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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Ed: . . . Largo defends the point-of-view that is essentially impossible to justify, and equally impossible to demonstrate... to wit, that humans possess something that no other thing in the universe possess.
I don’t see how one could ever say what others have or don’t have IF that thing that is impossible to justify seems to be the very thing that is at least one necessary part perceiving others. How could one ever claim, then, “an exceptionalism?”
Known and unknown are not synonyms for something and nothing.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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jgill: . . . in monitoring the environment non-consciously . . . there is also feeling of having awareness [i am aware] which is not necessarily doing monitoring but lip service to some form, however minor, of some iota of monitoring.
In an incomplete sense of speaking, that conclusion seems to be in the ballpark.
Due to a medical issue, I’m up and down 5-7 times a night, and oftentimes desperate for sleep. I pad around the house in search for new or more comfortable places to fall back asleep, and as I do so I am often in some state of semi-consciousness. I awake confused about my location and my being. “What’s going on?” I can’t tell if I’m in a dream or not. Luckily I have some training that seems to help alleviate disorientation that I’ve gotten from years of meditation.
Oftentimes sitting in the early morning hours before the sun arises after a late night, I’ve been overcome by drowsiness and have toggled back and forth between different dream states (this one and that other one). But my mind has learned to take that into account and hold on to attention as they switch back and forth, and some of the subtleties in-between. I can see parts of unconsciousness. Recently becoming a painter in my retirement (and attuned academically to various processes of improvisation, trance, wu-wei, hot cognition, etc.), I’ve also been consciously watching how my unconscious / intuition is communicating through *bodily actions* and through symbols as I struggle with “problems” in my painting (expressions and sometimes representations). What I suggest to you is that there are other things going on than what I can conceive and communicate in detail. I just can’t say, but I’m seeing it. The more I watch, the more I see.
For those of you who are readers, I would suggest The Tibetan Book of the Dead, if you can suspend your wont for physical definitiveness for a little while. The entire society of old Tibet was oriented to preparing a person so that they could achieve enlightenment at the most opportune time—when death of the body was near. The book is a process manual for how to recognize and deal with the different stages of consciousness devolution. The point being here is that one can be taught and see the dissolution of consciousness. There are also equal procedures the mahasiddhas or yogis use to visualize / simulate the same dynamics.
It’s been said that The Tibetan Book of the Dead was written for the living rather than for those who were about to die. The point of that was to avoid taking this apparent life all too seriously or concretely.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 3, 2017 - 11:10am PT
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All organisms have some kind of monitoring of their surroundings and you can call this awareness if you want. But most of these organisms do not go around saying they are aware, which is simply saying a word for the feeling that describes what state you are in regarding this monitoring.
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Here, you have conflated (IMO) awareness with machine registration that occurs mechanically with, say, a motion detector.
Your contention is that awareness is bound up with goings on in their surroundings. Or that your "feeling" of awareness vanishes when we are absorbed in high focused activity.
Actually, awareness doesn't change at all in any of these starts, but what happens to you when you let your surroundings drop away and don't narrow focus on a ski run or a thought or anything at all. Awareness is still there, just like it always was.
What you are trying to do is grasp the nature of awareness in terms of a function or state of mind. That's why your descriptions are so muddled, in my view.
I have noticed that one thing that many people have is a kind of cognitive glitz or stumble when asked to consider awareness that is NOT fused to evaluating or external stimuali or tasking.
And Ed, what ever made you think that "no other thing in the universe posses" awareness. I said earlier that awareness is fundamentally the same for every life form that has it. What is different is between us and the other life forms is the robustness of our brains, which feed content to awareness.
What I did say is that awareness is unlike any other phenomenon in the universe - unless you can tell us otherwise. But humans don't have an exclusive on awareness. Just don't go and start conflating sentient awarenss with machine registration, which occurs with syntactic engines - like the motion senor in my back yard that flips on a light.
But once again, the knee-jerk response to conflate awareness with content, or feelings, or sensations, of some state or function, is what makes most people circle the wagon on these issues, IMO. The escape hatch for the circling is to simply suspend all efforts to monitor anything, including the feeling of being aware. The the picture starts to clear up.
Otherwise you end up with statements like this: "The feeling of awareness or having or needing an awareness does not come about when we are very busy and focused."
