tar

or consider a dream, a kind of communication is going on within a dreamer, in their own private language talking to themselves, where a door could be standing for an opportunity or whatever...how you going to label that or take the ASCII code for yuki and show me where studying the relationship between those numbers, one can gleen the meanings cold and white. And where in the labels, in the numbers do you see exactly the same facts, the same meaning that taking the ASCII code for snow, would yield

Doctordick, "My opening assertion is that there exist relationships within those facts which can be deduced without making any assumptions as to what those facts actually are." There is meaning behind language that is not actually contained in the language itself. Consider your misspelling of role. SwansonT knew what you meant, even though the numbers you put on the page would have added up to roll. A language is a kind of secret code established between two or more "minds". One thing standing for another. You said your breakdown works because everything can be labeled and numbered. Thing is, you have to know what is standing for what, and that can only be done with some prior understanding having had occurred between the two minds. Even the IKEA pictures are based on "watch me, I'll show you" and the photos are standing for the arrangement the pieces of furniture scattered on you floor, should take, if you want to build an arrangement similar to the one conceived by the designer. So a label is already language. The thing the label stands for, is a thing existing in reality, or in the other mind, quite unlike the number that is standing for the thing. Your xs in your equation could stand for anything. Therefore your formula stands for no particular thing, or any particular thing, and therefore, in my mind, no particular thing. So take the ASCII code for roll and add the numbers together and give a stranger, not privy to this thread that number and see if she can deduce what fact you wished to represent. Regards, TAR

give a man a fish and he eats for a day teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime

path finders are followed by path users but you don't even have to be the same species to use the same path through the brambles I remember hiking through the woods as a boy and following paths made by deer. So perhaps the ability to mimic or mirror neurons or something is the innate part of behavior, and what we assemble from these component abilities is the learned part.

So there still might be a little something in the brain of a modern human that does not exist in a Zebra. Consider the defining ability humans have to use tools. Now apes use tools, hit things with sticks, put blades of grass at the entrance of a termite hill to collect a spoonful of lunch, etc. but a Zebra doesn't use tools so much. Opposable thumbs? Are they the innate part of tool use. Perhaps. Then how about language. Is there a junction in the brain that allows for symbolization? Maybe the same structure that allows for the theory of mind. A certain thing says to me that whales might have this junction in common with us, as they talk to each other and teach each other the layout of the oceans. These things that are innate, might not be innate as the thing itself, but innate as an ability to learn or remember, or compare or match or notice change and such, and thereby the ability is instinctual or innate, but the actual lesson is due to conscious involvement with the environment. You still have to fit, either way, but some of your smarts as a species are passed down in ability and some is passed down by watching your parents survive. And sometimes, like in the case of humans you can also live in the shelter your parents built.

makes me wonder how many years into the future is a person responsible for

Area54, Well of course you are right, but your being right only is useful for your own dopamine to flow, it does not mean anything useful to our survival as individuals, or as a group or even as a planet. But it shows that we, meaning you, can put ourselves in the shoes of somebody that would be pleased if the time 'till the end was lengthened. Such a person is not currently available, so who is it, that would care if the universe lasted 600 billion years, or 600 billion years and a day. It comes down instead for your need to be right, for dopamine to flow, for you, for you to feel alive and OK and in control and "right". This is perfectly understandable, perfectly allowed and something I have in common with you, this need. But the point here, is not that the universe will end a day earlier because of life on Earth, the point is that there IS life on Earth, and that is a good thing, now. Regards, TAR

'Area54, But your worrying about the demise of the universe, I think, is something that is also built in to our brain chemistry. Consider how badly we would feel if the Earth was about to be destroyed by an asteroid. Consider the joy and relief we would feel if we constructed a system to repel the thing away from collision. I think we consider our lives precious. And our families, and the life around us, which has also claimed fleeting victory over the tendencies of the universe. And I know I do, and I expect you as well, consider the Milky Way "our" galaxy. We care about it's future...even billions of years from now, when we won't be around and any precautions we might take against its demise would be inconsequential. Thing is, we feel this is our universe, because it is. And we want to live forever. 'Cause we are addicted to life. Regards, TAR

Area54, That was another part of my epiphany. Treeness, from the first member of the species I was looking at, until and including the individual I was looking at was but a fleeting moment within the expanse of space and time that is reality. That is why, especially why being alive is a victory. We are securely insolated from the beginning and the end by immense amounts of time, and likewise are insulated and protected from having to worry about the rest of the universe, by immense stretches of space. Even the Sun, with us every day, is 7 minutes away at the speed of light. A super nova could be happening right now in the Milky Way and we will not see the light or feel the gamma rays for up to 100,000 yrs, the place is so immense. So I would not worry about life speeding up the eventual heat spread of the universe. Not an issue. Regards, TAR

