Ilya Startsev
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Posts posted by Ilya Startsev
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5 minutes ago, Nicky said:
You don't need Genetics at all to understand why what you posted is nonsense.
Can you please explain why you consider what I posted 'nonsense'?
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Since MisterSwig is seemingly accepting Novella's criticism of HeartMath for granted, I want to quote a famous sociological work concerning some of the practices of the likes of Novella that are common in modern science:
QuoteSources of "subjectivity" ... disappeared in the face of more than one statement, and the initial statement could be taken at face value and without qualification ... It is in this manner that our scientists, when noticing a peak on the spectrum of a Chromatograph, sometimes rejected it as noise. If, however, the same peak was seen to occur more than once (under what were regarded an (sic) independent circumstances), it was often said that there was a substance there of which the peaks were a trace. (Latour & Woolgar, 1986, p. 84)
In other words, if Novella and his team had the result that McCraty had gotten, they would accept it as true science. The problem with that is that these scientists don't see the problems that McCraty and his researchers do because these individuals clearly look through different methodological lenses, structured by different epistemologies.
Reference:
Latour, B. & S. Woolgar. (1986). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP
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2 minutes ago, Nicky said:
This part of it is understood just fine. Your claims contradict basic, well researched Biology.
Is that so? You are right that I don't know Biology (sic) so well, or maybe not as well as you do. Can you tell me what the purpose of "junk" DNA is, please?
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34 minutes ago, Eiuol said:
When you say the signal itself is the emotion, you end up dropping the entire meaning of a signal, then equivocating anything internal as some kind of mental content (which is conscious or unconscious according to you). If information is sent by the heart, through the circulatory system, counts as an emotion, then certainly the signal sent by your toe count as an emotion; if the heart counts as a source of emotions, your count can as well.
But I'm not equivocating in terms of the source from where that signal originates. This confusion is similar, for example, to misunderstanding Aristotle's epistemology. The forms (causes) exist objectively, but we need to use our soul (source) to make "imprints" of them, thus originating them within our (sub)consciousness for further processing. If our heart counts as the source of emotions, surely our toes don't. The idea that taking a signal for the thing itself (hereby, emotion) as false goes back to Alfred Korzibski's work (another darn Kantian) who tried to disprove Aristotelian objectivism. I am indeed taking the signal for emotion, but it's a specific kind of signal (not just any kind) because it was imposed by the specific organ in our body (namely, heart) which then allowed the signal to be transferred throughout the body. This signal, in contrast to Korzibski's reified abstractions, is natural and therefore objective. Similarly to this equivalence of blood pulse (the aforementioned signal) and emotion, I would, however, go even so far as to think of my ontological Model as reality itself, but now that would be supported by Korzibski's idea of knowledge being structure, and hence what we would call reality is our knowledge of it that we gained through structure that was correctly taken (read: imprinted, a la Aristotle) from outside. Someone would say that correspondence theory is false, but that's another topic.
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3 hours ago, MisterSwig said:
I read the HeartMath slides at the website. I saw no mention of "encoding blood." They talk about sensory neurons in the heart which send nervous signals to the brain, something Dr. Novella also talks about and accepts.
The more recent work by HeartMath begins thusly:
QuoteEvery cell in our body is bathed in an external and internal environment of fluctuating invisible magnetic forces. It has become increasingly apparent that fluctuations in magnetic fields can affect virtually every circuit in biological systems to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the particular biological system and the properties of the magnetic fluctuations. One of the primary ways that signals and messages are encoded and transmitted in physiological systems is in the language of patterns. In the nervous system it is well established that information is encoded in the time intervals between action potentials or patterns of electrical activity. This also applies to humoral communications. Several studies have revealed that biologically relevant information is encoded in the time interval between hormonal pulses. As the heart secretes a number of different hormones with each contraction, there is a hormonal pulse pattern that correlates with heart rhythms. In addition to the encoding of information in the space between nerve impulses and in the intervals between hormonal pulses, it is likely that information is also encoded in the inter beat intervals of the pressure and electromagnetic waves produced by the heart. This supports Karl Pribram’s proposal that low-frequency oscillations generated by the heart and body in the form of afferent neural, hormonal, and electrical patterns are the carriers of emotional information and that the higher frequency oscillations found in the electroencephalogram (EEG) reflect the conscious perception and labeling of feelings and emotions. It is quite possible that these same rhythmic patterns can also transmit emotional information via the electromagnetic field into the environment, which can be detected by others and processed in the same manner as internally generated signals. (McCraty, 2015, pp. 125-126, citations deleted)
Then the rest of the article flushes out the details and shows empirical data that is brushed aside by Novella as mere "noise".