You don't ever get "very busy" or "focused" without first being aware of WHAT you are busy with or focused upon. Awareness is postulated in both - we can easily see why. But you can never appreciate what awareness is so long as awareness is fused or enmeshed with content. One of the interesting things about this is that awareness can never be experienced AS content, because you can never escape it to evaluate it "out there." And Ed's justified is begging for a physical cause, isn't it. And a function the you can demonstrate from a 3rd person perspective. Funny thing is you can find out for yourself easy enough. Why not give it a shot?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Mike, that was Dingus McGee, not jgill. No probleme . . .
;>)
Get some rest.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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aren't you basically saying that the substrate "creat[e]s" or gives rise to consciousness, or is the agency from which consciousness emerges
I am not saying those things. I will say that without a brain a person will not have consciousness.
That still leaves you with the Hard Problem
Not me. I am interested in incremental advances in understanding brain function. If there is a Hard Problem such as Chalmers proposes, we have not come up against it, yet.
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WBraun
climber
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I will say that without a brain a person will not have consciousness.
Consciousness will still be there.
You will just be a vegetable but consciousness will still be there as long as you remain in the body.
When you leave your gross material body then all consciousness in that material body will cease.
You'll be like the driver in the automobile with a dead computer.
You'll be just sitting consciously in there drooling because the car will not go anywhere.
So you'll get out of the car, leave and get another car.
Stoopid people will stay in the car and think they are the car and they are now dead.
That's the brainwashed consciousness of the gross materialists .......
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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But you can never appreciate what awareness is so long as awareness is fused or enmeshed with content
But the appreciation of awareness - the empty stage - is a momentary pleasure and doesn't allow an investigator any traction in the pursuit of the hierarchy of consciousness. If anything could be said to be mere navel-gazing that is it. It's when the wheels of consciousness begin spinning that life becomes interesting. Where does this focus on empty awareness lead?
Far more intriguing is the way the brain, or mind, manipulates time. A slamming door awakens us, but the mind weaves a narrative leading up to the bang that seems to precede the incident. And yet we are instantly awakened. How can this be?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jgill,
My apologies for the confusion. Believe it or not, I was responding to your report that consciousness is an umbrella term. I fumbled the cut-n-paste. I blame my wife. I commented on your choice of words “non-conscious awareness,” but I can see that my conveyance was not successful. Rather than the abstract ideas the ISSA website provides, I’ll ask a more pointed question that might get you to the point.
With regards to your experiences in lucid dreaming, how is it that one wakes up into unconsciousness? Is one conscious or not? Would you say there an entity that is conscious in a dream? Is the dream real (in reality)?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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With regards to your experiences in lucid dreaming, how is it that one wakes up into unconsciousness? Is one conscious or not? Would you say there an entity that is conscious in a dream? Is the dream real (in reality)?
When you "awaken" in a dream you become fully conscious, realizing you are in a dream state. You are not unconscious. In the Art of Dreaming you become pure will - pure I-consciousness - seemingly capable of free will and thrilled to be able to exercise it. Depending upon the depth of your involvement you may or may not have a "dream body". Forty years ago when I did this sort of thing regularly I almost always had a body with bodily sensations.
My first experience I decided to arise and walk over to the closed door to see if I can walk through it. I still remember feeling the fibers of the rug I was walking on and putting a hand on a dresser and stroking the wood. As I moved through the door it was as if I was moving through dense fog momentarily.
Other times I would be an observer looking at whatever appeared and able to shift my gaze at will, contemplating what I was seeing. This happened last week, as I have written.
It's so easy to come awake. All you need to do is form intent, and I do not mean exerting any mental effort. Just tell yourself you will have the experience and relax.
In a way this seems to be an opposite of Zen, in that your "I" is fully realized and has magnificent prowess.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jgill: In a way this seems to be an opposite of Zen, in that your "I" is fully realized and has magnificent prowess.
Well, . . . . I don’t remember that perspective or understanding about Zen. Most of which I remember was simply, pain (smile).
I would not presuppose to speak for a Zen disciple, but in my experience with Zen (about 7-10 years), I don’t remember anyone referring to a fully realized “I.” It’s my understanding that the practice brings a more open view that subsumes an “I.” There is an “I,” but only that among an uncountable number of other perspectives. Sort of like watching 250 TVs at the same time.
Thank you for your description about lucid dreaming. I see that you don’t appear to hesitate to say what and how things are / were in your lucid dreaming. I might have thought that if you’ve had the experience, you’d be a bit hesitant to say who and what you or your consciousness is—at least in that context. I mean it’s interesting that you’d be fully conscious in a dream state. I guess it was just a recognized hallucination, huh? Was it ever your experience that you would see outside of your body in the moment, discoverable things in the awakened state?