Dimreepr, Well you are right, the best way, and perhaps the only way to reset the line, is to stop doing the thing that you are obsessed with, that destructive thing, that gives you a good feeling, but for the wrong reasons. Nicotine, for instance makes you feel good (provides dopamine) and makes you feel alive, but you are training your system to have you feel like you are surviving, and feeling good in a general, not for any particular reason, way. Where enjoying life for its own rewards, is the way evolution has set the table, and things that feel right, that feel good, that give pleasure and make you smile and laugh and swell your heart with pride and accomplishment, actually ARE good things to promote and engage in. Survival of the fittest also includes actually fitting. Feeling right, belonging, and feeling ownership and responsibility for the place, for your self and for those things included in your feeling of self. I am thinking that the idea of self, is crucial to survival. It is what delineates you from everything else and is the thing that is maintained when you survive. Consider how good it feels to win. And consider the food chain, where the winner is the eater and the loser is the eaten. The one that wins is the one that survives, and every living thing tries to win. The same chemicals that exist in the brain of a gambler when he wins, exist in the brain when using certain addictive drugs. And I have felt since I had an epiphany on a hilltop in Germany 40 years ago, that life is a victory over a universe that is otherwise heading toward entropy. If living things did not want to survive, to be separate from and in opposition to general existence, they would not be. Regards, TAR

Ten Oz, It was not political it was realistic. If you strand a bunch of people on an island or on a continent, without food, water, shelter and medical assistance they are not going to do well. Having one, or having 1000 is not going to make a difference. They are only going to survive if somebody helps them, or they brought sufficient supplies(money) with them to live on or they turn into an invading army. I am not sure you are allowed to make several leaps as to what my intentions are and my political beliefs. My point was simply that we survive as a group, partially because of the investment in efforts of others. I would not be able to go down to the store and buy food unless someone grew it and prepared it for me and put it on the shelves. 1 You suggested 100 naked and afraid, would survive, where one would not. I was giving an example where 1000 people sent into the wilderness are still naked and afraid and dependent on society for their survival, not on their instincts. Regards, TAR

the ability to learn and remember is certainly built in, but the particular interaction with the environment is freshly experienced

and where learning is required to have a particular complex behavior that thing being instinctual is proven to be not very innate

Ten Oz , In the definitionn the example suggested that a person's consciousness could be raised. That implies there is something about consciousness that can grow in scale, after birth, after the innate, built in, instinctual components of awareness of ones surroundings are set, Where the interaction between said species and the environment adds to the built in senses and responses. Regards, TAR

(and those 100 people surviving...I am thinking of thousands that die as refugees, when their society breaks down)

Ten Oz, Well with consciousness scale does matter, as is evident with the lists we saw earlier showing the number of neurons in various species. The ones with more neurons were better candidates for having what we humans would call consciousness. If simple awareness of the environment around qualifies an entity as alive, the fact does not immediately equate to consciousness. Sentience but not consciousness. Consciousness I think does vary in scale. What a university is capable of, over a 2 or three hundred year period, far exceeds the consciousness of any one professor. Regards, TAR

Ten Oz, I think the dopamine reward for suicide can be understood in the same manner as one handles delayed gratification, and in the same manner as one gets pleasure from pleasing an unseen other, or themselves. Consider the situation is not only what dopamine is flowing in your head, but what dopamine is flowing in the head of a loved one. As a survival thing, it is important for tribal members, extended family type tribes, to pass on their genes, protect their genes, please the others in the group. Dopamine here is not isolated to one brain. We seek the happiness of the clan. In terms of where you get dopamine by committing suicide, I think it has to do partly with control. If you kill yourself you are exercising control over your own condition. Usually I think suicide is committed in cases where the subject has lost control. Lost a fortune, or a wife, or made some control ending mistake, as in on their way to a life in prison (after severely NOT pleasing society). Or consider to Evgenia's point my dad's desire to not be a financial burden on his family and society when he is bedridden and failing. Not that he is going to commit suicide, but he has a directive to not extend his life artificially. This gives him a certain control over a situation, life, that he is rapidly losing control of. He can still actually get some dopamine considering leaving others in better shape than sucking up resources for little gain. Or consider suicide bombers, they are pleasing Allah, and those that are fighting for Allah. Or consider the millions waiting for rapture. There is something built into us, that seeks pleasure for others, even if we rationally can not take part. Like on purpose dropping a dollar, knowing that someone else's eyes will light up when they see it lost on the ground. Or the people you hear of that leave gifts anonymously. The pleasure is in the plan. Regards, TAR

