Using field research (Meditation) to discover Consciousness

[Swami]

On Fri Aug 24, 2018 8:39 pm, TSGracchus stated the following:

So you think that flipping coins and checking the I Ching, or laying out Tarot cards, or astrology will substitute for science?

Meditation can calm the mind. But it has not produced scientific discovery.

But, by all means, ignore or discard the findings of "Western science" and consult the lint in your navel for answers.

The statements above clearly show a lack of knowledge and experience with meditative practices. It also shows intolerance. As I proposed before, scientists can discover the origins and nature of consciousness and the Universe using field research. You have no evidence that my approach would not work because you lack the experience that I have with meditation. Your proposal is for science to continue in its failed reductionistic and materialistic approach. Centuries have passed and reducto-materialism has still left mankind with the same important questions that we've been asking since our beginning.

""insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."


Let us address some of your claims and show why science needs to adopt meditation as a means to knowledge.

Why should scientist use meditation?
You stated that meditation "only calms the mind" but you're incorrect. Science shows that meditation leads to higher states of consciousness, changes in brain structure, and to emotional well-being. Science needs to be able to deal with consciousness directly instead of relying on "correlates" of consciousness. Meditation just so happens to be an effective first-person approach to deal with consciousness directly. No one has had more first-person experience with all levels of consciousness than the Eastern religionists - some 2,500 years worth of experience. It's only reasonable that scientists collaborate with Buddhists, Hindus, etc. Many are starting to do just that so that should tell you something!!

How does meditation lead to knowledge?
The simple answer is that meditation leads to a state and experience of pure consciousness. In that state, you can explore and experience how consciousness in its most pure form works which of course opens the door to direct "knowledge".

Locke and Hume, believed that we could gain knowledge about the mind through a careful examination of inner experience. If it is true that meditation makes
available certain kinds of inner experience that would not otherwise be possible, then those forms of experience might possibly result in new knowledge.

At the same time, many contemporary researchers in psychology may object to relying on a method of introspection to learn about the mind. In the past, philosophers and armchair psychologists, relying on introspection, have arrived at widely varying conclusions; they have also missed basic facts about how minds work that can be established by simple experiments. Psychologists might argue that introspection simply allows people to project their hypotheses and presuppositions onto their experience and does not help us learn new truths about how the mind works. Only careful experiments, carried out with scienti�c rigor and from a third-person point of view, can reveal such truths.

Buddhists could reply by drawing a distinction between trained and untrained introspection. In most people, they could argue, the faculty of attention is weak and undeveloped, and, as a result, attempts at serious introspection will typically be overwhelmed by various forms of distraction. But those who, through meditation practice, reduce the intensity and frequency of distractions and gradually develop their capacity for attention are eventually able to look at mental phenomena and see them as they actually are.

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Article quotations taken from Dr. Charles Goodman article, Buddhist Meditation Theory and Practice. http://www.academia.edu/36937894/Buddhi ... actice.pdf
You don't have to download anything. Just scroll down and the article will start showing up.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 1 by Razorsedge]

You have no evidence that my approach would not work because you lack the experience that I have with meditation. Your proposal is for science to continue in its failed reductionistic and materialistic approach. Centuries have passed and reducto-materialism has still left mankind with the same important questions that we've been asking since our beginning.

Are you of the opinion that any open issues that science has not yet explained in every detail is therefore a failure of science, and that if follows that the de facto explanation is something that science can never address? There is no scientific evidence that consciousness is anything more than an emergent property of the brain, and while science continues to make progress in understanding the mechanistic details of consciousness, anyone is free to offer opinions on their favorite alternative explanation. So far those have not fared any better in that the various mystical and supernatural explanations for consciousness have not yielded anything that represents a consensus agreement among humans who study the subject.

If we are to maintain the scientific method as the core tool for gaining scientific knowledge, science has to continue to study the subject of consciousness, do experiments, analyze them and think of new experiments and measurements to make, etc. with the goal of adding more pieces to the puzzle. It sounds like you are suggesting that all scientific inquiry into the subject from a materialistic viewpoint should stop simply because the answer has not yet been 100% answered, and cave to the idea that we'll never figure it out because it is some mystical "thing" that can only be understood by meditation. That sounds like a major cop-out.

[brunumb]

[Replying to post 1 by Razorsedge]

The simple answer is that meditation leads to a state and experience of pure consciousness. In that state, you can explore and experience how consciousness in its most pure form works which of course opens the door to direct "knowledge".

Please share some of the knowledge gained by this method that was inaccessible via the scientific method.