3 hours ago, MisterSwig said:I can see you're heavily invested in this belief and have read a lot more on the subject than me. So, can you link me to a scientific article about this idea of encoding blood with information? I want to at least understand what you're talking about before responding further.
Also, can you link to articles for your other main claims, namely that people with heart transplants are emotionally confused, and the story about the heart recipient tracking down the murderer of the donor?
References & Bibliography:
McCraty, R., & Childre, D. (2002). The Appreciative Heart: The Psychophysiology of Positive Emotions and Optimal Functioning. Boulder Creek, CA: Institute of HeartMath.
McCraty, R. (2001). Science of the Heart: Exploring the Role of the Heart in Human Performance. Boulder Creek, CA: Institute of HeartMath.
McCraty, R. (2015). The Energetic Heart: Biomagnetic Communication Within and Between People. In Rosch, P. J. (Ed.), Bioelectromagnetic and Subtle Energy Medicine (Chapter 14). Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Pearsall, P. (1999). The Heart's Code: Tapping the Wisdom and Power of Our Heart Energy, The New Findings About Cellular Memories and Their Role in the Mind / Body / Spirit Connection. NY: Broadway Books.
1 hour ago, Nicky said:They exist in even the simplest animals. Even some plants (like those carnivorous ones) have cells capable of generating an action potential. Doesn't mean they have brains.
That's exactly right. Notice that they also don't have blood cells. Heart and brain develop together only in higher animals.
1 hour ago, Nicky said:Very clearly, it's 40 thousand neurons that have nothing to do with anything except the function of the specific organ. No organism could ever evolve to move some of its central brain function to another organ. It would be ridiculously inefficient.
I don't think we understand how the human body operates very clearly as well. Some, like Richard Dawkins (in his talk with Lawrence Krauss), think that our bodies are so inefficiently made that we should modify them in order to improve them. Others, namely, geneticists, see a huge amount of seemingly redundant DNA and call it "junk" DNA. And the stories just pile and pile. In contrast to them I think our bodies are extremely efficient, if you learn to understand them correctly (through the prism of good philosophy, of course). The 40 thousand neurons are mentioned by McCraty in his 2001 version of Science of the Heart (p. 4), but in the newer version available free on their website that paragraph, among others, is missing, which is very strange. They are clearly trying to show that those neurons have functions other than simple autonomous functions like pumping blood, and these neurons surely aren't used for processing pain, as we can't feel our hearts, so that already means they are relatively independent from the nervous system as a whole. McCraty & Co. usually cite in their earlier work Armour (1994), but I don't know what that neurocardiologist's standing is in the field and whether he is still relevant.
Reference:
Armour, J.A. and J.L. Ardell, eds. Neurocardiology. 1994, Oxford University Press: New York.
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Just to show that I've considered empirical research concerning emotions from more authoritative sources than HeartMath, here is what I wrote to Bill Harris on my blog after banning him in 2016:
I found Purves et al.’s Neuroscience (2004; see complete reference below) to be the most respected and used textbook in graduate neuroscience courses. I’ve read the section on emotions (Chapter 28) and skimmed through most of the book. Here is my interpretation of the neurological perspective on emotions (if you are not familiar with it, see the textbook, and also compare to similar findings of Ekman summarized in Lakoff, 1990).
