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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 23, 2017 - 08:36pm PT
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That works for me. You can't be wrong or right in this case.
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Not quite. You are still using an evaluation system appropriate to stuff, things, qualities, etc. But with awareness, the situation, and our epistemic sense of HAVING awareness, is a totally different phenomenon above and beyond the incident of evaluating external objects.
As mentioned, awareness is a given to being alive, the fundamental fact that is beyond question to anyone who has it. It is our deepest intuition about what is so and what is true. It is self-affirming. It is not some article of content with qualities nor yet quantities 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. Ontologically, having awareness is the proof of its existence. It is our fundamental assumption in being alive, before thought.
From a 3rd person perspective we indeed can't prove we are wrong or right about someone else having it because awareness is not an external object we can measure or evaluate. We can gauge awareness based on behavior and bio markers, but the evaluation per having awareness is implied and inductive. We can, however, prove when someone does NOT have it, in a the case of someone brain dead or blown up by a bomb, for example.
But the same intuitive knowing about what awareness is, per its fundamental nature, can also be self affirmed but in most traditions that focus on that work it must be demonstrated over a period of time and peer reviewed and vetted like crazy.
The controversy arises because with any other phenomenon we can arrive at 3rd person evaluations, but as we all know, our experience is directly available only to us, so plumbing the depths of awareness will always fall to the individual. Seeking neuro correlates is worthy work, but that's the public part of the phenomenon, and we cannot expect such investigations to disclose the "what it's like" aspect anymore than we can expect to know what it's like to be Fruity or Ed or Mike, something we all know we cannot do.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 23, 2017 - 08:36pm PT
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No sunrise is the same, and “the sun rises” is the grossest of declarations.
Your solipsism is showing, Mike. You seem to have your own definitions of words and you object to what most people take them to mean.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Feb 23, 2017 - 08:37pm PT
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DMT: Forest, I'd like you to meet a tree.
:-D
Largo: Owing to the absence of any thing or phenomenon to which you could possibly be mistaken.
“Absence” is a worthy consideration. Unfortunately, it’s like the number zero . . . a placeholder for just about anything. (Weird, huh?)
According to Wei Wu Wei, what needs to go along with absence is the very absence of absence. Then you’d be at emptiness.
As you might see, that requires some cognitive gymnastics. What is the being of no-being? Where is that? ( Jgill) Perhaps mathematics has something to say about that? Could that be similar to the “i” as in the square root of a negative number?
To this consciousness, the investigation all reeks of mind. It’s a kind of mental gymnastics that creates the very world we think we live in.
If one took away all of the trappings of a concrete reality, what would be left? Would everything then be gone and nonexistent? Ha—I don’t think so.
Be well.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 23, 2017 - 08:38pm PT
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You are still using an evaluation system appropriate to stuff, things, qualities, etc.
No I am not. Not intentionally. How do you know what evaluation system I am using?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 23, 2017 - 08:48pm PT
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You are still using an evaluation system appropriate to stuff, things, qualities, etc.
No I am not. Not intentionally. How do you know what evaluation system I am using?
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By the answer: You cannot be wrong or right.
No offense intended but yours are all very standard questions and opinions that are encountered during basic Zen training and have been for over 2,000 years. And you're right to keep asking them. the fact that you are using an evaluation system at all is the rock you will keep stubbing your toe on in this regards. It's taking a slide rule into emptiness. You eventually have to put it down for awareness to disclose the empty stage, so to speak.
What's more, there is nothing airy fairy of wo wo or magical to this whatsoever. It's simply using your consciousness in a way that is vastly counterintuitive and which goes directly against our evolutionary impulses.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Feb 23, 2017 - 08:51pm PT
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. . . in most traditions that focus on that work it must be demonstrated over a period of time and peer reviewed and vetted like crazy
OK. We're back to page one and the absolute necessity to meditate a certain way. This presumably leads to an epiphany . . . after which not much seems to happen. Except that you keep meditating year after year and achieving that same blissful state, realizing the "I" is a fabrication. Then what? Do you plunge deeper and deeper into that vacuum of nothingness? If so, tell us what you've discovered.
Scientists are hooked on experiment, conjecture, validate, prove, etc. and when they finish one project they move on to another. This makes for a fascinating career in which new discoveries keep popping up. It keeps the practitioner alive with the excitement of exploration.
What does your path of inquiry offer? Please be explicit.
What is the being of no-being? Where is that? ( Jgill) Perhaps mathematics has something to say about that?
I'll have to run that by Foxy Loxy also.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Feb 23, 2017 - 10:11pm PT
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Jgill: . . . you keep meditating year after year and achieving that same blissful state, realizing the "I" is a fabrication. Then what?
You keep living year after year and achieving the same XXX state, realizing (whatever it is) is a fabrication. Then what?
