The material students need to know in order to discuss mind and Society knowledgeably is covered in this 4 year course
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Robert and I had an excellent dialogue on August 15th on Revolution radio and we will post that on foundations of mind. Because we cannot meet in person we will use radio this discussion group and the internet for the summer school. In the meantime here is an extended discussion in order to clear the ground.
The context in which this summer school takes place could hardly be more extreme. For the first time since the Second World War appeals to freedom of conscience freedom of assembly and freedom of expression in the West have been trumped by what is in effect dictatorship. Up to this year it was inconceivable to anybody born after 1930 that arguments appealing to these freedoms would ever fail. The countries comprising the axis powers never showed any sign of slipping back into dictatorship after 1945 . Varnishingly little of ex Soviet Union is a dictatorship. But fail they have.
So we need something else. What is it? The question is relevant to this course because
Our freedoms were taken away from us in the name of science. The science in question was almost entirely bogus. Moreover the main protagonists including officials from the world Health Organisation did not hesitate to condemn humanity as a "parasite on the Earth" whose numbers should be reduced with the help of Vaccines. Bill Gates first said this publicly as far back as 2010 and made efforts since then to be elected into the board of the w h o as a country!
And the people lined up in billions to get these so-called Vaccines. They did so while publicly available published data showed The Vaccines were not authorised did not work well and were in fact dangerous. In fact they were not Vaccines because they did not stop transmission. More state published information revealed that the PCR test which was at the core of removing all our basic freedoms was never authorised and was never designed to detect SARS cov 2. It should not surprise us now that the Pfizer vaccine according to the cdc's own criteria should never have received emergency authorisation because it did not work 50% better than a placebo. As our summer school starts it seems likely that this vaccine about which the former chief Scientist of Pfizer has said it deliberately targets the ovaries through its use of micro lipids is about to receive full authorisation.
Obviously most of these problems are beyond the remit of this course. What is not beyond the remit of this course is the clear attempt to contaminate nervous systems with graphene in order eventually to facilitate state and other authorities sending signals directly to the brain. In a sense the summer school is about the late great human brain!
But let's get back to to the fact that arguments about freedom of assembly conscience and expression are now routinely being trampled on. If you assemble they send out riot police. Eminent scientists working from crises of conscience and expressing themselves against the so-called pandemic are now routinely fired. Not just that but they are banned from the so-called social networks and have to go underground. Again for boomers and even pre boomers this would have been science-fiction in 2019.
We ask you to consider whether to use a classic English expression the worm has not turned. To use a less stately one we will not be able to put Humpty back together again. What we may have to do is to return to the original crisis of western society around the time of the Invention of the printing press which begot protestantism.
Because much of the articulate and organised resistance has come not from the Academy and other inteligentsia but from religious sources. There are those who consider their bodies the Temples of the Holy Spirit and the cosmos to be the Mystical body of Christ. That of course can be translated into the terms of Islam and other religions. Nevertheless there are many of us for who this will not be sufficient.
In this Short Introduction to the summer school we are going to ask you to consider an alternative. We will start from this question about sources of authority deriving from ultimate reality. We will then Delve into the reparse of nature which foundations of mind has pursued for close to a decade. The final section dealing with how we treat mind and world consciousness attention is likely to be of even greater interest to many.
Ultimate reality is usually thought of in terms of an absolute which is the source of being and which typically has been called god. From the time of copernicus cosmology and cosmogony differed according to whether God was involved or not. In the church cosmogony made reference to the Book of Genesis and cosmology referred to planets and stars including the sun orbiting the Earth. The copernican Revolution changed that cosmology irrevocably.
The first radical statement of the summer school is that it was at that point that god was dead. Biblical cosmology and cosmogony were now simply fairy tales divorced from the business of real life. Even the religious Wars of early modernity were a Sideshow compared to the carnage caused by the totalitarian systems of the 19th century which presaged current clashes of civilization between traditional liberal democracy extreme financialised inequality and most recently communism with Chinese characteristics has indeed become a world player.
Whenever anybody came forward with cogent arguments about the fact that freedoms of assembly and speech were normative he was shouted down immediately with appeals to science. It was pointed out that there were articles in peer reviewed scientific journals proving him not just wrong but an enemy of the people. By August 2021 it has become clear that most if not all of these articles were completely bogus and several have had to be retracted.
The solution here is very simple which is to impose a model of openscience with all articles and peer review published with names of the reviewers and it is remarkable that States have not done this a long time ago by facing down the lucrative scientific publishing industry.
But the fundamental issue is that of authority. As soon as protestantism appeared the Catholic church was fatally wounded in its later fights against Marxism and nazism. Kukai is unusual among Buddhist monks in that he wrote a manual about how to seduce young postulants but the Catholic Church has terminally discredited itself by institutionalizing sexual abuse of Minors on an industrial scale. We cannot look there.
In fact there is no source of authority that we can appeal to. The plutocrats who seem to be behind the new totalitarianism clearly anticipated arguments on the basis of Reason and enlightenment freedoms and had hired an army of so-called fact checkers to discredit anybody who used these arguments. The prediction by Billy Gates that things do not get back to normal until essentially all 8 billion of us are so or vaccinated seems to be less brilliant prophecy than inside information.
