What I actually mean is that Consciousness, for the most part, is actually limitless, as hinted in my last sentence. We can both experience reality and somewhat create our own, which is an interaction between mind and matter; there’s also phenomena (paranormal, magic, drugs, etc.) in which is tied to the subject of consciousness. But as a whole, we must not exactly reduce consciousness to some specific function, even if the function could be very a big one.
…“must not”??
“shouldn’t” to be more precise, if you will.
What you just said is pretty much what I just said (but you explained it better). We still hold truths in our minds even though there is a mismatch between our experience and our truth (mistaken cognition or invalid cognition). For example if I see a bush at night and mistake it to be a man then what I see is " a silhouette of a man at night" and not “a bush that appears as a silhouette of a man at night”. This is a mistaken (invalid) cognition does not function as a man but the silhouette of a man at night still appears to my consciousness (even though it is a mistaken awareness). The invalid part is not that I see a silhouette of a man (this is valid cognition) the invalid (mistaken) part is that I think it is a man (I mistakenly infer man from a valid awareness).
It sort of sounds like you are using a bit of the thoughts within The Seven Treatises on Valid Cognition by Dharmaiīrti
Unfortunately it is the end of year and real life is placing some huge pressures on me (business and pleasure) and so I am unable to read much at the moment (but possibly in the future).
…same question.
“Must not” for what purpose?
“Should not” for what purpose?
Is being truthful on that issue defying some purpose?
In a sense, I agree with you. I think consciousness is capable of producing anything you can imagine. I think it is capable of producing anything you can’t imagine. But still, no matter what product of consciousness we’re talking about, there always seems to be these two ways of looking at it–as a creation of the mind or as the perception of something real out in the world. There are at least these two functions of consciousness that I think all other functions get subsumed under. And it seems odd to me to say that sometimes consciousness perceives reality but at other times it creates reality for the beholder. It seems more parsimonious to say that it only ever creates reality, and when it gets it right, we call that “perceiving reality”, and when it gets it wrong, we call it “creating reality”.
Right, which brings us to the differences between mistakes of thought and mistakes of sensation (what we call hallucinations). I think most people aren’t hallucinating when they make mistakes of consciousness–I agree that it’s usually thought.
Never heard much about Dharmaiīrti. Google doesn’t bring up much. What do you know about The Seven Treatises on Valid Cognition?
Actually it is Dhamakirti, not Dharmaiīrti. You can find him on the net from the spelling that i mentioned, but not much about him.
He was brahman from South India. Though, some say that he was prince born in Sumartra but got influenced by Buddhism and moved to India . He later became a teacher at Nalanda, which was the best in its time and also first true global university in the history of the mankind.
He wrote extensively on Buddhist logic.
with love,
sanjay
Would you happen to know enough of Dhamakirti philosophy to discuss it?
I think that the two could be synthesized with an explanation that reality itself is always “creating”; an interconnection between us and the “outside” world through conceptual and historical Time (something that Hegel suggested).
No. I merely know who he was and what he did, nothing else.
James, pure Intellectual philosophy was/is never my first priority or purpose. I am more interested the empirical part of religions, because that is how i got into all this. I looked into the religions for the explanations of my experiences, and in that process, i became aware of their scholars and work to some extent.
But, i am far far away to be an expert of religious litrature, even of Hinduism too. Though my limited knowledge is still more than what an average intellectual knows about religions, even from those who are interested in philosophy or consider themselves philosophers.
with love,
sanjay
What is the function of consciousness?..
…to be forever aware of limitations and to expand if it is to remain aware.
Or put another way, driving with one’s headlights on.
Do not know much of Dharmakirti other than reading a commentary to his works 10 years ago.
But that aside.
There are generally, I think, three types of awareness:
- An valid awareness that has no valid basis (e.g. dreams and hallucinations)
- A valid awareness that has a valid basis (e.g. there is smoke coming out of a chimney)
- An inferential awareness (e.g. there is smoke coming out of the chimney; hence there is a fire in the house)
Generally, as humans, we are mostly operating from position 3. This inferential awareness may or may not match with a so called objective reality as it depends on our prior experience and knowledge. We, as humans, are highly dependant upon inferential awareness as we cannot read minds and all forms of communication are highly unreliable (we are all compulsive liars). That is, we infer the thoughts and feelings of others based on the behaviour of others (their words and their bodily actions).
