Interbane wrote:

PJPross wrote:Self-realized, enlightened truth is discovered intuitively and surpasses the five-senses. You can't "reason" your way to truth.

This can be shown to be false in so many ways. Yes, you can reason your way to the truth. What other way do you suppose the truth is reached? By eating cheetos? Intuition can sometimes lead to the truth, but it often fails.

We can't engineer our way to making enlightened choices. In our emotional world, love and hate can be separated by but a thin line. Anger and remorse are linked together like conjoined twins. The enlightenment industry has grown up out of people's need for a "placebo" to deal with these dangers. Just believing you have a path to keep you balanced and your emotions under control can easily make the difference to actually make it so.

Reason may have as much to offer as mysticism in making this step out into self-fulfilling confidence. More to the point, reason will work well for some people, and intuition will work well for other people (and emotional release will work well for still other people). But only one of those paths should be thought of as a "technology." The others are habits, or a path, or something much more vague but, as likely as not, adapted to the individual deciding to follow them.

Interbane wrote: Which means that even when you have an intuition, it must still be aligned with sound logic and evidence, ie reasoning. There's no way around this, if the "truth" is your goal. Fuzzy language won't get you closer.

In general I think this is right. I think Kahneman had a very good framework for thinking about how reason can "correct" the perceptions we jump to. Intuition is even looser than perception. In my mind it is most useful for raising the right questions. If a salesperson or a politician sets off alarm bells in my intuition I start asking myself about what seems off, where there might be some information going unaddressed, or some risks glossed over.

Intuition can create motivated reasoning, but in the realm of managing the emotions, that can be a good thing.

Interbane wrote:

"Truths" are proven to oneself.

Sorry, no they aren't. We're terrible at discovering the truth. You, me, all of us. Truths don't prove themselves to us. We have to fight and kick and scream for every morsel, and it's often painful.

Yeah, okay, truth with a high degree of confidence is difficult to come by. In general we have to make choices in real time with imperfect information. On the other hand, nature has given us "intuitive" processes like falling in love to make that choice business go smoother.

For all of Michael Shermer's fuss about it, our tendency to overperceive tigers and other ambiguous threats is part of that natural equipment. So what we do is look closer at what seemed like it might be a tiger, or just get out of there. In many ways religion and New Age consciousness work by similar mechanisms. Going with certain kinds of intuition about life can actually make our life a lot smoother, even if it is based on faulty reasoning.

I think we need an emotional intelligence about making commitments based on partial information. We try to keep in mind that our reasoning process may be faulty, and keep in mind what we have to keep checking out to correct our path at the level of nuance. But knowing we have made a commitment has real value for fighting off anxiety and toxic stress.

PJ wrote:It's best to put them out-of-the-class so that the teacher can dedicate their time to those who are "awake" and want to learn.

Because those are the ones whose emotions respond to that "treatment." The problem is that the mechanism seems to require them to consider everyone else to be unenlightened. Maybe there is a better version out there, in plain vanilla flavors like "anger management," which offers the method without the hype.

Chris OConnor wrote:Are The Planets Just For Decoration?

The fact that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies filled with hundreds of billions of stars makes me think the planets circling those stars aren't actually "for" anything and just are. I'm sure to you a supernatural deity created the universe and put all those heavenly bodies there for a purpose. To me this would be a tremendous waste of time, space and matter. To think a god created planets 5 Billion light years away is just insane.

Chris, I have not read PJPross's book, but his comments here do not justify your assumptions. Astrology in its main western form is only based on the solar system, with the positions of the visible background stars only serving as markers for the solstices and equinoxes. The popular myth that astrology assumes influence from the stars is just wrong, except for Indian astrology. So it is most unlikely that PJPross would be making any assertions about other galaxies as you assume. He also has said nothing about a supernatural deity, so I don't see why you are sure about his views on that.

ant wrote:

Interbane wrote:
Intuition is the creative force that leads us to create hypotheses.

Creative force? You've been watching too many Star Wars movies.

On a more serious note, what is the source of intuition, in your opinion?Or, what exactly is it? I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on it.

Excuse my barging in, but I have some views on intuition. I think of it as the "feeling" that tells me "where" progress can be made. I first remember it from doing mathematical proofs, actually. Sometimes I would just have a feeling that a certain approach would get closer to making a match between the requirements and the available material. It didn't always work - sometimes there would turn out to be a glitch that couldn't be gotten around. But often the match was really there, and a few more steps in that direction would show what I only "sensed" before.