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WBraun
climber
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Is there and "I" that controls my behavior independent of my brain.
YES
Just as the driver ultimately controls the car he drives independent of the computer within the car.
The computer ultimately responds to the commands of the driver.
This is a crude example that only gross materialists might even understand although I seriously doubt the gross materialist can even understand a simple thing period.
They're way too brainwashed in their western mechanistic defective science is the only way ......
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Is there and "I" that controls my behavior independent of my brain.
Yes.
No.
Wait a minute,
Yes.
On second thought,
No
I mean, Yes
Maybe No
Could be Yes.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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I think part of the the problem is that trying to decide if there is an "I" in charge apart from the brain or if only the brain is in charge does get a bit absurd. The corporate model with a CEO or president in charge doesn't seem to be a very enlightening point of view. I would say that the person (or even that part of the person you want to call "the mind") is much more than the brain. Although I would also say the brain is a fundamental part of what we call the mind (in math we always distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions but rarely use anything like a corporate model). Does that make me a "gross materialist"? I suppose, because I think the physical entity of the brain is a necessary condition for consciousness. If somehow you could grow a human brain in a bath of fluid, removed from sensory contact, devoid of language, culture and shared experiences with others; never experiencing the challenge of learning to walk, the love of its parents, play with companions, how could it be conscious in any meaningful way?. This brain never even experienced sucking a thumb in the mother's womb.
As the smoking duck points out, even a computer needs programing (software) which is nice to distinguish from hardware. Plus it needs a connection to the outside world to engage. I kind of doubt the human mind is best understood as 1s and 0s (although I may be wrong) but to say a computer is "just" circuitry is to ignore the importance of programming and the importance of a connection to the "outside" world (even with a computer it seems useful to distinguish "outside" from "inside"). It may be that the computer model is a useful way to understand some aspects of the human mind, but even in a very rigid system with strict rules, like playing chess, the computer appears to think in a very different way than the human it plays against.
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TWP
Trad climber
Mancos, CO & Bend, OR
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I quote Jan, 20 posts antes, whose views correspond to mine. (We both studied anthropology ... does that explain our viewpoint?).
"The knowable and especially the unknowable are the answers to those things which our ape minds and ape developed technology will never be capable of understanding. We don't expect an ant to understand Plato and realistically we can't expect ourselves to know the universe, let alone its purpose or meaning."
To expound on this point:
How hubristic to assume humans are capable of understanding the profound questions we barely comprehend!
Are humans the paragon - the be all and end all - of consciousness, intelligence and evolutionary potential?
How absurd to assume so!
On the bacteria-plant-ant-mammal-primate-human tree of evolution, why do we think we've reached a pinnacle from which the mysteries of the universe have become "knowable" to us? But not those "lesser" forms?
Best we give up the pretense any human can achieve the "ultimate" of awareness, perception, intelligence, etc. which we wish were within our grasp. To wit: we should give up the idea we can ever be "god-like" in any of our abilities. Thou I profoundly wished in this lifetime - for myself and through diligence and meditation - that I could disprove the hypothesis which I have just put forth.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 5, 2017 - 01:19pm PT
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Talking about "I" and personalities and sub personalities pertain to psychological studies.
If you really wanna get jiggy with that work, et into 4th Way work or Sufi stuff. This leads to Enneagram work, which is often coated with all kinds of New Age shuck and jive but the basic stuff, especially that worked up by Aalmas and others, is robust work.
The most comprehensive look at the "I" and subpersonalities I have found is Hal Stone and the Psychology of Selves. As is usually the case with this stuff, this is slow going, and generally takes years to even get a feel for what is involved.
But it's all there for whoever is looking.
BTW you can find out a ton about free will by simply watching your creative process when tasking - doing a math problem or writing a poem or whatever. It's always a dance between the geyser of options supplied from your brain and awareness/"you" sorting and sifting and honing in on the promise land. The feedback loops involved are mind-boggling to consider.
JL
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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even with a computer it seems useful to distinguish "outside" from "inside"
Inside what boundary, outside what boundary?
Many thanks for your participation, hoping that does not transgress your bounds.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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I'm typing on the keyboard of my computer so it will engage with something on the outside (namely: me). Even when it's powered on, it will go to sleep (something that happens inside) when it's not engaged for awhile. When I install an ap it comes from outside (e.g. downloaded from the internet) and gets put inside. If your computer breaks, you might try opening it up to look on the inside. Or you might just throw it away and get a new one. I"m not trying to make any big ontological claims here. Just common use of language.
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