Kaballah and the Zohar?

[invert_nexus]

Yeah, I can't read this whole thread. Too much for my delicate psyche to take. LOL.

Bullshit. I've read a certain 17 page thread by Mephura on this theory we're discussing. This one's only up to 8. I think it does go much farther than the original did though. The original thread kept circling the original premise without getting very far. This one circles as well of course, but, we are integrating far more into it than was brought up in the language thread.

Your delicate psyche might be psychologically 'murdered' by the gestalt being conceived in this thread so humbly named "kaballah and the Zohar".

Hey uhm, i think we force patterns onto everything because of our experience. Our experiences get all crunched up into concepts, concepts form the root of the tree of our thoughts so to speak. We can encompass portion X of our conceptual basis at any given time. New input is filtered through the remnants of the process we've been ungoing up until that moment. Voila: patterns.

Yes, but you left language out of the picture, didn't you? This is the proverbial tree of knowledge. While gestalt is the tree of life.

Hey, I like that. Brings us back to Kaballah. Hah!

 

[wesmorris]

I didn't know I was supposed to include language. What aspect of language are you looking for? I got it all baby.

Yeah pardon.

Oh, and pardon this EDIT too please,

IOW, I'm not sure where you want me to fit it in. Here's a little smidge:

In the context of my prior assertion, language serves as an AMAZING tool to aid in the formation of concepts. It is the backbone of the cruncher (that which crunches experience into concepts). Language allows for the conceptualization of experience without having to make the shit up for yourself. You get the benefit of a tool developed from eons of experimental abstracts - it is the basis that allows us to stand on the experiences of our predecessors.

Think of experience as a viscous goo flowing in a path like a river. Put a stick upright in the river and the goo clumps around it. A concept is the stick, written on the stick are words. The words cause the concept to shape a certain way because they have a correlation between stimulus and thought connected with them in a structured manner. Stuff flowing down the river catches on the parts that they fit into by the nature of the path left for them from all the goo caught up on the sticks.

Take that whole idea from three to four dimensions such that from three dimensions things can appear to be at two places at one time. Thus you have the observer and the observed.

What a yucky analogy. Hehe.

 

[invert_nexus]

That's what we're on about. You already know the theory. It's the same one that Gendy was pushing in Mephura's thread long ago. That thread was more about language. This thread is more about brain. But, language is still integral.

Basically, it's about gestalt. The pattern-finding. The making of gods from unknown forces. Abstraction of language leading to gods. Inevitably perhaps.

I'll go through and try to find key posts.

 

[gendanken]

I'll go through and try to find key posts.

You'll be wasting your time and this thread will swell with more bagagge.
He won't read it.
And don't bother thinking this is some ploy to get you to respond, Wes. I'm only being blount.
I would not read it either.

 

[invert_nexus]

I was going to provide links, actually.

 

[wesmorris]

Comment on my gooey analogy damn you people. Ack it's weird. That shit seemed like GOLD to me Jerry. GOLD.

 

[wesmorris]

Okay here's the kind of thing I'm looking for here.

Wes, you're fucking amazing. In one fell swoop, just a few paragraphs, you managed to package the essence of solutions to the mysteries of language and mind in a package I could understand - and be WOWed by. Your sir, ROCK MY WORLD. I will be sending you women, money and various nicknacks intended to highlight your coolness.

Thank you, Wes, for being so goddamned YOU, and braining me right up! More later, as right now I'm so completely blown away!!!!

Wow and thanks again,

Everyone who isn't Wes.



Get with the program people.

*snort*

LOL. That was theraputic. Goddamn I'm an asshole.

EDIT TEN MINUTES LATER:

I feel naked in public.

*does a pretty good cartman voice*

"screw you guys, I'm going home"

 

[invert_nexus]

Shit, Wes. Didn't see your phantom edit. Sorry bout that.

