Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3

[smcder]

Noumenal / phenomenal

View attachment 4515

What you say is very useful. I am taking it onboard as best I can.

I would give you examples of ineffable qualities... but the words escape me.

When you and Constance say you don't understand a piece of my work, it does remind me of the kind of criticism one might get in a music-playing context:
Four musicians may play a movement from a quartet by Beethoven. On its conclusion one of the musicians turns to the others and exclaims, "you were rushing" or "you were out of tune".
This is invariably not true. On closer inspection it turns out that from bars 35 to 38 the relative speeds differed, and in bar 80 there was a grating intonation discrepancy.
What this analogy is intended to illustrate is that issues of comprehension can be usually tied down to parts of sentences (rather than the whole thing) i.e. usually one loses understanding at a particular bit; and that it is a reciprocal thing where one individual might not understand one section whilst another individual might find problems with a different section.

A single comment like, 'facts are generally metaphysical whereas information is epistemological' is good because it is a focused, accurate criticism that demands I re-examine my (sometimes) generic and idiosyncratic use of terminology.

If you can be exact in your criticism that would be very helpful. I can imagine that many people don't read like me i.e. they get a flavour from a text whereas I read every sentence on its merits. I think my difficulty with some phenomenology writing is that I drill into the efficacy of sentences rather than let the concepts wash over me. Most of my sentences are very carefully considered - they never flow but rather are the culmination of an arduous exacting process.

Noumenon short version:

My ideas about noumenon assume a valid reductive explanation of phenomenal experience - so you might have a problem with my noumenon ideas.
I think what the paper says is,
1. phenomenal experience is what we know through experience - what it is like.
2. Noumenal experience is everything else that could be experienced - which I think includes the phenomenal experience of every individual in all existence and every kind of experience presently realisable or otherwise not.
3. The 'thing in itself', the substance from which there is or can be experience and reality is beyond the noumenal and phenomenal - it is always unknowable.

How does one realise the noumenal? in other words, how and why does the noumenal become one's actual phenomenal?
As a speculation, I relate these questions to quantum mechanics via the vector wave ideas - Our phenomenal consciousness does not know what phenomenal consciousness is to be its path; likewise a photon does not know the shortest path between two points; how could it? The photon explores every possible path, (every noumenal potential) and ends up going, as probability would have it, the shortest distance. Thus phenomenal consciousness emerges from the noumenal as a probable of many possibilities (which are influenced by the actual path taken - what we do influences what noumenal potentials become realised in the combined pool of human possibilities).
I know it sounds abstract and bizarre (the terms are inexact), but I have not devoted much to this and I am making it up as I go along.

I would give you examples of ineffable qualities... but the words escape me.

Yes, I know ... but the point is you can't just declare something to have ineffable qualities ... so if you bring it up, you have to somehow substantiate it.

Have a look again at my comments, not the overal critique about the angels, but the sentence by sentence part:

In this first instance, I am working at the sentence level, removing the words "rather subjective" ... and offering two possible ways to re-word it ... not sure I can be more granular than that? Or what am I missing?

Phenomenal experience is the term used to describe the rather subjective ‘something it is like’ aspect of experience. Examples of phenomenal experience include what it is to experience depths and shades of colours, the variety in the subtlety of aromas, the character of sound clusters, or the pleasantness of tactile sensations. Whilst being a fundamental aspect of the way we relate to the environment, the phenomenon of our subjective experience has ineffable qualities that evade objective analysis. Phenomenal experience is the experience that individuals identify as the subjective experience of consciousness.

smcder "Phenomenal experience" refers to the 'something it is like' aspect of consciousness.

*smcder I deleted "rather subjective" - because "something it is like" seems to be entirely subjective ... I could have written:

"Phenomenal experience" refers to the subjective, 'something it is like' aspect of consciousness.

And here too:

smcder Examples of phenomenal experience include what it is to experience depths and shades of colours, the variety in the subtlety of aromas, the character of sound clusters, or the pleasantness of tactile sensations. Whilst being a fundamental aspect of the way we relate to the environment, the phenomenon of our subjective experience has ineffable qualities that evade objective analysis. Phenomenal experience is the experience that individuals identify as the subjective experience of consciousness.

smcder this is confusing because

*"the phenomenon of our subjective experience" isn't the same thing as "phenomenal experience"
this pinpoints the confusion to two similar but not exact phrases ...

