Undercover

As a pleasing interlude, perhaps the Earth's gravity does not pull objects towards its center but rather fails to resist by its outward pressure the greater array of incoming gravitational fields while permeating objects such that those at lower elevation which experience greater gravitational field compression move slightly slower as per the observations of relativity and clocks...or maybe an ever so slight redshiftinglike effect? I'm not sure if that's true, but what do you guys think? This explanation makes gravitation similar in principle to quantum fields, Ockham's razor and all.

The structure of the universe emerges from supradimensional fields that were separated into different spectrums by the astronomical force of the big bang, a process which is still ongoing on mostly localized scales, within the parameters of various environments. We have much yet to learn about these spectrum interactions such as electromagnetic radiation, soundwaves, atomic matter, nuclear matter, dark matter, dark energy, gravity, standing waves, and likely much more.

In general, interactions of fields within fields and their various spectral ranges generate a huge assortment of waves by complex interference mechanisms, giving rise to diverse quantization as periodic amplitude. Within specific spectral parameters, which are analogous to aggregated substance such as in the planets of our solar system, interference is such that dynamic equilibrium or fluctuating wave superposition is attained; the waves commonly tend to synthesize as in visible light, electron orbitals, pitches, etc., while continuing to participate in various kinds of relative motion and oscillation. Our sense-perceptual organs are designed to hone in on some of these spectral ranges in an extremely reflexive way as per the laws of classical physics and thermodynamic chemistry. ESPN taps into additional spectral ranges that lie beyond these boundaries. Consciousness is a hybrid of many spectral ranges, some within and amongst biochemical bodies, some moving or perturbed faster than the speed of light so as to conjoin bodies in synchronicity, and some comprising aliens of the spirit world.

I'm curious if Buddhist philosophy has something introspective to say about the structure of consciousness in this respect. Seems beyond the Western psychological tradition. Even the postulated collective unconscious is typically viewed by Western academia through the theoretical lens of evolutionary rather than transpersonal mechanisms, as if the common substance of mind is transmitted solely via heredity instead of a nonlocality such as quantum physics and quantum biology have been modeling. Jung did address the concept of synchronicity, but I haven't read his proposals.

The brain is the "command centre" of the body without which there can be no function at all. We know this because we know what happens when we take psychoactive drugs or receive a bullet to the brain. You cannot control your brain function; you are not even aware of it. — Janus

Apologize for getting spiritual, but maybe its possible that the physical substance of consciousness transcends the organic body, a functional complex of which the brain is a key component yet not the entirety? Any philosophy that talks about a possible qualitative experience of soul in connection with material contexts? Sounds like something your Mr. Chalmers would have been into.

Qualia are just percepts of the mind's experiencing that can be distinguished as particulars. Like "life" or "language", the term is an intrinsically vague reference to a class of phenomena, more approximating generality than precise definition. My claim is that this class of phenomena can be subjected to a partial explanation based on biological applications of quantum physics that unify these phenomena within a new neuroscientific/physical framework, a mechanistic accounting for their causality that will transcend currently mainstream concepts. Qualia are percepts, and I'm saying we are approaching the point where percepts can be modeled by material science. Doesn't mean its the only or best way to model them, but its an important piece of the puzzle and promises a huge synthesis of philosophy, social and physical sciences in the future.

The nature of energy itself, though, remains largely mysterious, and we do not fully understand how it contributes to brain function or consciousness." — Fuckiminthematrix

Energy is correlated with frequency and thus wavelength. Energy is also correlated with mass. In an atom, mass is correlated with shape. In visible electromagnetic radiation, wavelength/frequency synthesis or "superposition" is correlated with color. So maybe the structure of mass alongside its energies in matter are associable with hybrid wavelength phenomena, which would also explain the capacity to generate qualia, in this definition a sort of qualitativity intrinsic to matter, out of which first person experience in organic lifeforms is constructed. Adding superposed wavelength theory to atomic theory might allow a table of the perceptual elements.

Everything is quantum mechanical at magnification levels great enough to reach that deep, but the evidence that those physical processes have any bearing whatsoever on greater issues that we like to discuss are very difficult if not impossible to verify. The gaps between physical levels in terms of speed and range are very wide, and it may not be possible to leap past intermediate levels. — magritte

It seems to me there is an intermediate level in biochemical mechanisms such as entanglement systems within photosynthetic reaction centers, a kind of quantum machinery within cells, perhaps an energy transfer process capable of transcending membrane barriers that could permeate some macroscopic structures to the point of being core to their function. In my own musings, I called these macroscopic entanglement systems "coherence fields". We don't have the technology, experimental designs or models for this yet, but like you said, someone needs to run with the hypotheses.

