/lit/ - Literature

>>18925154
Don't think general anesthesia existed when it was written.

>>18925154
The consciousness and the mind are two separate things, the mind is "relatively real", changing and limited while the consciousnesses is permanent and indestructible, it's the foundation of all. The mind is occupied with objectivity, thoughts and forms. In pure consciousness there is nothing to be experienced or known since it's pure subjectivity.
Consciousness therefore remains in both anesthesia and coma, even death.
You could say that wakefulness, deep sleep and anesthesia are just different phases played out on the stage of consciousness.

>>18925365
Refuted by Zhuangzi.

>>18925590
I'm not an advaitin so I don't really have a stake in the game, how did he refute it?

>>18925365
>In pure consciousness there is nothing to be experienced or known since it's pure subjectivity.
>Consciousness therefore remains in both anesthesia and coma, even death.
Sounds like it doesn't exist at all. Don't know why you even bother with the concept at that point.

>>18926042
>Sounds like it doesn't exist at all.
According to the Mandukya Upanishad and Mandukya Karika, it exists in every moment at the same time as everything else, it is the constant, effortless and natural basis in which everything else takes place. The self-shining presence which accounts for the uninterrupted continuity throughout waking, dream and deep-sleep. No explanation of consciousness and mind is coherent without there being a pure subject or pure consciousness. If at the end of the road there is just objects and no non-objective presence, then there is nobody to know the objects, there is nothing providing for them to be integrated into the unwavering continuum of awareness which we experience. The mind changes and is fallible, but your access to the contents of the mind like thoughts and sense-perceptions is always infallible, and this is because the ground of mental-contents coming into being is unwavering pure consciousness.
>Don't know why you even bother with the concept at that point.
yea, why bother talking about philosophy and metaphysics at all if its not about objects we can perceive right in front of us? like just be a logical positivist and read Steven Pinker lmao

>>18925154
Anesthesia is like deep sleep. And consciousness is still there in deep sleep, the proof is that if I shout next to you it will wake you up, because you still had enough consciousness to be able to perceive a sound. Similarly, anaesthetised people can wake up due to x or y condition, which is a sign that their consciousness has not disappeared. And if consciousness died and then came back with each anaesthesia/sleep, we wouldn't be the same person each time.

>>18926433
Hi vedantabro, what do u think of platonism, and what is the advaitic conception of universals?

>>18926638
Yes, the consciousness is still there but it's so subtle that a dreamless sleep can go by in the blink of an eye, it feels like that part of your life didn't even happen, so how is this pure consciousness in effect different from nothingness? Also I don't think there needs to be an unchanging foundation for a sense of self, continous change accounts for continous experience where is the problem? Change and multiplicity are the fundamental attributes of being, so I think constancy and unity could only apply to non-being, that is if it would exist, but it doesn't, so it doesn't have attributes either.

>>18925154
>Does the Mandukya Upanishad say anything about what happens to consciousness when one undergoes general anesthesia?
No, but it can be viewed as implying that all states of mind will share a certain number of characteristics that will make them assignable to the category of either vaiśvānara (waking life), taijasa (dream) or prājña (deep sleep). The fourth, (turīya), is not a state of mind. General anesthesia, would be assignable to prājña because of how the anesthetized mind does not perceive duality. Śaṅkarācārya in his bhāṣya on Māṇḍukya Kārikā 3.18 writes that falling unconscious, dreamless sleep and being in a trance are all characterized by the lack of the perception of duality: "It is further borne out by reason as duality is not perceived in the states of swoon, deep sleep or trance (samādhi), in the absence of the activity of the mind."

https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/mandukya-upanishad-karika-bhashya/d/doc143688.html

>>18926644
>what do u think of platonism
I like it and find it interesting, but I also find myself drawn to eastern writings more.
>what is the advaitic conception of universals?
Richard Brooks has noted that the question of universals vs particulars is not mentioned in Advaita writings until later Advaita Dialecticians like Śrīharṣa and Citsukha refute the definition of universals provided by the realist Nyāya school, but this was just a small part of their method of showing that attempting to build such systems of realist logic from the ground up are ultimately flawed, for these Advaitin thinkers the reality of consciousness is still undeniable though.