Pharoah wrote:

If you can be exact in your criticism that would be very helpful. I can imagine that many people don't read like me i.e. they get a flavour from a text whereas I read every sentence on its merits. I think my difficulty with some phenomenology writing is that I drill into the efficacy of sentences rather than let the concepts wash over me. Most of my sentences are very carefully considered - they never flow but rather are the culmination of an arduous exacting process.

I think that's good in the composition part of the process, but I think the reader would benefit from your going back and getting some flow in it ... it really does feel choppy and it's hard to put the whole thing together, I re-read and lose the sentence at different parts ... flow isn't a bad thing and doesn't mean you lose the exactness you are seeking. Writing isn't music. (to me)

Now, that said the more readers the better ... because yes I'm sure readers bring di

 

[smcder]

Noumenal/phenomenal

" if you can be exact in your criticism that would be very helpful. I can imagine that many people don't read like me i.e. they get a flavour from a text whereas I read every sentence on its merits. I think my difficulty with some phenomenology writing is that I drill into the efficacy of sentences rather than let the concepts wash over me. Most of my sentences are very carefully considered - they never flow but rather are the culmination of an arduous exacting process."

I don't know if many people read like you or not ... but if it's true they don't ... what are you gong to do about it? You don't get to tell your reader how to read you. What do you know about your reader and what sacrifices are you willing to make to be read? To be understood.

they get a flavour from a text whereas I read every sentence on its merits.

I don't always read the same way - I read and then (sometimes) I re-read. The first time I skim and see if a thing is worth re reading ... Then on re reading - some parts I may read for flavor, sometimes I read every sentence on it's merits. Sometimes I go back and do both. Sometimes I read aloud or re write the text … whatever it takes to understand.

The two most difficult reading experiences I had were

1) Law … Law school (Heidegger has nothing on the guys at the UCC) and working at the state legislature, editing a piece of legislation on malware

2) reading mathematics, grasping calculus - I finally had to go back and get it in its historical development, what problems were they trying to solve?

I don't know about @Constance but if I remember she ran or edited a university press and from what I can gather she would also use a variety of approaches/techniques in reading.

So there is no one way to read ... even for a single reader who may use various approaches ... if you only read sentence by sentence I think you very well may lose something ... And it's good you identify that. Now … you can go and read phenomenology! ;-)

But yes, some texts or parts of them are composed at a paragraph or higher level and have to be read that way.


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[Pharoah]

Yes... I like the clarifications.

Any views on the following:
On the view that knowledge is roughly justified true belief, knowledge is belief dependent. And if we grant that belief is realised conceptually in the sense that you can believe that P only if you possess concepts sufficient for grasping P, then this would indicate that knowledge is always bound by the sophistication of conceptual limits. And if knowledge is to be held as truth, that further entails that knowledge is factive. Inevitably, the standard position is to assume that only humans are capable of possessing knowledge by virtue of the identification and conceptualised coalescing of beliefs about the facts of reality. However, it is surprisingly easy to illustrate that not all truths need necessarily be represented conceptually and indeed that some kinds of knowledge of truths cannot ever be conceptual in construction; which would mean that there can be true knowledge that is not justified true belief.

 

[Soupie]

@Soupie I'm fine with not referring to information as non-physical and/or immaterial. The point I don't want to lose though, is that information is different from, say, the tree in my neighbor's yard.

The MMMI website has a relevant chapter regarding this:

mind, matter, meaning and information - psychological information

intentional information

We obtain information about any particular thing through a complex set of interactions between many different things.

The prime example is that of sight. This minimally involves a light source such as the sun, atmospheric conditions, the object concerned, the reflective properties of other objects around it, the various components of the eye, the optic nerve and the brain. Each element in this system (such as the light entering the eye) has its own physical information, that is capable of conveying information about something else (such as an apple) because it has been affected by that thing, and thus has characteristics (such as colour) that somehow correspond to it. We have evolved and learned to use such interactions to obtain information about any visible object.

As always, we have a choice as to whether to adopt the formal stance. What goes on inside a human skull, or in the nervous system of any organism, can be viewed as mere material processes, or as information processing. Having taken the formal stance here, though, there is a further choice open to us, and that is whether to adopt “the intentional stance”: information being processed neurologically can be considered to be “about things”.

