More from Nhoj, as per
http://www.project-reason.org/forum/viewthread/24532/

The Garden of Eden is a pre-cognitive allegory of the arrival of the third floor.

Eliminate the illusions? Damn it man, do you realize what you are suggesting? We must embrace the farce, and make it our own, instead of the other way around. Long Live the Farce!

Here is my science fair entry…

(Note- Can Zen posted this excert of a Joni Mitchell interview. It is the origin of the term nyeep. I had previously used flash or flashy thoughts without sucess. I’m sticking with Joni’s nyeep. -Nh)

Joni Mitchell:
“Well, my intuition is more accurate than my intellect. My intuition will tell me - like, first of all the instinct is like a computer chip; it’s like Shakespeare on a pinhead. You get a lot of information very fast - - - nyeep (makes an electronic sound)! Now if you want to expand on that you’d have to go to your intellect to expand it, to tell it, but you would know - nyeep - that fast with instinct a tremendous amount . . . And if someone said, “what are you thinking?” You’d have to now go to intellect to tell it - - so it’s a lot slower. Intellect is a lot slower. You can learn a (snaps finger) . . . And sometimes intellect will tell you . . .well it gets mixed up with image and all. It’s slower and . . . (she thinks . . ) . . . Stupider! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! It’s a good tool, but it’s linear and analytical and, and you know . . . Reason is revered as being, you know . . .the great standard. I think it’s a wonderful tool, but highly over-rated. I think there are other ways that knowledge comes that are clearer and quicker, and they can’t necessarily be explained!”

Ms. Mitchell is talking the talk. Intuitive second floor flashy thoughts. “Shakespeare on the head of a pin”. Nyeep! I get it.
“You’d have to now go to intellect to tell it”, “go to your intellect to expand it”… Up to the third floor to make a sequence or narration. “Intellect is a lot slower” It has to run or playback. “Stupid-er!” Ironically, what she is calling intellect has no intelligence of its own. “It’s a good tool…” A tool for harvesting our intelligence from the nyeeps. “…it’s linear and analytical” It makes sequences that allow for greater analysis. She totally gets the second and third floor.

It’s something about guitar players. Like many activities, learning guitar really makes these two mental operations stand out in contrast. One cannot consciously play guitar and keep time or keep in time. When performance time comes, if you really know your set, consciousness must find something else to do or vanish entirely and leave the work of playing and keeping time to the nyeeps. On the other hand, one cannot unconsciously learn guitar. Each component of playing must be introduced as a narrated instruction. The sequences must be spelled out (“expanded” “told”) before they can be imbedded into nyeeps. How well do you know your part? How well can you talk while playing it?
A good band plays totally from the nyeeps makes an “intersubjective experience” out of keeping time together.

Nyeeps is starting to sound like file folders. Imagine a flashing image of a folder called Shakespeare. It contains, all in one flash of nyeep, your bottomless cup (or head of a pin) of knowledge of Shakespeare. I say flashing because this is an idea that doesn’t have to run to be know on an intui-tive (or second floor) level. Now, if you want to share Shakespeare, you’ll have to open Word (third floor) and run the sequence.

All decisions made by everyone are on the first and second floor. When one begins to think that consciousness is in charge of anything other than the act of sequencing itself, that is the real user illusion.

. . . [I]f our “intangible intuitive sense” could “speak” to us, we would not need a third floor. It flashes to us in tiny narratives. Our intangible intuitive second floor’s sequencing ability is very lim-ited and can be observed mostly in just two formats: Last, now, next… or, three or four beats (nyeeps). Anything other than that is a stretch…. Until you break over into a new sequencing rou-tine upstairs.

[The third floor] is the greatest motivating tool known to sentience. Once the primal levels “see” the rewards at the end of the narratives, our natural survival drives will try to reach them. Even if that means delaying gratification in ways that it can “see” without the narrative. We will choose the narrative path if we understand it to offer greater rewards than the odd impulsively shop-lifted snickers bar.