I thought about neurological emotions and decided that the deviation in the position of the facial muscles from the natural (neutral or no expression) requires more blood flow. It’s the same with our bodies — when you exercise your body or you rub the skin, you excite the muscles, so the pulse quickens, and the excited skin area becomes red from increased blood content (in most cases). So, in contrast to “emotions” that neurologists see, this phenomenon is better defined as excitation, which is triggered in the muscles/tissues by increased blood pulse, and not other emotions, like happiness, hatred, etc. Moreover, expression of hate or fear (correlating with specific positioning of eyebrows, cheeks, and other features of the whole face) requires a greater blood flow than the expression of happiness or pleasure (smiling). Therefore, the negative “emotions” on the face lead to a greater increase in heart rate than positive “emotions.” Clearly, none of their research really deals with emotions other than excitation.
REFERENCES
Purves. D., G. J. Augustine, & D. Fitzpatrick et al. (2004). Neuroscience (3d ed.). Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates, Inc. Ch. 28.
Lakoff, G. (1990). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago UP. pp. 38ff.
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10 hours ago, MisterSwig said:
From Novella's article:
QuoteThe heart contains its own electrical system that regulates itself in order to keep the heart pumping in a coordinated fashion. ... A recent review of the evidence indicates that the heart contains a complex intrinsic nervous system comprised of multiple ganglia (clusters of neurons) that network with each other.
Indeed, the neurons in the heart that are only called a 'brain' (for ease of understanding) regulate, that is, as HeartMath found out, encode blood with impulses that have information in them. Skeptics stuck in brain-centered consciousness cannot accept this because this idea doesn't correlate with Kantianesque science, but only some ancient philosophy (like that of Aristotle, who was indeed heart-centered and thus self-conscious).
QuoteNone of this means that the heart has a mind.
Indeed it doesn't. But it means it might have a soul, which is not reducible to mind (contrary to what Descartes and his followers thought). This soul is also pre-conscious, or at least serves as only a part of our consciousness, since it affects (as HeartMath studies have shown) our intelligence -- how clearly we are able to think, for example.
And here is a logical mistake:
QuoteIt takes more than neurons, or even a system of neurons, to form a mind. A complex network of neurons can function like a computer chip, and no more has a mind than your laptop does.
Neurons in our head may form mind, but mind is only in the head by definition. Hence what's in the heart is not a mind, but a (little) 'brain', independent from our brain/mind. A complex, natural network of neurons, however, cannot function like a computer chip because they have nonlinear, that is synergetic, qualities in their interaction, which cannot be artificially imitated (at least with today's neurology) or with computer engineering, in which about 50% of circuits are linear (and only memory circuits are non-linear, but they are not the same sort of complex nonlinearity as in neurology). It's a faulty comparison and obsolete metaphor, as other neurologists know ("Unplugging the Computer Metaphor", "Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer", etc.), and it's an equivocation with the term 'mind', following in Descartes' (or more clearly, Kant's) steps.
QuoteIt takes the specialized organization of neurons in the brain to produce cognitive processes that we experience as the mind.
Neither emotions, not the heart (and its mechanisms) have anything to do with cognition. That's called overthinking, which is another problem of both this article's author and today's culture that follows this kind of Kantian thinking (categorized as DIS). The author, Steve Novella, by the way, is one of the critics of HeartMath, having called their research 'noise' in an article on his blog (but disabled the comments after his fellow skeptics posted a few responses) a year before this article in Neurologica. This blog post was used for a Wikipedia article directed against HeartMath (with no comment from HeartMath on it, of course). I was able to write enough criticism to have the article deleted. Other skeptics also realized their mistake, as Wikipedia tends to be overcrowded by skeptics, and there are not enough open-minded individuals there. My criticism, however, was deleted because it was too lengthy (the moderator said it's not a forum), and I've seemingly lost it and cannot find it. I remember that through my research Novella happened to be a kind of person (like Kant) with problems with his heart, a very narrow-minded, brain-centered scientist, who only pathologically tries to destroy but doesn't really create.
12 hours ago, EC said:What happens to people who have a heart transplant? Are they experiencing the emotions of the dead person? How do these new, different emotions get translated in a different brain that doesn't speak the same language of these new heart emotions? Do you know what a metaphor is and when it's applied correctly?
