[FRIAM] Eternal questions

[Steve Smith]

 uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
> It's not a matter of being absolute or not. It's a matter of nit-picking the particular word used rather than trying to dig into the mechanism. Balling up the composition into "have", "are", or "doing" is all useless posturing. I don't care. Use "are" if you want. I don't care. It's silly to distinguish.

It is not silly to me insomuch as each of those *feels* very
different.   I see others who seem to *do* their emotions... "throwing
tantrums" vs "having fits" vs "being spastic"...  

My inner experience is more that of "having fits" in the moment, but on
careful analysis, I sometimes recognize that I might have "thrown a
tantrum" trying to disguise it as "having a fit".   In the long run
though, it seems that it does sum to "being spastic".

> What I do care about is *how* we compose from part to whole. Superposition is, at least implies, a particular composition, a frequency domain, overlay. But I'd argue it's an impoverished one. The question is about the "hard problem", qualia, quality, etc. When you look at the experiments surrounding general anesthesia, with electrodes planted in various places on and in the body, you see time series that exhibit very long- and very short- term patterns. Consciousness can be quantified based on these time series (and spectral analyses of them). You can do the same with semi-conscious sedation. They are not superpositions so much as sequential modes, iterative feedback loops, waxing and waning in intensity ... waves upon carrier waves. So superposition is necessary, but insufficient.y 

yes, more aptly "coupling" I'd hazard, though to a casual outside
observer, superposition is what is observed from the outside?

I was in a men's group for a while which had any number of silly (to me,
not to them) rituals which included checking in to the group with our
emotions.   They desperately wanted everyone to conform to the
mad/sad/glad/scared basis space.   I resisted, often checking in with
"hopeful yet trepidatious"...   which was the only words I felt
comfortable using to describe the feelings I had.  They tried to
intimidate and cajole me into mad/sad/glad/scared.   The best I could
offer was "I'm glad to be here, a little sad that I have to describe it
in these four words, scared that you will reject me because I'm not
following your code precisely, and mad that you might do such a
thing".     I thought "hopeful but trepidatious" was a good shorthand
for that.   I stuck with them for a few months until I attended a
weekend intensive which was quite profound but mostly just made me
realize I had better things to do than drive 90 minutes round trip once
a week to struggle with these guys who had too tight of a formulation
(bless the cardinal directions and their colors, check in
mad/sad/glad/scared, etc.) for my interest (over time).

> Anyone who wants to talk about emotions and things like qualia or sense of self, has to talk about such things. If they don't, they're merely talking to hear themselves speak.

That's a tight prescription and judgement...

Carry on!

 - Steve

>
> On 8/26/21 10:16 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> uǝlƃ ☤>$
>>> Ouch! Dude. No! 8^D You're committing the same sin Nick commits. 
>> I understand that I was being provocative with the specific formulation
>> "we ARE" as if it were an absolute.
>>> To say we "are" our emotions ignores the composition, the algebra by which parts compose the whole.
>> I agree and only wanted to add to the composition "are" along with
>> "have" and "act-out" .
>>> The point is the very high order conscious *attention* to lower order frequencies. Not all is one. There are many parts to organize. How are they organized?
>> To what extent are our identities/sense-of-self (inner experience and
>> outer presentation) the superposition of our "emotions"?   yes, we are
>> more and less than that, yet for some purposes it seems we ARE that.
>