Maybe physicists can work at the problem from the foundational angle of superposition principles, integrating quantum mechanics with molecular chemistry, and the neuroscientists and psychologists can look for molecular mechanisms and behaviors that harness these superposition principles in the brain, just as magnetoreception was discovered by collaboration between field biologists observing animal behavior and chemists investigating the composition of biologically active substances from a quantum angle, with some commonly held intuition thrown into the mix.

It can't be a coincidence that the brain is so rich in apparent qualia and produces an uncommon kind of electrification as standing waves. A close linkage must exist between quantum fields like the electrical field of the brain and qualitative experience.

Most biochemical reactions happen too fast to be accounted for without near instantaneous motion such as in entanglement. Systems of entangled particles like subatomic bodies of water conjoin molecules in photosynthetic reaction centers, the foundation of the ecosystem, and will probably be discovered in much functionality throughout nature. Magnetoreception in birds and butterflies relies on a quantum process called the fast triplet reaction that is sensitive enough to register the magnetic field of the earth. The brain produces a similar field as standing waves measured by an EEG. Biochemistry of the nervous system and especially the brain may be fine tuned for responding to this field, generating the synthetic holism of human consciousness. Fields on fields cause superpositions analogous to hybrid wavelengths of the visible light spectrum. Entanglement systems similar to photosynthetic reaction centers could have comparable superposition effects with the brain's electric field. Qualitative consciousness is the brain's electric field superposed with these entanglement systems as honed by evolution.

Its the only possible explanation. — Enrique

These are facts/presuppositions we can share, and an adequate foundation for research. I think this resolves the issue on an initiating conceptual/hypothetical level, but neither of us are scientists I suspect. Someone's going to have to fund experimental investigation of a quantum consciousness theory. I wish I could get the chance to participate in some capacity.

Perhaps they have been dissolved to the satisfaction of some.Whether or not someone thinks they have been dissolved seems to be a function of the person's presuppositions, which is back to what I have been saying. — Janus

But our presuppositions are based on what we believe to be the facts, so its a matter of how much we are willing to pool into a common discourse. As per some comments by contributors to this forum, we may need a whole new "language game", and this might not be the most ideal period in human history to realize that requisite. Doesn't mean its not possible though. I think this new language game can begin with concepts such as superposition and entanglement as they apply to biological systems and cognitive science.

This sounds like panpsychism. The matter that makes up the brain is intrinsically thinking/feeling stuff? I assume you mean neurons? What about the matter what makes up the neurons? Is it thinking/feeling too? — RogueAI

My theory is that qualia are quantum superpositions which rapidly flit in and out of existence as matter moves, so for instance a cloud of gas has some properties of feeling and image generation without a level of organization that we could regard as constituting experience. Its when these qualia get metaorganized in association with for instance an organic body that qualitative experience emerges, and I probably don't have to tell you how much more of consciousness this accounts for. The mechanism is analogous with the combination of light waves to make the visible color palette. The human "what it is like" essentially amounts to synthetic arrays of quantum resonance, roughly speaking extremely complex color fields. Turns out qualia aren't so ineffable after all!

Talk of qualia muddies the water. Take something simple, like the pain of stubbing a toe. How does the feeling of pain emerge from non-thinking/feeling stuff? Science has no answer. Science has had no answer for a long long time. I expect science to continue to flounder. — RogueAI

The pain is to some degree quantum superposition, and that is what "qualia" can refer to. The what it is like is a property of physical matter (maybe a quantum field phenomenon?), as unintuitive as it seems to our wiring mechanism corrupted brains. The matter brains are composed of is intrinsically thinking/feeling stuff, just like it has a shape, size and texture. There are more than ten thousand kinds of neurons in the human brain and their electric fields interacting with different combinations of glial cells, probably explaining much of the variety.

My nominee:

"The reason is that..."

Its a bit presumptuous to assume reason is the foundation of existence, don't you think?

Qualia aren't about soul/mind/body anymore, they're about distribution of quantum processes within nature and the body, something introspective thought might shed light on. — Enrique

Should qualify this, I think a place has to be set aside for theorizing unconscious motivation as in psychoanalysis, so a domain of mind exists beyond nature, body and first person thought.