I've already pointed out the incorrect metaphor used by Novella to compare our brain/mind with computer. I think my comparison of heart with soul is credible, just as brain is related to mind. We also know that these people who have transplanted hearts are very confused sometimes and shocked by the new kind of and unfamiliar emotions they are feeling perhaps for the same reason you are pointing out: namely, that their brains weren't related to the same hearts and hence are unable to understand these new emotions from the lives of the previous owners. It can be particularly shocking sometimes, depending on the kind of person the donor was. For example, here is something from The Heart's Code:
QuoteI have a patient, an eight-year-old little girl who received the heart of a murdered ten-year-old girl. Her mother brought her to me when she started screaming at night about her dreams of the man who had murdered her donor. She said her daughter knew who it was. After several sessions, I just could not deny the reality of what this child was telling me. Her mother and I finally decided to call the police and, using the descriptions from the little girl, they found the murderer. He was easily convicted with evidence my patient provided. The time, the weapon, the place, the clothes he wore, what the little girl he killed had said to him . . . everything the little heart transplant recipient reported was completely accurate. (qtd. on p. 7)
And we already know how emotions serve as the foundation for memory.
9 hours ago, Eiuol said:...
If you stub your toe, does that mean your toe generates an emotion? There is a signal, an emotion will probably occur, but is the toe forming an emotion? It's causal confusion. You might end up offering a scientific explanation of heart as the source of emotions. In the process, you would end up destroying any sense there is of making any distinction of brain processes or any other systems in the body.
The confusion is taking nonessential parts of the body and giving them meaning to which they don't contribute essentially. Physical pain is processed by the brain and isn't the emotion I'm talking about here. Emotions like fear, love, hate, excitement, peace, etc. are not reducible to brain impulses (or nerve impulses, for that matter), senses or sensations, facial expressions or intuitive feelings. Emotions are those (im)pulses that contain information from environment or other parts of the body (toes included) but are produced within us. They are sent to processing centers in the brain to interpret this information, which then becomes conscious and gets mixes with a lot of complex conscious and subjective processes. Hence we can, with our brain, repress emotions, but that doesn't mean they don't occur somewhere deeper and are transferred throughout the circulatory system. What's causing emotions is different from the source of emotions. Cause of emotions is not the place where emotions are produced. The same confusion you are showing between cause and source are found in the brain. Kant, in particular, believed that we cause our phenomenal realities, and even the source of them was somewhere within our brains (the noumenon as the direction toward which we go through practical reason to the deeper levels within ourselves). This is the same confusion found in neuroscientists like Novella who are in the same category as Kant.
What causes the formation of our human information is the environment, the context. We, however, are the ones who produce this information (we don't cause it, in this sense). Reality causes, we adapt, assimilate impulses, integrate information (even subconsciously!) and hence produce it, but the sources of production of such information are different and not only found within one organ, but within many (and yes, even our stomachs have their own electromagnetic frequencies and own neurons, but stomachs are not as significant as our hearts, without which a person cannot live and with even an artificial heart a person lives maximum of 4 years). Yet we see animals who can live without their brains or heads, but no animal can live without a heart for very long.
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7 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:
Okay, here's a serious question. How do you define brain? You say there is an independent brain in the heart. What exactly do you mean by this? Can you point to the heart-brain on an X-ray?
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6 hours ago, Eiuol said:
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We wouldn't say that a paramecium shrinking away from the light is having an emotion.
But this is why mysticism isn't just a mistake. It's a framework of thinking. Jung didn't simply have radical ideas that questioned the paradigm around him. That would be fine. How the heart relates to emotional processing could end up with some pretty groundbreaking ideas if pursued far enough. Yet this would change entirely if we are trying to say that an emotion itself, like what we say when we mean sadness or excitement, manifests in the heart. That would require additional premises, particularly ones about an unconscious. And then we wouldn't be grounded in empirical science anymore.
