This discourse originally took place on the Theos-World Re: [Mind and Brain] List


                                  Mind and Other Passing Clouds
May 06, 2006


Cass writes:
Leon seems to be referring to the patterns of nature, for example, with the right temperature, moisture, etc a tornado will form itself, a snowflake forms with water, cold air gravity and wind. So if the conditions are right, nature has a self organizational principle. Patterns are not designs but naturally occuring events.

Matter and energy by themselves produce order from chaos.

According to James Watson, DNA is a language, a molecule with an incoding encoding system. Information can be stored and transmitted through matter or energy but information is neither matter nor energy. It requires another dimension, a dimension of will and intent. Basically Mind preceded DNA, a watch is preceded by the idea of the watchmaker, the idea precedes the presentation of an idea, its implementation.


LEON:
I thought some of you might get a kick out of this discussion between me, Dirk (a physicist) and (Jud), a dyed in the wool philosopher of "eliminative materialism" who denies the existence of anything that is not material (which he mixes up with "substantial" in one form or another... And doesn't realize how close to a theosophist he is. Even though he calls all us "transcendentalists" who believe in the existence of consciousness, mind, time, etc. -- "bloody fools." (He's a Liverpudlian, and has a kind of twisted sense of humor.) I like his style.



LEON:
The Implicate Order.


JUD:
Implication is not proof - it is just a fancy name for a guessing game. You obviously have never played the game of *consequences* when you were a kid? ;-)

LEON:
but that's also where people like Brian Green look for such in String Theory.

JUD:
That vortexes of the material of the cosmos occur is quite likely. If water on planet earth reacts that way sometimes [in certain gravitational circumstances] then there is no reason why other material should not do the same in that which separates us from everything else. As long as no tom-foolery-time is introduced into such speculation I have no quarrel with such theories as being worthy of consideration.


LEON:
Well, then don't include me with the woolly headed transcendentalists you keep ranting against. ;-)


JUD:
*Time* is an abstraction. BTW - How would ABC fare without time as part of the set-up?


LEON:
But I can't see how one can measure or examine a vortex without following its spiral path and other changes of condition that takes place in successive, yet continuously smooth moments of time, that can be measured by counting ticks of a physical clock? <\^:-)


JUD:
It is perfectly right and proper to create the notion of *Time* and equip it with seconds, minutes, hours, days and tears, etc. complete with as many ticks as you like AS LONG AS people are not told either outrightly or by implication that the useful fiction actually exists.


LEON:
If you can prove (and I mean scientifically) that those moments of time along with the constant changes of condition within the vortex don't exist or happen -- you're a better man than I am, Charley Brown. :-(


JUD:
If I meet a Trobriand islander on a beach who genuinely believes that his dead grandfather lives in an empty coca cola bottle which the sea has cast up, then how can I prove him wrong? Better to leave him with his fantasies and the memory of his beloved relative. It is IMPOSSIBLE to prove that that which does not exist, which is believed by another to exist - does not exist. I cannot point to the changing vortex as that does not exist either - all that I can point to is that which is *vortexed*�caught up in a�powerful circular current of water - water in the case of the stuff that goes around and around as it disappears down the plughole in the bathroom or the material which acts in a similar way out somewhere beyond the earth.


LEON:
But on that level of deeper order and chaos there is no matter as you know it.


JUD:
I am not some Leonardo or Einstein if that is what you mean. All I know is that nothing cannot exist, and that only that which exists is a logical possibility. There is no *level of deeper order* - that is a myth. ALL entiatic material exists in the way that it exists. If it exists in modalities that we label *chaotic* then that is only that our present knowledge is incapable of discerning the actual order in what we perceive as *chaotic.*


LEON:
Nevertheless, that chaos that connects conscious and mind with matter must exist in some form or another


JUD:
There is no *chaos* or *order* Leon - there is only that which is chaotic, or that which is ordered. Only the chaotically disorganised protesters milling around in the city square exist - the *chaotic disorganisation* does not exist. Only the orderly ranks of soldiers standing stiffly to attention on the parade-ground exist - the *orderliness* does not.