There’s no where to go, nothing to be, nothing that needs to get done. You find yourself exactly where you are, exactly where you need to be.
It doesn’t matter where that is. There is no final state, not even liberation or enlightenment . . . I’d say.
Why can’t we be here now, when there is no where else to go (even possibly)? (How can this be communicated?)
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Feb 23, 2017 - 10:21pm PT
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There’s no where to go, nothing to be, nothing that needs to get done. You find yourself exactly where you are, exactly where you need to be
OK, if that's the case why are we discussing "mind" and philosophically probing "first person" and "third person" and why does JL keep referring to quantum mechanics and postulating a "model" and why don't we accept what HFCS says about extremely complex circuitry being at the heart of it all and why does Foxy Loxy run laps in our back yard? It's all so perplexing. Is there no end to it?
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Feb 23, 2017 - 10:43pm PT
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If you ask Foxy Loxy he/she will give you the truth every time. Tomorrow starts the third or fourth time during this thread ( can't remember) I am off to an annual 8day zen retreat. See you in March.
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survival
Big Wall climber
Terrapin Station
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Feb 24, 2017 - 02:02am PT
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So did we figure out if a chigger has a soul, or what?
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Feb 24, 2017 - 07:34am PT
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This thread is hopeless, but not serious. I'm quite comfortable with things being hopeless...
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 24, 2017 - 07:52am PT
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Yes that is the conclusion of the gross materialists.
They always ultimately become frustrated in the end and say "Nobody knows" but in future "we" gross materialists will know.
And thus they continue their huge expensive endeavors at the expense of the poor people they take their money from.
Meanwhile, the knowledge is already there and completely proven.
All while the gross materialist's scientism infested system locks them out ......
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Feb 24, 2017 - 07:59am PT
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The duck ain't stupid. Did the duck vote for Trump?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Feb 24, 2017 - 08:10am PT
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Jgill: why are we discussing "mind" and philosophically probing "first person" and "third person" and why does JL keep referring to quantum mechanics and postulating a "model" and why don't we accept what HFCS says about extremely complex circuitry being at the heart of it all and why does Foxy Loxy run laps in our back yard? It's all so perplexing. Is there no end to it?
Geez, John, you have a lot of questions, don’t you. :-)
It IS perplexing. There IS no end to it.
Legend has it that the qualifying exam in a doctoral program in philosophy was simply the question, “Why?” This challenged and frustrated doctoral students for a number of years. Finally, one doctoral student had the guts to answer with one word as well: “Because.” He supposedly passed the exam.
Why, indeed. Why anything? Looking at the long list of possible answers to “why,” one might come to question the value of any answer. (Say “hello” to nihilism.) Even the value of life itself can be questioned when a life is difficult.
It’s been suggested that human beings created culture to whilst away time. Here we are.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Feb 24, 2017 - 08:13am PT
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"Reason is intelligence taking exercise; imagination is intelligence with an erection."
(Victor Hugo)
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Feb 24, 2017 - 08:21am PT
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OK. We're back to page one and the absolute necessity to meditate a certain way. This presumably leads to an epiphany . . . after which not much seems to happen. Except that you keep meditating year after year and achieving that same blissful state, realizing the "I" is a fabrication. Then what? Do you plunge deeper and deeper into that vacuum of nothingness? If so, tell us what you've discovered.
In Chinese and particularly Japanese culture, Zen produced a whole aesthetic with numerous superb art forms. That hasn't happened in the West yet. Zen folks are still debating if they should Americanize or follow Japanese forms. Zen art on the other hand, flower arranging being the one I am most familiar with, retains its character yet is different in every country. A Sogetsu flower arrangement in a hotel in India is unmistakably Sogets Ikebana yet looks quite different from the Korean or American versions if you're into subtleties.
What Zen will produce once it is truly indigenous in America we don't know, and probably won't live to see. Perhaps it will be just the kind of metaphysics that Largo is doing, not satisfying to the pure scientists but providing a bridge between humans and humans, and humans and robots, to reconcile one with the other and give meaning to both? I think we already have a kind of Zen of ecology in America - no place to go, nothing to do, just leave those less intelligent species in danger of extinction - alone.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Feb 24, 2017 - 08:26am PT
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Feb 24, 2017 - 12:10pm PT
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I wanna know more about that fun part. Like it, HFCS!
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 24, 2017 - 12:53pm PT
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Way to go, Dr. Mildred Dresselhaus! Outstanding!
The art forms Jan comments on can be beautiful, but aren't they products arising in raw awareness and as such objects, very much physical objects, of consciousness? John, are these things legitimate focal points for your inquiries? How do they fit into your upcoming model?
Foxy Loxy is very much a teenage girl, and she runs and jumps out of the pure joy of being.
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