Consciousness

[mikkel_the_dane]

All subjectivity is erased when we accept non-duality of Brahman, i.e., 'what exists'. If it was 'nihilism, we would not have been discussing this here. (That is where I differ from Buddha)
Not sure about it, but perhaps Brahman has a non-existant phase.

Yeah, you don't subjectively post as you, as you are not a subjective you. That is all an illusion and your post is that too. So stop posting, because you are in effect delusional for what is real.

I never understand how somebody do something that is subjective and then deny it is subjective. But it appears to be subjective.

 

[Aupmanyav]

Sure, but this doesn't give us any insight into what it is about the nervous system that allows it to do this.
Nervous sysyems can do something that results in us having experiences. Agreed?

Agreed. See here for 'Nervous system in Humans': Nervous system - Wikipedia

 

[Aupmanyav]

Yeah, you don't subjectively post as you, as you are not a subjective you. That is all an illusion and your post is that too. So stop posting, because you are in effect delusional for what is real.

I am an illusion at the worldly level, thinking myself to be Aupmanyav and spreading knowledge, but at the absolute level of reality, I am Brahman, i.e., 'what exists'. Some people say 'Star dust'. Everything in the universe is that only. Mandukya Upanishad said 2000 years ago 'Sarvam Khalu Idam Brahma' (All this here is Brahman).

 

[Aupmanyav]

Abner Shimony was just finishing his PhD in philosophy at Yale, when he read Max Born’s Natural Philosophy of Cause and Effect and decided he had to take a second doctorate in theoretical physics.

Nice person.He understood that Philosophy without science is not complete.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

I am an illusion at the worldly level, thinking myself to be Aupmanyav and spreading knowledge, but at the absolute level of reality, I am Brahman, i.e., 'what exists'. Some people say 'Star dust'. Everything in the universe is that only. Mandukya Upanishad said 2000 years ago 'Sarvam Khalu Idam Brahma' (All this here is Brahman).

No, that is not a fact, because the Mandukya Upanishad is an illusion, becasue there is no Mandukya Upanishad, because All this here is Brahman, so that can't really have happened, as All this here is Brahman.

 

[Aupmanyav]

Like on a rainy day, the sun plays hide and seek with us; similarly even at the worldly level, we are able to see the reality at times. But that does not last long as the sun gets covered again with clouds (maya, the veil of ignorance). We reject the reality because of our prejudices. Some are able to recall that moment.

 

[cladking]

I am an illusion at the worldly level, thinking myself to be Aupmanyav and spreading knowledge, but at the absolute level of reality, I am Brahman, i.e., 'what exists'. Some people say 'Star dust'. Everything in the universe is that only. Mandukya Upanishad said 2000 years ago 'Sarvam Khalu Idam Brahma' (All this here is Brahman).

Your last post got me to look this up. I love the concept of "brahman". It is another idea that is just like the root of my premises and ancient (natural) science. Indeed, I suspect the concept pre-dates the confusion of the language. Reality exists and as we perceive it it is blissful awareness but at its heart is reality itself. This is similar to the way other species think however they don't actually experience thought at all.

I usually say things like all of reality is subjective and based on our beliefs but you are effectively saying the same thing from another perspective. Your perspective resonates with reality and is internal to it but mine is external to reality with a scientific view.

Too many people think science provides answers about reality and consciousness and forget that outside of definitions and experiment science doesn't exist at all. Science is a mode of enquiry, not a list of answers.

 

[Whateverist]

Until there is a scientific definition of consciousness with the concomitant quantifiable variables any discussion about it is philosophical in nature.

The only thing science is likely to offer up is a working definition of consciousness. It must, as demonstrated in this thread, make wholesale assumptions about something it is incapable of grasping and so not able to measure and study carefully.

This objection is interesting ..

The problems with the qualitative discussion about the philosophical nature of consciousness is that it is severely tainted with subjective philosophical and religious objections of subjective 'arguing from ignorance' that lack a scientific basis for the highly variable and conflicting claims of philosophy and religion.

… in that what consciousness refers to first and foremost is precisely subjecthood. So a purely empirical approach would like to begin by first setting aside that which is to be studied so as to study what exactly?

Yet lots of cognitive science has been done and interesting results obtained, but they realize they must still be interpreted for what they tell us about our lived experience which of course is subjective.

