[Platt] What I mean is that for many years, ever since I heard Murray Gell-Man say on TV that science had no idea what consciousness was, I have known there was a huge gap in the scientific explanation of the world. To fill that gap has been an interest ever since. Wilber was one of the first who provided some answers. His two early works, "Spectrum of Consciousness" and "Eye to Eye" opened up a new world of explanation to me. From him I turned to various writers from the scientific community such as David Darling, Paul Davies, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett and others. Each attempted to fill the gap in different ways, as the brief excerpts I used in my previous post to you illustrated. Then along came Pirsig with "Lila" and his gap-filling Dynamic Quality which cast a whole new light on the subject. Since then I've vaciliated between the various explanations I've come across, but never being completely happy with any of them. Pirsig's seems to be the best because it accounts for beauty which even physicists look for in their equations. His weakness as I see it is his inability to account for the phenomenon of "experience." So round and round I go. Right now I'm reading Hofstadter's new book, "I Am a Strange Loop" which I hope will offer another answer to throw in the mix. Of course, it may come down to "Oops" after all, with consciousness merely an "emergent" from complexity as the materialists say. But in the meantime, I'm having a whale of a good time. I suspect that you are, too.
[Case] I don't know the context but I suspect what Gell-Mann was talking about is the difficulty in defining what consciousness is. Science would be happy to study consciousness and in fact does but probably isn't calling it that. The authors you mention, and having not read all of them this is speculation, but I imagine they come up with their own definitions and then discuss that. This is not a path to consensus of course. But since the 12th century natural philosophy, or science, has agreed not to introduce the supernatural into its explanations and for good reason. While I share you perplexity about what it all means, I get highly suspicious when the topic turns to consciousness or spirit existing eternally, or the material world being a manifestation of the consciousness. Pirsig and Wilber both point out that higher levels emerge from lower ones until they get to actual higher levels then all over a sudden they want to introduce some kind of Omega Point that "exists" in the future and is pull us toward it. Or acting as a "strange attractor"? To me it make more sense to say that if there is such a thing as consciousness and if it is evolving then it arises from the same natural processes as biology and that it is in the process of emerging and we are part of that process. I know the laws of cause and effect have taken a beating of late. But stating that cause and effect are probabilistic is a far cry from having some imagined future state determining the course of future history. Hofstadter sounds interesting I have a couple of his book for what ever reason I never seem to get around to reading them. moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