There doesn't seem to be anything in Advaita doctrine that is inherently opposed to universals, as you can view them as a natural part of how maya unfolds, but they simply weren't a concern for Śaṅkarācārya, since the Upaniṣads already present a coherent framework for understanding the universe that guide one to God/liberation without requiring one to stop and think about universals or nominalism. The 15th-16th influential Advaitin Madhusūdana Sarasvatī in his works accepted the use of universals as part of explaining the nature of the relatively-real universe, but without making them real in an absolute sense (which only Brahman is). The scholar Sthanweshwar Timalsina is of the view that in classical Advaita, Brahman is the highest universal.

>>18925599
I don't think it does, Guénon in 'Symbolism of the Cross' demonstrates how passages from the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi agree with the Upaniṣads and Advaita, both it and Taoism are arguably non-dual doctrines. It seems that sometimes, people who are into process philosophy or anti-foundationalism try to reduce Taoism to being just that, and imagine it in conflict with other schools which its not really in conflict with. The Tao is described just as the Upaniṣads describe absolute Consciousness:

Eyes look but cannot see it, ears listen but cannot hear it, hands grasp but cannot touch it, beyond the senses lies the great unity – invisible, inaudible, intangible - Tao Te Ching 14

Something formless, complete in itself, there before Heaven and Earth, tranquil, vast, standing alone, unchanging, It provide for all things yet cannot be exhausted, It is the mother of the universe, I do not know its name so I call it “Tao” - Tao Te Ching 25

>>18925599
>>18927679

Zhuangzi in chapter 5 and Śaṅkarācārya in Vivekacūḍāmaṇi both describe the enlightened man in the exact same way:

"He has attained perfect impassibility; life and death are equally indifferent to him, the collapse of the universe would cause him no emotion. By dint of search, he has reached the immutable truth, the unique universal Principle. He lets all beings evolve according to their destinies ... The outward sign of this inner state is imperturbability: not that of the hero who hurls himself alone, for love of glory, against an army in line of battle, but that of the spirit, which, higher than heaven, earth and all beings, dwells in a body to which it is indifferent, taking no account of what its sense convey to it, and knowing all by global knowledge in its motionless unity. That spirit, absolutely independent, is the master of men; if he cared to call them all together in their multitude, they would all rally on the appointed day; but he has no desire for their serve"
Zhuangzi - chapter 5

Here is the Self-effulgent Atman, of infinite power, beyond the range of conditioned knowledge, yet the common experience of all - realising which alone this incomparable knower of Brahman lives his glorious life, freed from bondage. Satisfied with undiluted, constant Bliss, he is neither grieved nor elated by sense-objects, is neither attached nor averse to them, but always disports with the Self and takes pleasure therein. ... The knower of the Atman, who wears no outward mark and is unattached to external things, rests on this body without identification, and experiences all sorts of sense-objects as they come, through others’ wish, like a child. .... The man of realisation ... lives unmoved in the body, like a witness, free from mental oscillations, like the pivot of the potter’s wheel. He neither directs the sense-organs to their objects nor detaches them from these, but stays like an unconcerned spectator. And he has not the least regard for the fruits of actions, his mind being thoroughly inebriated with drinking the undiluted elixir of the Bliss of the Atman.
Śaṅkarācārya - Vivekacūḍāmaṇi

>>18927640
>states of mind will share a certain number of characteristics that will make them assignable to the category of either vaiśvānara (waking life), taijasa (dream) or prājña (deep sleep).
to clarify: falling into a swoon, being anesthetized, entering into a trance in meditation and deep dreamless sleep are all variations of prājña, instead of prājña being strictly identical with deep sleep alone.