I think children are innately uncomfortable with the unfamiliar until they are acclimated to it, and that can include racial differences. But these aren’t permanent hard-wired attitudes, at least, not to start with. Such discomfort must eventually be explained by the narrative and often as a permanent explanation. Usually, the body acclimates much more easily than the narrative will allow itself to be modified. Our tendency toward dogma starts with ourselves. Egos are dogmatic and they like to live in world that is, too.

It’s not a false impression. If the long narrative fails to be in control at a local level (a person), than the external tools kick in. Your door, I mean. Then, the jack-booted enforcers of the narrative will engage in acts that are not for the benefit of any human conscious creature, but for the benefit of the mass-narrative. Who are the Brain Police?

We can’t deny that we have narrative to thank for nearly everything around us including posting. I think we should press on with the narrative after first acknowledging that it is a fixable and re-deemable farce and not a perfect and unchanging God-given explanation.
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The last time I sat down with someone who was totally honest with me, I wanted to get up and run. I mean honest about everything in their life in an explosion of emotive expression. That kind of honesty must be metered out thoughtfully.

(Note- This is an excerpt of a bit making FUN of BM’s posting style. -Nh)

Here are two homilies about something being inside of something else. How they’re mated is doubly clever.

First, and this is standard issue, just put the words, “Therefore it would follow that…” between them. Remem-ber, the chances of their being even three people out in front of you that can go more than five or six beats without help is remote. They’re not going to follow you. You’re just telling them that it follows. They will only walk away with the punch line and only if it is punchy enough.

Second, and here is the really devious part…  The Decoupling Couplet. Put one of these babies in your syllo-gism and it will fly like it had wings! Compact, symmetrical and completely meaningless, it’s a great way to put a couple of short self-contained beats in the middle of a wind-up without distracting from your original lack of intention or content. Who wants to ignore themselves?
Congratulations! You’ve just used one step of logic on a trivial or meaningless topic to emphasize a larger point that isn’t there. Now, you’re locked in. Now, everyone will be convinced that you are being entirely logical because for a fleeting moment, they caught you at it.
Make sure that when you get to the words, “ignore ourselves”, you sound like you are just running out of breath.

Now we a have good starting point. We can build off this in either direction linking to other homilies with a thoughtful pacing of therefores and obviouslies until all the little cards are used up. But we’re not done yet.

Read what you have aloud. Listen to what you sound like. Remember to use tension and release techniques like raising and dropping in pitch or pace. Don’t go too long without either roaring or whispering. Any two Short Answers can be linked together if you make them sound like they do. If you’re really good, I mean Golden, the sound is all they’ll follow.

That attention to delivery keeps the whole business airborne long enough to convince the suckers that they are standing before someone who is telling them The Long Answer. That’s it. Except to make sure that you deliver all this while holding aloft whatever item is locally believed to be where The Long Answer is.

Break up your show with some foot-stomping, hand-clapping cardio-vascular musical interludes to flush out the crowds’ nervous systems and they’ll leave feeling good and thinking you’re the reason why.

Again, congratulations! Your homily-borne morality has been installed, and a festive evening has rebooted the patrons and updated their registries. Society is safe. Go now and rest ye faithful servant.

The problem with all this starts when some educated, urban sophisticates with well-trained narrative abilities start to show up at the tent expecting to find The Long Answer as advertised. Like most who can both hear the delivery and suspend the full content simultaneously, long thinkers naively assume that everyone around them can, too. They are surprised to find an emotional festival of pseudo-intellectual gibberish and servo-concentric tautologies. They too may leave feeling good but will be far more skeptical about why.
______________________

(Note- part of my TML review… -Nh)

Sam mentions Benjamin Libet on one page and his book list at the end includes Tor Norretranders’ book, which takes this off on a brief sidebar. Back in ’92, I was perusing a Border’s Outlet and eye-balling the book covers and noticed one with an eyeball staring back at me. It was titled ““The User Illusion- Cutting Consciousness Down to Size”. Gosh! That’s what I’m trying to do. I looked at the table of contents and saw a chapter titled “The Half-Second Delay”. I instantly became very aware of my spine. I remember being completely motionless but suddenly everyone in the store had turned my way as if I had let off an electromagnetic pulse. Perhaps my jaw made a thud when it hit the floor. I bought the book for $4.