 

[Whateverist]

I would add that if I am correct about the nature of consciousness then it probably IS irreducible.

I think so too.

Flat negative statements that you assert emphatically that that consciousness is irreducible, is not supportable by you. Actually science has come along way to demonstrate that Consciousness is indeed reducible by the current scientific methods.

Even though we do not know if consciousness is reducible or not, the ‘evidence’ (conclusions really) presented here are likewise based on unsupported assumptions, especially the assumption that there are always more and finer levels of reality which undergird anything we wish to study scientifically.

But of course citations will be wanted so here are a few notes from my reading of Iain McGilchrist's The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, a book of neuroscience, epistemology and metaphysics published in 2021. Since I'm reading it on my Kindle (for the first time) I cannot give you the page number in the hard copy version but will include the location number provided to me.

Regarding the insistence on objectivity, location 10052:

Ideas, including scientific ideas, do not live suspended in a vacuum, but have relationships across time, and at a point in time, with others, forming out of observed regularities the ‘models’, ‘laws’ and ‘principles’ which are our own creations, shaped as much by what they do not include as by what they do. Adding to their contingency is a simple and very obvious point, the limitation imposed by our sense organs – and our brains. We can’t detect what our sense organs do not permit us to detect: there may be senses that we could have had, but don’t, which would have revealed other aspects of the world to our understanding and which we are incapable of imagining – could we have imagined what it is like to hear, if we had only sight, smell and touch to go on? When aboriginal people say that they can hear, or see, or sense things that we cannot, how do we know they are wrong? And the senses we do have are limited in extent: we can’t hear what bats and bears take for granted in their world. It would be irrational to suppose we are directly aware of more than a little of what exists. Why assume that our cognition is capable of more than a few limited forays into the vastness of reality? Evolution is a process. We know more than mice (though there must also be things they know that we don’t). A more highly evolved creature may one day regard our understanding of the world much as we now view that of the mouse. ‘The wise scientist’, wrote Chargaff, ‘will be aware of the eternal predicament that between him and the world there always is the barrier of the human brain.’15

I think this observation at location 10145 might apply here given the vehemence with which the OP has presented his thesis and rejected out of hand all objections raised against it:

Science is the stronger for being freed from the superstitious beliefs that are foisted on her by her false friends, those who are in love with certainty and need to know they are right (there are many of these in religion, and in
politics, too, so science is not alone). There is among many of the public, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out, ‘a religious belief in the unconditional power of organised science, one that has replaced unconditional religious belief in organised religion ...We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.’

And more on the over emphasis on science at location 10163.

It is a tenet of science that its basic intellectual aim is to improve knowledge about the world, nothing being permanently presupposed about the world independently of evidence. But ‘to say, with the radical empiricist, that only factual statements have validity is to be not only dogmatic but self-contradictory, since the statement itself is not factual.’28 Its ‘truth’ is an assumption based on intuition, not on any kind of fact, logic or science in itself. That is fine, but it needs to be acknowledged. So does the assumption that contraries are incompatible. After all, one of the greatest scientists of all time, Niels Bohr, adopted the opposite assertion – contraria sunt complementa – as his motto.

Okay I'll stop here at location 10307 with more on objectivity and how that is improved by bringing to bear more than an accountant's obsession with measurables (my bolding):

The whole enterprise of science as she is practised is dependent on imagination in order to interpret what it is one is seeing. The problem is not that it is hard to rule out the human element, but that by attempting to rule it out – especially by ignoring the role of interpretation – we misrepresent the situation we describe. A particularly striking example is given by the economist Robert Chambers: 22 different studies of soil erosion in one catchment area in Sri Lanka yielded figures that differed by a factor of 8,000. ‘The scary part’, comments David Boyle, ‘is that all the figures were probably correct, but the one thing they failed to provide was objective information. For that you need interpretation, quality, imagination.’57 Better still would be to accept that objective is a relative term, and that truth is, too: complex, multifaceted, rarely if ever single, never simple. Which, to repeat, since the point is so vital, does not for an instant imply giving up on it altogether.

 

[RestlessSoul]

All subjectivity is erased when we accept non-duality of Brahman, i.e., 'what exists'. If it was 'nihilism, we would not have been discussing this here. (That is where I differ from Buddha)
Not sure about it, but perhaps Brahman has a non-existant phase.

