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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Aug 14, 2015 - 11:35am PT
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JL said "Again, maybe I am misinterpreting Ed, but from my understanding, and per the standard take from the experiential camp, strictly speaking there's no such thing as an "objective experience.” Every experience we have occurs inside our personal subjective/experiential bubble, so in a sense, it's all ultimately subjective."
I think you are correct with this statement; and you are either attached to the experience or not attached.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Aug 14, 2015 - 03:04pm PT
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HFCS, all I meant was that I can't literally hear their thoughts, only how they express them with words and expressions. A certain amount of guessing is involved.
I pretty much agree with your perspective about age and wisdom and would only add that some I have met show more or less in those domains. Some don't show much wisdom and some don't age so fast. Choices, I suppose.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 14, 2015 - 06:54pm PT
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Ed said:
My focus lately has been on what "experience" is, and whether or not it is a separate phenomena than any other physical phenomena. My contention is that there is no difference.
Because I cannot get Ed to answer the question - what do you perceive the difference is between an object and subjective experience, it's hard to bore in on this because perception itself is conflated with the content (qualia) of experience.
What I believe Ed is saying in the quote above is that the stuff that falls under the light of his consciousness - which constitutes his "experience" - seems qualitatively the same insofar as it is all furniture, so to speak, for sentience.
In this sense, a feeling, a thought, a bowling ball, a song, a rainbow, a partridge and a pear tree all appear in the field of Ed's awareness in much the same way. So when Ed says he is exploring what experience is, I believe (because this is a very common avenue to explore in meditation) his focus is entirely on qualia, the content, the thoughts, feelings, sensations, dreams and so forth that pass through his awareness.
When Mike said Ed was searching down the wrong rabbit hole, he wasn't trying to say Ed was doing anything wrong. Rather, if my interpretation of what Ed is saying is correct or in that ballpark, it's simply a case that his meditation teacher has not yet given him the assignment or instruction to start learning to detach from content - as PPPPPPS has been saying all along.
When you learn to detach from content - and virtually every experiential tradition calls content impermanent, without any ultimate reality ("no more significant than a dog barking in an alley") - you will slowly or perhaps quickly realize what Ed has claimed is not so - that perception itself (NOT, I repeat NOT the impermanent content of perception) is in and of itself quite a different article than any other phenomenon in "physical reality." You need to be careful not to assign a value judgement on this, that sentience is "better" than anything else. But rather, consciousness is not selfsame as content. Or the physical objects in our sense data field.
Once you start to detach from mind, the mind is no longer trying to discursively reckon itself - an impossible task akin to (as mentioned) trying to kiss your own lips. We can never escape ourselves to get a 3rd person POV. Once this process begins, the "I" slowly starts calving away and there is no longer anyone watching, there is simply watching. And when detachment deepens, watching shifts to conscious presence.
This is a radical shift of which no one is ever mistaken. And it can happen to anyone quite unexpectedly, though most people must work into it by way of conscious and supervised practice, as is the case with most any exacting discipline.
Note the words of writer W.H. Hudson, writing of being a caballero in Patagonia over a century ago:
"I had always been able to think most freely on horseback; and on the pampas, even in the most lonely places, my mind was always most active when I traveled at a gallop. This was doubtless habit; but now, with a horse under me, I had become incapable of reflection about my experience; my mind had suddenly transformed itself from a thinking machine into a vehicle for some other unknown purpose. To think was like setting in motion a noisy engine in my brain; and there was something there that bade me be still, and I was forced to obey. I was all suspense and watchfulness, yet I had no expectation of meeting with an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as I feel now sitting in a room in London. The change in me was just as great and wonderful as if I had changed my identity for that of another man or animal; but at the time I was was powerless to wonder at or speculate about it; the space felt familiar rather than strange, and although accompanied by a strong feeling of elation, I did not know it, did not know that something had come between me and my intellect - until I lost it and returned to my former self - to thinking, and the old insipid existence."
