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position yourself as an alien observer who happened to have evolved trilobozoan radial symmetry. you might have conceptual models of two separate oppositions an

position yourself as an alien observer who happened to have evolved trilobozoan radial symmetry. you might have conceptual models of two separate oppositions and a third (their constant mixing) and build corresponding mathematics to reflect your biological nature. or perhaps some parasite or virus which requires a host body. in which case you must concern yourself with your own survival, the survival of your host and the stability of the host/virus system, often tending towards co-dependence to ensure future generations. these types of entangled systems are how life tends to really operate, from the dust mites on your skin to the bacteria in your gut it's a giant complicated mess of competing and cooperating hierarchical dependencies which are taking a rather more risky route towards increasing entropy than an icy comet orbiting our sun every few thousand years. human cognitive experience is a tiny sliver of the humanity engine, and often breaks in quirky ways- see drugs.

alfredallan1 8y ago
"some parasite or virus which requires a host body. in which case you must concern yourself with your own survival, the survival of your host and the stability of the host/virus system” I’d really like to agree. But arguably, humans are dependent on the earth for their survival, and yet the evidence suggests minimal concern for the stability of the planet’s ecosystems. Many viruses also end up killing the host system, often leading to the death of the guest viruses themselves..
alfredallan1 8y ago
One doesn’t need to go to the trouble of imagining oneself as an alien observer to do this. There are many examples closer to home. Many migratory birds have a sort of fifth sense (I don’t recall the nomenclature) that allows them to “feel” the earth’s magnetic field, and do not have the the red-blue-green combination for their primary colors - the world view of a bird and a human in a skyscraper looking down at the scenery below/around would already be significantly different. Or fish, for example, it’d be interesting to imagine life in the water, moving around at the flick of a tail.. The point being, one’s experience of reality is highly dependent on the physical apparatus one is equipped with.
- goldenkey 8y ago
  But if one wants to understand what layers can be peeled off conscious experience while still all the while continuous, then senses can safely go out the window. All one is left with is pure thought fueled by memory..but even memory can be inhibited by different drugs. Pure thought lacks space..lacks sense of self. Can even lack time..no order of thoughts..just an oscillating jumble. Pure thought is the ultimate nature of consciousness because it has the fingerprint of the universe - interaction - without referencing it -- only manifested by it. A bunch of machine learning neurons on my computer have no notion of anything lest I feed it to them. But calculation -- ie. interaction - they are given..and based on. In fact, giving them sensory input about the world is nice but isn't the inherited notion of computation, calculation, and information/memory/storage much more fundamental and genetic to this universe? Not some specific form like a curated data set? Everything in this universe has the mark of its laws and ultimate fundamental nature. But I think the simpler systems show much more of an imprint. Pure thought is one of the most distilled fingerprints of the nature of fundamental interaction of this universe.
  - smallnamespace 8y ago
    > All one is left with is pure thought fueled by memory > Pure thought lacks space..lacks sense of self. I think this is stretching the definition of 'thought' past the point of meaninglessness. If you remove all interaction with the rest of the universe, any closed system will still have self-interaction. And if you take it to the extreme, any collection of matter can be seen to 'compute' some function. Which one of those systems 'thinks'? All of them? Every sub-system of every system?
    - goldenkey 8y ago
      Yes.. Computation is the grand aesthetic.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - alfredallan1 8y ago

alfredallan1 8y ago

"some parasite or virus which requires a host body. in which case you must concern yourself with your own survival, the survival of your host and the stability of the host/virus system” I’d really like to agree. But arguably, humans are dependent on the earth for their survival, and yet the evidence suggests minimal concern for the stability of the planet’s ecosystems. Many viruses also end up killing the host system, often leading to the death of the guest viruses themselves..

alfredallan1 8y ago

One doesn’t need to go to the trouble of imagining oneself as an alien observer to do this. There are many examples closer to home. Many migratory birds have a sort of fifth sense (I don’t recall the nomenclature) that allows them to “feel” the earth’s magnetic field, and do not have the the red-blue-green combination for their primary colors - the world view of a bird and a human in a skyscraper looking down at the scenery below/around would already be significantly different. Or fish, for example, it’d be interesting to imagine life in the water, moving around at the flick of a tail.. The point being, one’s experience of reality is highly dependent on the physical apparatus one is equipped with.

goldenkey 8y ago
But if one wants to understand what layers can be peeled off conscious experience while still all the while continuous, then senses can safely go out the window. All one is left with is pure thought fueled by memory..but even memory can be inhibited by different drugs. Pure thought lacks space..lacks sense of self. Can even lack time..no order of thoughts..just an oscillating jumble. Pure thought is the ultimate nature of consciousness because it has the fingerprint of the universe - interaction - without referencing it -- only manifested by it. A bunch of machine learning neurons on my computer have no notion of anything lest I feed it to them. But calculation -- ie. interaction - they are given..and based on. In fact, giving them sensory input about the world is nice but isn't the inherited notion of computation, calculation, and information/memory/storage much more fundamental and genetic to this universe? Not some specific form like a curated data set? Everything in this universe has the mark of its laws and ultimate fundamental nature. But I think the simpler systems show much more of an imprint. Pure thought is one of the most distilled fingerprints of the nature of fundamental interaction of this universe.
- smallnamespace 8y ago
  > All one is left with is pure thought fueled by memory > Pure thought lacks space..lacks sense of self. I think this is stretching the definition of 'thought' past the point of meaninglessness. If you remove all interaction with the rest of the universe, any closed system will still have self-interaction. And if you take it to the extreme, any collection of matter can be seen to 'compute' some function. Which one of those systems 'thinks'? All of them? Every sub-system of every system?
  - goldenkey 8y ago
    Yes.. Computation is the grand aesthetic.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- alfredallan1 8y ago