Change is evidence of time but time is more than change, it is the mathematical description of change. In Relativity this description is the geometry of spacetime. Time is the way change happens. In quantum spacetime change seems to happen according to a different geometry. The mathematics of how change happens in quantum spacetime is different from the mathematics of physical spacetime, so we have two spacetimes. — EnPassant

The laws of quantum spacetime might be a product of the properties of waves, while physical spacetime as you call it is an emergent property of complex wave combinations as generated by the interaction of quantum fields, on some scales giving rise to what we recognize as shape (equilibrated superpositions?) and relative motion. Then what are waves an emergent property of? That's something we can't even begin to imagine at this stage of science.

I mean instantaneous communication. Block out all the annoying prophesying that comes from all quarters of the presumptuous Earth. Of course how much do we really want to try and find out? It would make a good sci-fi novel! You might have to put in place a code of ethics specifying that only engineering specs are transmissible, with everything else ignored.

I suppose a mathematical model of the entire universe in terms of energy flow is no more feasible than a mathematical model of the entire universe in terms of particularity. But it does serve at least as a qualitative image of how energy flow in the wave function can transcend spatiotemporality. Within certain frames of reference, parameters of the function might be established with enough precision by experiment to make the model useful for predicting retroactive causality amongst categories of wavicle ensemble, according to new physical laws of acceleration density within wave fields that oscillate in effectively infinite dimensions. Maybe physicists will one day synthesize pilot wave theory and collapse models along these lines. Could be used to communicate with the future via technology. Anyways, it was an entertaining thought experiment.

oh, Marchesk, when you gonna listen?

an intrinsic aspect of quantum superposition in matter is the qualia constituents that contribute to colors, sounds and feels, conjoined in specific and relatively rare ways to generate qualitative experience in brains and elsewhere....(and so on)
— Enrique

Tell me again how talk of qualia clarifies things. — Banno

...Human qualia are not action potentials alone, they're wave interferences between quantum resonances in cells and the global quantum field of the brain that is exuded by trillions of simultaneous action potentials, producing along with additional factors an extremely complex array of superpositions. — Enrique

For all the little Banno buddies who still think we need to argue this til the year 3000, maybe you didn't get it the first time lol Qualia aren't about soul/mind/body anymore, they're about distribution of quantum processes within nature and the body, something introspective thought might shed light on.

If everything is physical (physicalism), then how do we account for (i.e. categorise) the mental/experiential? — Luke

The experiential in this context is metacognition or 'conception' of qualia arising from brain plasticity. This domain is always changing as we acquire more information about the world and is designed to do so, for instance Freudian concepts have entered public consciousness and affected behavior. The key is to facilitate its maximum adaptiveness and versatility so we can incorporate new concepts as they arise from science and elsewhere, as rationality, the best reasons for holding our various perspectives. Veering too far into materialism, nonanalytical emotion, mysticism or any particular perspective to the exclusion of contrary ones quickly becomes maladaptive. Experimenting balance and progress is the ultimate human value. Rationality isn't foolproof, but its the best metacognitive strategy we've got, and while not necessary in every situation, effort should be exerted to make it the core of culture.

Would you consider this a form of emergentism? — Marchesk

Qualitative consciousness on the macroscale is emergent from material qualia on the nanoscale. Its not a simple ascending pyramid though, top down factors exist as well.

Most biochemical reactions happen too fast to be accounted for without near instantaneous motion such as in entanglement. Systems of entangled particles like subatomic bodies of water conjoin molecules in photosynthetic reaction centers, the foundation of the ecosystem, and will probably be discovered in much functionality throughout nature. Magnetoreception in birds and butterflies relies on a quantum process called the fast triplet reaction that is sensitive enough to register the magnetic field of the earth. The brain produces a similar field as standing waves measured by an EEG. Biochemistry of the nervous system and especially the brain may be fine tuned for responding to this field, generating the synthetic holism of human consciousness. Fields on fields cause superpositions analogous to hybrid wavelengths of the visible light spectrum. Entanglement systems similar to photosynthetic reaction centers could have comparable superposition effects with the brain's electric field. Qualitative consciousness is the brain's electric field superposed with these entanglement systems as honed by evolution.

Its the only possible explanation.

Oh. Ok. Tell me again how talk of qualia clarifies things. — Banno

arf!=meow!=moo! lol

Tell me again how talk of qualia clarifies things. — Banno

you nitwit! lol matter=quantum superposition=qualia