Of course the next step here is for Hudson (RIP) to have detached from this elation etc. and go back to to being present with that watchfulness. Once that starts to deepen over time, objective evaluations and insights are a possibility, though NOT about the content of awareness (we are NOT doing science without instruments here) - the people, places, things and phenomenon - but rather to the watchfulness itself, and the universal aspects of same.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 14, 2015 - 07:40pm PT
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that perception itself (NOT, I repeat NOT the impermanat content of perception) is qualitatively entirely different than any other phenomenon in the reality
aside from the sloppy grammar, I think you don't have any basis for this statement.
The "process" by which the "perception itself" is compared with "every other" phenomenon happens to be an objective process (by definition of objective). It is a process that requires a description of both the "perception itself" as well as "every other" phenomenon.
What is readily apparent in this statement is the humungous over-reach of the claim, for starters, we cannot describe "every other" phenomenon, we don't know the totality of possible phenomena. Also, we cannot compare these things without some representational language with which to describe them. I agree that "reducing" the "perception itself" to language, and our experience of "every other" phenomenon, is an abstraction that may miss many features of the things we are trying to describe.
When this happens in a meaningful way, we usually develop language to help capture the important nuances. Once again, lack of a representative language doesn't imply the impossibility of making a description, which is implied by the claim of uniqueness of "perception itself."
The fact that we are talking about it at all indicates the very possibility that we can talk about it...
The paradox is the no-MikeL-thing statement I made above... MikeL can choose to not participate at all in this conversation, when he does not, we have no idea what his ideas, perceptions, and experience on these matters would be.
You have experiences, I have experiences, we communicate our experiences, we compare them, and we find commonality in the descriptions we communicate. We know that our language does not represent the thing exactly, but we also know that it captures many of the aspects of those experiences.
As far as meditation practice, there seems to be some interesting idea that I don't experience detachment, but from your descriptions (and other descriptions) and from my experience, I have achieved such a meditative state.
There are other, similar states I've been in, related to the idea of "experience itself," not necessarily via a process of formal meditation. I don't see it as something unique from "every other" phenomenon.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Aug 14, 2015 - 08:08pm PT
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Objective vs subjective: You are objective when you collect data, formulate theory, and predict results. You are subjective when you are frustrated as you collect data and rant a bit, when you are unable to make two ends of the theory match and curse your wife and children, and when you make a prediction only to find it wrong and throw a temper tantrum in the faculty lounge.
That's it.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Aug 14, 2015 - 08:42pm PT
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JL posted " but now, with a horse under me, I had become incapable of reflection about my experience; my mind had suddenly transformed itself from a thinking machine into a vehicle for some other unknown purpose. To think was like setting in motion a noisy engine in my brain; and there was something there that bade me be still, and I was forced to obey. I was all suspense and watchfulness, yet I had no expectation of meeting with an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as I feel now sitting in a room in London. The change in me was just as great and wonderful as if I had changed my identity for that of another man or animal; but at the time I was was powerless to wonder at or speculate about it; the space felt familiar rather than strange, and although accompanied by a strong feeling of elation, I did not know it, did not know that something had come between me and my intellect - until I lost it and returned to my former self - to thinking, and the old insipid existence."
It made me laugh because it was so familiar (good representational speech). The part that caught my attention is how shocking it is when the internal chatter stops and how intense the awareness is. The chatter is so dominant it is hard to believe it could ever stop and when it does stop ; well, how could the same thing be so amazingly vibrant.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 14, 2015 - 10:05pm PT
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that perception itself (NOT, I repeat NOT the impermanat content of perception) is qualitatively entirely different than any other phenomenon in the reality
aside from the sloppy grammar, I think you don't have any basis for this statement.
The "process" by which the "perception itself" is compared with "every other" phenomenon happens to be an objective process (by definition of objective). It is a process that requires a description of both the "perception itself" as well as "every other" phenomenon.
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What would you consider a valid "basis" for this statement, given that we have made it clear that we are NOT doing science without instruments, and that the ground traverse starts where discursive evaluating dead ends?
