Mothy McFey's blog: "Assorted Looking Glass Nonsense"

I was chatting with my good friend phillip about Saul Paul Sirag's mathematical proof of Consciousness this morning.  I read what I could of the proof in Jeffrey Mishlove's encyclopedia called The Roots of Consciousness.  That heavily-illustrated book arose from Mishlove's PBS television series years ago (circa 1988), which was called Thinking Allowed.  At the time of its publication, he was the only person in the country with a Ph.D in Parapsychology, which he received from Berekley.  He probably still is.  

The proof involves calculous, string theory, and hyper-space geometry.  I am not a gifted mathematician, but I survived integral and derivitive calculus and non_Euclidean geometry in college; and I studied Einstein's Special Relativity Theory as part of the non-Euclidean geometry, since you had to deny Euclid's Fifth Postulate in order to have parallel lines meet in "infinity," which can only occur in Einsteinian curved space....Anyway.  Sirag's proof is very cool, and a very nifty depiction of what Consciousness "looks like" mathematically.  Mathematics is about capturing appearances and suggesting that Truth, but it knows that there is a difference between a description and the thing itself, which is not merely mathematical.  That is what Physics is about ~ the math and the more.

The problem is that the "more," in any kind of language ~ mathematical or lingusitic ~ still is more than the language can do more than merely evoke.  The best teachers are those that teach you that ~ that it is up to you to receive that feeling to learn for yourself.  I can't help but get a tad political about this, since I have been a teacher, and I believe that teachers should not be held accountable for those students who couldn't give a shit if they learn anything or not.  It is not a teacher's business to solve a student's pathologies.  The teacher can only offer and encourage.  Just saying.  

So, just as in particle physics, the act of observing an experiment alters the experiment, so does language alter a person's experience from the full flesh of experience to a mere experience of the mind.  That may evoke something in someone receptive, but it is never the thing itself.  Unless, of course it is only about itself, like so much modern art strove to be.  LOL.  

To varying degrees, both on and off line, we move in and out of these various "dimensions" ~ the dimension of the mere mind, the multi-dimension of total experience, and whatever is in between that suffers from one or another distraction that renders it less than "total."

I think it is really difficult to see the "real stuff" out of mathematics.  Even though it can pin down the wigglies in a way, they are still wiggly and math isn't.  Neither are words.  Even with the tricky techniques they both have just aren't IT.

If you are looking for Truth, you can figure it is probably a lot more than any of this.  And if you aren't, don't expect to get any education, and that will be your doing, not your teacher's.  You can tell that to your kids, too.