The spiritual evolution of man in the light of physical evolution?

OK,  let me think of the last big discovery of physicalism?    (crickets....)

Are neuroscience data a product of the philosophy or are they just good observation and documentation.  Are some theoretical claims - say B. Baars and his Global Workspace Model - used to claim that the brain is the root cause of mind, sure.  Note the good data of Baar's research doesn't say that.  The analysis of Bernard says it, as a narrative and it just happen to fit with the fashion of the times.  Please let me also say that Baar's work is highly professional.

But there is NOTHING Baar's work can postulate from the GWM that threatens anything I think is solid scientific analysis.

Baar offers a process model, just for that his position is substantial.  Process model can be tested virtually and physically. 

Baar's process model is one delineating how communication of competing bio-information processes resolve themselves.  (Hence, aimed at communication functionality and selection of focus, both informational activities)

Even if someone like S. Dehaene can map the workspace on to a physical neuronal-network, it doesn't magically make all the causes of an informational network - physical.  There are meanings that can change the action when detected and incorporated.

There is nothing wrong with research done with the context of only physical causes.  It is incomplete on purpose.  Informational realism doesn't change any physical science - it just doesn't pretend that there are no informational transformations or that mind changes real-world probabilities.

What Psi needs is a process model for mind, that is based on the best of modern neuro-science, with a corresponding model for how mind is actively interacting with the environment.

You're certainly not wrong in regards to GMW but I don't feel like we should discount physicalism so much. We have to strongman, give it the best argument we can and go against it that way. We've got all stuff about technology, physics and figuring out stuff about neuroscience (I'm happy we know how epilepsy works for example). But then physicalism has limits, which might be discovered eventually, or we can expose them faster with good PSI research.

You're certainly not wrong in regards to GMW but I don't feel like we should discount physicalism so much. We have to strongman, give it the best argument we can and go against it that way. We've got all stuff about technology, physics and figuring out stuff about neuroscience (I'm happy we know how epilepsy works for example). But then physicalism has limits, which might be discovered eventually, or we can expose them faster with good PSI research.

I would see Materialism -> Physicalism -> as not having a next step.  Is there anything new after J. Kim?

What's new in science is quantum information processing, bioinformatics and AI!

"Best arguments" are opinions from analysis.  A process model for mind and how Psi may be a predictable, but erratic, phenomena is the game-changer.  A process model generating new confirmable information about natural events can be tested and documented.  

G. Tononi and others are out and about trying.

"Best arguments" are opinions from analysis.  A process model for mind and how Psi may be a predictable, but erratic, phenomena is the game-changer.  A process model generating new confirmable information about natural events can be tested and documented.  

G. Tononi and others are out and about trying.

This reminds me of Neil on Skeptiko who was convinced the missing piece to G.Tononi's work lay in quantum biology. We see some testable ideas in Dr. Danko D. Georgiev's book, Quantum Information and Consciousness.

I think Dean Radin and Stuart Kauffman working together is also a "big deal", in that Kauffman was a hard atheist and is now at least agnostic to a kind of Panpsychic Pantheism.

Kauffman's ideas will be "battle tested" with his patented Trans Turing System for drug discovery. If he ends up a billionaire that's pretty good proof that between quantum "chaos" and classical "order" there's a Poised Realm through which reality passes going "up" from the former to the latter.

That would mean macro-entities, such as our bodies and brains, are always connected to environment [with a place to act non-locally]. This then give[s] a kind of physical mechanism for Carpenter's First Sight theory, where Psi is always "on" in everyone's life.

But where I think a lot of this needs to head in the present direction is more stuff encouraging people to do Psi conducive activities that still have value without "hits". Few are going to practice Zenner Cards at home for little gain. But in the documentary Mediochre posted, Tom Campbell talks about rapidly speeding up his ability to find bugs in his programs via meditation. Only then did he go further with OBEs and Psi.

That kind of stuff, showing how lucid dreams / meditation / intuition-training / etc can make you more successful, that will sell Psi to the public. IMO anyway...