The concept of intentionality originated in medieval philosophy, but was revived by Franz Brentano (1838–1916). It is related to but different from what is usually meant by “intentional”. It can be thought of as “aboutness”, and Brentano suggested that it was the “ineliminable mark of the mental”. Our beliefs, for example, are necessarily about something, and Brentano claimed that this is true for all mental phenomena, and no physical phenomena: thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, loving, wondering, and expectation are all about something: they take an object. This object need not actually exist—we might be thinking about a unicorn, or Santa Claus—but without some object, however imaginary, there is no thought.

Daniel Dennett, whenever we consider a piece of writing, for instance, to be “about something”, we are adopting the intentional stance towards it. It is not an intrinsic property of this string of symbols that we call “a sentence” that it has meaning. That depends on the attitudes towards it, and the uses made of it, by its writer and readers. And my belief that you have mental states that are about things, feelings, etc., is due to (or rather, simply, is) me taking the intentional stance towards you—and vice versa.

Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance, MIT Press, 1987.

(Some writers, unlike Dennett, distinguish between intrinsic intentionality, which they say people have, and derived intentionality, with which things like writings have to make do. These people are saying, in effect, that people are somehow special, while Dennett insists that the only thing special about people is the attitude, the stance, we take towards them. One of my biggest things, one of my main reasons for writing all this, is that I have a solution that accommodates both Dennett's skepticism and these others' (and my own) intuitions. This is explained in a section not yet online. Sorry!)

Dennett's other stances are:

• the physical, from which things are just things (a person, from the physical stance, would have no thoughts, feelings, etc.), and which is the mainstay of science, and
• the design stance, in which we assume things to have been designed, and ask questions like “what is it for?”

Belief in Creation is probably largely the result of taking the design stance towards natural phenomena. Asking “what is it for?” does often work when considering features of living things, but there it means not “what was it intended for?”, but “what evolutionary advantage did it confer?”

When a beam of light entering your eye carries information about an apple off which it has bounced, that information is encoded. The encoding takes place when the light encounters the surface of the apple and is filtered by the structures it finds there as it is reflected, so that the balance of the mixture of wavelengths within it is changed. The decoding takes place within the eye, the optic nerve and the brain, as that particular mixture of wavelengths is interpreted to be the colour of the apple. Only the light's own physical information enters the eye, but that can be processed to yield information about the apple. The physical information of the light is the carrier, the brain etc. is the decoding mechanism, and the apple's colour is the coded message. Without the intentional stance, all of the information in the brain etc., before and after the encounter with that particular beam of light, is “just” the physical information of its structure (however complex), but if we take the intentional stance, some of that physical information can be taken to encode intentional information about things outside the brain.

Dennett uses the concept of the intentional stance to emphasise that this is a strategy we adopt for certain purposes, even though its use is so habitual that we are not normally aware of it. If we ignore the encoding and decoding processes, taking the view that we receive information about an apple directly, when one is in sight, then we are taking the intentional stance. It is essentially a simplification, in which much processing is ignored. We take it when we think of DNA as the blueprint of the organism, as if the decoding mechanism were a person who would use it that way. When we view any information as being “about” any thing, we are taking the intentional stance. Otherwise, there is only physical information, which, as the form or structure of physical reality, is not about anything, and exists entirely for its own sake.

But it is worth noting that, where the intentional stance is adopted, it builds on the formal stance: mere matter cannot be “about” anything. Only information has that capacity. Just as we are usually unaware of taking the intentional stance, so Dennett was unaware of taking the formal stance, when he introduced the array of stances that omitted it.

The next level up in the hierarchy, above psychological information, is cultural information.​

 

[Soupie]

I = Awareness

You might want to go back and see the exchange between Soupie & I on this

Here's an exchange between two individuals about the same concept.

