Consciousness as experience buffer.

Rats of Multa wrote:

"The entire purpose of consciousness is to provide an "I", which in turn provides the faculties of self-examination, logic, and something you so commonly attribute to magic known as free will."--farfromglorified.

okay... so i dont think there is any "purpose" here, unless we want to talk about god and stuff,.. which i dont..... but at least i think this is the root of my troubles with your comment.

I don't believe in God (I'm an agnostic), and I have no idea what you mean by "stuff". Neither God nor "stuff" are necessary to find purpose in this life or that which makes it possible.

If you believe that you, and that what makes you actually you, have no purpose, I wholeheartedly support your right to act accordingly. But I warn those who accept that mindset to be careful what they wish for. A belief in a world and a life without purpose will get you exactly what you ask for.

Somewhere in this thread I believe you said something that amounts to "following your stomach will lead you to eat well". I encourage you to go meet those who live by such a pathetic mantra: among them you will find many who starve and the rest who simply steal from those who produce the actual food those others believe can just be conjured out of thin air, or by worshipping some wooden idol. Your stomach cannot find or grow your food. A desire, on its own, cannot make it so.

my point was that consciousness and instinct are not mutually exclusive faculties,... and that was my interpretation of what you had said previously.

I didn't say they are mutually exclusive, nor do I believe they are. Consciousness simply represents a futher step in the evolution.

Ahnimus wrote:

Right, just to clarify, reason, would be synonymous with cause and not purpose.

Okay. Do you not see that when you look to understand the reason gravity works the way it does that you are also partially looking for the purpose of gravity? In the why? sense? And I'm not talking in a god sense, but in a universal law sense.

angelica wrote:

The way I see it, you can just as easily insert "dream" in to the "follow your stomach" part, farfromglorified. If you follow your stomach, you don't give up logic or your sense of self. You use logic and your sense of self to fulfill the needs of the stomach.

Not if you deny that which makes that logic and sense of self possible.

And similarly, if we insert "dream" making the quote about following your dream we therefore end up getting our share of our dream, too. We may get lost but we'll find our dreams. I thought you would be a great believer in this philosophy.

I don't like the philosophy of "following your dreams". I like the philosophy of achieving your dreams. Everyone follows dreams. Few people achieve them.

farfromglorified wrote:

Not if you deny that which makes that logic and sense of self possible.

Who is denying anything? If one takes their sense of self, and makes the decision to follow the Grateful Dead, that is a logical choice made by self, whether others think it's foolish or not. There is no denial of self. You are saying if we just meander aimlessly and detach of our choices? I don't believe that is possible. Even the choice to not make a choice is a choice. Also, Rats of Multa and I agreed on aligning ourSELVES with the forces beyond our control, which I distinctly interpreted as acknowledging the "I" aspect in this equation. I surrender to the aspects of myself beyond my control all the time, consciously. By doing so, I align with all of mySelf and am more potent. (remember the aspects of self that we are not conscious of but that make contracts without our conscious awareness, for example by speaking unconsciously through body "language", among others) What I am doing is accepting what things come up from beyond my conscious awareness, as it comes to my awareness so that I can deal with it. Psychological problems happen for people when they block off parts of themselves and serve the ego only.

I don't like the philosophy of "following your dreams". I like the philosophy of achieving your dreams. Everyone follows dreams. Few people achieve them.

I can agree on fine tuning the wording. It's the concept that I appreciate. The concept of allowing a vision larger than yourself (edit: going beyond "self" as ego, to "Self" being the whole person including what is unconscious) to be the priority that you use all of your skills, talents and ability to attain. Including developing the necessary skills, and developing POTENTIAL that is otherwise latent (beyond our view our ourself), along the way to this attainment. Nothing else matters, because by the inner light of vision, one knows one has everything they need in the minute, including knowing that works for tomorrow and the next day, onward.

Ahnimus wrote:

I don't see it as intelligence. It's simply that if it didn't work, nothing would exist, if nothing exists, we wouldn't be asking any questions about our existence. So simply put, in order for this to be, this has to be. If it wasn't this way, we wouldn't be here. You can try to deconstruct it to find purpose, but it just doesn't offer any solutions. It's like determining the odds of any given hand in poker. The chance of being dealt a royal flush is extremely slim, but if you get one, it doesn't mean it was dealt to you with purpose, intelligence or design. It just means that a large number of deterministic factors worked in tandem and ultimately resulted in you being dealt the royal flush. Though, it was in-fact fate that you were dealth that hand, it was predetermined, it was not. It's difficult to explain, it's not that there was a plan behind it, it's just that those deterministic factors behaving the way they do, the way they have to, ultimately leads to being dealt the royal flush, over and over again, with the exact same variables, you get the exact same outcome. It's not a matter of being preplanned, it's just that the outcome of mixing those variables is set in stone.

What I am referring to is more along the lines that when we learn a new principle and we think it's so cool and complex. I feel this way about other intelligent people. I'm awed and I appreciate the depths and the complexity surrounding me. There is so much awe-inspiring depth and intricacy and it seems the details can go on and on. Say you quadrupled in intelligence. There still would be mindboggling universal principles to keep you entertained. At the same time, I also make the point that it just is what it is. It can be looked at as good, bad, or indifferent, depending on how we approach it. So, I'm agreeing that there is not inherent "goodness" in these universals.

Ahnimus wrote:

I don't see it as intelligence. It's simply that if it didn't work, nothing would exist, if nothing exists, we wouldn't be asking any questions about our existence. So simply put, in order for this to be, this has to be. If it wasn't this way, we wouldn't be here. You can try to deconstruct it to find purpose, but it just doesn't offer any solutions. It's like determining the odds of any given hand in poker. The chance of being dealt a royal flush is extremely slim, but if you get one, it doesn't mean it was dealt to you with purpose, intelligence or design. It just means that a large number of deterministic factors worked in tandem and ultimately resulted in you being dealt the royal flush. Though, it was in-fact fate that you were dealth that hand, it was predetermined, it was not. It's difficult to explain, it's not that there was a plan behind it, it's just that those deterministic factors behaving the way they do, the way they have to, ultimately leads to being dealt the royal flush, over and over again, with the exact same variables, you get the exact same outcome. It's not a matter of being preplanned, it's just that the outcome of mixing those variables is set in stone.

I have noticed you use the expression "deterministic" a few times, which I interpret as " obeying or acting in accordance with a describable set of rules" . Are you familiar with teh concept of an "emergent system", which is a system which operates by rules, but where teh complexity of the system is such that it is impossible to determine what outcome will actually occur, rather, we have to wait and see what happens, or emerges ?? Weather is an example of this, so really is poker, even though the probablities are a lot simpler.
With your poker analogy, I thnk what you are saying is that even though teh probability of a royal flush is low, it is not zero, but even knowing that, there is no way to predict or control when one will occur.
So it is more an emergent system than a deterministic one, as I undersatnd it.