Where you get hung up, Ed, and lost, in my experience, is in believing that the only way to know or comprehensively encounter a phenomenon is through describing or quantifying. And if he quantification is sound, then the basis for knowing is real. This is to try and make maps (language, numbers, etc,) do more than they can. A topo can never replace climbing the route. Furthermore, you do the route first, THEN describe it.
I don't need to describe perception itself to know that it (raw awareness) is totally unlike any other phenomenon I have ever encountered in reality. If nothing else, all other phenomenon I or anyone else has ever described, can be directly encountered "out there," at a distance from perception itself. Even qualia has borders, however indistinct. But perceiving can never be perceived as an object "out there," for obvious reasons.
Of course we don't have an infinite sample base to draw from to complete Ed's comparisons, but no one in the history of the world has ever insinuated by any means - from art to music to math to poetry - that sentience itself is "just like" or even remotely similar to any object that you or anyone else has ever described. If you believe otherwise, give us ONE example. Then tell us how awareness (which is NOT content "out there") is, for example, qualitatively "just like" a fig tree (content that IS "out there," graspable with sense data).
No one can supply one single instance where sentience is intelligently compared with an object - though by Ed's past descriptions of machines to which he ascribes awareness and experience, I suspect he might conflate mechanical input or uptake processes with the "watchfulness" that Hudson mentioned in his quote - even though Hudson was very clear that he was not talking about content. Just as it is very clear that the machine is not communicating to us its experience with watchfulness sans objects - that much we can surely agree on.
The reason a person might consider sentience the same as any other phenomenon is that what Hudson encountered has not yet become their direct experience, otherwise they would have had Pssp's immediate reaction to it - that watchfulness is entirely different then "any other object." There simply is no one we can find on any land mass who has directly encountered that watchfulness sans content, who would EVER remotely conflate it with every other material thing in the world. The notion is experientially absurd.
But to really bore into this, allow me the following questions:
Do you understand, experientially, the difference between content (qualia) and perception itself? Does this make any sense to you at all? And have you ever received expert instruction on detachment and impermanence?
There was a reason I asked you to try and describe the difference between sentience and an object, and I suspect there is a reason you have yet to entertain the question.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 14, 2015 - 10:44pm PT
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Where you get hung up, Ed, and lost, in my experience, is in believing that the only way to know or comprehensively encounter a phenomenon is through describing or quantifying.
what are we doing on this thread?
and to your prosecutorial inquiry (no one expects the Spanish Inquisition!)
Do you understand, experientially, the difference between content (qualia) and perception itself?
I'm not sure that qualia=content, but let's leave that question aside. And I'm not sure of the modifier "experientially," but I believe I fully understand the difference between the act of perception and what is being perceived (the "content"). It is a rather elementary distinction.
Does this make any sense to you at all?
Absolutely makes sense.
And have you ever received expert instruction on detachment and impermanence?
Probably not that you would recognize as expert.
No one can supply one single instance where sentience is intelligently compared with an object - though by Ed's past descriptions of machines to which he ascribes awareness and experience, I suspect he might conflate mechanical input or uptake processes with the "watchfulness" that Hudson mentioned in his quote - even though Hudson was very clear that he was not talking about content. Just as it is very clear that the machine is not communicating to us its experience with watchfulness sans objects - that much we can surely agree on.
I think you missed the point of this argument entirely. And I think it is precisely because you cannot say why we would "surely agree."
The point is that we cannot say how we know each other experiences "watchfulness." To the point of your last question, "... have you ever received expert instruction on detachment and impermanence?" you might appeal to an authority (your "expert") to certify that I had received proper instruction on detachment and impermanence. We would have the expert's word that I had successfully achieved the state of "watchfulness." Yet oddly, neither the expert nor anyone else can actually know with any certainty that I had or had not. It is, after all, my experience alone.
If I am incorrect on this point, perhaps you can explain how you would know if I had achieved the state of "watchfulness" or if I had not... instead of making an innuendo.