JCS-ONLINE

Buddhism and Subjective Experience

Robin Faichney

Keith Sutherland wrote:

Anyone who takes subjectivity seriously will ultimately have to acknowledge the experiencer as separate from the objects of experience.​

This assertion is unjustified. Buddhist philosophy takes subjectivity very seriously indeed, but in it subject and object are "ultimately" seen as one. The Enlightenment experience is commonly described as a transcendance of the subject/object dichotomy, in which there is no experiencer, nor thing experienced, but just experience. This is not to say that subject and object *are* necessarily not separate, as interpretations of that experience might differ, but it does invalidate the claim about "anyone who takes subjectivity seriously".

Keith Sutherland

This shows the confusion that we can arise from relying on books, oral traditions and other Travellers' Tales. Let's just for a moment forget all this philosophising -- Eastern or Western -- and just refer to our own experience. In this context I recommend we all re-read Mait Edey's post .

Let me assume therefore that whatever one may feel the "ultimate" truth to be, that none of us have any problem distinguishing ouselves from other things. As we follow our chosen spiritual path we should find that the self seems to get less selfish, as we identify less and less with the particular lump of rotting flesh that we carry around with us. If you just extrapolate that a bit, its quite easy to think of a graceful state in which the self has escaped from its skin-encapsulated cocoon.

(Continued at link above...)​

 

[smcder]

Here's an exchange between two individuals about the same concept.

JCS-ONLINE

Buddhism and Subjective Experience



I = awareness Deikman

(Continued at link above...)​

Have you done the experiments?

 

[Constance]

To help us get our feet on the ground . . .

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, CONSCIOUSNESS: A NATURAL HISTORY
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 5, No.3, 1998, pp. 260-94

Extracts:

". . . Without an account of consciousness, according to Searle, none of the theories can rightfully claim to be a theory of mind. . . .

The question of ‘how consciousness arises in matter’ thus appears absolutely central for both Nagel and Searle. In this paper I outline basic reasons for thinking the question spurious. This critical work will allow me to pinpoint troublesome issues within the context of definitions of life and in turn address the properly constructive task of this essay: to demonstrate how genuine understandings of consciousness demand close and serious study of evolution as a history of animate form. I should note that this demonstration will omit a consideration of botany, though plant life is indisputably part of an evolutionary history of animate form. The omission has nothing to do with importance, but with keeping a manageable focus on the question of consciousness; and it has nothing to do either with a trivialization of the ways in which plants are animate, but with an intentional narrowing of the complexity of an already complex subject. As will be shown in the concluding section, the demonstration has sizable implications for cognitivists generally and for philosophers in particular, notably: (1) a need to re-think the common assumption that unconsciousness historically preceded consciousness; (2) a need to delve as deeply and seriously into natural history as into brains and their computational analogues; (3) a critical stance toward arm-chair judgments about consciousness and a correlative turn toward corporeal matters of fact."

". . . We are a long way from a natural history of consciousness. Given the ultra- exclusive defining terms Dennett insists on, it is no surprise that that history is hard to come by. By radically privileging language, Dennett pulls the evolutionary rug out from under us.7 Whatever modest nods made in the direction of an evolutionary history at the beginning of his quest to ‘explain consciousness’, he does not follow through. A consideration of language itself in the terms he conceives it shows his lack of follow-through unequivocally. If, as Dennett explains, human language explains consciousness, then consciousness arose in the form of human language. The question Dennett does not ask himself is how human language itself arose.8 Clearly, he should ask the question. Indeed, he should ask not only how human language could even have been conceived short of an already existing consciousness but how human language in the beginning could even have been standardized short of already intact consciousnesses.9 Dennett does not seem remotely aware of such questions, much less aware of their needing answers — which is why only linguistic creationism can explain a Dennettian consciousness.

In sum, we cannot arrive at an understanding of ‘how mind got there in the first place’ by espousing biological naturalism but neglecting natural history, by wondering what it is like to be a body other than the one one is but neglecting penetrating studies of other animate forms, by championing a metaphysical theory that shackles inquiry before it even begins, by giving selective definitions of life, by privileging human brains, or by explaining consciousness in narrative terms. In none of these instances do we arrive at an elucidation of consciousness as a dimension of the animate. Until such an elucidation is given, a viable answer to the question of ‘how mind got there in the first place’ will be consistently baffled. "

Sheet

 

[Constance]

Further help in thinking through Kant:

“…nor can foot feel, being shod”.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins


“The Self as Noumenon”

Extracts:

“. . . Kant's metaphysics can be understood as having a positive and a negative result. Positively, it overcomes the aspects of skepticism inherent in the cartesian project and demonstrates that we have knowledge of the external world. Negatively, it asserts that we can have no rationally provable knowledge of the noumenal world of things in themselves outside the categories of our experience in space and time. Therefore, Kant's critique refutes both the skepticism inherent in empiricism, represented by Hume, as well as the claims to metaphysical knowledge of rationalists such as Leibniz.

