Re: Understanding reality in order to understand consciousness

Serge,

Is my assertion (changing our understanding of reality -- changing scientific tenets/paradigms -- FIRST;  is a prerequisite to developing an effective model of consciousness)  comforting to you and in line with your thinking, or is that approach in conflict with your rationality and logic and thus cannot be allowed to co-exist with your approach and system?

Comforting or in conflict?
...

---In jcs-online@yahoogroups.com, wrote :

Ralph Frost on June 28, 2016 wrote:

>On another level, the meta-theory IS the underlying general principle 

>of nested structured~duality (NSD).  In my approach, reality is NSD. 

>If I were trying to populate some of your many categories I might say 

>the  the MT and GS and AT .. levels are all NSD.

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[S.P.] Can you, please, consider any example from real life and demonstrate how your "underlying general principle of nested structured~duality (NSD)" works?

[rf] How it works?  Generally, I expect one off-the-cuff answer to that question is it "works"  via or through nested structural coding, which perhaps you and other readers can think of as resonance.  Consider the statement of the basic principle: all things have some structure and have and/or exhibit one or more sets of differences (dualities).   The 'nested' aspect of the different levels of organization (nested structure)  promotes variations in influences and interactions.   On the physical side of things, perhaps you might want to consider the spherical/in-out instance of NSD presented in, for instance: http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Albert-Einstein-Principles-Physics.htm     On the ~mental side of the fence, perhaps you and other readers can reflect upon pattern recognition within different contexts and also within different paradigmatic models or belief systems.

In the real life experiences of changing paradigms, there come moments or periods just before the shift where, let's say, two models (or instances of nested structured~duality) fit the same sets of experiences or measures (or instances of nested structured~duality).   Having the various aspects of the puzzle and the descriptions and potential outcomes all in the same category (instances of NSD) simplifies the analytical tasks that participants face making it somewhat easier to first conceptualize or imagine  alternative paradigmatic instances [they are, after all, just different instances of NSD], and then for participants to assess which alternative is more general/more terse than others -- have greater load-carrying capacity.   Again, having both physical artifacts and phenomena as well as mental/descriptive artifacts within the same single category allows for some productive descriptive, conceptual, analytical efficiencies which are simply not available in less unified, more verbose  models.

[sp...] Your mere battologization that everything is NDS gives no understanding, sorry. Your re-defining reality as NDS gives no understanding as well -- here, you (re-)define the unknown through the unknown. For me, it is not a rational approach. Any exchange of opinions should be based on rationality and logic.

[rf] I don't say everything is NSD. I say reality is NSD, but, great word, Serge!  Yes, I use repetition, but I personally don't think the repetition is unnecessary.   I have noticed some signals from a few people that they have developed some understanding and appreciation for the imagery I am expressing and advocating. Yet, here we also are with your misunderstandings of my expressions.   Not that you don't know it, but changing scientific paradigms, on-the-fly is fairly challenging. While not necessarily chiseled in stone, even if only encoded in binary in optical media and/or structurally coded in stacks of ordered water and carbon-based arrangements, the dominant model has quite a bit of "inertia" or resistance to change.  For one person to express and convey the improved, clarifying, more unified tenets and paradigm, that is essentially impossible to do via the dominant rationality and logic.  Yet, even though it's a dirty job, some individual, sometime will need to face it and do it, or initiate parts of it.

You suggest I define one unknown through another unknown. In one way, you are quite right, but so do you do the same thing. So do we all.   When you point at a tall woody plant with leaves and mesmerize listening children and claim that people call and know this thing and similar artifacts by the label and symbol and word of "tree", you protein fold a noise or markings so as to create the sound and signal which lodges as a memory within the listener, repeating the teaching/encoding process through which your forebearers  conveyed the same impression to you.  [Or, however, it was that you learned the different various tidbits.)

The thing of our experience is that there IS NO arbitrary meaning or arbitrary "tree" other than as the forebears or ourselves assign.  What we have is a complete series of unknowns which we call or label and are taught to call and label:  tree, rock, paradigm, rationality, neuron....

As I came and have come to  face up to, and understand this vacuum of intellectual meaning -- or perhaps because I had first provisionally adopted that all of reality has the trait or property of being NSD --  I notice that all the labels and meanings,  are variations of some type of NSD -- of some type of nested structural coding, for instance, minimally, in the protein-folding experience of resonating the words or marking of their symbols. 

That's one place  where and how the principle fits in and does useful work.Your forebears taught one definition of reality. I am presenting another and/or expanding on one other significant property in the definition of reality.

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[sp...] As to my system of four levels of intellectual products (the D-level, the GS-level, the AT-level, and the MT-level), it is understandable even for young children. For example:

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1) the D-level assertion: "This is a tree."

2) the GS-level assertion: "All the trees have trunks, branches, and roots."

3) the AT-level assertion: "If we cut off all the trees on our planet, the level of oxygen may drop sharply, and this may lead to extinction of life." -- the AT-level assertion has certain explanatory and predictive power, and, also, it is verifiable and falsifiable;

4) the MT-level assertion: "The presence of trees is an important factor that the life on the Earth resides. So, we should protect trees." -- the MT-level is for a faith, for a belief system, for a world-view, for a way of existence (like vegetarianism, environmentalism, naturism, etc.), for a set of postulates, general laws, general principles, general ideas, etc.