The reason this was electric for me is that I was already convinced that there was such a delay to find. The reason I was already convinced is because the manner in which my vision was failing was slowly revealing (subjectively, of course) that what we can know about what comes screaming in through our eyeballs is obviously spread out through time and very compartmentalized. Everything Tor described about Libet’s experiments made perfect sense to me but even Libet’s own explana-tion of the results was simply nuts. Even the counter-evidence of later experiments made sense. In the nearly 20 years hence, I have discovered no one who can give Libet more than a passing shrug, like Sam here, and that could simply be because I am a loony but I am gratified that the idea is in-putted into his brain.

Sam discusses what morality has and can mean to a monolithic model of mentality, which for me, is a dead end from the start.

I think that Sam is talking about an entirely separate creation of a non-faith-based, no, faith irrele-vant ethical system and that is a wonderful idea. Applying that creation to a discussion of moralities of the past or morality in the mind will serve to further alienate Sam and atheism from the general public. I know he hates to hear that, but it has already looked that way from here. To be fair, just being on TV and keeping a cool head does more for all of us than anything Bill or whoever gives him time to say (or not). As always, I agree comfortably with the bits and pieces of his arguments but not the case as a whole.

(Note- I have no memory of this. -Nh)

[talking to Stuka]:

Take notice of which of two ways your thoughts are elapsing. Are they with or without a narrative? By narrative, I mean, is the thought you’re having this instant part of a sequence with the thoughts you just had and are about to have? This is to contrast against the component thoughts themselves, which are more like flashes of instantaneously thought thoughts that just appear in their totality and go by.  Are you cognizant of how these particular thoughts in their sequence add up to something? I am describing much, much less than “hearing voices speak in your head” though that would certainly be included. Are they brief little narratives that quickly give way to new narratives? Is it a continuous saga that, if not on one theme, seems to be coming from a particular single ongoing narrator?

If you can find the narration, then ask if you are more directly experiencing having the flashy thoughts that are being narrated as if supervised externally, or are you the narrator trying to supervise the passing flashy thoughts that you have no apparent control over? Are you in possession of your thoughts or are you just having them? Only the former is conscious experience. The latter is unconscious experience. Obviously this is a terrible use of the word conscious but bear with me for the post. Shave off the “I am aware” part of consciousness, make it a given that you are aware (please), and then think of consciousness as something that you can be aware of, either directly or from a distance.

Shutting off this narrator-level function is at least the beginning of what most would call meditation. Once in an un-narrated state with passing thoughts passing as they will, and with you experiencing them directly without any awareness of their sequence or making any attempt to sequence them or anticipate them, then you have found an awake and unconscious state of mind.

Consider what you have just become incapable off and all the things that you are now best suited to do. This is the mind of our ancient hominid ancestors. The peak stretch of an acid trip is like this. There are many means of inducing an incapacitation of narration (wow. I typed “incapitation”). This is also variously described as our state of nature, animal mind, the inner beast, our sinful nature, etc. Our eventual management into what we are now was made possible by the emergence of narration as a sort of second-floor mind (conscious) that could supervise and sequence the first floor (unconscious) mind. The most amusing irony I have found in my research is that many of the weirder procedures we use to shut off the narrator are modeled upon, if not exactly the same as, the techniques we originally used to create, sustain and support the ability to narrate so long ago.

You’re probably asking, “Am I drinking whiskey?” Well, yes. But only (swallow) right now. I suddenly had a flashy thought that I should make that clear.

The next step, for extreme meditation, is to make the flashy thoughts go away, too.

