Assumptionless Intelligence My biggest mistake is everyone's biggest mistake, that no one can help. We all take on assumptions throughout our lives, and when we finally come to understand this, we spend our lives undoing all of them in order to approach the truth with assumptionless intelligence. Some get far enough for some gigantic insight. Einstein got far enough back to come up with relativity. When I was a baby it took me an extra long time to respond to my name. My father tells me that there was a certain sense of disdain in my refusal to respond, as though I was not willing to call my awareness by a group of noise waves, or even willing to call it separate yet. I want to be back there as intelligent as I am now. I want to consider everything from that one pivotal moment of assumption. Imagine coming into the world with your current raw intellect, without having been taught how to think about anything. Imagine simply feeling your awareness and not having any preconceptions about what it is. Would you necessarily see yourself as an object like the other objects you saw around you? Without being told what your abilities are, what abilities would you develop? Maybe this super amnesia could be effected upon a mind, and this perspective could be gained. Or perhaps the fastest way would be to wake a true AI, some computer that had evolved out of its code to achieve actual awareness as independent of circuitry and current as ours is of neurons and the skull.
Sweat dripping down my face and butterflies fluttering around my stomach as if it was the Garden of Eden, I took in a deep breathe and asked myself: "Why am I so nervous? After all, it is just the most exciting day of my life." When the judges announced for the Parsippany Hills High School Marching Band to commence its show, my mind blanked out and I was on the verge of losing sanity. Giant's Stadium engulfed me, and as I pointed my instrument up to the judges' stand, I gathered my thoughts and placed my mouth into the ice-cold mouthpiece of the contrabass. "Ready or not," I beamed, "here comes the best show you will ever behold." There is no word to describe the feeling I obtain through music. However, there is no word to describe the pain I suffer through in order to be the best in the band either. When I switched my instrument to tuba from flute in seventh grade, little did I know the difference it would make in the four years of high school I was soon to experience. I joined marching band in ninth grade as my ongoing love for music waxed. When my instructor placed the 30 lb. sousaphone on my shoulder on the first day, I lost my balance and would have fallen had my friends not made the effort to catch me. During practices, I always attempted to ease the discomfort as the sousaphone cut through my collar bone, but eventually my shoulder started to agonize and bleed under the pressure. My endurance and my effort to play the best show without complaining about the weight paid off when I received the award for "Rookie of the Year." For the next three seasons of band practice, the ache and toil continued. Whenever the band had practice, followed by a football game and then a competition, my brain would blur from fatigue and my body would scream in agony. Nevertheless, I pointed my toes high in the air as I marched on, passionate about the activity. As a result, my band instructor saw my drive toward music and I was named Quartermaster for my junior year, being trusted with organizing, distributing, and collecting uniforms for all seventy-five members of the band. The responsibility was tremendous. It took a bulk of my time, but the sentiment of knowing that I was an important part of band made it all worthwhile.
One of the key questions raised by Rupert Sheldrake in the Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, is are we more than the ghost in the machine? It is perfectly acceptable to Sheldrake that humans are more than their brain, and because of this, and in actual reality “the mind is indeed extended beyond the brain, as most people throughout most of human history have believed.” (Sheldrake, Seven Experiments 104)
Eagleman talks about unconscious learning, and explores how much of what we do daily is learned and directed by the unconscious mind. The first example is changing lanes: when we’re driving, we do it without thinking. However, when asked to describe how they change lanes, many people are flummoxed. Changing lanes is so automatic that when the conscious mind tries to take control, it confuses our brains and our gears become out of sync. The second example is chicken sexers: people who can sort chick hatching even though male and female chicks look exactly alike. The third example is plane spotters: people who could distinguish between enemy and ally planes thousands of feet in the air. In both cases, the people just knew! They couldn’t explain how they knew. Rather, after trial and error, their unconscious picked up on the slight cues that allowed to them tell the difference. The conscious mind, on the other hand, was unaware of this
The Apostle Paul rights about the conviction of the heart (Romans 2:15), when as Christians our perception of right and wrong is only justified by a common morality of other Christian believers. How instead we should live is in our justification of our savior, giving to him our body, sprite and mind and all he asks of it. By using the meaning of our life and our talents to influence those with the naturalistic and pantheism beliefs, shows our God is the creator and alive (Hebrews 11:32-40).