LEON:
-- one of which is my entirely logical ABC description of the coadunate but not consubstantial coenergetic fields that exist between these entities.


JUD:
I like this idea of yours very much.  I have a gut feeling [I do not often admit to intuition so make the most of it while you can] that it is physically impossible for chaotic matter to exist, that *order* is the guiding force of the cosmos. People do not get cancer because of the *chaotic character* of some aberrant cells - they get it because the cells were either genetically damaged as part of their foetal development or later exposure to carcinogens. Mountains explode as volcanoes not because of the *chaotic behaviour* of the subterranean systems of molten rocks but because of pressure from contiguous entiatic material. The bafflement concerning the double-slit experiment, which beats the transcendentalist *ontologically challenged* scientific experimenters, is concerned with the lack of understanding that the interference pattern signifies the interference of *that which keeps things apart* - precisely the same material [increasingly being referred to in the press as: *dark matter*] that links up humans with humans, and humans with trees, and trees with trees, and everything else in this God-bereft universe.


LEON:
What appears to be chaotic is only the indeterminate coenergetic fields that exist in the Planck space close to the zero-points of this space time continuum... But which indeterminacy is only the result of the material scientist's inability to resolve their order -- due to interference of the sub-quantum energy projected by the observer in each descending hyperspace field -- with the so called metric order of that aspect of the material universe that they can measure with the physical constants that apply on this densest substantiality phase of the fractally involved fields between the zero-point of the primal singularity (which is reflected everywhere in the physicist's "vacuum") and the fields of metric mass-energy we experience and consider as the only existent reality...


JUD:
I don't know if you have had time to look at the brilliant Google video representation of the slit experiment? I realise that this will be *old hat* to you Leon, but could it be that it is not the fact that the electrons are being  *observed* that causes the *mystery* but the presence of the observational equipment which disturbs the experiment? Having just typed that and then read over your paragraph above I now see that this is more or less EXACTLY what you say in other slightly different words: *due to interference of the sub-quantum energy projected by the observer.* Now whilst this conclusion is what occurred to me as being blindingly obvious the first time that I saw the experiment, and whilst I now see that the same conclusion occurred to you [who know far more about the quantum aspects of nature than me] can you explain why the producers of such representations of the experiments always harp on about the fact that the aberrant behaviour of the electrons it is caused by their being OBSERVED rather that the fact that the metal observational equipment is OBVIOUSLY at the root of the problem. As a yachtsman this is so obvious, for in my active yachting days I always has to get my compass *swung* by an expert every year, and any metallic object introduced into the wheelhouse would immediately cause the compass to rotate and give a false reading.


LEON:
Forgetting (if we ever knew) that, without consciousness and mind to experience them, along with the intermediate fields that connect them with each other, no objective thing could exist in such a nihilistic emptiness. "Nothing comes from nothing" (as Buddha said) doesn't mean that nothing (or "emptiness" in his jargon) isn't the only reality that has to be underlying everything before something comes into being in slowly increasing substantialities as time or change progresses. And that "everything" (or at least their encoded holographic image interference patterns) is in the spinergy or infinite angular momentum surrounding that nothing which ultimately resolves into all the fields win fields within fields that constitutes the entire cosmos -- which is both conscious and material, subjective and objective, as a simultaneously and dependently arising gestalt right from the get go.


JUD:
What a disappointment. We were beginning to get along so well and now you have introduced consciousness and mind again to spoil the party, but now you bring in the idea that no objective thing could exist in such a nihilistic emptiness. But of course it couldn't - and that proves that such a nihilistic emptiness could ever exist [or rather - could ever not exist.] Something does not come into being in slowly increasing substantialities as time or change progresses for neither time nor change exists. What exist has ALWAYS existed in other forms. Entities cannot *come into existence* nor can they go *out of existence.* Entities are always current versions of former versions.


