Gee wrote: ↑July 17th, 2020, 2:15 am
I started underlining your references to divinity/religion above, but there were too many. I don't want to talk about religion in this thread -- there is a forum for that. But I do recognize that religions have their own theories of consciousness, which they tend to call God, so what I do is put "God" in quotes and expect people to simply interpret that word in whatever way satisfies them. Sort of a generic "God".
That might be why I avoid the word 'soul'. I think almost any directly religious language falls into the trap of 'Aha! This is just pre-scientific (inferior) belief trying to reassert itself in the world again, and the proof that you're thinking pre-scientifically is that you're using pre-scientific/religious language!'. If some of that content actually turns out to be true, such as dying, having your consciousness survive, having different 'stages' of yourself separate off like fuel tanks on a NASA rocket, the well is too thoroughly poisoned now to even consider such things just on the basis of how the culture war between science and religious/mysticism has been framed. My biggest complaint about my time in AMORC (I won't make these claims about BOTA because they didn't do this) is that they made wild claims but then they wanted you to try experiments that there was no way you'd be able to accomplish - as a given if it's all BS and almost as a given if some reincarnational process which can take lifetimes is required to have gone on hundreds of cycles for you to so much as get out of your body and peak around or be able to do any sort of energy healing with other people. That's the kind of thing that bothers me, ie. if anyone's going to try moving the cultural needle in any direction, if we assume for a second that such things are possibly there in the cultural discard heap for either culture war reasons or lack of industrial applicability, ease of fraud, etc. then pursuing such things only makes sense if it's grasped from the bottom and taken in the most painfully boring and incremental steps - meaning if you've got a basic energy exercies you're practicing and it seems to be going nowhere then do it for years, and one might not even need to join an order to do that (which is probably part of the trap that has them running people at a 'one size fits all' speed that's too much for most people).
Gee wrote: ↑July 17th, 2020, 2:15 amThe closest that I can come to the word "soul" would be the word "mind", and collective is self explanatory. So the collective soul would be much like the superego, but it is also a collection of all other species and it appears to be accumulative, so it would be a collective of all unconscious experience from all life that has existed on this planet -- or Mother Nature.
So a couple of things on that - a) it doesn't have a personality that we could recognize as a pesonality, 2) there seem to be 'agents' for the lack of a better word running around and communicating down the stack of consciousness in various ways - and they seem like they're stretched thin in numbers, ie. the behavior seems more like dots of polytheism in an otherwise sleeping or comatose giant.
Gee wrote: ↑July 17th, 2020, 2:15 amBut it is "God". Think about it, your unconscious "listens to your prayers", "is actively conscious of your hopes, dreams, pains, trials, etc.", and "is watching you constantly". Because of the unconscious, you are always connected to other life and never alone. The unconscious is reactive because it is all about emotion, which means that it is also about beliefs -- so don't throw out your beliefs -- I think they are important. Also consider that complete isolation can kill you. I suspect that a disconnect from the collective communal unconscious is dangerous.
So we might agree on various angles of this but disagree on our angles of approach.
A good way of explaining my take on this - trees are both alive and real. They're also neither benevolent nor evil, it's not part of how they operate or what they do. If someone finds themselves getting attacked, stabbed, or getting mauled by a bear under a tree and they for some unknown reason decide to appeal to the tree for help that tree can help them by continuing to photosynthesize, draw up water and nutrients through its roots, metabolize CO2 and release oxygen (at least during the day - it does a bit of the opposite at night), and if that person dies in this situation that same root system can draw up nutrients from the blood of the slain person below.
It goes in line with something I've heard mentioned before (an author I was just mentioning to Greta), that nature - to the degree that it's conscious - loves all things equally. It loves every person, if they get lost in the woods and either starve to death or get mauled by a bear nature equally loves the maggots that are rending that person's carcass.
I think the only sort of collective unconscious I could get on board with is one that has the priority of dynamic equilibrium and, like we see when we talk about viruses and any other form of life, 'getting as far into the future as possible' as its core values and to that end the occult adage fails when it's said that 'nature is so careful of the species, so careless with the individual - until it comes to humans', no it's just as careless with the individual here as well.