Again, I agree with you, but for different reasons I think. I don’t know if you’ve been reading my replies to others, but I explained my exact views on consciousness to Jr Wells here. They say that we and the universe are participants in the same creative process–our minds and material world we experience around us, being cut from the same substance, are part of one flow moving forward in time and always changing. Every new instance brings into existence something new, and so there is no other function than that of inventing.
I should say, however, that the invention of new mental forms is not to be confused with illusion or the unreal–though mistakes can happen, I consider the reality of the experienced and the perceived to be in the experience and the perception, and so whatever appears to the mind already is real, for that appearance carries with it its own reality.
So does that mean you’re in the naive realist camp?
I would say that the function of consciousness is to focus on the object that appears to consciousness. Invented or non-invented is irrelevant. Reality or illusion is irrelevant.
I think you are complicating things where they need not be complicated.
But you know what it does. It is our name for experiencing. When you experience, all of that, that’s consciousness. (and in response to your last dichotomy it could be both to any degree of mixture). It’s a bit like asking what is the function of volume (or more philosophically 'extension. Like what does the volume of a bat - thge fact that it is 3 dimensional - do? I think it is an odd question - of course, by this I mean, it is an odd question in my worldview, but even perhaps an odd one in yours.
Another way to ask the question is to ask what would life be like - I presume objectively - if there was no consciousness, the whole zombie issue in philosophy.
Back to the issue of unfiltered pure vs. inventing. Scientific research pretty strongly supports that it is a mix. One can further philosophically interpret scientific research and argue that it is all invented, to some degree based on stimulation of stuff ‘out there’ and based on real qualities of stuff out there. But that the brain/organisms paints its own painting based on this stimulation. There is no direct seeing - in this model. I think we have each read - now I forget his name, but a rather interesting book about percpetion by some philosopher whose last name begins with N - and he gives some pretty good subjective exercises coupled with arguments to show how much of what we perceive, we imagine - the blind spot is a simple hard to argue with example, but he gets into more encompassing examples.
But I am not sure this is consciousness. IOW a robot would also ‘perceive’ and it’s perceptions - I mean the kinds of simple robots we already have that most poeple do not attribute consciousness to - are interpretations and filtered by their lenses and programming, both the hardware and the software. IOW interpretation can take place without consciousness. Or a kind of mindless translation of data.
Consciousness, it seems to me, is the fact of experiencing, that there is a subjective aspect, not simply billiard balls void of experience ramming into each other and not noticing it.
Of course I am a pantheist so it gets a bit more complicated for me. IOW someone cannot simply shove a simple example at me and assume I will assume, yah, with that there is no consciousness.
Yes, it would be an odd question to ask what the volume of a bat does–but I think that’s only because the answers are trivial and mundane: the bat’s volume is preventing other objects from occupying that space, for example. I think the question of what consciousness does is less mundane–I mean, it seems obvious to me that it is at least a process (regardless of whether that’s “seeing” reality or “inventing” reality), especially when you look at that process neurologically.
But you did get my point, didn’t you, that whatever way we describe what consciousness is “doing” can be translated into what consciousness “is”? Would you still think the question odd if it were asked that way?
How would the absence of consciousness affect our biological functioning, perhaps?
I agree that it is a mix in that it is always both at the same time–but that it arbitrarily switches from one to the other is what seems odd, if not absurd, to me.
Nietzsche? Why so reluctant to use his name?
Well, between you and I, I don’t think we have to pretend to believe in the objectivist’s materialistic paradigm (where independent non-conscious objects exist out there). You’re a panpsychic and so am I. I am also a subjectivist and an idealist (and it’s hard to see how that wouldn’t go hand-in-hand with panpsychism, and I assume this is true of you as well). In other words, for me (and you), there is no such thing as a robot, or any mechanical system, or even a rock just sitting there without some kind of subjective “feeling” (see my example above about the vacuum cleaner).
^^ Would you call this “feeling” consciousness or is it something prior to consciousness–as though true consciousness only begins once you have some degree of epistemic connection to reality–even though the “feeling” is obviously something more than cold, dead, blank, unconscious nothingness.