No, a paramecium doesn’t have a heart and thus has no emotions. I differentiate thoughts (cognitive content) from emotions, just as I differentiate positive from negative emotions that cancel out, like fear and love. Excitement during exercise and peace are also emotions, since they occur at or after heart-rate changes, when we can become conscious of them. However, just like thoughts, emotions can also be subconscious or unconscious: I use these two terms interchangibly, although I realize there is a technical difference. In philosophy, though, they both would mean being outside of conscious thought.
Measuring objective emotions that I’ve been talking about is real. All you need is a device that can find the differential of heart-rate, known as heart-rate variability, or heart rhythm. Emotion research like that is quite groundbreaking and completely ignored by most neuro & cardio scientists.
As for MisterSwig’s comment, I’m not sure if it’s serious or sarcastic, so I won’t reply to it.
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By the way, if you want to know another mystical psychologist, you should consider Sabina Spielrein, the first female psychologist and one who was related to both gentlemen. Her mystical tendency (yet she wasn't a mystic!) related her to Jung, but her position was more idealist than his. The trio they formed can be categorized as: Freud DISintegrating, Jung INTegrating, Spielrein MISintegrating (a sort of a Hegelian variety). This is the context from which all of psychology developed, along one of these three lines.
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On 2/14/2019 at 7:12 PM, Nicky said:
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As per that definition, Jung was not a mystic. Only action he ever ascribed to his heart is pumping blood. Everything else he did with his rational brain. ...
If Jung believed that he was brain-centered, then this would relate to himself not understanding his mystical nature, even being opposed to it, and his self-confusion. An essential starting point of any realist/mystic is a real context. All of Jung's psychology is saturated with contexts and context-bound entities. Archetypes come first to mind as we think about how they form the historical, beyond-mind patterns of the collective subconsciousness. In contrast to Jung, Freud dug into his psyche, thus starting with the brain and lowering his focus to the individual subconscious, which he believed to be the dominant factor in psychology. Although both used the same material for their psychological theories, they surely went in different, even opposing directions from their positions.
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14 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:
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I wonder if heart rate is controlled by the medulla oblongata in our heart-brain or the one in our head-brain. Because that might be relevant to the source of emotions. If the cybernetic information travels from the head to the heart and back to the head, wouldn't that mean the head-brain is the source of emotions? But that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. So I guess that heart rate must be controlled by the heart-medulla.
Wouldn't medulla oblongata be the first point that blood pulse passes when entering the brain? Hence this point is prior to the limbic system's processing, yet it cannot be the source of emotions, but merely a subconscious unit on the path between the heart and the brain. Although heart and brain can work autonomously, as we know that hearts starts working before the brain in human development, it's optimum for them to work together, cohering their individual impulses. When one dominates the other, as when heart pulses disbalance our brain chemistry or the brain forces our heart-rate to change due to autosuggestion, we lose control of ourselves. Yet it seems that both problems develop within the framework of brain-centeredness that is so widely spread in our culture, taking one endpoint of the human organism for the starting location. With heart-centeredness I don't think the same problem occurs, or at least we don't know enough about such frame of consciousness to know what its hidden dangers might be.
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8 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:
Do they start in artificial hearts as well?
It's a complex question and a problem that doesn't have any experimental data because most people just think that the heart is a pump and can be replaced like any other organ, completely ignoring the fact that the real heart has a brain that's independent from the brain in our head. From books such as The Heart's Code we know that heart transplant receivers experience emotions of their heart's donors. My guess about the artificial heart carriers is that they won't experience the same kind of emotions as everyone else or that they won't be able to become as deeply conscious about their emotions as everyone else. However, the definition I give to emotions is still that they are changes of heart rate. Yet that definition is too simplistic because it ignores the information encoded by the heart in our heart rhythm, which would be the cybernetic nature of emotions.