To proceed further we will first need a schema of Kant's model of the mind. In common with other Enlightenment psychologies this is a "faculty" model, dividing the mind into clearly demarcated and classifiable aspects, each performing a specific function or activity.

This can be summarized in the following diagram, which we will now explain:

. . . There are two primary faculties, the sensibility and the understanding. The sensibility is "the capacity (receptivity) for receiving representations through the mode in which we are affected by objects." (pg 65) These representations take the form of intuitions. Kant writes, "In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge [eine Erkenntnis] may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed." (pg 65) The sensibility divides into a pure and an empirical component yielding, respectively, pure and empirical intuitions. Empirical intuitions are concrete sensations, i.e. seeing a rose, smelling it, touching it, etc. In contrast, pure intuitions are those "in which there is nothing that belongs to sensation. The pure form of sensible intuitions in general, in which all the manifold of intuition is intuited in certain relations, must be found in the mind a priori." (pg 66) For Kant, space and time are the pure intuitions of the sensibility.

The other faculty of cognition besides the sensibility is the understanding. If the sensibility is the passive faculty of the mind, being a receptivity to being affected by objects, the understanding is the active faculty of the mind. Intuitions, "are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts." (pg 65)

Concepts are, like the intuitions, either pure or empirical. Empirical concepts are the whole content of the mind and its possible thought, excepting all intuitions, i.e. memory, abstract ideas like weight or freedom, etc. This would include all working over and reflection on intuitions in thought (for example, picturing or remembering something), intuitions being solely the sensations themselves in their moment of sensation.

Pure concepts of the understanding, like the pure intuitions of the sensibility, have a formal relationship to empirical concepts such that they express the a priori form, or the condition of the possibility of empirical concepts. Kant writes that the content of thought, in order for it to be thought, must first already, "all be ordered, connected, and brought into relation." (pg 131) Kant calls this activity of cognition synthetic, or an activity of synthesis.

Synthetic is the same term used in the synthetic/analytic distinction, because in terms of the the logical form in question an analytic proposition only breaks open or analyzes a concept, while a synthetic proposition brings into relation two distinct concepts in an act of synthesis.

Following in the footsteps of the Aristotelian tradition, Kant constructs a table of categories, "of pure concepts of the understanding which apply a priori to thought concerning objects of intuition in general," (pg 113) and which constitute, "the list of all original pure concepts of synthesis that the understanding contains within itself a priori." (pg 113) The section of the Critique of Pure Reason where Kant constructs the table of categories is called the Transcendental Logic, and is where he deduces the pure concepts of the understanding in parallel with the deduction of the pure intuitions of the sensibility in the Transcendental Aesthetic.

We will not be discussing the Transcendental Logic further in this presentation, so that we can instead focus our attention on the argument of the Transcendental Aesthetic, where space and time are found to be the a priori pure intuitions of the sensibility, and the condition of the possibility of our cognition of objects. This will allow us to see clearly the procedure of what Kant calls the transcendental deduction, which is a philosophical method original to Kant that forms one of his most important contributions to philosophy, and which is central to later thought.

The Transcendental Aesthetic, then, is the portion of the Critique of Pure Reason to which we will now turn our attention and investigate Kant's deduction of space and time as the a priori condition of the possibility of any experiences of the world. . . .

This understanding of a standing transcendence, as I am calling it, is the main aspect of Kant's philosophy that I want to draw attention to in this presentation as being a form of non-dualism.

It does this not by eliminating, absorbing, or reducing differences, as in other philosophies, but rather by effecting a synthesis of elements into a phenomenal unity, while preserving epistemic and ontological degrees of priority between the elements.

This method in various forms proves to be extremely influential. It underlies Husserl's eidetic reduction and is adopted and modified by Heidegger in his existential analytic and formal indication.

