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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Awareness, schmarness!
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 8, 2017 - 07:25pm PT
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Fruity, I didn't forget. But I had to review The Lonely for a writing assignment and thought I'd toss it out there again. Such a classic. It's what makes AI so fascinating.
And John, I think you might want to use another word other than "illusory" (based on illusion; not real) to describe awareness.
If you look at any aspect of your existence, awareness is a given. It is self-affirming. It is not some article of content we can be mistaken about. The crux is not what we are aware about - be it a unicorn or a boson - but rather that we are aware in the first instance. The fact that we are aware is simply beyond question for virtually all sane and sober sentient beings. WHAT we are aware about is a whole different deal, and so long as the two get conflated, I believe no meaningful look at "mind" can ever transpire.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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The fact that we are aware is simply beyond question for virtually all sane and sober sentient beings. WHAT we are aware about is a whole different deal, and so long as the two get conflated,
Do you consider it possible that an oyster could be aware?
If you have no knowledge of what a sentient being is aware of, can you talk about it being aware?
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jstan
climber
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Awareness is the realization that death is a possibility. Awareness, is therefore, a tool for survival and has evolved in all living things. So yes. Oysters are aware. It is not clear whether those believing some part of them will live forever, are aware. That belief is not a tool for survival.
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WBraun
climber
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Every living entity will always survive.
There is no need for artificial methods of survival ......
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Life evolves, to consciousness, and consciousness of consciousness, . . . and then ? :-) (We have much to look forward to *now.* Heh.)
I’m surprised at so much writing about supervenience. But hey, we all have opinions.
Two things jump out at me.
1. We can argue about anything on any ground. (What we know could be irrelevant.)
2. Everyone’s view is valid. Don’t you think so? If you’re fair, you can see that everyone has an argument. It’s a good thing to see that.
Every description, carefully designed and followed, yields an insight.
What THIS IS cannot be trapped by any one description. That should take one to an impasse. Now the thing to do, is to jump: fly, float, be groundless. As weird as it sounds, you’re not moving. Everything else is. You’re just finally starting to plug-in. A kind of automatic pilot takes one to anything and everything that’s needed.
There is no reason why every wisdom seems to come late. (Sigh.)
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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I think awareness is designed to be coupled with an object of awareness. The meditative state you have described in which awareness has no object is a condition that, apart from the pleasure of your experience, has no meaning. Therefore it should be irrelevant to a study of mind.
You and PSP differ in your descriptions of emptiness. Paul has commented on the mind being cleared for action. I.e., prolonging the pure existence of empty awareness is of no importance as it is seen as an initial step in focusing and moving forward in thought and deed. You, on the other hand, believe awareness has a kind of separate abstract existence that possibly can be investigated. The fact that there seems to have been very little if any progress in this direction over the span of human existence should caution you to be wary of wandering down that path. (yes, I know, for millennia monks have practiced this feat. Where has it taken them but deeper into themselves and not upward to the stars?)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Everyone’s view is valid.
If you work as a historian this is a difficult position to justify.
Let's take a look at an early historian's approach.
Against pseudo-history he applied a free, inquiring mind, unwilling to give any greater weight to Greek tradition, simply because he was a Greek, than to that of another race.
An awakening consciousness of the distinction between myth and fact is shown by his own words: “I write what I believe to be true; for the various stories of the Greeks are, in my opinion, ridiculous.”
Hecataeus of Miletus
ca. 500 B.C.
from
Hellenic History
George Willis Botsford
Charles Alexander Robinson, Jr.
Fourth Edition, Macmillan, 1956
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WBraun
climber
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The meditative state you have described in which awareness has no object is a condition that, apart from the pleasure of your experience, has no meaning.
I agree as that is just pure impersonalism.
Everything including the absolute has personality and variegatedness ......
Everyone’s view is valid.
Yep ...... difficult position to justify.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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"So you may be stuck with a conundrum. Being stuck in a dual view is the the source of the conundrum.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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^^^. And that's what I'm getting at. To perceive raw awareness as somehow separate from objects of awareness is an artificial duality. Good point.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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And John, I think you might want to use another word other than "illusory"
Yes, I meant like an illusion rather than an actual illusion. But some would recognize no difference, I suppose. Anti-duality in this context means one cannot separate awareness from its object in any real sense. But I've been wrong before. Let us know if you can get a grip on raw awareness.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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J gill said"You and PSP differ in your descriptions of emptiness. Paul has commented on the mind being cleared for action. I.e., prolonging the pure existence of empty awareness is of no importance as it is seen as an initial step in focusing and moving forward in thought and deed. You, on the other hand, believe awareness has a kind of separate abstract existence that possibly can be investigated. The fact that there seems to have been very little if any progress in this direction over the span of human existence should caution you to be wary of wandering down that path. (yes, I know, for millennia monks have practiced this feat. Where has it taken them but deeper into themselves and not upward to the stars?)"
