LS Re: the four levels as awareness


Bodvar Skutvik (skutvik@online.no)
Mon, 17 Aug 1998 10:39:09 +0100


Date: Sun, 09 Aug 1998 23:01:48 +0000
glove <glove@indianvalley.com>
wrote:

> hi Maggie and squad
 
> i have a problem with the notion of self-awarness and just how it may be
> determined to exist in anyone or anything other than the self who is
> experiencing it. i am self-aware (i think, therefore i am) and so i
> assume every other human being is too, but i cannot prove it. but am i
> really self-aware? perhaps i am merely aware and the mind has learned to
> form what seems to be a continuous series of events out of a
> discontinuous series of leaps and jumps in perception (the self),
> leading me to believe i (as self) am in a flow of awareness through
> time, when in fact 'reality' is really a series of leaps which my mind
> irons out into a continuous series of events taking place.
snip.....

> one interesting example of this type of perceptual trickery our mind
> allows the self to do is indicated in an experiment done to determine
> how we determine our body parts from other objects within the field of
> our vision. the subject, seated, rests his/her left hand on a table,
> while a small screen placed beside the hand blocks it from view. also on
> the table, in full view, is a rubber hand. while the subject watches the
> phony hand, the researcher strokes both the real hand and the rubber
> hand with a brush and asks the subject to describe what is being felt.
>
> almost all the subjects tested said the rubber hand felt like their own.
> even more telling, when the researcher missed stroking the real hand and
> only stroked the rubber hand, the subjects reported a numb feeling in
> the hand. it seems that the mind is locked into a canalized pattern of
> response and when the response is not what has been patterned, the mind
> responds by attempting to remain within the canalized pattern even
> though conflicting data is coming to it.

Glove and Lilacs.
I zoom in on the "rubber hand" part of your long and extremely
interesting letter because you (correctly) spot a giant SOM platypus.

You hint to the mind as a sorcerer performing tricks to keep up the
delusion of a smooth reality. Yes, that is putting it mildly. I have
earlier referred to Benjamin Libet's experiments which revealed the
same "magic" and must return to it again.

One of the more weird things he found is that in the brain a sensory
input (say a touch to the skin) raises an electrical "evoked response"
which has to last half a second to become aware to the subject. But
how is that, touches are felt as occurring simultaneously with the
actual touch!? A pin-prick to a big toe first needs a considerably
time to even reach the brain and then half a second's evoked response
should amount to nearly one second!! (the reflexes are something
else) Well Libet found that the "mind" transfers the sensation
backwards (forwards possibly?) IN TIME so as to occur in synch with
the event.

You - Glove - call it mind and Libet calls it mind, but is it not
possible that it is the mind/body notion itself which is the SOURCE of
"living" rubber hands and trickery with time? What if we apply the
MOQ to it?

A biological organism - a body - is BiPoV at work: not a body
"containing" such. At that level there is no time or neurologists
:-), only SENSATION. Whether sensations take place 'out there or in
here' or 'before or after' is completely irrelevant: Good sensation
means preservation of life and vice versa.

Then the Social values (SoPoV) grew out of BiPoV. Life's values became
subordinate to a greater good: Society. At that level ideas of time
and neurology are just as absent, there is only EMOTION: it feels good
(safe) to be part of a greater entity and the individual is just a
preserver of society. Bad conscience means that the individual
strays from the common cause.

Finally Intellect (InPoV) grew on top of SoPoV and only here did time
and - eventually - neurology occur. The chief Intellectual pattern
is the separatedness of self from other (from society and from
the physical world, even of a mind separate from the body). It grew
to such proportions that it can be said to be Q-Intellect itself.

For thousands of years it reigned as S-O METAPHYSICS and the notion
of a mind inside a body (a ghost in a machine) became orthodoxy. Not
until recently has the paradoxes (the trickery which has to be
inferred if the mind/body notion is to be defended) been exposed.

Well, what is the MOQ explanation of the Libet findings or the Rubber
Hand experiment? It is that sense impulses (BiPoV) are to pass
through the "line of office" becoming modified by the process.
Neural signals are processed-evaluated-modified by BiPoV (making a
rubber hand and/or a phantom limb "real"). Bodily sensations are
pem-ed by SoPoV and Social emotions pem-ed by Intellect. That's why
scientists make these strange findings. There is no direct connection
from matter to mind (no "indirect" either: InPoV is not exactly SOM's
"matter" and Q-Intellect is definitely not SOM's "mind"). It is only
the Q-sequence.

Bodvar.

--
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