In the context of my prior assertion, language serves as an AMAZING tool to aid in the formation of concepts. It is the backbone of the cruncher (that which crunches experience into concepts). Language allows for the conceptualization of experience without having to make the shit up for yourself. You get the benefit of a tool developed from eons of experimental abstracts - it is the basis that allows us to stand on the experiences of our predecessors.

This is an area of divergence. The sentence in bold up there. In fact, it seems that language is jsut that it creates experience by making it up. By explaining it. It's like someone explaining oneself to oneself. Over and over again. Rationalizing all the fears, worries, regrets. In the end, the experience may have little to do with reality. It is an interpreted memory that never was. A concept.

Think of experience as a viscous goo flowing in a path like a river. Put a stick upright in the river and the goo clumps around it. A concept is the stick, written on the stick are words. The words cause the concept to shape a certain way because they have a correlation between stimulus and thought connected with them in a structured manner. Stuff flowing down the river catches on the parts that they fit into by the nature of the path left for them from all the goo caught up on the sticks.

Kinda gooey.

Seriously. It's hard to conceptualize exactly what you're describing here. The river and the stick are easy. The words on the stick, carved? By carving them into the stick then they create a weakness in the stick that causes it to bend this way or that way. This would imply language as a weakening force. Your "correlation between stimulus and thought connected with them in a structured manner" is a bit. . . hard to understand. What's the correlation? What's the stimulus? What's thought? What's the structured manner? What's the stuff flowing down the river?

Definitely enigmatic. And as such it inspires thought, perhaps I should spend more time doing that and see if I can make something of it.

Take that whole idea from three to four dimensions such that from three dimensions things can appear to be at two places at one time. Thus you have the observer and the observed.

Heh. Hard to conceptualize in three. Impossible in four. I think I get a glimmer of what you mean by observer and observed. You seem to mean that the stick at one 3 dimensional moment is different than the stick at another 3d moment. One observes. The other is observed.

Problem. You spoke of the river moving in the original analogy. Wouldn't it already be 4d? Or, I suppose it was 3d with 4d implied as in our universe. Therefore, when the 4d is made apparent. Time is lost. So, if this is the case, then the observer and the observed are. . . lost in time?


edit:

EDIT TEN MINUTES LATER:

I feel naked in public.

*does a pretty good cartman voice*

"screw you guys, I'm going home"

I spent those 10 minutes composing and contemplating. Fatass!

 

[wesmorris]

This is an area of divergence. The sentence in bold up there. In fact, it seems that language is jsut that it creates experience by making it up. By explaining it. It's like someone explaining oneself to oneself. Over and over again. Rationalizing all the fears, worries, regrets. In the end, the experience may have little to do with reality. It is an interpreted memory that never was. A concept.

Making it up is part of the experience. It's the river. It's made up of a bunch of sticks and goo. They are all part of the river.

Kinda gooey.

Yeah.

Seriously. It's hard to conceptualize exactly what you're describing here.

Experience (now) = sum of senses plus thought (now)

In the river flows your experience. Sticks a concepts, shaped and organized by words. Which tag a lot of the concepts. The words have a map of their own (dictionary), coupled to your experience of them. Words though, are shapes of experience themselves. Stimulous forms the words and sticks them into the river of experience. As the river flows, experience(s) build on the sticks, shaping the flow of the river. It still flows, but in a different direction... a different shape than it was before.. which changes what gets stuck on the sticks, and how we perceive the experience... the new stimuluous re-enforces the shape of the sticks by adding experience. It changes them... re-arranging the shape and relations of the sticks to one another and the river pushes them around and makes them stronger by depositing more experience. Soon you have islands. Language acts externally by directly effecting stimulus.. repeating and re-enforcing it.. or breaking it down, as new relationships between the sticks arise and fall.

The river and the stick are easy. The words on the stick, carved?

I dunno. They are the foundation for some, but concepts can form in the eddies between the sticks. Perhaps the words are... yes.. the words GET carved onto the stick because they are flowing in the river. They bump into the stick and get stuck, or leave an impression on it. Those impressions are present on every stick or island they hit, until in solidifies into granite and can no longer be dented. Emotions can directly affect the hardness of the stick, by straining or 'fluffing up' the part of the mind (the 'active subset of concepts' the observer encompasses in a thought.