From his conclusions regarding the nature of space and time Kant articulates a metaphysical position, which he calls transcendental idealism. We will now turn to examine and critique this position.

Space and time, Kant says, are in us, as the form of our sensibility. Therefore, he argues, they are not properties of things in themselves [ding an sich], but only of objects as appearances.

He writes, "What we have meant to say is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things which we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them as being, nor their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us, and that if the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish. As appearances, they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us." (pg 82)

Objects within space and time are empirically real. Simultaneously space and time are transcendentally ideal, while objects exist in some unknown manner independent of us as things in themselves. Regarding appearances, Kant wants to be clear that he does not consider them to be "a mere illusion. For in an appearance the objects, nay even the properties that we ascribe to them, are always regarded as something actually given. Since, however, in relation of the given object to the subject, such properties depend upon the mode of intuition of the subject, this object as appearance [Erscheinung] is to be distinguished from itself as object in itself [scheinen]." (pg 88)

Transcendental idealism therefore posits two distinct realms of reality, the phenomenal realm of the appearances of objects in space and time and the noumenal realm of things in themselves. As all our knowledge comes from experience, according to Kant's adoption of the empiricist model of cognition, and as we can have no experience of things in themselves, but only appearances, we cannot draw any metaphysical conclusions regarding the nature of the noumenal realm on the basis of pure reason. . . .”

http://thelemistas.org/en/MSS/Bjorge/Nondualism/SelfAsNeumenon



. . .”

 

[Constance]

Note, both of the above articles^^ should be read in full.

 

[Constance]

Yes... I like the clarifications.

Any views on the following:

On the questionable view that knowledge is roughly justified true belief, knowledge is belief dependent. And if we grant that belief is realised conceptually in the sense that you can believe that P only if you possess concepts sufficient for grasping P, then this would indicate that knowledge is always bound by the sophistication of conceptual limits. And if knowledge is to be held as truth, that further entails that knowledge is factive. Inevitably, the standard position is to assume that only humans are capable of possessing knowledge by virtue of the identification and conceptualised coalescing of beliefs about the facts of reality. However, it is surprisingly easy to illustrate that not all truths need necessarily be represented conceptually and indeed that some kinds of knowledge of truths cannot ever be conceptual in construction; which would mean that there can be true knowledge that is not justified true belief.

I like it with the addition of the adjective I suggest in blue at the outset. I suggest that change to prepare your analytical-school readers for the shock that awaits them in the last sentence of the paragraph (depending on the journal in which you eventually publish this paper).

[Biographical note: My ex, who always demanded that I edit his papers (a laborious task), sometimes complained that I made things "too painfully obvious." But given the difficulty Steve and I are having in following clear lines of development in Pharoah's writing, it's probably a good suggestion for Pharoah as well that he attempt to make his meaning clearer, sentence by sentence. I think Pharoah's doing so would help Soupie even more.]

 

[Constance]

Here's an exchange between two individuals about the same concept.

JCS-ONLINE

Buddhism and Subjective Experience





(Continued at link above...)​

Best line goes to Keith Sutherland: "one should beware of the Cloud of Unknowing becoming a smoke-screen to cover up incoherent arguments."

 

[Soupie]

Have you done the experiments?

Yes. We talked about this issue back in P1. It's probably when I began using the obnoxious phrase "the mind is green." Perhaps I'll change it to "I am green."

At times there is experience of being an experiencer distinct from what is experienced, and at other times there is only experience.

When I purposefully introspect, the I is always present. However, throughout the course of a typical day, there are many moments when the I is absent.

Based on my experience, most people intuitively feel/believe "I = awareness."

Imo this is a conceptual understanding. For example, a newborn baby likely does not hold the concept that "I am an awareness distinct from that which it is aware." However, it seems that most people reach this conclusion at some point in early childhood.

I am green.
I am awareness of green.

What could the truth of either of these two concepts reveal to us about the nature/origin of consciousness?

 

[smcder]

Yes. We talked about this issue back in P1. It's probably when I began using the obnoxious phrase "the mind is green." Perhaps I'll change it to "I am green."

At times there is experience of being an experiencer distinct from what is experienced, and at other times there is only experience.

When I purposefully introspect, the I is always present. However, throughout the course of a typical day, there are many moments when the I is absent.