The easiest way to do that, is to remodel the mental house I just described. Instead of the first and second floor, make them the second and third, for they are sitting upon the ground floor of a mind that isn’t even unconscious.

Before there were thoughts, or any where to have them, there was the nexus of our nervous system. It was grand central for all the processes of the body that had to be supervised to operate in concert. It was inaugurated once the limits of the spinal cord’s network abilities were reached. As a component of the nervous system and the body, this brain did not have thoughts or was it an experience unto itself. It was a part of physical experience along with the rest of the nervous system.

That is what you can find if you make the flashy thoughts go away. The easiest way to do that, or describe it at least, is focus on everything that isn’t your brain. Elbows don’t have thoughts, flashy or otherwise. Try to gear down your experience to your immediate physical presence. If you are aware of even a twentieth of second going by, you are in your brain. Everything’s immediate arrival is feeling. Have no thoughts about the feelings, and no automatically triggered (trained) thoughts (that’s the tricky bit), just feeling… response… There is no structure imposed. The source of all feeling is near immediately. Don’t take it any farther than that. Don’t build anything.

Look at something beautiful, and try not to know what you are looking at. Try to reach up to your eyes and see the sight as it comes in before the part that knows what it’s looking at. The whiskey. Yes.
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I think I agree with Mr. Metzinger….
Metzinger says:
As to what is happening in the brain during thought (the neural correlate of consciousness)...“we might envision as an information cloud hovering above a neurobiological substrate.  The border of this information cloud is functional, not physical; the cloud is physically realized by widely distributed firing neurons in your head.  Just like a real cloud, which is made of tiny water droplets suspended in the air, the neuronal activation pattern underlying the totality of your conscious experience is made of millions of tiny electrical discharges and chemical transitions at the synapses.  In strict terms, it has no fixed location in the brain, though it is coherent.”

What IS this information cloud?

It is the serial processes of the third floor running over the parallel processes of the second floor.

I chased the right-left brain scheme real early on but that soon led me to something more like the cloud idea.

[On the notion of free will]:

Even on a fast, impulsive level, our entire nervous system and its brain are experiencing a two-piece frame- NOW and NEXT. NEXT is not a spooky perception of the future. It is any learned or pre-recorded association and anticipation we have accumulated from our previous perceptions or planned in our DNA. It is a hole where the future will be. All our immediate perceptions (NOW) and all the preset cues they trigger (NEXT) are together and, to our bodies, a single frame of experience. As in, FOOD-BITE. Choice doesn’t enter into it until NOW and NEXT present a dilemma. Otherwise, things just flow along. Python’s Cleese portrayed a brain-damaged boxer whose jogging path was challenge by the dilemma of a parked car. His body stands there and waits for its mind to solve the problem but nothing happens, then his brain timers-out and the boxer turns around and jogs back the way he came. That is Mr. Hippo’s perceptual experience. The system does not accommodate choice or have any means of perceiving one.

Remember when doctors would hit your knee with a hammer and your leg would jerk forward? There was nothing you could do about it. A flashlight into your eye would make your pupil shrink. Our bodies are full of examples of this leading to that. These things happen so fast that our senses can only witness the outcome. There is no free will of any sort for Mr. Hippo. He does what he must because of what he is. The ongoing flow of sensations that result from these physical processes provides the substrate of our ongoing experience. Tied with each of our ongoing sensations is Hippo’s emotional reaction to it. Any sensation(NOW) and the emotion it triggers(NEXT) like desire, satisfaction, anger, fear etc. are together in a single if very fast frame of experience for Hippo. Fast, but not an instant. A millisecond or less.

As you may have noticed, most of Hippo’s sensory experience doesn’t warrant our attention unless it is loud enough. Most of the time, we can shut out most of Hippo’s experience. Shut it out of what? Is there somewhere else for our attention to be? Could it be a supernatural realm with free will?

