Synchronicity Anyone?

Originally posted by EnlightenUp
In a strictly physical aspect, thought is action.

Yes. Not willed action, however. Thoughts come to us; they appear in consciousness. We reason with our will, perhaps, but our conclusions always seem to come from outside us, as if from the world itself.

Brain activity cannot proceed [precede?] thought if thought is brain activity neither can thought proceed [precede?] brain activity if brain activity is thought. That's sheer nonsense if they are equivalent. I suppose you're saying there is brain activity that isn't thought and all thought is brain activity, a subset thereof, therefore brain activity that is not thought proceeds brain activity that is thought. If you say "brain activity proceeds thought, then thought is experienced (which is brain activity)" what's experiencing it? Other brain activity? What about experience that isn't thought?

I'm assuming you mean 'precede', not 'proceed'. Thoughts are what brain activity looks like to consciousness.

The conscious experience of thought must involve brain activity, certainly. So perhaps the brain activity corresponding to consciousness is triggered by other brain activity once the relevant neurons receive enough input to make them fire. Or perhaps there is no separate brain activity corresponding to consciousness; maybe certain types of activity simply generate what we call consciousness as a by-product. See below before responding.

Why would a "conscious" subroutine need to be conscious and what make such a thing more capable of difficult decisions than a configuation of neurons and associated electrical patterns that do the same but is not conscious?

A good question. Pinker (see my earlier reference) explains it like this: when information is dumped into consciousness, it is in a place where it is accessible not just to the subroutine that first processed it, but to the myriad other subroutines that are available within a functioning brain. In other words, when you become conscious of something, it is because the unconscious subroutine that normally processes that information found it unable to deal with, or decided it might be useful to other processes too, and put the data up for grabs by posting it to the public workspace labelled 'conscousness', where the other subroutines--demons, as they're called--can get at it.

It seems obvious conscious experience would change if the unconscious processes were changed...

Yes, this is implicit in the above model.

...thus leading one to wonder if there are in fact truely unconscious processes at all. It simply may be a case of losing track of it, ie. not to be remembered in the following moment.

No, I'm afraid you have this wrong. It does not follow that if conscious experience is dictated by unconscious mental processes (something I think would be very hard to argue against), then 'unconsious' mental processes must be conscious--at least, not in rational terms. If at all we are made conscious of them, it is as emotions.

As for the experiences that are not thoughts--essentially, sensory, physiological and motor expreiences--they are what we call awareness and seem to form the core of the experience of consciousness.

You mentioned that there must be a place where there is no time? Yes, that is in fact this material world. Time is comparing one apparent movement pattern against another. There are clocks. The brain is a clock as well.

This sounds like an argument that time exists, rather than the opposite. Clocks give information. They measure a change in that information. Information is real.

It hit me all on my own that strictly multiple consciousnesses (the kind that is not a philosophical zombie) make no sense at all.

This sounds interesting, but simply making your meaning clear would be a matter of several paragraphs at least. I shall reserve comment until I have read them.

And yes, plodding obsessive reason... is a critical tool in forming a synthesis... If I were in that awareness now, I could not converse with you.

Yes, mystical experience is hard to convey, or even to relate.

To what level do you compare non-reductionist/non-materialist ideas to stereotypical Abrahamic notions like "God is a separate, personal and authoritative entity"?

Not much, to be honest. For me, the problem with rationalism (which is what I think you mean by 'non-reductionist/non-materialist ideas') lies elsewhere. It is that rationalism is unfalsifiable, and therefore provides no useful or illuminating explanation for anything. It may be true, for all we know; but we shall never be able to tell and it makes no difference anyway. In the meantime, scientific materialism provides us with good, useful explanations of reality that we can and constantly do entrust with our lives. For me, there is no contest.

reply to post by Astyanax



(From page 1)

Originally posted by Astyanax
Before you determine that synchronicity exists, you'd need a study that involved a large sample of people. And every 'meaningful but apparently causeless' coincidence reported by your sample would have to be carefully investigated to establish that it was actually causeless. This would be very hard*. Pareidolia would certainly have to be taken into account--and eliminated. Have you done that?

You suggest above that a potential study into synchronicity/coincidences, would need to be done and that each of the reported coincidences or synchronistic events, would have to be “carefully investigated to establish that it was actually causeless”…

Originally posted by Astyanax
Dogmatic refusal to believe something, against compelling evidence that it is true, is not scepticism but superstition. It is important not to confuse the two. I do not.


*Ontologically speaking it would be impossible, since all events have causes.

…And then you go on to say that “all events have causes.”

Are you simply suggesting that it is impossible, rather than hard.

Which is it?


- JC

reply to post by Joecroft

My own feeling is that it is impossible, but I'm trying to keep an open mind here.

Getting back to the OP and to my own understandings and also those who hold similar ones to mine.
I take the situations in life that we often have heard about so often of those people/s who are in survival situations where everything is dire indeed and the obvious hazardous and life threatening conditions around them suggest on pure logic alone that a survival expectancy is nil.
These individuals then despite all odds, then indeed survive the situation on what seems determination and courage alone and then go on to lead normal and healthy lifes thereafter with a new found healthy respect for the state of mind of oneself.

Then you get the reverse where a person is found to have cancer and the prognosticating Doctor gives a bleak picture of certain death at a certain time in the forecoming future etc. Then these individuals take on all this bleak information and do in fact die in that way.
Then again there are others who have a certain frame of mind and do not take the advice of the Doctor and in a deterministic way go on to recover in a seemingly miraculous way through a series of synchronistic events etc.

Originally posted by timewalker
It happens to me almost daily. Mostly with television or radio. Sometimes I think of a friend out of the blue and they end up calling that day. Just earlier tonight I was looking at previous works of James Cameron and saw he did True Lies with the Governator and I thought about always getting the title confused with Total Recall and I went to turn on thee TV. Low and behold True Lies was on. Pretty boring I know but it is just fresh off the old noggin.

It's a good thing to be in sync with the universe.

In cases like this... your subconscious mind (like a receiver) probably picked up on a movie schedule/ad sometime earlier... literally pulling it right out of the air... then later you unwittingly turn to the channel and there it is. There has to be a specific frequency/channel that delivers this type of subliminal media on a regular basis... because this type of thing happens to me all the time.