Registered: Dec 2003
Posts: 179

Hey all,

If you are into NKS hopefully you are aware of the Leibniz's monadology.

Essentially Leibniz postulated two different spheres for existence:

1. The world in our mind, where things like causality, matter, space, and time are perceived

2. The world beyond our mind where "true" causality exists

He defined the 2nd world with the "monad."

What I'm trying to do is propose the 1st world counterpart to the monad, and I'm calling it the "zene".

I'm seeking feedback and criticisms on the following text:

http://www.techmocracy.net/mike/zenetics.htm

Let me know what you think.

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged

Registered: Dec 2003
Posts: 179

Hey all,

I've gotten a handful of private emails on this subject, so first, thanks for that.

I came accross this today:

http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/smythies.pdf

Very interesting paper.

It seems to confirm a good deal of what zenetics claims.

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged

Registered: Oct 2003
Posts: 69

Mike,

I just checked in after an absence of a few weeks during which, as it happens, I have been working on esoteric stuff which relates directly to the conscious vs. sub-conscious aspects of mind.

You write:

What we call the conscious experience is broadened under zenetics to include what is traditionally called sub-conscious. The reason is the distinction between conscious and sub-conscious suggests that more than one physical process is at work in the brain. Of course, there might in fact be; but it has yet to be demonstrated; and until it is discovered there will remain the possibility that the distinction does not exist and thus a source for a great deal of confusion on the subject of mind.

Comment:

I submit that Mind is, for the want of a better term, a UNITARY continuum such that there exists NO genuine dividing line between Mind's conscious and sub-conscious attributes.

Rather, ALL of us come into the world at one end of the continuum and, at once, begin to move towards the other end.

MOST of us pass on before reaching the other end - a FEW do reach it.

We call them Prophets, Sages, etc.

If I understand it correctly, THAT is what the ancient Greeks termed our "race through life" - a "race" undertaken by the Human Spirit to free itself from the fetters of Time and Space.

In the final act of Shakespeare's play, 'The Tempest', when Miranda exults over a Brave New World, her father Prospero responds: "'Tis new to thee."

As in: What else is new?

The continuum of Mind and Sex are alike in that, while at its immature end, we cannot possibly envisage what lies at the other end.

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged

Registered: Mar 2005
Posts: 2

I agree that there is no qualitative distinction between conscious and subconscious thought, but we can try to make quanitative statements in this direction. Modern neuroscience gives a picture of the human mind as being a collection of brain functions which run more or less in parallel, while occasionally referring to one another (a highly readable exposition of this view is given in V. S. Ramachandran's 'Phantoms in the Brain'). If you modelled the mind as a computational network, you would see distinct clusters corresponding to particular functions, with varying degrees of interconnectedness, and you could identify one highly connected 'supercluster' which could be associated with the conscious mind. That there would only be one large cluster could be the result of evolutionary necessity, to allow effective decision making, or could be an inevitable emrgent porperty of the sort considered in chapter 7 of ANKOS. Indeed, such structure is already present in random graph processes (see for instance 'Random Graphs' by Bela Bollobas. A network like the brain would be better described by a random digraph, but this behaves in many respects like a random graph with half as many edges). For a subconscious thought process to be completely inaccessible to the conscious mind, there should be a lot of 'computational steps' between connections to the conscious mind (a subgraph with large diameter) and the computations performed should be sufficiently complex that they should not be deducible from a typical input and output to the submodule (so the subgraph should be 'fat in the middle'). You could look for, and try to quantify such structures in investigations into human brain activity, but they can also be seen in silicon computer architecture: Specialised 3D graphics programs could be considered to be occuring in the 'subconscious' of your computer, for example.
-Chris Collins

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged