From: murphyg@Software.Mitel.COM (Gary Murphy)
Newsgroups: alt.paranormal,alt.consciousness
Subject: Re: a couple of questions
Date: 14 Aug 92 16:47:04 GMT
	<1992Aug10.153242.1250@irscscm.UUCP>
Organization: Applications Software II, MITEL Corporation, Kanata, Ontario,
	Canada
In-reply-to: cwilkins@irscscm.UUCP's message of 10 Aug 92 15:32:42 GMT

In article <1992Aug10.153242.1250@irscscm.UUCP> cwilkins@irscscm.UUCP (Charlie Wilkinson) writes:

   rfrazier%peruvian.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Robert Frazier) writes:
   : 
   : 	I agree that there is a sort of collective conscience out there, and
   : that people are more or less capable of tapping into this knowledge.  This
   : idea is quite common, actually it can be found in many religions and
   : philosophies.  

I don't see where you find this "idea is quite common" in the following:
Buddhism (at least Tibetean and Zen), Islam, Christianity (gnostic or
otherwise), or Judaeism (I'm not sure where Rastafari fits in there ;-)
and these account for an alarming percentage of humanity!  What I do
find, in all those and shamanism, is the ability for any person to "see
things as they are" (which I know Minsky abhors as a concept ;-)) and
thereby to appear to have extended their reach, but none of the
religions I've listed would say you would be doing anything special; the
closest you might find are those occurances in the African religions
(i.e. Christianity/Judaeism) where an individual is _chosen_by_God_ to
be given special visions, visions which _that_one_person_ is charged to
personally distribute through the standard media.

In fact, the only 'religions' I've ever heard expouse such an idea as an
'aether of consciousness' that can be used for information gathering is
the New Age and the psychotheology of Jung from which it grew. (although
Jung felt only Aryans had access --- see his wartime editorials)

   : 	What exactly is human intuition?
   : 
   : 	My personal experiences have first gave me the feeling that there
   : is some sort of underlying low-level link between everything, and further
   : experience is strengthening this belief.

How can you tell if a 'belief' is 'strengthened'?  What exactly are you
measuring? What sort of point-gain do you get and which experiences are
causing this gain?  Certainly there is much evidence, and testimony from
even those religions I cited to suggest all things are hopelessly
intertwined, that in any one 'thing' are all the elements of every other
(which is NOT the same as some cosmic WAIS server, but more like a
fractal of the self-similarities)

   I think intuition is a sub-conscious and/or conscious use of the link that
   you mentioned above.

My bet is intuition is the subjective experience of letting the brain
tissue do its work without conscious interference, like when a woman
giving birth for the first time finally gives up control and lets her
body do what it already knows how to do.  Intuition is letting the
experientially gained 'facts' settle in the network and 'insight' the
result of recognizing and using the local minima that occur.  This does
not require any conscious logic, but is the complement of logical
deduction, which itself is something we have all _forced_ our
brain-tissue to do (and not very well, I might add ;-), so you can
consider my logic here suspect)

   What does everyone else think?  I sense that some of you agree.   ;-)

What? Does everyone else think I sense that some of you agree?
Logically, then , some don't, right?  In any proposition (or bet) it is
always best to cover both sides ;-).  Here's the kicker: what evidence
would you require (occam's razor aside) to demonstrate that the
collective conscious (unconscious though it may be) is no more than a
figment of a consciousness uncollected?



--
Gary Lawrence Murphy - Gary.Murphy@software.mitel.COM - (613) 592-2122 x3709
                     Where do purposes come from?