kmich wrote:Yes. You are addressing the fundamental questions, Parodite. Scientific method requires an object of investigation. If one is wishing to study subjective experience, that must be turned into an object, a “brain” if you will, which alters it ontological reality and produces the confusion you present.
Yes, that is saying the same thing. The observing eye cannot observe its own act of observation without splitting itself in two and still being "one and the same" so to speak. It is impossible.
A conundrum is inevitable, although I do not think that nature is tricking us as much as we are tricking ourselves through our own cultural biases.
With nature tricking us I meant that it is inevitable and natural for us conscious human beings to experience the world with us in it,
as-if there is a mind-body duality (as well as a hard problem when you try to squeeze "mind from observed matter" for the reasons I mentioned). That
sensation of a mind-body duality arises naturally (and serves a functional purpose), it only becomes a conundrum when you look in the wrong direction causally. As when you would start with observing smoke and then boggle your mind for millennia (which indeed philosophers and scientists to did and do even till today) how on earth smoke can produce fire. It really is as simple as that I'm afraid. It goes against the 2nd law of thermodynamics as well btw.
A good site with some nice cartoons:
http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/. Or start just
here.
One of the pictures from his site is enough to summarize the situation, of what is actually happening illustrated with visual perception:
Our known physical world is of course the colorful world in his head, the model/representation/translation.. But he also sees himself in that colorful world, as part of the representation. The gray reality in the picture that surrounds this colorful bubble of experience... is of course the greater reality in which that conscious bubble is somehow embedded. But we actually don't know how to represent that gray reality... what dimensions it has..."what it is like". Most likely not just color, form, contrast and movement arise in that colorful bubble, but also space and time are models that arise in the brain... as everything else that occurs there..
What can be said about the gray world represented in the picture surrounding the colorful experiential bubble? That's a discussion outside this thread, but I find it the most interesting discussion. I maintain that reason and science are the best guides there still.. You can for instance make some reasonably good guesses about things, such as saying that things that appear similar in the experiential bubble, for instance the bricks in your wall .. are also similar "whatevers" in the gray, experience independent world but
probably very different from those bricks. With in principle crazy possibilities that ten similar bricks in my bubble are representations of 10 similar gray elephants... so to speak. Our brain may use a grammar where similar gray elephants are always are translated into yellow stone bricks. Just using this example to emphasize the need to think out of the box here, even rather literally out of the
experiential box.
Many cultures are radically non dualistic where subject - object, mind - matter distinctions are not seriously considered. In these cultures, the world is infused with spirit and the spirit infuses the world, and one ignores this reality at ones peril. The mind-matter splits and our assorted resolutions that we create can strike such people as very peculiar and ominous. An example by the Lakota Sioux Holy Man, Lame Deer in his response to the world of the White Man:
"All creatures exist for a purpose. Even an ant knows what that purpose is not with its brain, but somehow it knows. Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist. They don’t use their brains and have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or their dreams. They don’t use the knowledge the spirit has put into every one of them; they are not even aware of this, and so they stumble along blindly on the road to nowhere - a paved highway which they themselves bulldoze and make smooth so they can get faster to the big, empty hole which they’ll find at the end, waiting to swallow them up. It’s a quick, comfortable superhighway, but I know where it leads to. I have seen it. I’ve been there in my vision, and it makes me shudder to think about it."
I think we had a booklet with a text of the same guy on my parents bookshelves... I loved it. Many others have pointed out/to the same thing... using their contemporary cultural context, language, symbols and experiences. Buddha, Jesus, J. Krishnamurti, U.G. Krishnamurti, recently Eckhart Tolle and probably thousands of others who just don't need taking the trouble putting things into words. When the conceptual mind is calm or even in total stand-by, but our senses and body functioning at full speed unhindered, the present always fresh and alive, quick anticipation and participation. In Indian lingo then "the big spirit" is present. In Western slightly poetic lingo I'd say "the present is bigger and much more alive". But since I'm told words don't matter...