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Has anyone read Ivan Yefremov's Razor's Edge? I am reading it right now and finding that much of aesthetics expressed in the beginning of the first part resonates and in parts joins with Rand's objective aesthetics. Here is a quote to consider (my translation from the Russian original):
QuoteIf you simplify the definition, which is actually much more complicated, like everything else in the world, then it must be said first of all that beauty exists as an objective reality, and is not created in the thoughts and feelings of a person. It's time to turn away from idealism, hidden and obvious, in art and its theory. It is time to translate the concepts of art into the common language of knowledge and use scientific definitions. Speaking in this common language, beauty is the highest degree of expediency (целесообразности), the degree of harmony and combination of contradictory elements in every structure, in every thing, in every organism. And the perception of beauty cannot be imagined other than it being instinctive. In other words, entrenched in the subconscious memory of a person thanks to billions of generations with their unconscious experience and thousands of generations with an experience that is realized. Therefore, each beautiful line, form, combination is a rational (целесообразное) decision, developed by nature for millions of years of natural selection or found by man in his search for beauty, that is, the most correct quality for this thing (the main character is arguing against the criticism of the aesthetic virtues of the statue of a naked woman in front of him that feels alive). Beauty is what's leveling chaos, that general pattern, a great middle in expedient universality, comprehensively attractive, like the statue. (Razor's Edge, Part One, Chapter 3).
Yefremov, being a professional scientist (paleontologist, geologist, and biologist), is also an artist of words who wrote science-fiction in beautiful and rich prose. He was inspired by Jules Verne and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, but he also shares many elements from other scientists and philosophers. In this paragraph, you can find an amalgamation of diverse elements merging toward the same goal, the meaning of beauty. Here you can see Darwin's biological evolution, Aristotle's golden mean, and Democritus's principle of expediency, but beneath it all, as I judge, hides the most basic and favorite principle of Aristotelian art: the Golden Ratio. I think this perspective on art is closer to Rand's objective one than, say, to Kant's subjective one. Here is another quote, in which Yefremov criticizes the art in the Soviet Union at the time of his writing (1963-1965):
QuoteFragmentation and distortion of form, perspective and color transitions represent a natural tendency in the schizoid psyche to distort the surrounding reality. ("Five paintings" short story)
It's unfortunate that his little known works in which he expresses his aesthetical views are not translated into English yet. However, you may have heard of his most famous work: Andromeda Nebula (in my opinion a work comparable to the classics by Stanisław Lem, especially his The Magellanic Cloud). Although Yefremov chose utopian Communism over nuclear-weapon-proliferating Capitalism, his focus on human spirit, competency, and beauty is all so surprisingly similar to Rand's.
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On 2/14/2019 at 7:12 PM, Nicky said:
... someone being classified a mystic doesn't mean rational people should disregard the wisdom they might produce.
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That inference (mysticism is outside of reason, therefor it's the consequence of emotions) could only be valid if you first accepted that emotions are necessarily divorced from reason.
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Emotions are only divorced from reason in totally irrational people (which is a theoretical concept, because such people couldn't survive).
You correctly identified that mysticism is outside of reason. But that also means that it's outside of most emotion. Mysticism is based in arbitrary propositions, and the emotions resulting from such propositions. It has nothing to do with most emotions (which result from rational thought, and possibly intrinsic archetypes, if Jung is to be believed).
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Jung called himself an empiricist (which is neither a mystic nor a rationalist). Empiricists have major flaws, but mysticism is not one of them. Also, Jung transcended a lot of those flaws, he just didn't have a better word than empiricist for describing himself.
Quite strange that I haven't received an email notification of you quoting me, so sorry I'm so late here. I came to the forum to post a new thread, but only now I've noticed your replies!