By carving them into the stick then they create a weakness in the stick that causes it to bend this way or that way. This would imply language as a weakening force.

It can build up or leave a dent I'd think.

Your "correlation between stimulus and thought connected with them in a structured manner" is a bit. . . hard to understand.

Maybe I clarified a smidge?

What's the correlation? What's the stimulus?

The stimulous is part of experience.

What's thought?

'the process as felt by the observer", maybe? Hmm. Something like that.

What's the structured manner?

I just meant that words relate to one another in the structure of language.

What's the stuff flowing down the river?

Experience. Thought and stimulus. A record of the where the river has flowed, recorded right in the shape of the river, and experience by "the observer". The observer from a 3D perspective could be viewed "at the focal point" of the river, but extends into stuff deem 'meaning': the abstract as tied through this focal point to experience. You'll have to really stretch to imagine a river with a focal point... I know. But those are the words I have at the moment. I see it, and I dig a little farther each pass. Maybe it will collapse to be reborn as some sort of crystalized viscous goo, with a focal point in a higher another order, like the twelfth derivative if you get my analogy.

Definitely enigmatic. And as such it inspires thought, perhaps I should spend more time doing that and see if I can make something of it.

Yeah well it comes so powerfully sometimes that I get a little excited. I try to curb it with a lil humor. I get in these weird little trances where my thoughts flow to my fingers and I try to interpret what I see.. it's a rush sometimes when there's some sense of real clarity to what I'm saying. It's clear to my own reference, but it's not necessarily objectively clear at all. I find that seemingly ironic in the intensity of the experience and wonderfully humorous of the condition of being self-aware. Meh.

Heh. Hard to conceptualize in three. Impossible in four. I think I get a glimmer of what you mean by observer and observed. You seem to mean that the stick at one 3 dimensional moment is different than the stick at another 3d moment. One observes. The other is observed.

Perhaps the cohesion of the imaginary component of mind, being ultimately a spoof of reality, harmonizes with its complement in that "poof infinity" kind of thing somoene mentioned before. Somehow the focal point is the POV, sees both sides and mutates into something more. Maybe the physical, subjected to an abstract reflection of itself... hmm. Time. Flowing in time. Hmm. It's always right now to me. Hmm... perhaps self is merely the interaction I've described. The brain does the stuff, but the suff is more than the stuff you see. It's also the stuff it has been through. The interaction between the creation of the experience, and the experience itself (the abstract part), that is self. It's the brain/body and the shapes it forms in the imaginary component of mind.

Goddamnit. I've run out of steam as is obvious by my unadulterated reaching there. Ack that was ugly. Okay... well, the terminolgy gets all mixed up because the context keeps switching up on me in my head. Thought is interaction of phsyical stimulous, coupled with the imaginary component that stimulous has already formed. The flow of time, the flow of thought, the flow of experience, changes the features on both sides of the scizm between the two (the two being the physical and the abstract, where the physical leaves an impression upon the abstract through the scizm). Is scizm a word? The link, whatever. The "breach" between the two? Fuck I don't know Im' spent. I blew my mind wad. Pardon.

Problem. You spoke of the river moving in the original analogy. Wouldn't it already be 4d?

Yeah, I just hadn't mentioned that component yet.. it sort of depends on how you mean it of course... I meant take the 3D anolgy of a river and give it a 4th dimensional component.

Or, I suppose it was 3d with 4d implied as in our universe.

Not that. I consider the "4th D" in this deal "the abstract". That's the component of existence that doesn't exist unless conceived? "the imaginary"?

Bah.

Therefore, when the 4d is made apparent. Time is lost. So, if this is the case, then the observer and the observed are. . . lost in time?

Stuck in the moment eh?

I spent those 10 minutes composing and contemplating. Fatass!

Hehe. Yeah I know I was just all excited for a minute. I'm over it, but I do think I'm onto something goddamnit. Maybe not.

