Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id BAA08248 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sat, 2 Feb 2002 01:26:33 GMT Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2002 17:20:49 -0800 Message-Id: <200202020120.g121KnK29734@mail17.bigmailbox.com> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary X-Mailer: MIME-tools 4.104 (Entity 4.116) X-Originating-Ip: [66.156.194.7] From: "Joe Dees" <joedees@addall.com> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: ality Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk('binary' encoding is not supported, stored as-is)
> "Dace" <edace@earthlink.net> <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Re: alityDate: Fri, 1 Feb 2002 14:46:11 -0800
>Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>
>Joe Dees:
>
>> >> >"Prior" and "posterior" are functions of time. Space has no
>> >> >priority, and it has no posteriority. That's why it's space, not time.
>> >> >
>> >> And, I suppose, that time has no before or behind, no left or right,
>> >no above or below. In fact, time cannot even be within, for that, too is
>> >a location.
>> >>>>
>> >
>> >Time has two qualities, before and after. What it lacks is left, right,
>> >above, and below.
>> >
>> You forgot before and behind, even though I mentioned them above.
>
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but "before" does appear in my brief list of
>temporal qualities, the other being "after." I reject "behind," because
>it's primarily a spatial designation.
>
okay, you're wrong, so I'm correcting you; 'before' and 'behind' were the two elements you left off your list of the attributes of the SPATIAL aspect of spatiotemporality. Perhaps I should've said 'in fron of' so you could understand.
>
>I mention this because you seem to have trouble comprehending what I write.
>Over and over again, you make the same point that I've already refuted,
>completely ignoring the refutation, *as if it had never been written,* and
>then repeating the initial, now-refuted point.
>
I not only understand what you write, I disprove it on irretrieveable terms; it is you who apparently lack the cognitive attributes to grok same. Those vedantist and sheldrakean memetic filters must have your brain in a logic-denying hammerlock. What you are perhaps labeling refutations are nothing more than unsupported (because unsupportable, because wrong) faith/belief-based dogmatic assertions. I have given you logical proofs and empirical evidence for my assertions; name me ONE actual logical or empirical refutation you have profferred. You can't, for all you have done is repeat absurd contentions in some sort of interminable mystic mantra.
>
>
>Here's a prime example:
>
>> Memories stored in the brain has been verified for many years; brain
>surgeons frequently keep their patients conscious so they can monitor the
>immediate effects of the surgery and modify it as they go. patients
>routinely report that when certain areas are stimulated, that specific
>memories occur to them just as when certain others are stimulated, certain
>body parts move. You really need to keep up with fifty years ago.
>>>>
>
>Now, we've been over this before. That the stimulation of certain brain
>regions results in recall does not in any way prove that memories are stored
>in the brain. All we know for sure is that memory, like any mental property, is
>facilitated by the brain.
>
>The attempt to scientifically demonstrate the existence of memory traces or
>"engrams" in the brain goes all the way back to the 20s, when Karl Lashley
>experimented on conditioned learning in rats, monkeys, and chimpanzees. He
>would train them to remember the correct reaction to a given stimulus and
>then remove the portion of the brain utilized in the conditioned response.
>The animals would quickly regain their former memories, despite the
>permanent loss of brain tissue. This has led to the view that memories are
>stored holistically in the brain. But if the activity of neurons is holistic, we must
>hypothesize a mysterious, holistic property of the brain, which we might call
>"the mind." And thus memory is back in the mind, where it belongs.
>
>At any rate, there's no one-to-one correspondence between memory and neural
>configuration. This is not a serious, scientific contention.
>
OF COURSE memories are stored in the brain, but cortical neurons are plastic, and can easily relearn that which was excised, and even reassign an area to subserve such a function; this has been known for a long time by everyone who studied these things, except, apparently, you (or it could very well be that you have NOT studies these things). Check out the parameters on brain plasticity vs. canalization.
Of course, we can entertain your idea (if we wanna be humorously entertained) that the stimulation of certain brain tissurs just triggers the Ol' Psychic Channeling Transmitter-Receiver Set-Up From Woo-Woo Land to beam in the proper perceptual response, but we are left asking the question as to how each area of the brain stimulated which causes a differing perception or action knows what to ask to have sent, and if it already knows same, what use would it be to have clearly redundant info beamed in? It's like a neuronal network saying 'ok, I need the memory of seven years ago, when I caught the three-pound trout; please beam it to me pronto!" No self-respecting hog would wash in such a contention.
>
>> >Distance is not a property of time. Time is nowhere in particular.
>>
>> And space is nowhen in particular?
>
>The spatio-material universe is right now. Not only does it remain with the
>present, it defines the present. What is present is what is spatially
>presented.
>
What is present-at-hand is what is spatiotemporally situated relative to the apprehender, that is, contiguous with perception. Obviously, the back side of alpha centauri is no more present to preception than last week is.
>
>> >One more time, Joe. Spacetime is quite real as long as we
>> >recognize that time is not reducible to it. The only element of time
>> >that's coterminous with space is the present. To regard time as
>> >equivalent to space is to compress all of reality to the present, to
>> >erase history and future, leaving us in this eternal, static, four
>> >dimensional universe.
>>
>>No it is not; for spatiotemporality possesses BOTH extension AND duration,
>>>>
>
>"Duration" is precisely the concept that was thrown out in Einsteinian
>physics. 4-D spacetime does away with duration and replaces it with
>extension. Instead of involving only three dimensions, extension now
>applies in four. When you assert duration, you're asserting the reality of
>time. In other words, you're conceding the argument. This is why you
>imagine you can maintain concepts such as freedom and self. Because you
>really do believe in the intrinsic, irreducible existence of time.
>
Sorry, but duration is not a direction or an extension, but it is an irreduceable aspect of the spatiotemporal manifold. But it is difficult to prove an assertion to a faith-filled vedantist/sheldrakean true believer who is either too dense and onbtuse to understand the twems, or who, stubbornly, willfully and contrarily dismisses or ignores their import. The only scale upon which the 'arrow of spacetime' seems not to apply is simple the quantum one, but when you complexify matters, it applies most irrefutably. Isotopes decay, they do noy re-cay. When you pour a bowl of black marbles and a bowl of white marbles together, they intermix, but when you pour them back into their containers, they do not separate according to color. I have yet to see anyone shrink and crawl back in their mother's womb, Napoleon's bones are gonna stay apart, and Bill Clinton will not be president again if we just wait a year. And none of these unidirectional things happens unextended.
>
>> The spatiotemporal universe has been around for at least 12 billion years,
>
>Again, you reveal your unconscious acceptance of the reality of time.
>According to Einsteinian theory, it's not that the universe has been around
>for a given duration but that it extends in four dimensions, not just three,
>and the units of measurement of the fourth dimension are borrowed from
>our prescientific notion of "time."
>
The temporal aspect of the manifold is NOT an extended one, but a durational one. Einstein did not say that either aspect was nonexistent, but that they were both relative to referential frames (such as the universe as a whole, via Mach's principle, or to local gravitational referents, as in the B-52 tests. Temporal dilation (which really impacts as one approaches lightspeed) is accompanied by spatial compaction in the direction of travel. Both aspects are affected at once, and to proportionate degrees. Gravity likewise bends light, as was seen in 1919 when we measured the focusing effect that the gravitational field of the Sun had on stars behind it (known as gravitational lensing), pulling their light inwards enough that such stars were visible to us, rather than their light shooting far to either side of our planet.
>
>Ted
>
>
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