namaste Yamaka and others.
Since you seek to summarily dismiss subjective references like I, my, mine and so on on the one hand, and consciousness, feelings and so on on the other, as nothing more than neurological firewoks, I cannot help pointing out the logical fallacy in the term individual, which you seem to be fond of substituting for personal references.
• Firstly, you (and perhaps neuroscience) are not clear as to whether the individual you harp on, is a 'what' or 'who'. You say:
"The individual controls all voluntary actions" (of the brain), (in post#63),
"all originating from the individual who "thinks" and "writes";
"All started internally by the WILL of the individual"
"Individual is the BOSS here over his neural circuitry..." (all in post#68)
Since you say "the individual who 'thinks'", in what way this who of this individual is different from the what of his brain?
Who of this individual? I mean his SELF or Personality.
What of his brain? Brain is his Personality or part of his personality....
• Incidentally, the term 'individual' is an objective pronounce/reference, perhaps which is why you prefer it. But then, if a person is nothing more than an individual brain, it would be a logical fallacy for the brain to consider itself as 'I am the brain' as well as 'my brain'!
• Suppose an individual sees a photographic image of his/her brain. The individual would exclaim, 'Hey, that's my brain!' Would the brain then exclaim, 'Hey, that's my brain!' or 'Hey, that's me!'?
• Now, if that same individual sees a photograph of him/her, that individual exclaim 'Hey, that's my photograph!' What would the brain exclaim in this case? Perhaps, 'Hey, that's the individual who is I', or 'Hey, that individual has my brain' or perhaps keep silent?
• These are not frivolous examples because, the neurological ramifications of each exclamation above would be distinctly different, wouldn't they be?
I am afraid all this distinction appears frivolous to me!
• Sometime back I watched a film titled What the bleep do we know?, which explores using computer-animated graphics, the connection between consciousness and quantum physics and if that connection can be spiritual or just neurological.
Here is an extract from the script of the film that probably puts the entire gamut of consciousness, brain, nerve system, quantum mechanics and spirituality in the proper perspective (formatting and emphasis added).
brain does not know the difference!
• Scientific experiments have shown that if we take a person and hook their brains up to certain PET scans or computer technology, and ask them to look at a certain object, and they watch, certain areas of the brain light up.
• And then they've asked them to close their eyes and now imagine that same object. And when they imagine that same object, it produced the same areas of the brain to light up, as if they were actually visually looking at it.
• So it caused scientists to back up and ask this question. So who sees then? Does the brain see? Or do the eyes see?
• And what is reality? Is reality what we're seeing with our brain, or is reality what we're seeing with our eyes?
• And the truth is is that the brain does not know the difference between what it sees in its environment and what it remembers, because the same specific neural nets are then firing.
What is reality?
• We're bombarded by huge amounts of information, and it's coming into our body,
and we're processing it--coming in through our sense organs, and it's percolating up and up...and at each step we're eliminating information. And finally, what is bubbling up
to consciousness is the one that's the most self-serving.
• The brain processes 400 billion bits of information a second, but we're only aware
of 2,000 of those.
• But our awareness of those 2,000 bits of information are just about the environment, our body and about time.
• We're living in a world where all we see is the tip of the iceberg--the classical tip of an immense quantum mechanical iceberg.
• If the brain is processing 400 billion bits of information, and our awareness is only on 2,000--that means reality's happening in the brain all the time. It's receiving that information, and yet we haven't integrated it.
• The eyes are like the lens. But the tape that's really seeing is the back of the brain. It's called the visual cortex. It's right back here. It's like this camera and its tape.
• Did you know that the brain imprints what it has the ability to see? For example, This camera is seeing a lot more around me than what is here, because it is--has no objection and no judgment. The only movie that's playing in the brain is what we have the ability to see.
• The way our brain is wired up, we only see what we believe is possible. We match patterns that already exist within ourselves through conditioning.
• We create reality. We're reality-producing machines. We create the effects of reality all the time. We always perceive something after reflection in the mirror of memory.
The observer is not in the brain!
• in terms of what science can say about our world ... we are always the observer in science; always constrained by what is ultimately coming into the human brain, that allows us to see and perceive the things we do.
• So it is conceivable that all of this really is just a great illusion, that we have no way of really getting outside of to see what is really out there.
• Your brain doesn't know the difference between what's taking place out there, and what's taking place in here.
• We know what an observer does from a point of view of quantum physics, but we don't know who or what the observer actually is.
• Doesn't mean we haven't tried to find an answer. We've looked. We've gone inside of your head. We've gone into every orifice you have, to find something called an observer. And there's nobody home. There's nobody in the brain.