Mentioned the Psi side above, but wanted to note how parapsychology - paranthropology specifically - connects to the other side of the story ->

I actually think the other branch of evidence is going to go against the pseudo-skeptic narrative as well. Linguistics, Spirituality, Reason, Memory...the explanations spinning out from the Physicalist churches clearly aren't convincing as they have to depend ultimately on randomness.

Viruses responsible for memory, psychology responsible for odd commonalities in mysticism and spirituality, "just-so" explanations for the foundations of human society...the public isn't buying it, whether they are traditional church/temple goers or New Agers or even students doing proofs in the Math department....

From a review of Gordon White's Star.Ships ->

Magician Gordon White’s sharp and engaging Star.Ships weighs into this ongoing war with the hard-to-dispute claim that in many ways the field of combat has changed fundamentally. A ‘peace process’ may even have begun. Just two decades ago, those who were debunking claims of antiquity and keeping dates conservative seemed to have the upper hand. These days, headlines pushing back the date of Palaeolithic art or our emergence from Africa and settlement of Australia seem to be as common as those revising climate predictions in favour of the Four Horsemen. And beyond strictly archaeological dating, the study of culture has found that more sophisticated comparative methods, and a closer engagement with developments in the hard sciences, is pushing back the dating of things like fairy tales. To match the slight cooling of magic’s ardour for the archaic (most serious practitioners these days make concessions to recent debunking), science seems to be letting its icy resistance to the archaic melt a bit, and is following the evidence further and further into the past.

A genuine advance in this regard is the work that White’s argument leans on heavily: Sanskrit scholar Michael Witzel’s The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. (I’ve not read this imposing tome yet; there’s a useful review here.) Witzel’s approach marries the wide range of the comparativist to the historical framework provided by the latest research in genetics and geology. What emerges is a truly vast survey of myths around the world, with a branching timeline that traces a core mythical story — our ‘first novel’ — to origins around 40,000 years ago. This system of myth, dubbed ‘Laurasian’ by Witzel, is concerned with the creation and destruction of the world, and the separation of Heaven and Earth. Its linear narrative stands in contrast to ‘Gondwanan’ mythology, a less formal ‘forest of stories’ typified in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea, and Australia. Both are supposed to have emerged from a primal ‘Pan-Gaean’ complex of myths.

White’s main contention is that a significant number of aspects of the Western esoteric tradition can be traced — not through direct transmission, but through varying cultural continuities — all the way back to the Laurasian wellspring. It’s not an especially bold claim in itself — at least not in the world of magic.2 What marks White’s work as being worthy of attention is his detailed grasp of recent scholarship. That, and the fact that this scholarship can be so easily rallied to support magic’s greatest claims about its primal heritage. Recent scholarship has affirmed that while the texts of the Hermetica were assembled between the first and third centuries CE, they contain much greater continuities with ancient Egypt than previously realised. White wields Witzel’s thesis to push straight through Egypt and right into the prehistoric depths. The magicians, it seems, were right after all.

This fascinating genealogy of esotericism is served up with a choice selection of other familiar topics — Atlantis and aliens being the most prominent — that will be taken as either juicy or sloppy, depending on your tastes.

"Juicy or sloppy" probably is a good description of White's work [as a whole], or at least the perception to it. I do admit to worry when he goes beyond the esoteric to try and speak about medical issues [on his blog] but don't want to throw the baby magician out with the bathwater.

And, of course, the idea that spirits helped us evolve culturally goes back to antiquity and continues into modernity. Ramanujan after all believed his mathematical insights were being communicated to him by his family goddess, whose consort Vishnu's blood he'd see in dreams as holding vast sums of knowledge...

...the nature of Ramanujan’s mathematical genius, and how he himself perceived it, tends to be less explored. Hardy called it some kind of deep ‘intuition’, but Ramanujan openly stated that he received the mathematical inspiration and sometimes whole formulas, through contacting the Hindu Goddess Namagiri while dreaming. Ramanujan was an observant Hindu, adept at dream interpretation and astrology. Growing up, he learned to worship Namagiri, the Hindu Goddess of creativity. He often understood mathematics and spirituality as one. He felt, for example, that zero represented Absolute Reality, and that infinity represented the many manifestations of that Reality.