Gee, Yes, nice response. It is important I think to consider instinct and consciousness together as not separate things, and to understand the chemical mechanics of the thing, but to understand a chemical. like you say as a drop of water. You need the drop to make a cup of water or a lake, or a river, or an ocean, but the useful understanding is not that H20 or NaCl is present, but whether you are likely to run into a jellyfish if you were to go swimming. That is, a holistic view of the thing is preferable to a formulae. Mechanically you can or should be able to piece together the chemicals to describe the activity, but it seems in human terms, we should talk in metaphor and speak about emotion as if it is the same thing as the chemical and physical complex that creates it. When we talk about humans, we are not talking about a simple mass of billions of neurons with various neurotransmitters floating about within the cells and synapses...well we are, but that is just the drop, not the context. In amongst the folds are dreams and hopes and memories, and promises and expectations...emotions, that are as hard to describe in chemical and physical terms as a hurricane is to describe using just air and water and heat. Ten Oz, I think an ant is part of a colony. The entity, the self, we are talking about, with ants, I think is the colony, not the ant. Sort of like the ants are cells or organs within the entity, that are connected by chemical trails, not sinews and fibers, muscle and bone. Perhaps people are a little like this as well. We each are a separate ant, but attached to those we love into a greater being. To this, and the thread title, you can not have this greater being, without the individuals that compose it, and you can not have either without instinct and consciousness, emotion and thought. Regards, TAR

of course though you SHOULD be dependent on people you love for pleasure and to please

dimreepr, Good way to look at it. I have this problem with my dopamine theory, that says you can replace your drug of choice with other natural good clean fun types of things, getting into a giggle fest with your kids or going to a concert with a multi-instrument orchestra, or even, for full cup recognition, having an orgasm, but the problem with drug addicts is they have busted the system, and the neurotransmitters don't flow, or don't replicate the "feeling" of being alive, naturally any more, and it takes 6 months or never to get the system back to where a giggle fest does the job. But here my theory might be useful to recovering addicts in that it is probably better, in terms of getting your system back to gigglefest fighting weight, to not have your neurotransmitters balajnced by a doctor and pharmaceutical company, but to have your friends and family and friends and society, do the job. I guess I am talking about dependency. If you are relying on someone else to provide you with a reason to live, the ability to live and you are dependent on a drug to make you feel right, you have not actually succeeded in living, you are dependent on someone else to tell you how to live and are sort of a ward of the state. Consider as proof of this, how people under treatment with inhibitors and dopamine enhancers and serotine blockers and such have to be constantly monitored and the chemical balance has to be adjusted to where they are not too high or two low. Seems to me to be better to try and work away from the drugs entirely and let the body and brain operate. Feel pain when tissue damage is imminent or real, so that your body reacts to the situation. Gets you out of there, and puts you in a more comfortable place, or provided the healing chemicals to repair the damage inflicted. Not to take on a silly approach as to say no chemicals are good, just to use the great chemicals we have where indicated, and NOT use them to fool the system into a response that is possibly not completely accurate for the situation. For example, Chantax to help quit smoking makes many people "feel weird". And some have thoughts of suicide or find they do not enjoy other things they used to enjoy, as much. Why not just don't let nicotine into your body for a bit, and see that you don't actually die, and you can still laugh and smile and hug and kiss your mate and family and find enjoyment in life, as it was before you smoked So, as you say, reset the cup full line, but do it by filling the cup with dopamine achieved through victory and completion and scratching the itch, not dopamine achieved through ingesting nicotine (opioid). Regards, TAR