John you are insightful but it is much more subtle than your dualistic POV attempting to define awareness and mind. It's a slippery slope because " it "is mind not attached to thinking or feeling but at the same time mind that can observe thinking and feeling. "It" is not devoid of thinking and feeling as some ducks think we are talking about.
This is not an easy thing to write about and I am probably not really qualified to do it . I generally have poor writing skills, a limited vocabulary and most of all observe I have many attachments skewing my POV. Similar to when Ed said scientists know they are bias
; we have very strong conditioning that tends to bias our POV.
So the zen style meditation practice is to perceive the conditioning and to let it go; it is so deep there are many layers to let go and they can be very subtle. If you are trying to get something (some special super feeling)it is the antithesis of letting go. As you let go of more conditioning the awareness becomes more raw, more experience less theoretical.
At some point in the practice you arrive to perceiving the dualistic POV; that is the main thing that separates us from experiencing an unconditioned awareness. That's why in Zen a key questions is ; what is this "I" that wants things to be different than the way they are?
P.S. I had supertopo blocked a work so am not able to get as much access or respond quicker.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nice reply. But raw awareness still sounds like a very slippery quality of mind, ungraspable except as pure meditative experience and therefore not an accessible subject for scientific or intellectual investigation. Deeper neuroscientific studies might shed light on its physical basis, however.
Or some topologist out on the fringes of abstraction will develop the open sets of an awareness topology. The snowball effect is that bad in mathematics.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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It is acessable as a scientific or intellectual investigation. You just have to do it; as opposed to analyzing something we have not done. Back to the map is not the territory.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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JG:
I don’t believe in much of anything anymore. I’m just trying to stay open to what’s in front of me.
Sure there’s emptiness. All that stuff about what things are, how we know them, what’s going on, . . . I’m sure that’s important in some universe. It doesn’t much seem to matter. Living is such a full time affair. It’s difficult to find the time for these conceptual machinations sometimes,
It’s always good spending time with one another. I’m sure that’s whatever important will get ironed out among us. We are all good people.
I like the conversation between you and PSP.
There is no saying what objectless awareness is. I can’t say what that is anymore than I can say what the taste of sugar is to someone who has never tasted it. Pfffftttt! There is not a shared language for such things. (Much more research is needed to develop standards of performance.)
You seem to think that an empty stage means that nothing will go on. I suggest that a naked stage offers the greatest opportunity for anything to happen. I suppose that you might think that nothing should have the open opportunity to happen. (What kind of world would that be??)
For those people (liberals) who want to achieve the absolute freedom possible, I suggest a practice in emptiness. When nothing is concrete or serious, magical things will happen. It’s safe to say that when things are concrete and serious, then predictability will arise, and now a lot of pain a suffering will show up. Things WILL get ugly.
If one suspends all beliefs for just a moment (for argument sake), one can see (will face?) a much different event horizon. (Do you grok “event horizon?”) One will not know what one faces until that thing / event show up in the *now.* Only then will a thing’s “potential” will become realized: the dharmakaya will transform to the nirmanakaya. On other words, things become reified. Then everything becomes serious and concrete. (Didn’t Niels Bohr talk about this?)
I”m sorry that I encouraged folks to go to the Physics-for-Regular-Folk lecture series online at the U of A. Aside from atrocious self-aggrandizement and hawking for donations, I found the first two poorly presented and not exactly inspiring. The U of A makes cool telescopes underground (below the football stadium) and all, but if good science needs to be hawked, then we’ve really lost our way.
Be well.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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^^^^^^^
DMT, In so many ways, I see the need for some basic business skills just about everywhere.
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messnerrocks
Mountain climber
Bozeman
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Feb 10, 2017 - 09:58am PT
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Wow, this thread goes on and on. I think you all are over thinking this topic. Mostly verbose semantics arguing definitions of words that make it seem like there is some mystical, higher thing going on in your brain. What is mind? A bunch of neurons firing in your brain making connections with other neurons in the brain. What is mind in an amoeba? Same for us but more complicated because we have more neurons. The idea of consciousness is just knowledge that you exist and will die. It's not that complicated. There is nothing special about the human brain that elevates it above other living organisms except it's complexity. You will probably disagree, but I haven't seen this idea expressed here, so I thought I would give an alternative perspective.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Feb 10, 2017 - 11:43am PT
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Well, glad that problem's solved. Back to the religion thread I suppose.
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