Comments by "Peter deWolf" (@StoneShards) on "The Outer Limits of Cognitive Science | Dr. John Vervaeke | EP 321" video.

  1. Surprise and Micro-narratives--John's idea of the brain's function being to reduce surprise made me think of everyone's original experience: BIRTH! That was a major surprise on every level! hehehe...Doesn't it seem that the newborn infant looks utterly surprised! And it should be! It quickly moved from a liquid encasement to total exposure to a completely alien temperature/humidity/pressure environment. The cascade of sensation must have captivated the higher functions into a frantic panic...until, shortly, comparisons are made and habituation sets in, resulting in an increase in the infant's comfort. This must be the most formative event in every person's life.
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  2. The talk about "consciousness", nature vs function, or, structure vs operation, as I prefer, is a little clumsy: the EXPERIENCE of "consciousness" is "AWARENESS"--they're not the same thing. Again...requirements of technical language...Consciousness, itself, is the universal tendency to association; awareness is the personal immediate experience of consciousness. I don't ascribe to ideas of a "subconscious", or "unconscious", for the related reason: they're clumsy. The so-called, "subconscious mind", refers to an area of autonomous complexes, or habitual memory operations, which remain below the level of casual awareness because they don't require attention..."set it, and forget it"...RIP, Ron Popeil...
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  3. Once upon a timelessness, the Chaotic Void non-existed alone, a continuously seething all-potential. "Then", the statistically improbable occurred: a particular state of the random seethe REPEATED, initiating a sort of reverberation within the Chaotic Void that produced the EXPULSION of the repeated seethe state, in order to preserve it's chaotic nature intact. This event birthed God, to seal the breach, as it were. God is one of Chaos's seethe states, which is the entirety of Chaos in one of it's possible arrangements. The conditions of God's "birth" requires Its Nature to be Order, with the inherent duty to express Himself, to express order, to manifest His essential being: the Chaotic Void, His origin. The ejection, the birth of God, produced a surge of the first manifestation of Order, "many of the same from One"--God moved over the Chaos, like a skin covering a globe, instantaneously, in the form of particles, slivers, or sparks of divinity, Spirit. The whole of God is in each particle of Spirit, including His plan of creation, so to speak...the one is the other, and the other is the one. At the opposite pole from the expulsion point, this initial wave of divinity cannot reenter Chaos--It will not tolerate Order. So the wave bounces back, meeting more of Itself coming down, creating TURBULENCE and slowing the travel of spirit particles, and, in the process, engendering "delay"...creating Time, and every other thing that could be said to "exist" in any wise. Some spirit particles make it through the turbulence, encountering a more rarified turbulence in the next stratification layer. One or two maybe make it all the way back to Source. At this point the Cosmos is temporally stratified and manifestation has begun as the sole purview of the One Universal Mind, the second Person of the Trinity, the Son. At the bottom pole, the interface to Chaos, the Life Force, the third Person of the Holy Trinity acts as a bulwark against the intrusion of Chaos at the fringes of Order; Chaos seeks to dis-Order, and the Holy Spirit acts as a pressure valve, utilizing Chaos to drive Order...hence the chaotic appearance of the operations of living things. At the top pole, God is in an eternal stare-down with the Chaotic Void, as in a mirror, one state of the Void looking at Itself across the abyss. When Order observes Chaos, It KNOWS that It (God) is Order, that experience defining, modeling, "certainty" for the entirety of Creation.
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  4.  @richardl.currier4052  <--That's pretty much what I said--except I said even more, but allegorically, instead of metaphorically, as you seem to prefer. Your use of the term, "incorrect", is...incorrect. hehe...My allegory is more elucidative than your five brief metaphors, drawn as equivalencies. You'll have to be more specific about what you think is "incorrect".
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  5.  @richardl.currier4052  <--All "major religions" are in error to some degree necessarily--I shouldn't have to explain why that is. Your conviction that God and creation are identifiable "things" illustrates the depth of your religionism--obviously, a logical debility. I didn't speak of the colloquial "chaos", but, rather, a "Chaotic Void" comprising all potentiality, without the possibility of actuality. Of course, It's timeless and spaceless, otherwise It would be Order! You're right, I am "trying to describe things happening in a place where space and time do not exist", except, there are no "things", and nothing can "happen", in eternity. That's why my little story is an "allegory", a symbolic representation. The philosopher in me wonders about the purpose of existence. If the religionist in you objects to such activity, there may well be nothing for us to say to each other.
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  6.  @richardl.currier4052  <--I've got my religion, then, and you have...somebody else's religion. To each his own.
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  7. "Concepts are generative models"; narratives are instances of the models' generations, then, I'd surmise. But didn't these generative models arise naturally and spontaneously from original experience?! The world organizes YOU, in the process of your experience of it, to match IT.
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  8. 40:50--Jordan: "...whether the phenomenon of meaning is real in any real sense..."...<argh>..."real", eh? hehe...I know, it's the big bush the philosophers beat around. But philosophy should be more than a poetry of science. Technical language has requirements metaphorical language can't tolerate. The topic had me thinking: semantics is contextual; meaning, in general, is either "intention", or "value", of either signal type or symbol type. However, the phrase, "phenomenon of meaning", signifies a personal observation of meaning formation in awareness. In my experience, meaning forms from associations of memories and memory fragments elicited, as if resonantly ("what matches?"), from the object of intended identification, i.e. that which is presumed to possess meaning. Observation naturally proceeds toward identification, which, itself, proceeds to complexify with every appropriate--according to natural sympathy/antipathy--association. Our experiential memory base is the raw material available for conceptualization; we can't conceive of something we've never experienced in any wise. Our experiential memory base provides the references for all comparisons; and comparisons are at the heart of the valuation processes that form "meaning". It's interesting to consider that this ball got rolling with each person's BIRTH EVENT. "Comparison" came naturally with the shock of "difference" to the infant birthing. Hey, it's not called, "RATIOcination", for nothing!
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  9. 46:30--John: "...your brain is doing this self-organizing criticality..."...snap, snap, back and forth real fast...This is how I conceive of "awareness" as the process of relationship between "intention" and "attention". Developing awareness guides the process, giving it a purpose, and harvests the results, for further direction, of observation, or intention, and direction, or intention.
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