What is it that you learn from an expert that applies to your experience? at best, the expert can only inquire, using a representative language, which the student learns the grammar of, and the definitions describing process and the state.
How does this representative language differ from other, alternative languages?
finally, a set of questions for you:
how do you learn to meditate?
what is the role of your "expert"?
and by what means does the "expert" assess the progress of your learning?
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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Aug 15, 2015 - 06:02am PT
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"The Correct Color of Sunrise"
The reporter asked the venerable old monk the question,
"How did you know you were to be the spiritual leader?"
And the old monk answered,
"What is the correct color of the sunrise?"
The reporter was taken aback and then after thinking said,
"I suppose its whatever color the sky is when the sun rises that day."
And the old monk replied,
"How do you know what color the sky will be when you wake up that day?"
The reporter was stymied,
"I don't have any idea what color it will be."
And the the old monk said,
"Exactly!"
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Aug 15, 2015 - 09:27am PT
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Aug 15, 2015 - 11:02am PT
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That's very sad, Cintune.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Aug 15, 2015 - 11:27am PT
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If I had a point to make in this up above, it’s simply that making comparisons between conscious perceptions and consciousness is not the same thing. (Can one be conscious without being conscious of some object?) In the first instance, it would appear that one can generalize or categorize perceptions by focusing on the content of those perceptions. But since perceptions appear IN consciousness—all perceptions whether imaginary, “real,” or something in-between (???)--there can be no basis for comparisons when it comes to consciousness itself. Consciousness appears to be unavailable to categorization. Or, if you will, consciousness is THE Categorization—of which there is really only One.
In this consciousness (the one I call my own), all other so-called consciousness (of “others” that I cannot be sure of) still resides within the consciousness that appears to be my own.
Consciousness is not something that one can get outside of. It embraces everything and any not-thing that can be grasped.
What I’ve just written immediately above is somewhat logical and based upon reason . . . but the very living of it goes so so far beyond. My consciousness is infinitely wide, deep, breadth, depth, high, low, etc. I can look at anything and see another universe of infinities within it. Colors, sounds, sights, feeling, thoughts . . . all these appear to be innumerable, endlessly varied, and indescribable. Yet there is only one thing that allows me to make that statement: consciousness.
Categorizing or attempting to describe or “represent” consciousness seems to be the most real impossibility there is. (What a confounding linguistic statement that is.)
What we seem to create with language, math, and any other form of representation are “close approximations,” and they can be very effective as long as we stay at a relatively superficial level (even down to super micro or super macro levels of analyses). We can always go wider, deeper, higher, etc. and build out another, broader context. But it too only exists within consciousness.
(I liked Hudson’s writing a great deal.)
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Aug 15, 2015 - 03:22pm PT
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Thanks for that, Cintune. I think I get what you were getting at.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 15, 2015 - 04:52pm PT
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Categorizing or attempting to describe or “represent” consciousness seems to be the most real impossibility there is.
except the fact that you did it... in your post.
so not impossible to categorize... but when you try to pin it down with a more precise description, you run into trouble... that is something you and others have said time and again.
Your interpretation of that "trouble" is that what you take to be consciousness can't be more precisely defined, it escapes definition. Yet another plausible, and even reasonable interpretation would be that what you take to be consciousness is not actually consciousness.
I say this is "reasonable" because, as you yourself have pointed out many times, we tend to have a bias in our observations from our theoretical view point... this is a difficult problem in science, it is probably a very difficult issue when you the thing your are trying to explain is making up the explanation.
Another interpretation is that you do not have a representative language for consciousness, yet you are doing very well in your description, Hudson does well, and I presume that teachers of meditation do very well.... and the students learn the language and apply it. That is the basis of objectification, and once again, as you have pointed out, once you determine the language and the acceptable propositions in that language, it is not too surprising that the resolution of those propositions are somewhat set by the language.
This entire discussion of consciousness, sentience, yada, yada, yada is a categorization, and a very effective one. There are a group making the case for a categorization of "consciousness" as something beyond any other phenomenon. That is a categorization, it has a basis, it uses a representational language... it makes predictions for which there is a claim of verification.