You are correct in stating that rational people shouldn't disregard the wisdom mystics might produce. You are incorrect, however, about the other side, and the justification, of exactly this point. The reason we shouldn't disregard the wisdom of mysticism is the same reason for that wisdom being rationally considered as wise in itself. How is it wise? Some psychophysiologists, such as Rollin McCraty of HearthMath, have figured it out. And that proceeds from the other point you've tried to make that is disproved by their research, namely that, as you believe, emotions in themselves are only in irrational people and, at the same time and contradictorily, they are supposed to be arbitrary abstractions. What experiments done by the likes of McCraty show is that emotions don't start with the brain, but with the heart. Emotions, instead, are sent by the heart into the brain, within whose limbic system emotions are processed, namely within the hypothalamus, hippocampus, and the amygdala. Here are some quotes from a more authoritative source:
QuoteThe limbic system, located just beneath the cerebrum on both sides of the thalamus, is not only responsible for our emotional lives but also many higher mental functions, such as learning and formation of memories. ... The amygdala is the emotion center of the brain, while the hippocampus plays an essential role in the formation of new memories about past experiences. ... The hippocampus plays a key role in the formation of emotion-laden, long-term memories based on emotional input from the amygdala. ... The thalamus and hypothalamus are associated with changes in emotional reactivity. (lumenlearning)
What is gathered from all this is that brain only works as a processing unit, not the source of emotions, as you presume. Hence, emotional mysticism is literally outside the brain, as it starts in the heart and only then gets to the brain for our consciousness to integrate it, to make it into thoughts, memories, and then concepts/propositions.
Concerning Jung as an empiricist, well, you have claims of the likes of David Deutsch, who correctly presume that empiricists are more mystical and hence nearer to religious folks (as all empiricists were in fact religions and/or mystical -- look at Bacon, Locke) than they are to the kind of subjective rationalists of Kantian/Deutsch variety.
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The whole confusion here is over the definition of mysticism. Mysticism is not brain-based, nor is it reason in the rationalist sense. Mysticism is heart-based and is prior to or outside of brain-reason. Hence mysticism is an emotional way of connecting your soul with reality outside, including God. Mysticism is exemplified by the following mystics in the biblical tradition: Elijah, Isaiah, John the Baptist, and John the Apostle. The opposite tradition, that of religious law-makers -- or idealists -- is the following: Abraham, Moses, David, and Solomon.
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14 hours ago, Nicky said:
I hope the next words out of your mouth are "I was wrong". Because that's the only thing this obviously shows.
You obviously took that quote out of context, as the added quotes show otherwise than what you thought.
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By the way, here are some other quotes by Carl Jung that touch upon his mystic nature:
QuotePeople call me a mystic, but [humans] really are chock-full of mysticism; that word covers a large area of facts which we cannot understand.” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 296.
Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 294.
You seem to forget that I am first and foremost an empiricist, who was led to the question of Western and Eastern mysticism only for empirical reasons. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 195.
[And here he speaks based on the false dilemma (or black-and-white error), thinking that 'mysticism' is idealism (they are opposite, in fact)]: I was particularly satisfied with the fact that you clearly understand that I am not a mystic but an empiricist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 237.
(link)
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9 hours ago, Nicky said:
Sorry to post in an old thread, but this jumped out to me as I was searching for something unrelated, and I just can't help myself:
"Everyone who says that I am a Mystic is just and idiot. He just doesn't understand the first word of Psychology." ~Carl Jung
Thank you for the quote. This obviously shows that people like Jung and Carl Sagan took the word 'mystic' out of context, which is too bad for them, since, in relation to other individuals, they are obviously realists/mystics, that is, the true mysticism is always inseparable from reality: it's like aristotelian essentialism.
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On 3/23/2017 at 7:06 PM, Ilya Startsev said:
Since DIM categories presuppose basic philosophy, they cannot, strictly speaking, be used to classify it; the categories derive from the philosophy. Those who lay the foundations of methodical thought are not guided by definitions of method; on the contrary, they are the source and teachers of method. In a sense, though, one can validly apply DIM categories to basic philosophy, if one does so with an opposite meaning—not DIM processes as the source of such principles, but those principles as the source of DIM. (The DIM Hypothesis, Ch. 4, his italics)
Thinking back on Peikoff's careful note on application of categories, there is an opinion of quite an opposite thinker, namely Alfred Korzybski, that can be used to justify the metaepistemological nature of the DIM categories:
QuoteNot every individual knows or realizes the importance of, or seemingly consciously cares for, epistemology; yet every one unconsciously has one and acts ant lives by it. ... Every one has ... some epistemology. (Science and Sanity, p. 554, his italics)
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On page 409 (halfway through the book), Korzybski states a millionth time:
QuoteLet me repeat once more that the 'is' of identity forces us into semantic disturbances of wrong evaluation. (his italics)
So his entire book most probably consists of such repetitions without any justifications.