What is that sensing? The human mind is a pattern recognizer. We are the only animal with genuine language, and (I am told) the only animal who, in very early childhood, spontaneously imitates the sounds and sequences that older humans make. Those are obviously linked. Adults can't reward saying "Want some" if the baby doesn't try it, probably because the adult says "want some?"

We can infer that the brain must be capable of assembling a large number of possible templates, sequences or other arrangements of inputs, which can be compared to an abstract template. The ones which are not close never get assembled, and the ones that are close are then compared carefully to reject "wrong" proposals. But these proposals arise spontaneously from rough approximations to the abstract version. Intuition happens (I believe) when you don't know exactly what abstraction you are "comparing" to, but some pattern is waiting in your subconscious because of associations that have been made only vaguely before.

As an example, suppose it's true that dogs know when a person is carrying a firearm. (I have heard this is true, and based on a sense that the person carries himself differently). The dog presumably has a strong sense that certain ways of relating signal "threat". Humans have some of the same, but often only at an intuitive level - "That guy is aggressive" "How do you know?" "You can just tell." There is some vague configuration of signs, not clear enough to rise to the level of conscious confidence, but matching our template for "aggression" based on nothing more than associations made on a somewhat random basis in the past.

Acting, I think, is largely about tapping these vague associations to produce a simulation of the emotion or interaction called for by the script. Actors are notorious for needing to "get in touch with their subconscious" in order to pull off this feat.

The same business of raising subconscious associations to the level of awareness seems to be responsible for delusional perceptions. If the person "wants" to see or hear certain things, those are more likely to be triggered by vague associations. This accounts for the frequency of people dreaming about those who recently died, and even hearing the person speak (I vaguely recall some statistic like 40 percent of people with a relatively recent death of a loved one had heard the person speak afterward). The version that happens to me is that when I move to a new city, I am much, much more likely to see someone in a crowd who seems familiar.

A lot of my reading on the subject was in Tanya Luhrmann's "When God Talks Back" and related internet searches. Luhrmann is a Stanford psychologist who has studied schizophrenia and other causes of delusions, including intense religious imagination.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Chris OConnor wrote:Are The Planets Just For Decoration?

The fact that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies filled with hundreds of billions of stars makes me think the planets circling those stars aren't actually "for" anything and just are. I'm sure to you a supernatural deity created the universe and put all those heavenly bodies there for a purpose. To me this would be a tremendous waste of time, space and matter. To think a god created planets 5 Billion light years away is just insane.

Chris, I have not read PJPross's book, but his comments here do not justify your assumptions. Astrology in its main western form is only based on the solar system, with the positions of the visible background stars only serving as markers for the solstices and equinoxes. The popular myth that astrology assumes influence from the stars is just wrong, except for Indian astrology. So it is most unlikely that PJPross would be making any assertions about other galaxies as you assume. He also has said nothing about a supernatural deity, so I don't see why you are sure about his views on that.

I shouldn't try to speak for him, but I'm guessing that if you subtract the trillions of bodies in space and just consider the nine closest to us, Chris wouldn't change his mind about what they're for, or what they do, as far as influencing creatures of bones and blood on earth. Astrology today is probably a manifestation of humans' need for explanations that transcend scientific reason.

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The first law of thermodynamics doesn't actually specify that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but instead that the total amount of energy in a closed system cannot be created nor destroyed (though it can be changed from one form to another).

1 PROPERTIES OF MATTER LAW OF CONSERVATION OF MATTER Matter cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another. Matter and energy are interchangeable according to E=mc 2 (E=amount of energy, m = amount of matter, c= a constant equal to the velocity of light)
physicscentral.com/experiment/askaphysi ... 0221015143

This I can deal with until I ask why matter and energy exist at all. Apparently matter exists because there is no such thing as empty space. Then I get dragged into quantum physics where the speed of light is no longer a constant and a thing can exist in two places at the same time. And we then get to dark matter and dark energy. I think they are just now beginning to grasp just a little bit of the physics of the dark stuff.

So I have to try and wrap my feeble mind around all that and you want to add astrology? Ack!

I must say that, from a European perspective, this is a most entertaining discussion.