Parodite wrote:To me, the mystery of the subjective conscious self that happens to be "me" amongst potentially zillions of other "me's" that are equally subjective but different, has no direct relation to the mind-body problem or the clash between "materialism versus spirituality" which is just the result of a little magical trick that nature imposed on us, well, as a natural consequence. The real conundrum is why this particular self-conscious me that is me, is not the self-conscious me of somebody else. Not that it would solve anything to be another person's me, the question would still be the same in relation to other me's. The bulk of the people will argue along the lines of "duh.. you are not another me in the same way that object (a) does not equal object (b)." But that doesn't satisfy me at all, on the contrary it begs the question even harder. Yet there are enough
other people who feel the question is valid, even though the answer escapes us entirely. But I like to speculate on it.
No doubt there is the private “me” of subjective experience as a fundamental existential reality we all share, Parodite. I cannot experience the world directly out of your frame and you cannot do so out of mine. I wonder though if this is not the result of what A. N. Whitehead described as an “excess of subjectivity” due to the forceful trajectory of human life that deepens our individuality as we fulfill our assorted purposes, but, in the process, lose sight of the totality we owe our lives and emergence from.
Yes.. one strategy is the effort to get rid of this problem by trying to make it go away or at least look smaller as some sort of tragic byproduct... another strategy tries to elevate the self to Cosmic proportions to the point of delusional grandeur. Some people really come to believe they are God.. actually. Or "that we are all God". I find neither satisfying approaches.
The problem, I believe, arises from the conventional thinking that our world is best understood as a collection of given objects and relations that we are in the business of discovering and understanding. This is often an unconscious legacy of our creation myths that describe a world as already having been brought into being by an act of creation.
But it is also quite normal, a given, that our world is modeled as such by the basic grammar of our central nervous system; objects in space that change over time in relation to each other. A dynamic ever changing patch work of "similar differences and different similarities" (with thanks to David Bohm). There are cultural differences that make a difference too of course, but I believe some of the neurological grammar is too basic to change it, lest one uses drugs of sorts or suffers brain injury.
What if the universe is not a given set of given objects and relations, but rather a dynamic of events in an a stream of constant transitions subject to conscious choice and experience in an constant unfolding with our participation? What if things we call mind, matter, body, and brain are only abstract conditions we have designated for these events and not their substance?
I like David Bohm's toy model in his book
Wholeness and the Implicate order. Participation is indeed a good term. But is is easy to dream away when there are so many unknowns and cognitive limitations. Maybe just poetry is the best we can produce here.
This also gets into some of the process thinking of William James, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead as well as contemporary scholars like David Ray Griffin and Christian De Quincey. The primary work in this kind of thinking is Alfred North Whitehead's "Process and Reality," probably one of the most abstract and difficult book I have been trying to get through. One also hears echoes of process thinking in Physicist John A. Wheeler’s controversial “Participatory Anthropic Principle” which suggests that the universe requires a participation of conscious observers for its ontological foundation.
In these understandings, the experience of “me” is a dynamic, participatory series of transitions that includes an endless web of unfolding process and relations. You and I are not objects, but instead are ever evolving, changing processes grounded, emerging, and inseparable from the very fabric of the cosmos.
What I found is that most writers and philosophers easily get lost in general descriptions, describe consciousness as some sort of general process. But the whole point of "consciousness" is that it is
not general
as far as we know. It is particular, personal, subjective, completely exclusive of other subjective experiencing individuals. This might be some sort of an optical delusion of course... where somehow the indivisible wholeness of existence manages to create illusions of subjective experience and self here or there whenever the conditions are right. Unfortunately I don't but that theory one bit, and tend to see such philosophies to be more inspired by depersonalization/derealization type of condition.
What would this say about death? Obviously the body dies and our life ends. But asking what our death is is the same as asking what does it mean when a fire goes out. Does the fire go into absolute nothingness, become a "fire" in some "fire heaven," or, instead, does it continue to participate in the further, ongoing, process dance of an unfolding, experiential cosmos?
My guess is (I really have zil answers) that we are all just explicated forms of soul-strings (with a semi-poetic reference to string theory).. never born and never dying. Always there. But if you need to take some arbitrary starting point where us soul-strings came into being, or maybe were "launched" into this cosmic theater... our origins are in the big bang and we are all still there at the same time. Nothing is created, nothing is lost, just transformed, stretched, turned around, twisted, unwound..implicated-explicated back and forth in ever changing configurations and form. One soul-string can wind up being a certain human being.. but as easily unwind and be all over the place again rather literally. Only to curl up again into the form of a cat on planet-X. This would of course mean that human self nor consciousness should be overrated.