[rf]  Besides these different levels sounding like (nested)  emotional value statements to me and me not understanding which principle guides your logic,  FWIW, "the level of oxygen may drop sharply, and this may lead to extinction of life." is already false or misleading, particularly to small children. Reduced oxygen  could be disruptive for aerobes, but would likely be a boon for anaerobes and some other types  of life.

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[sp..] So, my system of four levels of intellectual products is all-sufficient, it works fine,

[rf] All-sufficient and works fine... for WHAT?  Are you suggesting that "reality is [these four] intellectual products", and that is your contribution to re-defining reality?

[sp...] and it does not need to be squeezed into anything like "general principle of nested structured~duality". As one may see, any general principle is an element of my system of four levels of intellectual products. A concept "tool" cannot be squeezed into a concept "hammer", because the concept "hammer" is just an element of the concept "tool". Nothing can be squeezed into its own element. Therefore, please, don't apply your NSD principle to my ideas -- please, apply it to some facts from real life and show the results to us.

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Best,

Serge Patlavskiy

[rf] I would likely say "folded" rather than "squished", but yes, reduction, simplification, information compression is what general principles typically do.

In the link listed above I came across the following quote by Einstein (relating to things on the physical side of the fence): 

"Physics constitutes a logical system of thought which is in a state of evolution, whose basis (principles) cannot be distilled, as it were, from experience by an inductive method, but can only be arrived at by free invention. The justification (truth content) of the system rests in the verification of the derived propositions (a priori/logical truths) by sense experiences (a posteriori/empirical truths). ... Evolution is proceeding in the direction of increasing simplicity of the logical basis (principles). .. We must always be ready to change these notions - that is to say, the axiomatic basis of physics - in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way logically. (Albert Einstein, Physics and Reality, 1936)"

What are the principles (logical basis) of the rationality and logic that you use and advocate, and are you ready to change those notions?

Best regards,

Ralph Frost

With joy you will draw water

from the wells of salvation. Isaiah 12:3

---

From: "ralph@... [jcs-online]"
To: jcs-online@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2016 9:50 AM
Subject: [jcs-online] Re: Understanding reality in order to understand consciousness

Serge,

The insight I am having comes with my different approach and more experiential, experimental methodology.   It's an insight (perhaps a supposition) which is like: "Oh, the reason there is not well-developed science of consciousness already is because the  tenets of existing alternative paradigms do not support such expressions."  Thus, to build an effective model of consciousness, first, one needs to redefine reality, that is, change scientific paradigms.

Since I had this insight this week I have noticed (with others' help) that my NSD story line is a robust alternative to scientific realism/materialism and the panpsychisms as a scientific definition of reality. Also, I notice that re-defining reality, let's say, in terms of 'structure' points toward a need for a science of structural coding rather than a science of consciousness.  So, the methodology has what I think are some efficient outcomes.

As for the "mete-theory",  I suspect you will be dissatisfied with whatever I write -- largely due to the substantial differences in our approaches.  I am chalking these differences up to temperament and might summarize to say you take a rational approach whereas I'm running on a more experiential, intuitive, actually faith-based approach.

My experience starts in 1977  with me hearing and answering a dis-embodied voice ask : "Ralph, how'd you like to present a scientific discovery?", and then that working out  through making and playing with magnetic tetrahedra, noticing principle and the 6^n structural coding in the 10^20 per second  tetrahedral flux in respiration, and considering and sharing other insights and observations like repeatable subjectivity as they have occurred.  

So, at one level, the meta-theory is faith-based. We all have spiritual gifts and abilities to share.

On another level, the meta-theory IS the underlying general principle of nested structured~duality (NSD).  In my approach, reality is NSD.  If I were trying to populate some of your many categories I might say the  the MT and GS and AT .. levels are all NSD. One size fits all,  you know, due to the incorporation of nesting as a  tenet -- which, otherwise is evidenced by your and others many different nested levels of organization in  expressions and models.

As for a model of consciousness, as I said, if you can follow my re-definition of reality, simplified as a tenets of structure,  then the "AT-level"  is perhaps best said as nested structural coding -- as previously outlined as a feature in energy-related respiration and enzymatic (structural) related transactions.

Thoughts, Serge?

Best regards,

Ralph Frost

With joy you will draw water

from the wells of salvation. Isaiah 12:3
 

---In jcs-online@yahoogroups.com, wrote :

Ralph Frost on June 22, 2016 wrote:

>-- To build an effective model of consciousness, first, redefine 

>reality, that is, change scientific paradigms. (Ralph Frost, 06/21/2016)

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[S.P.] For me, it is rational to connect understanding reality with understanding consciousness. By the phrase "redefine reality" I would understand a need to formulate a certain new set of postulates and general assertions concerning the existence and development of our Reality. In other words, we have first to construct some new meta-theory (some new "scientific paradigm").

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Then, within the limits of this new meta-theory we may try to construct "an effective model of consciousness". Here, by the phrase "effective model of consciousness" I would mean that the applied theory of consciousness must have a sufficient explanatory and predictive power. 

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In my case, I have constructed a meta-theory which takes into account the agency of informational factor. A special language, a special method, a special system of proofs, a special system of models and other elements of a meta-theory are elaborated. Then, I have constructed my version of the applied theory of consciousness within the limits of that new meta-theory.

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Now then, I would much like to see which meta-theory is constructed by Ralph, and what his version of a theory of consciousness looks like. I want to compare what is done by me with what is done by other thinker/theorist.

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Kindly,

Serge Patlavskiy