 

[wesmorris]

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I haven't dropped a load like that on a thread for a long time. Okay well see, I think I was trying to get more out of that analogy than I could. I started out just wanting to make the point about how experience contributes to conceptual development and how language fits into it. I think there is some good substance in there but it's all twisted up in stretching the analogy too far. I'll think about what I can do to clarify.

 

[invert_nexus]

I haven't gone too indepth into your added explanation. I'll check it out and see what floats.

Now, for it to be somewhat on topic. . . Bring in religion (Kaballah and the zohar) and the brain (our hijacking). And be careful, Gendanken might cut your head off if you go too far.

 

[wesmorris]

Pffffffffft. I've gone too far with her before. She keeps cutting it off, and I keep managing to sew the bitch back on. I wish she'd post a pic so I could at least imagine her naked while she's hacking.

 

[invert_nexus]

Ahh, when I read the first example, I was picturing a stick. Not many. Of course their would be more than one stick. Can't get very far with a single concept, now can we?

Reading it like that, seems to bring to mind a net. A net formed from our conceptions, tied together with our language. And it filters the river of experience for relevant data.

There would need to be a fisherman. Someone to come along and clean out the catch. To make use of this data. This would be the interpreter mechanism. And the things he makes with his catch, schema.

I suppose, depending upon what he is catching and how he is constructing his schema, he would alter the ties of the net. To allow more through here, to catch more there. Subconscious activities would need to be brought into play. Perhaps they could be some type of nanolife crawling about the net. Maintaining and altering it. Throwing away detritus. Eating others. So, some of the data collected would never make it to the fishermans table.

Religion? That would be a schema. Perhaps the original schema. There has to be a source of this bounty. That source is religion. Animism. God.

Hmm.

 

[gendanken]

Loathe letting things run away. One feels a strange sense of inundation and giddyness all at once coming back to so much that was not there before, like a child in a candyshop. All hail Wonka.

Let's see here (watch this post take me close to an hour)

Wes:

Hehe. Yeah I know I was just all excited for a minute. I'm over it, but I do think I'm onto something goddamnit. Maybe not

From nodes to sticks, huh?
A gooey river of experience shaping our thoughts with wordy packages curled around concepts.
Limiting our thoughts, each person according to their Shape of Language.

Look this up, monsiuer: Whorfian Hypothesis.
I'm also put in mind of magma and lava. Experince being the fluid heat of magma below and lava the dried, concrete byproducts on top- concepts wrapped up in words.


Vert:
Some quick points before losing myself- just so happened to look into pidgin with the angular gyrus the next thing on my plate, but fell into this fascinating little segue.
Turns out there is more to these planned or artificial languages than simple Klingon. Esperanto is a language started by a doctor named L.L. Zamenho, somwhere in the last century. Its an auxillary language that is, amazingly, used by millions of practioners worldwide.
Something like an ante-Babel is it what these languages (Esparanto and one called Volapuk with only 6 speakers in their inventory. Nelson: Ha-ha) are after.

Anyway, this next man was too much like me to not bring him up, so I will. A personal salute to you, my lord Urquhart. This post is your claim to infamy!
Sir Thomas Urquhart, a man I came across in my little studies on eccentrics but never really delved into him until coming across him yestereday. Known for his bizarre use of language and endless word catalouges (like Rapaccini, wonder where the fucker went..) he proposed in the mid 17th century a universal tounge called Logopandecteision. He was able to gather followers, in the hundreds, and one can only wonder what these people sounded like considering that this is how the this kindred spirit, Sir Urqurart, sounded in his tomes:

"... by virtue of the intermutual unlimitedness of their visotactil sensation... the visuriency of either, by ushering the tacturiency of both, made the attrectation of both consequent to the inspection of either. Here was it that action was pasive and action passive, they both being overcome by either-and each the conqueror. "

Would you believe this excerpt.......is describing a sex scene? HA!