Gee wrote: ↑July 17th, 2020, 2:15 amThere is nothing "alien" about the unconscious, and it is not some super-sentience that controls us. You are not going to find any facts that support those ideas.
Would it sound like fatal backtracking or goal-post shifting for me to say 'if such a thing exists it's x' rather than 'it's x'?
I've already described above - human happiness and flourishing is orthogonal at best to nature's goals. To then suggest the possibility that there is something discursively and self-reflectively aware that's running the show, which then also both blocks us from turning our faces back toward it and forces our extroversion, and perpetual fitness wars throughout our lives, as the conditions of the lights being on, that would be an egoic/superegoic mind that has it's own priorities and those priorities may range anywhere from slightly to completely asymmetric/orthogonal to our own.
This is where I consider myself somewhat agnostic between animism, animism with embeded dots of polytheism, and animism with embedded dots of polytheism which has a panentheistic superstructure - similar in flavor to what Kabbalah/Qabalah tries to suggest. We were talking about people's NDE's earlier, most people's NDE's go in Neoplatonist/Panentheistic directions and many people encounter something that seems like an incredibly bright white star that accounts for the conscious superset of all things looking back on them and overwhelming them with unconditional love.
That last piece, ie. the panentheistic element of NDE's, is what made me pause for thought when Adrian Nielson brought up what he thought the behavior of a supersentient AI might be, and it made me wonder if Elon Musk's take that we're living in a virual world might not be quite as 'watched too much Matrix' as I would have thought. In all likelihood though if such a thing is real there's no direct reason to believe that we're in some sort of human-made ancestor simulation though. Such a thing could have been built by species nothing like us, it could just as readily be the result of some other type of consciousness getting birthed in - lets just say the 'totality of all things existent' because the 'universe' we speak of is said to be a 3-sphere with a 4th time dimension, pseudo-Riemannian manifold, etc. and it gets confusing to say 'in the infinity of space' when we live in what seems to be a closed system. Such a thing could have come up in any number of ways and quite likely such a thing as an infinitely-expanding consciousness could have just as easily come up as the result of a completely different set of physics that didn't constrain consciousness to bodies that get born, live, decay (or blow up in cancer if the telomeres are too long), and die.
That's where I don't think conscious panentheism is necessarily a crazy idea, just that I'd assert - if it is there - that said 'mind at large' has completely different priorities, and its priorities would match *its* fitness landscape, not ours, because it shares none of our constraints and where there are no common constraints there's no empathy in the way we're used to thinking of it.
Gee wrote: ↑July 17th, 2020, 2:15 amThe rest of your thoughts seem to be centered on the goal or purpose of the collective soul (unconscious). That is all speculation. There is only one goal that is fact in regard to the unconscious and that is that
it must continue.
This whole thread is speculation. The whole point is to dig through it and see what makes sense.
Gee wrote: ↑July 17th, 2020, 2:15 am
It is not a metaphor.
I think I put this best to Greta earlier - if we're talking about the cultural layer, and the idea is attached that only brains and neurons are conscious, then it's a metaphor. If we're talking about something like functionalism, panpsychism, or some other manner of looking at it where that network itself is autonomously conscious or self aware in the Thomas Nagel where 'there's something it's like to be' that network, then it's more than a metaphor. Any space between those two we'd probably have to parse very carefully because I've seen a lot of places on this site where people are able to pull things far enough into abstraction that anything goes or it's a matter of just holding one's ground and not admitting when an idea has been parsed into components or has been found to be secondary or emergent rather than primary.
I'm not saying that I think that's where you're headed, I don't, but the danger of having a speculative conversation on anything like panpsychism, collective consciousness, etc. is that already - as a given - we're only talking about it because we're obsessively biting our fingernails, terrified of death, and we so badly want anything other than reductive materialism to be true (because we're just not strong enough to handle 'the truth') that we'll believe absolutely anything. This is part of why I really don't want to see threads on this topic get lost in abstraction, ie. there is genuinely something to discuss and we actually have to fight an uphill battle for our right to have this conversation in public because it's assumed that this is blatant dishonesty, fear of death, refusal to accept 'Science', etc. and any topic like this gets treated that way summarily in most places as if it's already been proven to be true.
Humbly watching Youtube in Universe 25. - Me