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Re: [microsound] markov anxiety



this will likely be only even slightly tangential to microsound, but....

anechoic wrote:

> very interesting question...since I am not a by-the-book buddhist not do I
> belong to any one sect or school of buddhism I mainly use it to maintain
> clarity...here is a scientific fact:

i think calling any stament about the nature of experience "a scientific
fact" is premature. we have no "science" of experience in a strict sense.
pyschology, neurobiology, cognitive science? none of these disciplines as
of yet has developd a rigorous methodology for asking and answering these
sorts of questions.

> we are NEVER fully aware of the
> present...

this is a meaningful thing to say only on the basis that experience is a
representation which refers to an external object, and that's a
troublesome basis. the nature of reference here is not something simple
and transparent; how one physical object can be magically connected to
another by reference is something of a mystery, or perhaps an indication
that we're dealing with an erroneous conception. it certainly seems that
it's well accepted on this list that meaning is actively created in
perception, that reference is a matter of interpretation, constitution and
that things do not mean or refer in and of themselves.

if you accept experience as a property of the brain, that is, conscious as
a conscious of a limited physical object, then it is senseless to say that
we are never fully aware of the present. our experience is
always experience of the present state of the brain.

only when you interpret that experience as experience which refers to,
represents an
external world, consciousness as consciousness of the world, do you run
into the problem that experience now refers to a time which has alredy
past, since there is a temporal/causal process by which the world affects
our nervous system (or, if you want to, you could use the troublesom
phrase, 'temporal process of receiving information from the world').

but this would then not be a matter of experience itself, rather an
interpreation of experience.

cf. your thoughts an music as itself meaningless, but granted meaning by
active perception.

> we are always processing what *just* happened which registered
> via our perceptual apparatus...what we are doing during this delay is
> constructing a pattern based on past events and statistically predicting
> the future using this information...our brains are somewhat like higher
> order Markov chains...we tend to collect information from the world around
> us by taking in large sets of data and matching it to historical data...so
> this process produces a delay in our cognitive apparatus...

Sounds like experience as informaion processing - certainly not an
unpopular view, but also certainly not an unquestiond view. cf. Tim
Smithers, "Are Autonomous Agents Information Processing Systems", the
writings of Francisco Varela, neurobiologist Humberto Maturana or Rodney
Brooks' work and the "new paradigm of AI".

We really don't have any good understanding of the sense in which
information is said to exist. Certainly it does exists, but how? Notions
of information as reference or as carrier of meaning are all too common,
ingrained and suspect. Other possibilities exist, say, information as a
process of action, of complex webs of causality. On those lines saying
that you "collect information from the world", is perhaps misleadinig,
though still potentially meaningul - maybe one would say instead simply
that the world effects us. One would say that the words that a person says
cause us to create (or recreate) meanings, not that a person transmits
meaning through communication.


> meditation is
> the only thing that can move us into a very close approximation of the
> temporal present...this helps us 'wipe the windshield clean' so we can view
> the outside world with more clarity...a good byproduct of this is that we
> can better experience our enculturation as programming and step away from
> it a little...

Don't mean to imply by my thoughts above that I disagree with your take on
the value of meditation. it's to me an essential tool for confronting the
reality of experience and unweaving deeply set misconceptions. we should
all do it more! maybe your conclusion here is just right: meditation can
be a tool for unweavinig the notion of experience as experience of th
world, and rather let it bee simply expeerince as experiencee. arriving
at the temporal present as the simple present of that experience, and not
the present of a referential representation.

> hope this doesn't read like hippy-shit! ;)
>

seemed rather sophisticated thinking to me. i just don't really understand
these things anymore.

cheers,
brett.


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