Attempting some quotes:

Hmm. So, it is about pattern-recognition as I had been thinking. But it's more than mere pattern recognition. It's about holistic pattern-recognition. The sum being greater than it's parts. It does seem to define what we are talking about rather well, doesn't it? Going beyond patterns into something . . . more.

Yup.

Man is a pattern finding obessisivo (my word).
And by being so makes errors. Consider Drosnin's claim- give him the Pentateuch and he can find a prediction of Jewish prime minister getting assissinated, the Shoemaker- Levy comet, the Oklahoma bombing and countless other hogwash supposedly predicted by biblical code. Listen to him talk about it and his convictions in his own belief of what he is saying could almost convince you.
Says Shermer:

"We are pattern seeking mammals, the descendants of hominids who were expecially dexterious at making causal links between events in nature. The association were real often enough that the ability became ingrained in our neural architecture. Unfortuanately, the belief engine sputters occassionaly, identifying false patterns as real"

In other words, Man's sanity, as I see it, is impossible without its inventory of false posititves. We've said this so many times in this thread I feel I bore you all with it.
A million-to-one odds happen every day in the world by the second, yet each time it happpens to us we feel there is a guardian angel, a mysterious something watching down from above, below, or inside.

Know what's funny? We can sit here clawing and yapping and typing out a theory and its all, quite frankly, bullshit. Darwin was laughed at. He said we come from apes.
I say Religion is language. Period.
Wes just called experience and language a swamp full of gook.

Did you check out the links I gave? I guarantee you that you will enjoy them. The MRI one and the brain disection one, especially.

Enoyed them.
But would still rather have a model.

Lastly:

A latecomer, but an important latecomer. It seems to be where this gestalt process takes place. But, it can't do it's thing with out the temporal. And, it is practically temporal itself. We may be guilty of outdated thinking on the brain here. I've been reading that the brain is not so divided into lobes as it once was. And the boundaries between these lobes are difficult to pinpoint at the best of times. And, all brains are different, to some degree.

Precicely what I am thinking.

One day I read about the homonculus having its genital respresentation on the cortex next to its foot represention, ergo the erotica of having one's foot sucked as those two senses combine as one into a sexual sensation.
Then the next day I look back in again and find that Penfeild has been revised and lo behold the foot is no longer near the genital area but an ankle, a leg, a knee and a whole thigh away from the pubic representation.

Then I read that not all people experience the same things as things are shuffled aruond embryonically, akin to kinda but not really having the same fingerprint which comes off as confusing to the layman.
Laymen, unfortonuately, being what we are.

MEH

 

[invert_nexus]

So. . . odd that you should mention Esperanto. I was just reading that very phrase earlier today. I didn't realize what it was that Calvin was referring to with it. Shame on him for throwing words like that around with explaining their meaning. I have some to add about this. But, it will take some time. It is confusing, technical, and theoretical. I will give you this little tidbit for now: Esperanto's Apple.

Would you believe this excerpt.......is describing a sex scene? HA!

Isn't it obvious? " Here was it that action was pasive and action passive, they both being overcome by either-and each the conqueror." Sounds sexy to me.

Laymen, unfortonuately, being what we are.

Yes, but so what? If we were brain specialists, we undoubtably wouldn't have enough time to dedicate to such little things such as this. At least, not until we were retired and our knowledge was outdated anyway.

The thing about the brain, of course, is that knowledge of it's workings are advancing and changing radically. This stuff on glial cells is sure to rattle the foundations of brain science should it bear fruit. But, we laymen can only sit here miles from the front line and read clippings of the mighty battles taking place so far distant. And we can make our little diagrams, and play with our tin soldiers. But, so fucking what? Gedanken, my dear Gendanken. This is what we are doing. And there's nothing wrong with that. Don't give up on me now.

 

[gendanken]

Pattern Finding Obessessivo:

Don't give up on me now

Pardon?

 

[invert_nexus]

You sounded rather depressed at the end of your post. With a loud MEH.

 

[wesmorris]

Here are some random sentences of me tryign to work this out in my head. There is insight and confusion below: It is ill prepared but it got too heavy and I thought it might randomly stimulate you somehow.