• There's nobody in the cortical regionsof the brain. There's nobody in the subcortical regions or the limbic regions of the brain.
• And yet, we all have this experience of being something called an observer, observing the world out there.
Conditioning and unconditioning
• The brain is made up of tiny nerve cells called 'neurons'. These neurons have tiny
branches that reach out and connect to other neurons to form a neural net. Each place where they connect is incubated into a thought or a memory. Now, the brain builds up all its concepts by the law of associative memory.
• Any information that we process, any information that we take in from the environment is always colored by the experiences that we've had, and an emotional response that we're having to what we're bringing in.
• Who is in the driver's seat when we control our emotions or we respond to our emotions? We know physiologically that nerve cells that fire together, wire together. If you practice something over and over, those nerve cells have a long-term relationship. If you get angry on a daily basis, if you get frustrated on a daily basis, you're rewiring and reintegrating that neural net on a daily basis; and that neural net now has a long-term relationship, with all those other nerve cells called an 'identity'.
• We also know that nerve cells that don't fire together no longer wire together. They lose their long-term relationship because every time we interrupt the thought process that produces a chemical response in the body--every time we interrupt it, those nerve cells that are connected to each other start breaking the long-term relationship.
• When we start interrupting and observing not by stimulus and response and that automatic reaction, but by observing the effects it takes then we are no longer the body-mind conscious emotional person that's responding to its environment as if it is automatic.
What are emotions?
• All emotion is is holographically imprinted chemicals. There's a part of the brain
called the hypothalamus which is like a little mini factory, a place that assembles certain chemicals that matches certain emotions that we experience.
• And those particular chemicals are called 'peptides'. They're small-chain
amino acid sequences. The body's basically a carbon unit that makes about 20 different
amino acids altogether to formulate its physical structure. The body isa protein-producing machine.
• In the hypothalamus, we take small-chain proteins called peptides, and we assemble them into certain neuropeptides or neurohormones that match the emotional states that we experience on a daily basis.
• So there's chemicals for anger, and there's chemicals for sadness, victimization, lust and every emotional state that we experience. And the moment that we experience that
emotional state in our body or in our brain, that hypothalamus will immediately assemble the peptide and then releases it through the pituitary into the bloodstream; (and then) it finds its way to different centers or different parts of the body.
• Now, every single cell in the body has these receptors on the outside. One cell can have thousands of receptors studding its surface, kind of opening up to the outside world. And when a peptide docks on a cell it literally, like a key going into a lock sits on the receptor surface and attaches to it and kind of moves the receptor and kind oflike a doorbell buzzing, sends a signal into the cell.
• A receptor that has a peptide sitting in it, changes the cell in many ways. It sets off a whole cascade ofbiochemical events, some of which wind up with changes
in the actual nucleus of the cell.
Most of all this is from the knowledge of Neuroscience...
Consciousness
• ... each cell has a consciousness, particularly if we define consciousness as the point of view of an observer. In fact, the cell is the smallest unit of consciousness in the body. We bring to ourselves situations that will fulfill the biochemical craving
of the cells of our body by creating situations that meet our chemical needs.
I disagree... each cell has NO consciousness... as I said before it is from the neural circuitry.
• ... we move out of the area of the brain that has to do with our personality, that has to do with our association to people, our association to places, our association to things and times and events. We don't exist in the associative centers in our brain...that reaffirms our identity and reaffirms our personality.
• Knowing that there's this interconnectedness of the universe that we are all interconnected and that we are connected to the universe at its fundamental level. I think is as good an explanation for spirituality as there is.
To me spirituality is to attain the state of "drunkeness" to understand or to approach GOD, which I totally reject.
• We are here to make something of this life. To acknowledge the quantum self, to acknowledge the place where we really have choice, to acknowledge mind--When that shift of perspective takes place, we say that somebody has been enlightened.
• Quantum mechanics allows for the intangible phenomenon of freedom to be woven into
human nature. Quantum physics, very succinctly speaking, is a physics of possibilities. It opens fundamentally the question of whose possibilities, and who chooses from these possibilities to give us the actual event of experience.
• The only answer that is satisfactory both logically and meaningfully: is the answer that consciousness is the ground of all being. We must pursue knowledge without any interference of our addictions; and if we can do that, we will manifest knowledge in reality; and our bodies will experience it: in new ways, in new chemistry, in new holograms, new elsewheres of thought, beyond our wildest dreams.
This is your own mental bombast written with a flair for verbal bombast... what does this really mean? I really don't know!
*****
eceased - Celebrity Atheist List