Based on my experience, most people intuitively feel/believe "I = awareness."

Imo this is a conceptual understanding. For example, a newborn baby likely does not hold the concept that "I am an awareness distinct from that which it is aware." However, it seems that most people reach this conclusion at some point in early childhood.

I am green.
I am awareness of green.

What could the truth of either of these two concepts reveal to us about the nature/origin of consciousness?

JCS-ONLINE

You did the two experiments in this article back in P1?

Experiment 1: Stop for a moment and look inside. Try and sense the very origin of your most basic, most personal `I', your core subjective experience. What is that root of the `I' feeling? Try to find it.

Experiment 2: Look straight ahead. Now shut your eyes. The rich visual world has disappeared to be replaced by an amorphous field of blackness, perhaps with red and yellow tinges. But awareness hasn't changed. You will notice that awareness continues as your thoughts come and go, as memories arise and replace each other, as desires emerge and fantasies develop, change and vanish. Now try and observe awareness. You cannot. Awareness cannot be made an object of observation because it is the very means whereby you can observe.





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[smcder]

Yes. We talked about this issue back in P1. It's probably when I began using the obnoxious phrase "the mind is green." Perhaps I'll change it to "I am green."

At times there is experience of being an experiencer distinct from what is experienced, and at other times there is only experience.

When I purposefully introspect, the I is always present. However, throughout the course of a typical day, there are many moments when the I is absent.

Based on my experience, most people intuitively feel/believe "I = awareness."

Imo this is a conceptual understanding. For example, a newborn baby likely does not hold the concept that "I am an awareness distinct from that which it is aware." However, it seems that most people reach this conclusion at some point in early childhood.

I am green.
I am awareness of green.

What could the truth of either of these two concepts reveal to us about the nature/origin of consciousness?

"What could the truth of either of these two concepts reveal to us about the nature/origin of consciousness?"

Did you read the article?


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[Soupie]

Yes and yes.

 

[smcder]

Yes and yes.

Ok I didn't see a reference to Deikman before 1/19/15?

He discusses the implications at the end of the article.


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[Constance]

I am green.
I am awareness of green.

What could the truth of either of these two concepts reveal to us about the nature/origin of consciousness?

Yes and yes.

? Is one of your 'yes-es' meant to be a response to your question in the first quoted post?

 

[smcder]

Yes... I like the clarifications.

Any views on the following:
On the view that knowledge is roughly justified true belief, knowledge is belief dependent. And if we grant that belief is realised conceptually in the sense that you can believe that P only if you possess concepts sufficient for grasping P, then this would indicate that knowledge is always bound by the sophistication of conceptual limits. And if knowledge is to be held as truth, that further entails that knowledge is factive. Inevitably, the standard position is to assume that only humans are capable of possessing knowledge by virtue of the identification and conceptualised coalescing of beliefs about the facts of reality. However, it is surprisingly easy to illustrate that not all truths need necessarily be represented conceptually and indeed that some kinds of knowledge of truths cannot ever be conceptual in construction; which would mean that there can be true knowledge that is not justified true belief.

Yes, I remember the comment by the referee ... I'll go and have a look.



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[Soupie]

Ok I didn't see a reference to Deikman before 1/19/15?

I've been trying to sense—and seperately—build a concept of my "I" since childhood.

Re awareness. I have experienced the experience he describes, but as I've explained I disagree with his conception of the experience. Perhaps you would say I'm not disagreeing with him but only agreeing with myself.

 

[smcder]

I've been trying to sense—and seperately—build a concept of my "I" since childhood.

Re awareness. I have experienced the experience he describes, but as I've explained I disagree with his conception of the experience. Perhaps you would say I'm not disagreeing with him but only agreeing with myself.

I'm not sure yet if you are saying the same thing as Deikman ... It would be best to use his exact language..

And I understood "yes" to mean you had done the two specific exercises Deikman describes ... literally word for word those two exercises back in Pt 1 of the C&P? Earlier when I asked I thought you said you had read similar descriptions - I didn't think you said then you had done the specific exercises.

If you have done the specific Deikman exercises - exactly as he writes them, why not write up your experiences? I did this in a couple of posts ... and I plan to write up my responses to the rest of the article. Then we could be sure we are comparing apples with apples.


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