Dimreepr, My thoughts lately are all toward how neurotransmitters affect us, and how one can understand others, and oneself in terms of the human need for dopamine. The human reward system is a complex of desire, motivation and reward that gives a need to move, an impulse to move, and a reward to move so we repeat the action when confronted with the same situation, thereby surviving and feeling good about it, so we do it again and again, continuously. So goes my dopamine theory. This complex has been studied and identified as including various agents like GABA, adrenaline and others, but can be simplified as to including norepinephrine, serotonin and dopamine. Enough to understand the situation as getting an itch, moving to scratch it, and having it feel good to have gotten the bloodsucking bug off, so-to-speak. My concern, in the field of mental health and addiction treatment is that addiction is considered a disease, when I think it completely natural, and not only natural but at the basis of our survival instinct and seems to be associated with the survival instinct of other animals and many neurotransmitters are even found in plants which means the plants either produce them so animals feel good eating them so they eat them again to spread their seeds, or that the plants themselves use the chemicals to establish need to move (will to live), movement (living, growing, being) and reward for moving (survival). Hence my concern. If we mess with the reuptake of these chemicals, we don't know how that is going to work out. Plenty of evidence in this article of causing depression and suicide and other unintended consequences, to consider that when you mess with these chemicals, you mess with our survival instinct, our life and consciousness itself and are "playing god" with another's consciousness in a way that no person, subject to the same norepinephrine-dopamine-serotonin complex themselves is really qualified to administer. See our current mental health and drug addiction problem in the U.S. for evidence that we don't know what we are doing to ourselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin–norepinephrine–dopamine_reuptake_inhibitor Serotonergic[edit] 5-Hydroxytryptamine (5-HT or serotonin) is an important cell-to-cell signaling molecule found in all animal phyla. In mammals, substantial concentrations of 5-HT are present in the central and peripheral nervous systems, gastrointestinal tract and cardiovascular system. 5-HT is capable of exerting a wide variety of biological effects by interacting with specific membrane-bound receptors, and at least 13 distinct 5-HT receptor subtypes have been cloned and characterized. With the exception of the 5-HT3 receptor subtype, which is a transmitter-gated ion channel, 5-HT receptors are members of the 7-transmembrane G protein-coupled receptor superfamily. In humans, the serotonergic system is implicated in various physiological processes such as sleep-wake cycles, maintenance of mood, control of food intake and regulation of blood pressure. In accordance with this, drugs that affect 5-HT-containing cells or 5-HT receptors are effective treatments for numerous indications, including depression, anxiety, obesity, nausea, and migraine. Regards, TAR It is actually alright to feel good about living. In fact it is required for survival. It is not a disease.

the little itches we get to immediately, and it feels good to get to them, the itches that are a problem are the unsolved ones, the ones we can't reach

Area54, In the context of this thread I would translate the aphorism to mean if all you have is the ability to scratch, everything is an itch. Regards, TAR

Area54, Noted, but modifying your conclusions to suit yourself is done all the time. Rationalization is something I became aware of, as a thing particularly self related. That is we look for the silver lining or the way that the unfortunate situation could be framed to still wind up with us winning, and feeling good about the situation. (getting some dopamine) Like when my Yankees lose, I figure its only a game, and maybe we will win the next one. Or when the squirrels get every one of my pears off the three trees we have, I figure, at least the squirrels got to enjoy the seeds. And make a joke of it, after realizing they are not after the fruit, but the seeds, that if only they had come to me beforehand, I would gladly have arranged a spot where we would put all the cores after we enjoyed the fruit and everybody would win. And we are all good at accepting loss...eventually, that is we understand that life goes on, even after a failure and there will be another chance at victory. And likewise, there is the sour grape thing, where if we fail to reach the goal, we rationalize that the goal was not a good one to begin with. Or the addict, obviously knowing that doing the drug is not beneficial overall proceeds to acquire and use the drug anyway because it will "feel" like a victory. When I quit smoking, with the support of people on this board several years ago, after smoking for 47 years, I went through several rationalizations. The primary one, was that if I was sitting on a lung machine, confined to a bed, unable to take a deep full breath, I would be very unhappy with myself for putting myself in that quite unpleasant position. So I took a delayed gratification type approach and told myself if I refrained from smoking I would be rewarded with deep breaths for a long time. Turns out to have been the case, and I received some dopamine, some victory dopamine just by NOT smoking. Another rationalization I was going through while deciding to quit was that I was going to suffer various maladies and losses if I did not smoke. Couldn't take a break and go outside, would smell things and jog my memory and lose concentration, would have no punctuation marks in my day, little interim rewards, interim victories, to get me through obnoxiously detailed procedures, would get upset with people more easily and the biggest thought, the biggest problem as to why quitting might be detrimental, is that I thought I would never feel good, the way an after lunch cigarette made me feel, ever again. Well it turned out another rationalization countered this thought, when I learned that nicotine receptors in your brain receive the nicotine and release dopamine. Same exact dopamine that is released anytime you do this life thing right. Hug a child, feed your family, pay the rent, look at your wife's beautiful face, take out the garbage, straighten the picture on the wall, solve a problem, root your team to victory, play a tune on the violin, smell the butter and garlic frying up the onions, snuggle in the chair and close your eyes after successful completion of a project...100 ways to get dopamine, meant that it was not that I would never feel good again, it was that since I was taking Phi's advice, and was making smoking "not an option" and I was expanding that to making nicotine "not an option", it meant simply that I was not going to have "that way" of getting dopamine anymore, but I still had complete access to every other way of getting dopamine, that did not involve nicotine. Same dopamine. Just cut out the middle man. (the one I was dependent on for my dopamine) Regards, TAR

But good to note that we all, have or do have a number of ways to enjoy life, and get our dopamine. It seems to be quite natural a thing. Although I gave up drinking while in the Army in Germany 36 or 37 years ago, I did consume my lifetime quota of alcohol beforehand.