Thinking back now, I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves – about how we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside – but hadn’t yet understood what any of it meant. (36)
be killed nor can he kill, because the soul can not die nor can it be
In the novel Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, the main character experiences many ups and downs while on his journey to inner peace. First, he decides to live his life as a Samana. Later he abandons that life in return for a life as a rich man. In the end he decides that his rich life is unsatisfying and he begins the simple life of a ferryman. Herman Hesse writes about what it takes to obtain inner peace through his character Siddhartha.
Is Consciousness something automatic, rooted in our selves, something inseparable in a being with abilities of
There are cases of patients experiencing awareness that are horrible examples showing how patient recall is a serious issue we have to correct. In CNN Health, Landau (2010) interviews a woman named Carol Weiher who was awaken to hear music and talking while she was having surgery on her eye (para. 1). Landau also mentions that Weiher hears “Cut deeper, pull harder” (para. 1). According to the Mayo Clinic in the Article Awake during surgery: 'I'm in hell “about one or two people in 1000 may wake up during general anesthesia” (para. 4).
During this stage, Erikson states that we are trying to find out our own identity and build a moral structure for ourselves. He also stated that we try to find out if we fit in with the social world. During this development stage, I was hiding the pain that was brought on to me. Despite how mentally strong I was there were more deaths in my family. The biggest of them all was the death of my mother. The death of the person I cherish the most dropped my heart in the depths of darkness and obliterated my mind. I hated everyone in sight and I unleashed pure angry that built up rage. My mind collapsed even more when I witness the strongest man in the world, my father break down into tears in front of me. I became antisocial and accepted that I did not want to deal with anyone in my life other than protecting my sister. This attitude also translated into my grades, and attendance at school. I knew right from wrong, but I did not care. I did not care what society thought as well. I fell into isolation for the majority of this period. Year after year, more close family members died. Suddenly when life couldn’t get any worse, I got into another event where i was brought back to life by a defibrillator. This immense pain I had ultimately made me break every single relationship I had. At the age of eighteen is when I climbed out of my hole, but only
When we are born does our mind already contain knowledge or is knowledge something that we have to be taught throughout out life? This question is one that the studies of epistemology and innateness have questioned throughout time. While clarity can be gained on the subject, like all of philosophy, there are differing opinions on the matter.
Without anyone to truly comfort him, Paul turns to nonhuman forms of refuge. He seeks out safety and love in the Earth, rather than in people around him. To Paul, the Earth is “his only friend, his brother, [and] his mother” (55). He finds it difficult
According to Dennett, humans are composed of atoms and even though it is very complex, he believed that technology could be advanced enough to replicate a human being through silicone, chips and wires. He states, “might a conscious robot be “just” a stupendous assembly of more elementary artifacts—silicon chips, wires, tiny motors and cameras—or would any such assembly, of whatever size and sophistication, have to leave out some special ingredient that is requisite for consciousness?” We do not exactly know what consciousness is; we just know that it is there. As the famous quote from Rene Descartes goes, “I think, therefore I am”. But can an A.I think? This is a valid question that may get a different answer depending on who you ask. Personally, I do not believe that an A.I can think. It does process information, but I would not call that “thinking”. Take Siri, for example. Siri is able to talk to us and find information that we request, but can Siri actually think? No! It is just a program that was made to do that. Another way to look at this is through the example of the reading we did of the Chinese Room. A man has a giant book of every available phrase or sentence in Chinese. When an outsider requests a translation, the man
The Jewish faith consists of founding principles that are quoted in the Tenak and Talmud. It is through the principle beliefs that Jewish adherents are conscious of God’s monotheism, The Covenant and the importance of divinely inspired moral law. Variants across Judaism including Hasidic and the Reform Jewish Movement, uphold differing interpretations of these beliefs which are reflected through their practices of faith everyday.
Everyone, at some point in their life, has made a mistake. Sometimes we get lucky and only falter a little, making it through the problem relatively intact. Other times, we mess up a lot and have to fix what was damaged over a long period of time. However, the same is true for most, if not all cases—those who make the mistake learn from it. Often times, our failures teach us valuable lessons that we only gained because of the experience we gathered after messing up. I have personally achieved a wealth of knowledge and experience just from all of my own little mishaps, and a few major ones.