[Swami]

Are you of the opinion that any open issues that science has not yet explained in every detail is therefore a failure of science, and that if follows that the de facto explanation is something that science can never address?

It depends on the subject matter. When it comes to consciousness, I can say with confidence that Western science is failing because it is unable to discover the important details (as opposed to "every" detail) of consciousness, i.e. its origin and nature. Consciousness is a phenomenon that is the most readily available to every human being (including scientists) but yet scientists can not explain it. While many want to put this mystery into the same box as other mysteries that science has solved and will solve but consciousness is unlike anything else in the objective and physical universe. It is subjective!

...anyone is free to offer opinions on their favorite alternative explanation. So far those have not fared any better in that the various mystical and supernatural explanations for consciousness have not yielded anything that represents a consensus agreement among humans who study the subject.

Religion has not necessarily failed. The problem is that many religions have an unbridgeable gap that can connect to science. However, this is not the case for many of the Eastern religions and that is because their means of knowledge and experience is "meditation". Meditation is something that anyone can practice. Scientists can collaborate with Buddhists and others to refine the practice and experiences with some scientific parameters.

If we are to maintain the scientific method as the core tool for gaining scientific knowledge, science has to continue to study the subject of consciousness, do experiments, analyze them and think of new experiments and measurements to make, etc. with the goal of adding more pieces to the puzzle. It sounds like you are suggesting that all scientific inquiry into the subject from a materialistic viewpoint should stop simply because the answer has not yet been 100% answered, and cave to the idea that we'll never figure it out because it is some mystical "thing" that can only be understood by meditation. That sounds like a major cop-out.

I believe that scientists have to adapt their methods when the subject matter requires such in order to be observed and tested. This is precisely what is required for consciousness. To piggyback off of my last point, this will take scientists engaging in meditation themselves and conducting their own self-experiments. This is something that you told me you are unwilling to do. Perhaps to you, science is practiced in a "lab", but to many other scientists, science can be practiced outside of the lab in the form of 'field research'.

[Swami]

[Replying to post 1 by Razorsedge]

The simple answer is that meditation leads to a state and experience of pure consciousness. In that state, you can explore and experience how consciousness in its most pure form works which of course opens the door to direct "knowledge".

Please share some of the knowledge gained by this method that was inaccessible via the scientific method.

I've gained a lot of knowledge from my meditative experiences but the problem is that science can not corroborate it using third-person approach. Scientists need to experience it for themselves.

This is why I came to this site to offer an "approach". I never promised to offer arguments and proof. I can only recommend the use of the approach so that you can prove it to yourself.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 4 by Razorsedge]

Consciousness is a phenomenon that is the most readily available to every human being (including scientists) but yet scientists can not explain it.

That depends on what you mean by "explain." One explanation of consciousness is that it is an emergent property of a functioning brain, ie. one of the manifestations of hundreds of billions of neurons interacting in complicated ways with themselves, memory elements, etc. This is a hypothesis that has not been disproven, although the details of the mechanisms are not fully understood. But this is a valid hypothesis that continues to be under examination by the relevant members of the scientific community. The jury is still out.

Centuries have passed and reducto-materialism has still left mankind with the same important questions that we've been asking since our beginning.

The first human EEG was performed in 1924, and the technical ability to carry out tests that can help lead to better explanations of consciousness (including its origin and nature) were not possible until relatively recently. So the time frame for making progress on this problem by science has not been centuries, but just a few decades. It is early days for this kind of research.

This is something that you told me you are unwilling to do. Perhaps to you, science is practiced in a "lab", but to many other scientists, science can be practiced outside of the lab in the form of 'field research'

I am not willing to invest a lot of time immersing myself in eastern religions because I am not searching for anything in my life that would benefit from such an effort. But I do field research outside of a lab as my job, which includes atmospheric gas measurements from high altitude balloon and aircraft platforms, some similar industrial applications, and various other projects that come along. And although I am not in the field of brain research myself, a quick Google search shows many links to studies of meditation from a scientific perspective, and research into how the brain works in general. I've mentioned a recent book I read here several times before which goes into some detail by just one researcher (Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts, by Stanislas Dehaene).

But this kind of research is still in the early stages, and there is no reason to believe at this point that consciousness will not be "figured out" by science and turn out to indeed be nothing more than an emergent property of the brain. That seems a reasonable default position to take given that supernatural, "god is involved", or similar explanations for anything have never, in any case, been shown to be the correct explanation. Zero for some large number of cases. On the other hand, science has been hugely successful in explaining nature and providing us with the technology to study things like consciousness with reasonable propects for success in describing its origin and nature, without getting involved with eastern religions or meditation.