I ask again, why is this language better than any other language?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 15, 2015 - 07:13pm PT
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Ed, I drank a cup of Jo so let me see if i can address some of these questions. This time I'm on my computer, not my phone, so less typos.
I asked: Do you understand, experientially, the difference between content (qualia) and perception itself?
Ed Sez: I'm not sure that qualia=content, but let's leave that question aside. And I'm not sure of the modifier "experientially," but I believe I fully understand the difference between the act of perception and what is being perceived (the "content"). It is a rather elementary distinction.
I now ask: You acknowledged the "elementary distinction" between perception and what is being perceived, said you "fully understand" the difference but did not elucidate per what those differences are, per your understanding. That was the question: What IS the difference between content and perception?
One of the gifts of wrestling with this question is that the qualitative difference between sentience and "all other physical processes" is made very clear, especially if you also understand what Chalmers calls "objective functioning," which is basically data processing and programed/conditioned responses, like what a machine can do in outer space.
Ed went on to say that his point in much of this is that we seem to have no firm basis for evaluating sentience in ourselves or anyone else, opening the door for the possibility that all the "experts" might well be totally wrong about all of this. This sounds perilously close to scientism, because "firm basis" is surly another way to ask for a quantification. Ed goes on to say: The point is that we cannot say how we know each other experiences "watchfulness."
Does Ed imply that all the experts are simply guessing about the progress and process of their students? Does this not give doubting Susans a seemingly valid reason to assert that so-called experts in the experiential adventures are no kind of experts at all, and that per the whole thing, all things are equal since no one knows or can "prove" anything.
Rather than ramble on and on with this, I highly suspect that what Ed really wants is to boil the entire process down to a discursive exercise, as though this was the only point of this thread. There is also the empirical process from which you draw your data, without instruments, and that is widely misunderstood on this thread, IMO.
Another question: When PPSP (who knows this terrain) says, "Beware of trying to invent your own practice," do you believe this is a belief, or an experiential law?
Per knowing where another person is in the process, in the ZEN tradition you have to demonstrate your understanding - not describe it, but this is another discussion.
Ed saz: "finally, a set of questions for you:
how do you learn to meditate?
what is the role of your "expert"?
and by what means does the "expert" assess the progress of your learning?
I'll try and get to those tomorrow. Describing how to meditate is a tricky one.
JL
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Aug 15, 2015 - 08:56pm PT
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There seems to be way too much Zen in this thread - to the exclusion of any other forms of meditation. "Raw awareness" or "pure perception" or whatever is always cited as the other end of the consciousness spectrum from scientific inquiry with its applications of reason, data, mathematics, etc. "Sentience" is inferred as arising in connection with the peculiar mental state the Zen addicts describe.
To me it seems that after years of guided Zen sitting one is unable to entertain the possibilities of other descriptions of reality. Indeed, apart from one's mind being opened by the process, it is instead tightly closed.
Perhaps the spectrum of consciousness is not quite as one-dimensional as that.
PS: Who keeps altering the format of this page, enlarging the width?
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Aug 15, 2015 - 09:08pm PT
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Sorry, that was me, this time. Big pictures determine the default frame width. Fixed that. And yes, there probably is a false dichotomy being represented by pitting the Big Fat Zero of Zen attainment against literally everything else. But then again, that is their whole schtick.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Aug 15, 2015 - 10:29pm PT
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Per knowing where another person is in the process, in the ZEN tradition you have to demonstrate your understanding - not describe it, but this is another discussion.
So by what means could you tell if EdH or JGill or someone like me have been to the same place/space that your describing without using terms like, Zen, or, subjective, objective, or, sentience, or for that matter, meditation?
Does it take language to reach a certain spiritual 'threshold', or even a material threshold?
Isn't it normally/modernly a "threshold" is reached, then the languages invented?
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 15, 2015 - 10:40pm PT
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Perhaps the spectrum of consciousness is not quite as one-dimensional as that.
100% correct ......
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