Re: Forwarded from Siddhartha Chatterjee

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Comrades,
    Part of the reason these sorts of discussions concerning religion
interest me is the opportunity to use what I am learning about the brain to
address traditional questions that religious opinion will raise to
materialists.  Marxists are of course the most serious challenge to
religions.  In the U.S. it is very painful religious environment for people.
However Christian North America might seem, the system has little about it
that really is Christian thinking anymore.

    One area in which religious thinking has been in the habit of raising
concerns is the nature of matter at the limit of smallness.  Quantum Physics
has various laws which violate common sense.    Aside from discussing the
paradoxes experientially of that sort of science, the discussion about
Quantum paradoxes to common sense often cover the internal difficulties in
religion itself or of how a religious point of view gets stuck in
assumptions which are not currently the materialist understanding.  That is
when someone claims as Siddhartha Chatterjee writes here,

Siddhartha,
Is physical reality to be caught by just the five senses, or do there exist
phenomena which cannot be apprehended directly by the senses and belong to
a higher order which is implicate (as opposed to explicate)? This question
is becoming increasingly important as the current fragmented and
mechanistic approach of science leads to confusion and crisis in different
fields of research.

Doyle
It is really not standard science the claim there are five senses, but that
there are six senses.  The internal sense of the body is a normal point of
medical theory and practice.  That 'sixth sense' is known as proprioception.
And it is important in some kinds of disability, especially Cerebral Palsy,
and spinal cord injuries.

My point is not that someone has to correctly cite the current number of
senses, as much as the discussion is stuck, or stagnated in an area of
thinking that is not really relevant and useful way of addressing
consciousness.   Currently existing religion occupies and promotes certain
assumptions about consciousness.  Most religions live comfortably enough
with the science of quantum mechanics just because it allows them wiggle
room in keeping to their beliefs.  More to the point of Marxists is what
does materialist knowledge in a scientific sense of how consciousness works
give us to address a mystical point of view when organizing the working
class.   There are traditional areas of understanding consciousness in which
religions do differ from materialists about how consciousness works which
can be directly challenged by science now.  The response to religion is not
so much in debate, but in how to construct computing communications systems
that address real human needs.

Broadly speaking the two areas in which major religions challenge
materialists are morality (a specialty of Western European religions, but in
my opinion an especial artifact of using alphabetic writing systems to what
language is can do in a computing environment), and consciousness without
words (as Buddhism promotes, in an effort to address the troubled mind
internally).  Marx was familiar with Christianity, and Judaicism, and
responded appropriately to them.  Perhaps the Chinese had similar responses
to the extent religions in their geographic area, but with respect to
Buddhism I see a current spread of the Dalai Lama's teachings in the U. S.
as well as other more or less traditional Buddhist thinking whose premise
has to do with the Christian inability to deal better with the troubled
mind.

Focusing upon Buddhism in particular which eschews the worldly for Buddha
insight, their main path of exploration is a religious sense is turning off
words in the mind.  I don't know why they think that is especially
important.  I mean I haven't the background to understand the many streams
of thought that have led to that, but it would appear to me a direct effort
to by-pass consciousness structures that appear in language as dysfunctions
in the social structure.  That is when people come to disputes and
contradictions how to disengage from the mess in order to re-approach
contact with other people in such a way that functional workings can
continue.  Or in essence a theory of how to work through emotional
dysfunction structures in human social networks.  I talk about networks as
important because where the brain work is not about ones social place the
point of turning off words is moot.  Turning off words is about withdrawing
from the means of social connection in order to address the dysfunction
properties one experiences within of consciousness itself.

Never the less it appears to me, that we have reached a stage in the
neuro-science to directly challenge these assumptions about how
consciousness works.  They can't survive intact as we learn about the brain.
Some examples,

Siddhartha,
It appears
that the practitioners of yoga and the other practices that go under the
generic rubric of 'mysticism' are somehow capable of tuning into this
higher and invisible implicate order(s) that surround us and permeates the
universe....
...I am reminded of the reception given by the Marxists (some of whom are in
this list) to the discovery of Viraj Fernando who had found one such
implicate order (geometric blueprint) of the sun-moon-earth system which
explained the wobbles of the earth's rotational axis. This phenomenon has
confounded geophysicists to this very day and the reason for this is
because they are trying to apply the Newtonian dynamical laws to a
phenomenon which cannot be described within the Newtonian framework.

Doyle
It is standard science about a neuro-network that it can "intuit" a pattern
of order in external relations.  What is missing from the commentary above
is how Siddhartha could go beyond the mere trite observation of the above
occasional insights that one sees everywhere in science.  How can Siddhartha
come to some material understanding about what to do with neuro-networks to
address the basic questions involved?

I would observe that pointing a neuro-network at a phenomena will give
insights that do arise not because there is a logical law, since that is not
how neuro-networks work.  That understanding "laws" itself can only be
understood as a cognitive science issue.  I would note that it not an
accident Siddhartha is relying upon an understanding of consciousness which
is about 'logic' not about how real human beings think.  Like Noam Chomsky
such assertions rest upon asserting a Platonism of consciousness structures
in outside the world, particularly concerning 'laws'.  Especially Laws of
transcendence which we can't test and know.

For me then the excitement I have is that such things as human consciousness
are being revealed, and giving us the means to understand how to bind human
networks into patterns of consciousness that address directly dysfunction in
cognitive structures.  It does not make sense to assume as does Buddhism
that turning off words in the mind yields much practical results in
organizing human social networks.  The Buddhist theory of turning off words
is explicitly about dysfunction in social relationships.  Avoiding the
entanglements of the troubles of earthly existence.   And that rests upon
precise ignorance of consciousness itself.  Since we can look at the
networked properties of human consciousness now with a great deal of insight
it is perfectly possible to materially create the means to address human
interaction structures that could completely erase all the myths of
religious assertions about how consciousness advancement needs to turn off
the "words".

I personally think 'relaxation's', 'detachment', and other primarily
religious areas of speculations upon how consciousness works have a great
deal with the material networked properties of computing communications.
That is a material understanding of emotions, of real time location in
space, of who one communicate with, and the structure of the communication
process are directly related to traditional religious speculation.  And at
the same time religion is useless for coming to a satisfactory resolution of
the problems one encounters.  I don't just mean getting a better job, and
social support from a socialist movement.  I mean that the problems of
social interaction in networks is about to yield to the productive power in
computing communications which give us the means to understand what
alienation might really mean, or for example turning off the words that
trouble an obsessive compulsive thinker.

These sorts of traditional religious beliefs now being challenged by the
science of consciousness have arisen from face to face talk in very ancient
contexts, with facial expressions, body gestures, being the primary channels
for conveying as much as possible of what the function of the neuro-networks
require.  Writing systems can't convey that sort of information adequately.
And language production has not been directly amendable to development with
regard to certain key aspects of the visual accompaniments to words spoken
until we understood the underlying material science of the brain.  The
computing industry will move rapidly to fill and develop what has been until
recently religious areas of belief.  That is going to be a significant
change for the whole human population.

So for Siddhartha I would ask, do you oppose the development of brain
science as the avenue to answer religious speculation?  I don't care what
Quantum physics says about the small scale laws of physics.  Are you
prepared to abandon your belief structure as consciousness is revealed by
the science?
thanks,
Doyle Saylor