>>18926941
>Yes, the consciousness is still there but it's so subtle that a dreamless sleep can go by in the blink of an eye, it feels like that part of your life didn't even happen, so how is this pure consciousness in effect different from nothingness?
Do you not see the contradiction between you admitting on one hand that there is still consciousness there but so subtle that dreamless sleep passes by in the blink of an eye, and on the other hand asking what the difference from nothingness is? There is nothing left, no sentient presence left in nothingness, no matter how subtle it is. Nothingness doesn't "go by" for anyone because of the total lack of sentient presence or living entities in nothingness.

>Also I don't think there needs to be an unchanging foundation for a sense of self, continous change accounts for continous experience where is the problem?
The problem with this worldview is that a changing awareness cannot detect change. If the awareness doesn't last long enough to witness the arising within and falling away of visual or mental objects from the space of awareness, then change could not be perceived, because that change takes place over multiple moments and in order for it to be detected as change, the same presence of pure awareness has to be there to perceive that change as it occurs over multiple moments. One awareness cannot complete the particular perception of a change begun by a previously existing awareness that differed from it, because when that awareness exists the previous one doesn't.

Before you say "I mean that awareness changes but not that it ceases to exist or ceases to be aware", that's not even possible. Pure awareness-presence or pure consciousness is completely partless, due to the lack of internal characteristics in awareness that could change, the only thing that *could* change about awareness is its very awareness that is its centrally-defining feature, in other words, it would have to cease to be aware in order to be subject to change at all, it would have to cease to exist *as* awareness.

However, we don't experience our own awareness ever ceasing to exist, even in deep dreamless there is still an extremely subtle consciousness, and in both waking life and in dreams, there are only gaps and interruptions in thoughts, emotions, memories, certain kinds of sense-perceptions and so on, but there are never any identifiable gaps or interruptions in awareness. When there are not any identifiable gaps or interruptions in awareness (it cannot be reduced to constituents because its partless and has none), there is no longer any basis for saying that its changing, for saying that it is subject to change. So, not only do we not have any evidence of it changing, but to say that pure awareness does change results in absurd implications that rule it out from being true, like change being impossible to perceive.

>>18927640
I would be careful about reading Advaita Vedanta interpretations such as Shankara's as a commentary to the Upanishads, they are extremely reliant on Buddhist philosophy (Shankara is called a "cryptobuddhist" by most Hindus, and most scholars agree). If you want to read the Upanishads, work through them with editions and commentaries that aren't sectarian, or at least read an interpretation that is closer to the original meaning of the Upanishads, rather than Shankara's 9th century AD quasi-buddhism.

>>18928040
Kek

>>18926433
No it just seemed as if the concept was self-negating.

Now it seems like you're just describing God.

>>18926042
consciousness is the experiencer of experience. when you die, no more experience is presented to the experiencer, but the experiencer is still there. you could indeed remove the experiencer from the equasion and just have experience in a vacuum, which would go against our preconcieved notion of experience, but some think that it is the way it is

>>18927979
Neither Gotama Buddha nor Shankara were teachers of anything novel or original.......

“The Buddha is a teacher of non-dualism (advayavadin [i.e. Advaita])”[Mahavyutpatti; 23: Divyavadaana. 95.13]

They were both teachers of the same philosophy.

>>18928403
>Now it seems like you're just describing God.
Yes, that's correct, it is because I am. Hindu schools like Advaita Vedanta, and certain kinds of Shaivism and Shaktism interpret the Hindu scriptures like the Upanishads (and in the case of Shaivites/Shaktists also the Tantric texts known as the Agamas) as teaching that God is the pure consciousness who dwells in all beings as that effortless foundational awareness underlying all thought and perception, although these schools sometimes differ from each other in exactly how they conceive of the nature of this God.

>>18928506
Hello Ken.