Subjectivity is an ineluctable facet of our experience, while objectivity remains, for us, an unattainable ideal. All of human experience, all of science, art and philosophy, all of being and observing and doing, occurs within the theatre of consciousness; and shared consciousness is rare. Our perceptions and our awareness impose this degree of subjectivity on us, and we can’t just wish it away.

Since every view is from somewhere, and no view is from everywhere, it is self evidently the case that the only possible objective (of if you prefer, non-dualist) perspective, must by definition be a God’s eye view. If, when you say that subjectivity can be erased by accepting Brahman, I am very open to that suggestion; but I would suggest that accepting Brahman as an intellectual concept would not solve the problem. I may accept Brahman as a concept, but unless I elevate my consciousness, break free of my ego, and become one with the universal underlying reality (which mystics in the Western tradition refer to as God Consciousness), I am still looking out at the world from the same subjective vantage point.

Cogito ergo sum, is a defining characteristic of our humanity; it may not be inescapable, but we cannot escape it by thinking harder, deeper, or more rigorously. The only escape from mind, as the Zen masters say, is through the attainment and practice of non-mind. And science cannot help us achieve this.

 

[shunyadragon]

The only thing science is likely to offer up is a working definition of consciousness. It must, as demonstrated in this thread, make wholesale assumptions about something it is incapable of grasping and so not able to measure and study carefully.

This objection is interesting ..

The Cognitive Sciences are NOT based on wholesale assumptions.

it is incapable of grasping and so not able to measure and study carefully with references. You have offered nothing more than a personal opinion.

… in that what consciousness refers to first and foremost is precisely subjecthood.

False as well documented by science, references provided. Where are your scientific references justifying this conclusion? You have not demonstrated any knowledge in the related sciences

So a purely empirical approach would like to begin by first setting aside that which is to be studied so as to study what exactly?

Confusing and unbelievably contorted conclusion without explanation relevant to Cognitive Science.

Yet lots of cognitive science has been done and interesting results obtained, but they realize they must still be interpreted for what they tell us about our lived experience which of course is subjective.

Disagree that lived behavior is subjective., because it would conclude that when science objectively observed lived behavior and connects it directly to neurological activity and function is subjective and it is not.

Still waiting for you to post scientific references to support your opinions.

 

[exchemist]

When arguing that science doesn't have an answer to consciousness, philosophers of mind are generally referring to the natural sciences. So the vision of science apprehending consciousness in a pincer movement, with physics, chemistry and biology on one flank, and psychology (with it's attendant Woo first weeded out) on the other, doesn't really hold water.

This is not to say that understanding psychology has no part to play in understanding consciousness. But it doesn't appear designed in any way, to address the question of why conscious beings have qualitative, phenomenal experiences, or why it is that electro-chemical activity in the brain gives rise to experience and awareness. In other words, why it is that there is something it is like, to be conscious?

I'm with Massimo Pigliucci on that. I don't actually think there is a "hard problem" of consciousness at all: What Hard Problem? | Issue 99 | Philosophy Now

 

[cladking]

Better still would be to accept that objective is a relative term, and that truth is, too: complex, multifaceted, rarely if ever single, never simple. Which, to repeat, since the point is so vital, does not for an instant imply giving up on it altogether.

Thanks for the post and quotes FaithNotBelief.

This is a concept that science believers can not seem to grasp; the complexity of all of reality. They know a few theories and a few experiments and suddenly they interpret all of reality , all their senses, all their knowledge, solely in terms of a few experiments and things they've read in books. They forget that science is founded on definitions and axioms so has no meaning other than in these specific terms. They think science opens their eyes to the truth when in fact it ofttimes closes their eyes to reality itself (amun).

There are structures on various species with nerve clusters that are appar5ently sensory organs but they are not understood. someday we will but in the meantime there is very very little we do know and some are blind to our vast ignorance and the infinite complexity of reality. They look but do not see. We all look and don't see but I know I can't see what I don't expect so my odds of seeing anomalies is much better than that of science believers.

 

[cladking]

Since every view is from somewhere, and no view is from everywhere, it is self evidently the case that the only possible objective (of if you prefer, non-dualist) perspective, must by definition be a God’s eye view. If, when you say that subjectivity can be erased by accepting Brahman, I am very open to that suggestion; but I would suggest that accepting Brahman as an intellectual concept would not solve the problem. I may accept Brahman as a concept, but unless I elevate my consciousness, break free of my ego, and become one with the universal underlying reality (which mystics in the Western tradition refer to as God Consciousness), I am still looking out at the world from the same subjective vantage point.