Stimulous is the pattern on experience. Say it sends a current (talking voltage through the river, shorting all of the concepts together and pushing them around via the shape of the river (the shapes of your stimulous). time drives stimulous onward, changing the river and the way it flows.

The strength of the charge (say it's a fancy field charge, with its strength modulated directly by stimulous). In the subjective beginning, there is nothign but a hole into the abstract, with no detail. As the charge of the field varies with experience, it deforms in the current state of mind. If the stimulous fits into particular nodes, holes or eddies or whatever, that which remains in the now from the processes that preceded it in the context of your mind. So back to the blank slate. Okay, mixing metaphors I can do.

So your thoughts, or your "flow of self" is the observer riding across conceptual relationships and iterating upon it via randomness and mutations of the patterns its distilled from its stimulous. Those patterns are sampled from conceptual relationships and the related sensory details. Not so much samples as just that the patterns are where time has pushed your sensory ride through the abstract facet of mind. I mean "pushed" in the sense of being encoded there (like recording on a tape, except this is recording onto mind) by the varying field of stimulous thing I was talking about above. The brain is the mechanics of it, generating the field, which in turn shapes the brain so the field effects how the connections grow which effect the way the field effects the way the brain gets wired. A very complicated feedback mechanism which feeds positively to some parts of the networks formed by the brain, and inhibits others.

Bah that's the shit I was thinking about. Seemed like a smidge of progress but I'll have to read it again later to see if there was anythign of value at all. My pretties are all gooey Gendy, you?

On second thought maybe I'm getting closer. I mean the brain IS a bunch of electrical gooey stuff.

 

[wesmorris]

perhaps a concept is really just the regulator (on the fly) that controls which memories are applicable to the current stimulous. maybe it's a pattern thats been directly encoded (brain growth / nueron interconnection) by previous stimulous. Thatt pattern specifies the strength of which circuit subsections should be active at a given time, activating specifically when the stimulous (whether "in focus" or autonomously recognized) matches the shape of the concept. "focus" is somehow the literal focus of the active subset of circuitry, through some weird constructive feedback thing, can direct and iterate upon its current condition (which is at least partially inclusive of a 'forecast' of stimulous to come) and reflect back onto the circuitry that generated it to direct the flow of the focus to some extent. the autonomous systems play a large role in that.

obviously there are a lot of autonomous sub-processes regulating the systems that support brain function, as it regulates them. there is also obviously some based model for the structure of information storage and abilities to process things per your diagrams. those underlie the stuff above.

maybe.

 

[water]

Just as a general note on *any* science and theories:

There are two main frames of thinking -- questioning phenomena:
1. What is this?
2. What is this for?

The two are of course inseparatable to an extent, but theories differ on what they choose as the primary focus.

In traditional linguistics, for example, the frame is "What is this?", as in "What is language? What are grammar rules?" etc. It tries to explain phenomena to their very essence. And then, based on that, some derive a pragmatic function of this phenomena. These theories are full of meticulous distinctions, categories, charts -- and one quickly loses sense of why all this is good for. (I don't mean to be unscientific, but yes, it is easy to get lost in those theories.)


In modern linguistics, the frame is "What is this for?", as in "What is language for? Why are we using it? What do we accomplish with it?" This is a pragmatic perspective, focusing on observable and practical phenomena -- the functioning, purposes and intentions. These theories appear rather simple, they tend to work with the findings of traditional linguistics, but they view them in the light of pragmatics.

To use an image: traditional linguistics was like analyzing the molecular structure of a spoon, while modern linguistics wonders what the spoon is for, not focusing much on what it is made of.
***

What I wish to point at with my example from linguistic theories is that analyzing the brain neurologically may very well not answer sufficiently how the brain works. It is like analyzing the molecular structure of a spoon, and on the basis of that molecular structure trying to figure what the spoon is for.

I don't mean to make light of anyone's efforts, but maybe it is time to re-conceptualize the way we are thinking about the human brain and its functions.