>>18927943
Time isn't made up of separate moments, that was Zeno's basic mistake, if you abstract time into discrete moments you won't be able to bulid them back together into the continuum we experience, and end up with paradoxes like he and you describe. If change is continous, like we experience it, then that entails that the consciousness that changes with it is *constantly in contact with its just passed version*, NOT that it is *literally constant* (this contact thing already suggests some discreetness, which there isn't, but you get it, it's a continuum). Analogies about time always fall into the mistake of picturing it as something spatial. For example say that time is a flowing river and your pure consciousness is a small fish at the bottom of the river staying in place looking up at the changing water above him. But how does the water change? We still need time, as it is, for this picture to move, so what does the water represent again? In reality we always exerience time and space together as the changing objects of consciousness. When there is near zero change, as in deep sleep, there is near zero consciousness, we don't experience neither space nor time, it's a near singular instant, but we can only recognize it as such after we awake and look back on it. So I think this pure consciousness you talk about isn't a constant underlying foundation of consciousness, but an extreme form of consciousness in which there is no change at all so it becomes a singularity, we come very close to this experience in deep sleep, but probably were even closer before birth and might be after death. But even if you don't agree with my conception I ask again, how is this state *in effect* different from nothingness, to us? As you can only affirm it *as something* from an afterward position of changing consciousness, if you die and never wake up again I don't see how that's different from the common atheistic conception of entering nothingness.

Mandukya Upanishad was influenced by Śramaṇa philosophy.

bump

>>18930372
>Mandukya Upanishad was influenced by Śramaṇa philosophy.
Why do you suppose this to be so? I dont really see any clear evidence of that. All the ideas in the Mandukya Upanishad are found in earlier Upanishads too. The central teaching of the Mandukya of a transcendent “4th” which is identified with pure consciousness and which is different from waking, dream and deep sleep is not an idea that was taught by Sramanic schools.

>>18929595
Any answer to this?

Is Hegel's Absolute Idealism really just crypto-Advaita Vedanta? I've come to this conclusion, is it wrong? It seems so evident to me, but looking up this connection I haven't really found stuff on it, am I missing something?

>>18932083
Yeah, Anon has no idea what Zeno was talking about and is just sort of ambiguously reacting to people who (wrongly) say that calculus "refutes" Zeno because you can sum up an infinite series (which doesn't actually answer any of Zeno's paradoxes at all).
>time isn't made up of separate moments
lmfao

>>18928403
God does things other than engage in reflexive self-awareness; the only thing that the Atman which is Brahman of Advaita Vedanta does is reflexively self-awarate. There is no going-on other than this, as everything but Atman which is Brahman is an illusion made out of nothing; it is maya. You, I, this post, your consciousness (remember, what Shankara is talking about that is translated as "consciousness" is not "whatever you call consciousness", he's referring to something VERY specific), my consciousness, the tree outside my window, none of it is real or exists in any meaningful way.

This is why he gets pounced on as an atheistic nihilist almost immediately by other Hindus, by the way. The "Crypto-Buddhist" line actually comes the dualistic school of Vedanta arguing that Shankara was tricked into being a retard to embarrass Buddhists by association into adopting dualistic Vedanta.

>>18932850
By the way since it may sound outlandish, I'm not trolling, it's a genuine question. Can someone knowledgeable on the two (tight circle, I realise) answer me please?

>>18933276
Time really isn't made up of *separate* moments like the frames of a movie, as far as I'm concerned, it's a continous experience. If you take a continous line you can point anywhere on it and there will be a point (these are non-separate points), but if you start with points (separate points) you won't be able to build a continous line from them, this is what I meant by taking time as a series of separate moments, and yes this is what at least some (like the one with the arrow) of Zeno's paradoxes rest upon, and also your argument against a changing consciousness, because you say that when we move from one moment to the next it goes out of being and simultaneously the new one comes into being only to be replaced by the next so the consciousness of each moment would perish, that's why you come up with the underlying continuity of the pure consciousness perceiving the succession of descrete moments, instead of taking the flow of (non-separate) moments as the continuity itself, which is my view. But of course there is no way to actually prove either side so you will probably stick your version and that's alright, just don't act like it's the absolute truth without any alternative explanation just because some ancient texts told you so.