So what do we know about the absolute from current science and can we turn that into a set of moral obligations? We know that there exists a substrate which is is beyond subject and object evolving noetic of massive energy at low entropy addicted to the edge of Chaos and knows itself through us. If we want to bring god back to life we must start here whether we consider this ultimate substrate as identical with the wave function of the cosmos or not.
Legitimately however we can Project the terms of scholastic philosophy and theology onto the substrate and say that it is absolute the ground of being eternal ubiquitous and much else.We can continue and say that this initial substrate as classical physics has chaotic dynamics shows a tendency to order through resonance is constrained in fascinating ways by laws on the evolution of dynamical systems and much else. These constraints we can continue manifest themselves in constraints on types of chemical bonds in chemistry and eventually syntax in language and other semiotic systems.
The addiction to the edge of Chaos results in systems like are planetary biosphere where quantities like the the amount of Nitrogen are vastly out of line with what one would predict and this allows our existence. Although we are of course disastrously affecting our biosphere we fortunately have not been able to change other phenomena giving rise to existence like the incredibly small value of dark energy.
Note we have not yet made any religious moves. The initial substrate that constitutes the absolute manifests itself at the quantum level than at the classical level and finally in Biology culminating in US. If we are to make a religious move the first is to suggest that we can sense this encompassing search of being through acts of worship. This will be too much for many people who have been brought up in an explicitly secular context. Unfortunately the arguments to reason and freedom we learned to formulate in these contexts have proven inadequate. Even if covid-19 is not sufficient for dictatorship covid 25 may be.
So let's keep experimenting shall we? When we accept an emanationist system what does our science look like? Well the predictions it produces are exactly the same which is just as well because otherwise it would be simply useless. But we have a new emphasis on Fields on transition of hierarchies on purpose in biology and on tools that help us handle these Concepts like symmetry breaking synergetics with control and Order parameters and much else.
So the Natural World is seen as the result of an absolute which emanates from a single point in time and space to culminate in us. This is a scientific and not a religious view. It is a scientific view which takes account of levels of being and is closer to the facts because we must insist on on new concepts of causality in biology or otherwise biology will continue to work as badly as it currently does.
The first step in a religious view as noted is to say that the encompassing source of being can be apprehended in in movements of body soul and spirit that we call prayer. The second Step is to say that this emanation which culminates in US is an act of will for the absolute to know itself. God tries just as we do. That puts us in the terribly responsible position of having to care for ourselves others and and the cosmos through the biosphere that we have. Now we have become religious outsiders in the society but look we have god each other and better science! And unlike those who who took the injections our immune systems actually work!
So onward to mind Science and Society in the Fourth foundations of mind summer school. What we're going to do is to look at how we handle concepts of mind and world attention consciousness awareness and in particular the relationship to quantum mechanics. As the plutocrats attempt to turn us all into cyborgs with graphene which will facilitate neural firing and fulfill the national science Foundation plan enunciated in 2015 of controlling us remotely let's look at why this is a bull in the China shop which is the human brain.
The first task that the brain must do is to to handle the blooming buzzing mass of confusion which is the sensory plenum around us. The mechanisms to do this we argue are Fourier and Gabor analysis. So at an individual neural level there are what are termed subthreshold oscillations. These do not cause the Neurons to fire.
In fact when they produced a full wiring diagram for a nematode called c elegans in the 1980s it took another 30 years for them to find a single neurone that actually fired and did something! Real neurones can be modelled by a mechanism as simple as a pendulum or what physicists prefer to call a harmonic oscillator. Now we come to the really clever bit. If these neurones are allowed change the delay of the signals they get from other neurons then they can do a fourier analysis. In recent years it has become clear this is neurophysiologically possible.
So far we have been able to take the blooming buzzing confusion and transform that by this analysis into a range of frequencies the brain can deal with. We must now refer this to to all the memories the brain has. These are not some kind of static data structure. They are rather a landscape of what are called attractor surfaces where each surface might correspond to a specific action rather than a specific stimulus. So if you see a green light you go but if you see a green sofa you sit on it.
This meaning for the organism is encoded by amplitude modulation of a carrier wave which is created by chaotic dynamics in the brain. So this mechanism involving a carrier wave is rather like saying that 103 on the medium wave dial you can find the show you are looking for which means the carrier is 103 but the signal is going to be the speech and music that you hear.
When you select the attractor surface there is an Avalanche of activity in the brain. Eventually after this processing which is immensely complex and involves almost certainly bose Einstein condensates the result is transmitted to cortex. At this point the initial sensory signal is completely lost and all that exists is the meaning for the organism.
What is consciousness ? There is a consensus that it seems to be related to synchronised oscillation over at least one Hemisphere at a frequency between 40 and 80 Hz called gamma. It is more likely to be attention that has quantum implications. Streams of processing in the brain that are attended to to suppress other such streams that are not being attended to. They also change the statistics of the information for example by suppressing correlation of fluctuations.
And that is the start of the summer school and what we are hoping to explore. We are a long way from traditional models of the neuron by which the new plutocrats hope to control us with with neural firing. Our brains are way too complicated for that. In the coming week we will go back and forth about how to interrelate the radio show this discussion group and the internet and please send me your suggestions. If you really want to master these disciplines then after the summer school consider taking some are all of the courses on the University of Ireland dot org website on mind science and society.
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