Yes, at the end of the day, I think consciousness is both the invention of things and the seeing of reality. A quality is invented–it emerged from the flow of prior experience, the continual metamorphosis of qualia–and as all experience brings with it its own inner being (as I explained above), it also passes, once invented, for actual reality–the very thing it is experienced to be.
But notice how the invention comes prior to the seeing. I mean, the seeing depends on something being invent to be experienced as seeing, and not the other way around. Objectivist, materialistic reductivist, theories of consciousness would have it the other way around: you must see reality before you can have the experience of it. It’s this question of which takes precedence–the inventing or the seeing–that differs my theory of consciousness from most others.
Sorry I said “panpsychic” above, but how could you not be a panpsychic if you’re already a pantheist?
Think of all the facets of existence that are not longer possible without volume! (I am not being facetious. I think consciousness is a similar kind of quality. It’s sort of doing nothing or sort of doing everything. But it is a facet of existence, not a device. Like ‘what is the eye doing’ makes sense to me in a way that ‘what is consciousness doing’ does not)
I like is better.
That was funny. I like the idea that I was being coy about Nietschze. No, I meant Nöe, whose name I managed to find. Action in perception.
Right, though the problem with a robot is that actually it just has the vague slow consciousness of the metal (etc) it is made of, and not the complicated types of immediate fast experiencing that a cat, say, has. Maybe later we will come up with robots that are like us. And by the way, this is not a critique of the technology - Oh, it is a poor copy - but that fact that my panpsychism does not mean that ‘really’ I can have a great conversation - if I truly listen - with a can of coke.
A kind of naked awareness, memory would be felt not in images, I would guess. But here I am getting into very speculative ground.
It’s the old colonialist bias. Take that as a metaphor. Oh, women can’t really think. Blacks don’t have souls. Animals do not really feel pain they are machines. And nowadays the border is plants, which even in science are now being granted nervous systemlike qualities, intelligence and even, perhaps, consciousness. Man - take that literally as men - is the measure of all things. Like me, experiencing, less like me, not.
I am panpsychic. But ‘psych’ for me, makes me think of the head. That’s not really necessarily the case, but so it is. So I prefer to think of everything as alive and part of an immanent diety, with emotional, desire based, mental aspects. ‘Psych’ for me raises connotations of what is covered in the older cognitive science and then in spirituality the work of the upper chakras.
If we go by the current scientific model, everything is inferential awareness, at best. Photons strike the retina in a certain pattern, causing a chain of events that incites a VR experience inside the brain of the organism. The organism is aware of this internal VR and draws conclusions about what it is ‘seeing’. Everything is the product of a nervous system deduction with many layers of remove. LIke that kid’s game telephone where a message is whispered around the circle of kids and gets slowly distorted, the final version often quite unlike the first. But here numerous changes in media in the telefone game.
The forum asks what is the function of consciousness.Now we are digging into the physiology and neurology of it. We are asking now what consciousness is, rather then how it functions. So we have limited the question to the very inductive processes, with which we are concerned. This mode of questioning reduces the function into defining what is going on. But are we not limiting the discussion whereby we exclude all the other functions of consciousness ? At some point it needs to be admitted that what we call consciousness is all the things we are talking about in an ascending process. We think, use our senses, create thought images of our outer and inner world’s we inhabit and exhibit, we use signs to communicate, and we do deduce, a logical sequence whereby the content of our life experience is attached to. The. The consciousness of the inherent value of thought is developed and its multiform manifestations in the arts, the thought about what we have created-philosophy, the sciences, and the modern technological world. This is all the product of consciousness, and this process is inverted unto what we call the self, and self consciousness develops. The reactions to this development again invert our fascination, our romance with these enamations, and we develop magnified and diminished concepts between the interior and exterior conscious realization of form and content, between the inner and outer consciousness, to react against this Romance with our production, and destroy our handiwork, as does the swell of the ocean’s tide wash away the sand castles built. If one could say what is the function of consciousness, we really should expand this to include the absolute tautology of a pantheistic awareness of all that is, namely Being it’s self. The function of consciousness is to become aware of Being.
Yes, in a nutshell