>>18934002
>Time really isn't made up of *separate* moments like the frames of a movie, as far as I'm concerned, it's a continous experience
Congrats anon, you're in complete agreement with Zeno and Parmenides, you just never bothered to actually read what they said.

>>18934060
They agree that our experience is continous, but than they argue that time is made up of instants, run into paradoxes and conclude that our experience of change is an illusion, as far as I remember. These paradoxes arise becuse you cannot put together a continous line from points because points have no extension, this is what I called the view of separate moments of time, and this is where there comes up your conception of the pure consciousness as the unchanging line holding these points together. The alternative view of the non-separate points is to take a point and move it in a direction continously, it will "draw" a line and there is no need for a separate line because the consciousness doesn't perish any time it just changes continously along with the experience.

>>18934355
>consciousness doesn't perish any time it just changes continously along with the experience
Except that consciousness is completely unchanging and change can only be identified and demonstrated in things other than consciousness

>>18934496
Yeah that's your view with your pure consciousness. I already presented mine several times, which is that consciousness arises together with its contents and there is no sense of talking about them separately so they change together, when there is no content there is no consciousness, so in this state it is unchanging, and singular in a way, by not even really being. To this state we get close to in deep sleep, and probably were in before birth. This is where you say that this state actually underlies all experience which I don't agree with, beacuse to me once the consciousness comes into being, change starts and there is no sign of this undelying changelessness, so it's not a constant substratum of consciousness but a specific state of consciousness. Of course you can abstract away from your immeadiate experience and extrapolate from your deep sleep and say that this pure consciousness always lies behind your experience, but just as I cannot demonstrate that that part changes too (in my view it doesn't even make sense to talk about it separately as such), you similary can't prove that it's unchanging.

I haven't really read all your posts about the question of Time guys, but if it may be of interest to the discussion, I'm currently reading Spengler's DOTW and he makes a big deal out of the fact that (I'm gonna do my best at expressing it with my own words) Time in his view is indissolubly and fundamentally related to "Life" itself, as in, the directionality of consciousness in its unfolding, or "Destiny".

>>18929595
>If change is continuous, like we experience it, then that entails that the consciousness that changes with it is *constantly in contact with its just passed version*,
Where is the evidence on the basis of which you are supposing that consciousness even changes to begin with? We don't ever experience it changing.

>In reality we always experience time and space together as the changing objects of consciousness. When there is near zero change, as in deep sleep, there is near zero consciousness, we don't experience neither space nor time, it's a near singular instant, but we can only recognize it as such after we awake and look back on it. So I think this pure consciousness you talk about isn't a constant underlying foundation of consciousness,
How is it not a constant underlying foundation? It's still there in sleep, no matter how subtle. This subtle consciousness in deep sleep is also there during the day and dreaming, and it's no less subtle during the day and dreaming, it's just that the mind is also active then, and so if people wrongly identify their consciousness with the changing mind then consciousness will seem to be more present and less subtle then even though it hasn't changed and remains what it is regardless of waking/dream/dreamless sleep. Just because the mind emerges from sleep and thinks "I was asleep and I recognize that sleep passed by without the mind perceiving time and space" has nothing to do with whether consciousness itself (and not the mind) was continuing as the constant underlying foundation.

>>18935217
>>18929595
>But even if you don't agree with my conception I ask again, how is this state *in effect* different from nothingness, to us?
It's different because consciousness is still present in dreamless sleep, dreamless sleep passes by for a sentient presence, nothingness does not pass by for anyone. You can be woken up from dreamless sleep when struck or by a loud noise, you cannot wake up from nothingness. How is this not "in effect"? You are acting like you have had positive experience of nothingness, and it's my responsibility to demonstrate to you how dreamless sleep differs from it, but this is wrong since you have never actually experienced nothingness and you have no way of knowing whether it even exists in any sense. How would you know if dreamless sleep was different from or similar to nothingness if you have never experienced nothingness? You can only match it up against what you are imagining nothingness to be.