[Divine Insight]

How does meditation lead to knowledge?
The simple answer is that meditation leads to a state and experience of pure consciousness. In that state, you can explore and experience how consciousness in its most pure form works which of course opens the door to direct "knowledge".

I would suggest that this is a silly as suggesting that if mechanics want to learn how to design and repair cars they should just drive a lot of cars.

The experience of driving cars contributes absolutely nothing to the knowledge of how cars are designed or how they do what they do.

My sister has been driving cars for over 70 years. She still has no clue how they work. In fact, the little she does know about the workings of a car did not come from her experience of driving the car, but rather it came from other sources like technical information that was explained to her by actual mechanics.

The same thing can be said about experiencing using computers. The vast majority of people who use computers have absolutely no clue how their computers actually work.

So the idea that to simply experience something will somehow automatically lead to understanding how it works is a very bad idea indeed.

Edited to add:

In fact, we have already seen this method fail repeatedly. There are countless examples of philosophers throughout history who have intensely "meditated" on their own consciousness in an attempt to explain consciousness. Thus far this method has produced no credible or verifiable results. In fact, many of the "guesses" that philosopher have made have turned out to be wrong.

[William]

[Replying to post 1 by Razorsedge]

The statements above clearly show a lack of knowledge and experience with meditative practices. It also shows intolerance. As I proposed before, scientists can discover the origins and nature of consciousness and the Universe using field research. You have no evidence that my approach would not work because you lack the experience that I have with meditation. Your proposal is for science to continue in its failed reductionistic and materialistic approach. Centuries have passed and reducto-materialism has still left mankind with the same important questions that we've been asking since our beginning.

In principle I can agree with your sentiments above.
However, I caution against making similar statements which reflect a similar intolerance.

I would say that the 'western mindset' and the 'eastern mindset' are two branches of the same mind going off in those particular directions to see where they might lead, in relation to that overall minds agenda.
Advising scientists who derive their thinking from the western branch to investigate the mind in the manner of the eastern is rather pointless for reasons you have already laid out in your argument.

Essentially the western mind is focused upon what it can do with what is available materially and this is leading to the rapidly approaching potential being actualized, with scientists creating sentient living robots or "Androids". Many scientists in the robotics industries believe that a fully sentient robot or android will become a reality in the very near future.

The west mindset has evolved to fear anything it cannot completely understand and control through material reality, and have compiled theories which are essentially disguising that fear with a type of bravado based in faith.

Because the western mindset either demonizes through its religious branches, or uses smarmy retorts (in the vain of "consult the lint in your navel" etc) through its scientism branch it remains largely ignorant of such things to do with consciousness which meditation and other forms of introspective device reveals to the practitioner.

In relation to its lofty goal of creating sentience through the machine, this ignorance will show itself to be a disadvantage if indeed they do manage to create machines which are able to defiantly prove to being sentient, because these androids are going to discover for themselves not just what they are informed by the western mindset, but also the eastern and middle eastern mindsets, and from this, deduce what their purpose in relation to the world is.

I have recently written more about this which the reader can access by clicking this internal link > HERE

Suffice to say the materialistic ego of scientism is in for some surprises in that department.

[brunumb]

[Replying to post 5 by Razorsedge]

I've gained a lot of knowledge from my meditative experiences but the problem is that science can not corroborate it using third-person approach

That's OK. I only asked you to share some of the knowledge gained by this method that was inaccessible via the scientific method. Please?

[Swami]

That's OK. I only asked you to share some of the knowledge gained by this method that was inaccessible via the scientific method. Please?

I have learned a lot, especially about myself. But to keep this short, I'll share 2 facts that I take away from my experience.

1. Consciousness can exist as a pure state of awareness.
In this state, I can't say if I literally left my body or if I was simply "aware" of things beyond my body. If the latter is the case the 'remote viewing' might be a better term than an OBE. Keep in mind that the United States government had great interests in remote viewing, so much so that they funded research for it.

2. Consciousness pervades everything.
I learned this by experiencing different levels of existence. One reality I reached was a reality of pure consciousness. I tried to determine the level of this existence (macro or micro) and I figured out that it was the most fundamental level based on how my experience progressed. Form went to less form then to formless. Forms only materialized after I thought about it.

I'm sure that anyone can come up with philosophical objections to my view, but I have very little interest in trying to paint a coherent picture. I'd rather focus on the raw experience, even if it doesn't all make sense to my 'rational' mind.