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On 9/11/2018 at 8:27 AM, splitprimary said:
you say "Korzybski includes Kant in the aristotelian tradition", which i'd agree with . . .
I'm starting to think otherwise due to this quote, in which he removes Kant from the category of 'philosopher' to which Aristotle belongs:
QuoteIn all fairness, it must be said that not all so-called 'philosophy' represents an episode of semantic illness, and that a few 'philosophers' really do important work. This applies to the so-called 'critical philosophy' and to the theory of knowledge or epistemology. This class of workers I call epistemologists, to avoid the disagreeable implications of the term 'philosopher' (p. 78, his italics)
And because he attributes noumena to Aristotelian analytics:
QuoteWe can not know 'essences', things in themselves (p. xvi, italics there) [and] un-speakable effects, such as an object (p. 35)
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To elaborate and analyze one of the previous quotes, I want to note that in Korzybski's own words, the problem with the mentally ill is that they "identify the symbol with actualities" (p. 196, his italics), which he has done on the previous page when he "necessitated" the '1 = 1' formula to mean the following external (in Korzybski's words "outside of his skin") elements:
- "different nervous systems which produce and use these symbols";
- "the surfaces" and "different parts of the paper";
- "the distribution of ink";
- other materials or material conditions.
So what happens is the equivocation between symbolic language made as a tool for comprehending reality outside and the empirical data from reality outside to which our language refers. Without the link of reference, which Korzybski ignores in his definition of identity ('absolute sameness in all respects'), he projects his own disorienting confusion on the readers and Aristotle, whose works he never bothered to read. Although Korzybski states some truths in his work (e.g., "[A]n enormous amount of knowledge may be found in a mature occasional perusal of a good grammar or dictionary, the neglect of which acts as a psycho-logical blockage to the understanding" - p. 763), he doesn't usually follow his own advice.
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Here is a quote by Korzybski that I think supports my evaluation of him as a mentally ill individual:
QuoteIf we take even a symbolic expression 1 = 1, 'absolute sameness' in 'all' aspects is . . . impossible . . . 'Absolute sameness in all aspects' would necessitate an identity of different nervous systems which produce and use these symbols, an identity of the different states of the nervous system of the person who wrote the above two symbols, an identity of the surfaces., of different parts of the paper, in the distribution of ink, and what not. (pp. 194-5, his italics)
And then, to make this absolutely clear, he adds:
Quote[Learning t]his may be comparable to the spending of many years in teaching and training our children that one and one never equal two, that twice two never equal four. , and then they would have to spend a lifetime full of surprises and disappointments, if not tragedies, to learn, when they are about to die, that the above statements are always correct in mathematics and very often true in daily life, and finally acquire the sadly belated wisdom that they were taught false doctrines and trained in delusion . . . from the beginning. (ibid., his italics)
Carl Jung: witchdoctor or radical scientist?
in Psychology and Self Improvement
Posted · Edited by Ilya Startsev
addendum
For sure this new science is influenced by spirituality and mysticism (collectivism -- not so much). Ancient philosophy of Aristotle was pointing exactly to this kind of science as well. You wouldn't call Aristotle a collectivist due to his political views?
That story about the girl touched Pearsall for sure, and he was quite honest, if gullible, and emotionally charged in the positive sense. I haven't finished all of the book, but there seem to be more stories about patients experiencing their heart donors' emotions. I would rather believe him than pathological individuals like Novella. And BS detector might be your overcharged brain (not in a good sense).
I am not aware of what "Liquid Buddha Studios" is about. Have they made some videos with faulty information?
Addendum: In any case, even if they did, there can always be good things hidden among rotten stuff. The book with McCraty's article I quoted from (Bioelectromagnetic and Subtle Energy Medicine) is exactly like that. I wouldn't believe other articles in it.