>As you can only affirm it *as something* from an afterward position of changing consciousness, if you die and never wake up again I don't see how that's different from the common atheistic conception of entering nothingness.
In Advaita Vedanta, which teaches this notion of constant foundational consciousness, they say this consciousness is everlasting, and that until the living beings attains moksha (liberation) they will keep transmigrating to other bodies when one body dies instead of never waking up again. So in the view of Advaita, the atheist conception of death is an impossibility. Dreamless sleep in specifically distinguished from liberation in Advaita because for the unenlightened being in dreamless sleep there is still ignorance that obscures ultimate reality from them, whereas in enlightenment and in moksha after the body dies when one is just infinite eternal bodiless consciousness-bliss, there is no ignorance of supreme reality, it is like day compared to the night of dreamless sleep. In both dreamless sleep of the unenlightened human being and in the unembodied liberation of eternal consciousness there is non-perception of duality, but in the former ultimate reality is obscured, whereas in the latter ultimate reality reveals itself.

>>18933276
It's funny to watch you to post that pasta over and over again and continuously make small edits to it when people point out the mistakes in it. Why do you feel to need to repost comments on Advaita Vedanta in so many threads when you clearly have not read much of its literature?

>as everything but Atman which is Brahman is an illusion made out of nothing; it is maya.
For Shankara, saying illusions are made out of nothing is a contradiction, since nothingness never appears in experience while illusions do, this just highlights how you haven't even read him (or at most skimmed several pages)

>You, I, this post, your consciousness (remember, what Shankara is talking about that is translated as "consciousness" is not "whatever you call consciousness", he's referring to something VERY specific), my consciousness, the tree outside my window, none of it is real or exists in any meaningful way.
That's not true, for Shankara the consciousness of all living beings is immutably real. Just because many people have the wrong understanding of consciousness does not mean Shankara is saying their consciousness does not exist, in fact even people who misunderstand consciousness still often have some partial intuitive grasping or glimmering of it on some level, but they wrongly combine it with other things and make other mistakes in their understanding of it.

>The "Crypto-Buddhist" line actually comes the dualistic school of Vedanta
That's incorrect. Not only is your understanding of Advaita wrong, but you have the historical facts wrong as well. It was people belonging to Bhedabheda Vedanta like Bhaskara who first made that claim in the 9th century, dualists like Madhva are not where it originated from.

>>18934773
>which is that consciousness arises together with its contents
When and where? There are no examples that can be found or demonstrated of it arising from anything. Our experience indicates in fact that consciousness is unproduced.
>and there is no sense of talking about them separately so they change together,
Actually there is sense in talking about them separately, because one (contents) is unaware and the other (consciousness) is aware or sentient. If you speak of them as non-separate you are missing and glossing over one of the most fundamental distinctions.
>when there is no content there is no consciousness,
It is impossible to empirically demonstrate or otherwise prove that this occurs, ever
>This is where you say that this state actually underlies all experience which I don't agree with, because to me once the consciousness comes into being, change starts and there is no sign of this underlying changelessness
That's wrong, because there is an immediate and undeniable sign of this underlying changelessness, and this immediately present and undeniable sign is that you always have infallible access to whatever the contents of the mind are. Even when the mind is fallible, mistaken, you always infallibly have immediate access to that mental mistake. When the mind is quiescent in deep sleep, you have infallible access to that fact as well. Whatever the mind is doing, you always have infallible access to that, this infallibility is unchanging and constant. This infallible access is consciousness itself acting as the ground of being for that which it has access to, hence consciousness is unchanging.
>Of course you can abstract away from your immediate experience and extrapolate from your deep sleep and say that this pure consciousness always lies behind your experience, but just as I cannot demonstrate that that part changes too (in my view it doesn't even make sense to talk about it separately as such), you similarly can't prove that it's unchanging.
That's not true, it is actually easy to show that consciousness is unchanging, this fact is demonstrated by how we always have infallible access to the status of the mind and its contents across waking, dream and dreamless sleep.