I believe all other consciousness than homo omnisciencis views all things from the inside. This is not exactly the same as having a view from everywhere, but there are similarities since its place in the entirety of existence can be further defined. It is this more than any single thing that separates modern humans from all other species. We not only describe all things from a timeless perspective at infinite distance but language forces it on us.

Our consciousness no longer resonates with nature.

Animals (and ancient man) are in the here and now and see reality from the inside. This is foundational to all these many languages too. A bee establishes the time as well as the distance by waggling in line with the sunrise. All other language is representative where ours is symbolic.

 

[shunyadragon]

I am an illusion at the worldly level, thinking myself to be Aupmanyav and spreading knowledge, but at the absolute level of reality, I am Brahman, i.e., 'what exists'. Some people say 'Star dust'. Everything in the universe is that only. Mandukya Upanishad said 2000 years ago 'Sarvam Khalu Idam Brahma' (All this here is Brahman).

You're drifting off into your own metaphysical whatever, let's get our feet on the ground and deal with the science. Beliefs like this you should have no issue with Gods.

 

[Copernicus]

We agree. To me the problem is in effect that we can't elimitate subjectivity in effect and some try to make the universe objective and physical. And that includes processes in a brain for which in effect some are subjective, yet physical.
In other words it is metaphysics and ontology that is the problem in the end.

I'm not sure that we do agree. We can talk about other people's subjective perspective as a third party observer and even do experiments to discover how and why physical events affect their perspective. So we have a basis for objective investigation of subjective experiences.

It's important to remember that physics is about interactions--forces that attract and repel interacting physical objects. Those interactions are chaotic but become predictable when observed locally. Patterns of interaction emerge from chaotic physical interactions, so it seems reasonable to me that very complex brain activity is nothing more than an emergent pattern of behavior that occurs when very complex fleshy robots (i.e. animals with brains) interact with each other. IOW, consciousness is another emergent pattern of physical interactions albeit an extremely complex one.

 

[Aupmanyav]

.. it is blissful awareness ..
.. but mine is external to reality with a scientific view.
Too many people think science provides answers about reality and consciousness and forget that outside of definitions and experiment science doesn't exist at all. Science is a mode of enquiry, not a list of answers.

IMHO, there is no bliss or sorrow for Brahman (To think like that is a common mistake, especially for many in Hinduism). Brahman is 'Nirvikar' (without blemish). Bliss is attachment, a blemish. One can have bliss or sorrow only if one is attached to something (In Hindi/Sanskrit - Asakti).
Though we may have interacted, I do not really know your perspective.
Yeah, sure science provides answers. Inquiry gets us the answers. We know what causes malaria.

 

[Aupmanyav]

.. (which mystics in the Western tradition refer to as God Consciousness), I am still looking out at the world from the same subjective vantage point.
.. as the Zen masters say, is through the attainment and practice of non-mind. And science cannot help us achieve this.

That is surely subjective because we are indoctrinated with the God concept right from start. That is the root cause of all confusion.
I do not follow Zen. My way is 'Jnana' - (Jnana Yoga); use mind, search answers, get answers. I have already completed my search.

 

[Aupmanyav]

.. let's get our feet on the ground and deal with the science. Beliefs like this you should have no issue with Gods.

I am firmly rooted to the ground. Where is God involved in my thinking? I have said repeatedly that Brahman is not a God, it is the stuff of the universe, 'physical energy'. I am a thorough atheist.

 

[Copernicus]

I am firmly rooted to the ground. Where is God involved in my thinking? I have said repeatedly that Brahman is not a God, it is the stuff of the universe, 'physical energy'. I am a thorough atheist.

Most people here are not familiar with Hinduism, and the difference between Brahma (a real god--the creator god) and Brahman(a) (essentially a spiritual force binding the oneness of everything or the "supreme self") is not obvious, perhaps not even to most Hindus. Not having been brought up in that tradition, I have no strong opinion of how most Hindus approach the subject, but there appears to be no cult followers of Brahman, as there are for actual gods in the pantheon. It is clear that the words share the same etymology, but some kind of historical semantic split emerged to separate the concepts of deity and divine force.