Throw a towel over that philosophical woody because the answer is boring, mundane and down to earth. No.
It’s not a realm that floats over the sensations of your body. It is a slower, longer frame rate that is flowing over the frame rate of your body. Your cinematic vision and hearing are experienced as ongoing mental sensations of sight and sound that are synchronized to this frame rate. It is somewhere else for your attention to be but not somewhere else as in beyond your head. It seems like it’s somewhere else because it runs just a little later than the body’s frame rate. 

Here, a frame consists of NOW, NEXT, and LAST. LAST is like an extra space that doesn’t have to be what you perceive from outside or the impulsive cue that it triggers. LAST can be your last perception like when you are comparing two things. This frame doesn’t have to involve your current perception at all. This frame has four spaces in which four “chunks” of ideas, perceptions, memories etc. can be “experienced” all at once, together but without order. We can hold something in our minds because we can put the same chunk in the same spot over and over again in each frame. We can consider options because we can perceive options in one single frame of experience. We mostly like to have only three spots going per frame, but we can easily push it to four. But that’s the limit for Mr. Now’s experience. His frames, like Mr. Hippo’s, are propelled at a rate that meets the needs of and is synchronized to the outside world. The flow never stops.

It is from this jumbo four-space frame rate that the will issue first arises. If choices can be perceived, can they be made? Or just perceived that way? Choice arises when there is a NOW-NEXT dilemma and a break in the causal chain of events. Something happens that has no established NEXT cue or one of only unfocused desire. Then, working within our four-space flow of frames, our intellect will examine, compare, explore and assemble new perceptions that eventually work out the necessary NEXT cue and things carry on again.

This process qualifies as pondering, imagining, considering, and weighing choices but it is really just a much longer and slower version of the hammer to the knee. The choice that is made is based on things you were prepared to think about using processes you were prepared to think with. There is an observable choice process involved that may even result in holding the body’s desires in check but it may as well be perceived as having come a brain full of millions of little hammers hitting millions of little knees. The choice is over once you have a NEXT cue.

Both of these guys can be zombies just doin’ what comes naturally. Mr. Now’s choosing ability is just a natural process of one thing leading to another on a much larger scale. One perfectly natural thing leads to another perfectly natural thing. We are free as in capable to make choices within this chunk limited perceptual system as long as they’re natural choices made from natural chunks that lead us to do natural things. What other kind could we make? Why would such a being bother with calling itself a being as long as it was being fed?

We’ve all seen such beings butting heads on nature shows and staggering in police videos and at WalMart. They might be choosing, but it’s a natural process of choosing and doesn’t require an independent agency or authority. Their choices have easily observable results- correct and death.

Obviously, there are many choices that this thinking process could never make. Like, deciding to sin or obey a god. Also notice that almost none of the Animal Kingdom does either of those. Why do we? Is it because we are unlike the rest of the animals with super-beings inside us? I’ll bet super-beings could have all the free will they want.

Many of us count on such super-beings being there making free super-choices about obeying a super-duper-being and such. If you took the super part away, it would all seem rather silly wouldn’t it?  Many would happily give up the super notion if there were something sensible to take its place. The Hippo/Now model isn’t super at all.

The super-gap can be filled with a simple, mundane and corporeal solution. We have an extra frame rate. It is even slower and longer and can float “freely” over our other two. These frames have no chunk limit and their sequential arrangement can be perceived and manipulated. This allows us to perceive stories and make them. From this perspective, any number of chunks can be organized into specified sequences or, artificial flows. If you are reading this, this is an artificial flow and not a natural flow. With this skill, we can re-order our perceptions into unnatural arrangements and turn our ideas into mental artifacts. No longer strictly natural, our re-ordered perceptions can create NEXT cues that would never result from the chunk-limited processes of our animal friends.

Our ability to create and perceive narrations has led to actions and behaviors that are at variance with a course guided strictly by our natural desires. We can pursue unnatural desires.

The Libet Bridge establishes a precedent that perceptive abilities beyond the simple act of perceiving are possible. But the bridge makes internal presentations only and has no means of exerting any force on nature… except to convince Hippo and Now to do something.