JUD:
[earlier] See this site for an excellent representation of this experiment: http://video.google.com/videoplay? docid=-4237751840526284618&q=quantum


LEON:
All that experiment and the quantum mathematics explaining it (?) shows, is that physicists (as well as other eliminative materialists) still can't figure out how and why the awareness of the conscious observer can effect the condition or state of a material object -- if observation and conscious (or unconscious) experience doesn't exist.


JUD:
Yes, But the point I am making about that video is PRECISELY THE FACT that they explain it as the abstractional *OBSERVATION* that is the mystery when it is the big chunk of metal that is the observing eye that is messing up the experiment.


LEON:
Matter (like objects and humans) are just specific combinations and specific clusters of the fundamental forces and particles, and all of them follow the rules of gravity.


JUD:
Very true.


LEON:
So finally I can say that seen from the level of basic Impose, involve, or imply as a necessary accompaniment or result order your "flesh and blood men and women" don't exist. Their clusters and combinations of fundamental however exist.


JUD:
Look more closely at mereology. To impose, involve, or imply as a necessary accompaniment or result of material combination that the combinatorial [macro] result does not exist is a question of language only. All in the physical realm are in a sense *nomological danglers* in the sense that everything in the cosmos that we know of is a community made up of entiatic singletons. As humans we need to label things. To label another human being by the molecular components and to describe them is impossible. It is far easier to label that bunch of countless trillions of particles as *Dirk.* I am fully aware that following your argument *clouds* do not exist. What exists is a contiguous assemblage of water particles and other detritus. I would never in normal language refer to them in this way though. I would never for example gesture to the sky and say to my wife during a romantic picnic in the wilderness: Look at the beautiful contiguous assemblages of water particles and other detritus set against the streams of photonic energy from the setting sun.* ;-)


LEON:
Jud, you're just a poet at heart... So all your nit picking about the non existence (at least in my mind :-) of all those intermediate connections between the clouds I see in my mind's eye and experience at my center of self conscious awareness (that follows my body around like an obedient puppy) doesn't exist in all their encoded pictorial beauty and shapes -- that sometimes look like dragons and other times like clusters of beautiful skymaids, and other fa ntastic things that I interpret by comparison with my memories of younger days in my equally existent and obediently functioning imagination.

Jud:
OK - I am a sensitive guy like you Leon. The fact that I AM AWARE that those representation of the clouds transmitted to the interior brain by the exterior feeder [the eyes] which cause the brain to readjust the way that it exists to cope with and accommodate itself to the new information about the clouds and its significance to the holism and measures it against stored templates etc. are just changes of brain layout does not detract from the pleasurable and perhaps poetic feelings I have about clouds. Is that what you are getting at? Yes, reading below - I think we have encountered another nexus of agreement?


LEON:
But don't imagine that my wakeful imagination, doesn't recognize the logic of my imaginary construction when i imagine a pixel of light reflected off an object of perception, and meticulously follow its complex path and transformations, as it travels from the 2-D twin cones of my retinas through the neural system and to the 3-D interference pattern they make in the em field of the brain, thence, coenergetically, to the fields of mind and memory, to eventually arrive at my zero-point center of perception in the middle of my head -- to be ultimately experiences as a 3-D point of inner light that appears to be out there on the object of my perception. And, then begin to wonder how all that can come about if it weren't for those intermediate non consubstantial fields of energy surrounding every particle, cell, and organ of my body, each with their own zero-point of potential or experiential consciousness. Why would this apparently intelligently self constructed evolving universe use any process of vision more complex (except for the holographic aspect) than the relatively simple em field image transmission and transformational processes used in the analog video system that records and sends the image of an actor in the studio to our home telly?


JUD:
I am beginning to think that we think in remarkably similar ways? I would give my right-arm to embrace you fraternally as a fellow eliminative materialist But an iron curtain stands between us - a transcendental stockade too high for me to jump over. The difference marked by this semantic palisade is an ontological one - about what exists and what does not. I find it impossible to suspend my belief into accepting the existence of *mind* and *consciousness* when every eliminativist fibre in my body cries out *No!*

All the Best,

Jud Evans.