“An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.”

Ramanujan claimed to dream of blood drops, after which, he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.  “While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing.”

“We proved that Ramanujan was right,” Ono says. “We found the formula explaining one of the visions that he believed came from his goddess… No one was talking about black holes back in the 1920s when Ramanujan first came up with mock modular forms, and yet, his work may unlock secrets about them.”

Mentioned the Psi side above, but wanted to note how parapsychology - paranthropology specifically - connects to the other side of the story ->

From a review of Gordon White's Star.Ships ->

And from the book itself ->

What are we to make of all this? There is, within a day’s ride of Göbekli Tepe, a recursion and layering of most of its significant features or motifs. The stars, specifically Orion and his surrounding corner of the sky; calendrical precision; the head, or lack of head, as depicted by the T-shaped pillars; the belief that the area is a conduit for Antediluvian wisdom; dogs and the dog star; the descent of the two angelic teachers via Jacob’s Ladder – also in the area; and a stellar covenant with the Creator in the form of the Abraham legend. All this at a crossroads, no less.

How do we account for the recurrence of these motifs over a span of ten thousand years, when ‘mouth to ear to mouth’ transmissions patently did not occur? At the Inhabited Sky conference in Madrid in May of 2015, Jacques Vallée made the following observation: ‘In science, when there is a new phenomenon, you look for patterns that can cut across culture, geography, and so on … The UFO phenomenon … has constant features across time and space.’

In the specific example of the area around Göbekli Tepe and Harran, as well as the Near East more generally, we do indeed see patterns cutting across time. That these patterns are commonly misinterpreted as either direct transmissions or simply not being there at all returns us to the core of the problem Dr Naydler described earlier in the chapter. Academia or materialistic inquiry is permanently ill-suited to examining something it thinks does not exist.

What is clearly needed is a methodology that can at least begin thinking in better directions. This would likely include some sort of unconscious resonance as well as John Keel’s notion of ‘window areas’; that there are some places in the world more likely to be the scene of extreme paranormal events such as mass UFO sightings or the Mothman of Point Pleasant. This analysis works backwards as well as forwards. Why was Göbekli Tepe built on this hill rather than that hill? Obviously, we will never know for sure, but the subsequent twelve thousand years of history suggests there very likely was a reason, and given the persistence of explicit star lore in the region, we are justified in proposing some sort of contact event may have taken place at least once.


Gordon White. Star.Ships (Kindle Locations 5065-5083). Bibliothèque Rouge.

I don't feel like all of this is right. We can't even rule out a physicalist explanations for PSI right now so that's already a mark (we can say they are unlikely, but the possibility is not outright disproved).

Huh? I find that absurd. With respect of course, I'm not just trying to be argumentative for the sake of it.

These days we live in a connected world - if we want to get in touch with anyone, anywhere on the globe, it isn't too hard, and for many of us incredibly easy, so accessible that we forget this is all a huge technological construction that has been put in place over recent decades. Can we imagine what life was like before all of this? I grew up in an age when even the telephone - landline version - was a luxury and an exotic item, certainly not readily available. When I wanted to communicate with people, I used pen and paper, wrote it down, put it in an envelope and trusted my missive to the postman.

What I describe there, pen and paper, the postal service was the norm for centuries, though universal and cheap post was still relatively recent, the first postage stamp being issued in 1840, not so long ago in the context of human existence.

What did humanity do in the centuries, millennia, aeons before these modern conveniences? People relied on hunches, feelings, dreams, visions.  These things don't have the same purpose as modern communication. They were about our deep connections to one another, usually to our loved ones, whether near or far. And this is where it gets interesting. These connections, which still operate today, but may be ignored or unrecognised, are independent of distance. And of time too.

There are simply no physicalist explanations for human-to-human contact independent of both time and space. They don't exist.