And do you think both of those symbols have the same Esoteric significance?

Of course the Christian Cross hasn't just been equaled with the Trishula in significance, but historically, also with the Ankh in Egypt, with the Nehushtan by multiple theologers of both Kabbalistic and Christian nature, and with the Caduceus additionally.

The symbolism with the Ankh (and especially, the Ankh-Djed) is especially interesting.
As some of you may know, the Djed (the pillar with 4 small horizontal lines near the top) is a symbol that represents Osiris. Osiris, the Egyptian God that created wine, that dies and is resurrected, that grants eternal life.
The Ankh-Djed symbol represents (among other things) Osiris with his arms extended outwards, making a "crucified" shape.
(Among other reasons also mentioned above, which is why the "crucified posture" is known in Western Esotericism as "The Sign of Osiris Slain").

Of course, I'm not implying that one culture "copied" the other or any of that. But that some symbolism is inherently eternal and ingraved in the human consciousness etc.

So my question about the Trishula, Crucifix, Ankh-Djed, Nehushtan, Caduceus, etc, is not "which one came first", but rather - do these actually represent the same Divine Principle?
And if so, is there a specific hidden symbolism / meaning in these icons that is often never pointed out / spoken of?aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

>>18935561
Goddamn, my cat pressed that stupid letter in the keyboard when I went to the bathroom

>>18935227
>>18935390
Okay I think we are going in circles now, I understand your view but don't agree with it, and I think I presented mine clearly, to me both of them work as a concept but neither can disprove the other, but you sound too dogmatic to consider alternate explanations. Again, you concieve of moments of experience as instants coming after one another (separate points/moments) and then postulate the pure consciousness (an unchanging line) running through them, holding them together and accounting for the continuity of experience. For me moments of experience come like moving a point in a direction as it draws out a line (non-separate moments), so there is no need for anything to hold them together, and consciousness and its contents cannot be separated, and change together without breaking continuity, in deep sleep this moving point comes to a near standstill, there is near zero change/content/consciousness. When awoken it starts moving faster again and this change is what consciousness and content simultaneously arise from without a fundamental separation, in a sense being the same as they are both the changing itself, different sides of the same coin if you will (there is no content separate from consciousness, and no consciousness separate from content). Where did they arise from in the first place? I cannot tell for certain, but I also believe that something doesn't come out of nothing, so this point in my analogy probably always moved with a near zero speed representing near zero changing as a potential consciousness/content, coming into actual experienceable consciousness/content as the change speeded up.

>>18933276
>Brahman of Advaita Vedanta does is reflexively self-awarate. There is no going-on other than this, as everything but Atman which is Brahman is an illusion made out of nothing; it is maya


Barbarian jingo. Stop being a hipster.

>>18938051
Based.

>>18934773
I'm not >>18934496. Anyways, the problem you're running into is that no, Parmenides and Zeno do NOT believe that time is made up of instants. That's entirely the point. They believe that time, space, and everything are continuous. The paradox is to demonstrate the inconsistencies that arise from believing in separate discrete bodies (or that time and space could be subdivided AT ALL rather than being treated as continuous). This is why "muh calculus" doesn't solve the problem. You could have something move from point A to point B, the paradox still stands: how does a discrete thing move through space and/or time? It can't. Of course we can just sum up an infinite series, Zeno isn't saying that we can't, he's asking how things move through discrete time and space.

Aristotle actually sets out to answer this problem, but that's an aside.

You're right about why it works, you're just misunderstanding what they're trying to say. Parmenides believed the entire world to be a large continuous whole such that there can be no discreteness. Parmenides (and his student Zeno) thus rejected the entire idea of subdividing space and time into discrete packets as anything but a thought experiment. Zeno is saying "discrete world causes problems, therefore monism because Parmenides".

To bring this back to India, Shankara offers a trivial solution to the problem by suggesting that there are discrete things, or rather that there is one single discrete thing, Atman, and that nothing else exists or occurs other than it and its self awareness.

>>18938135
Thanks for clarifying, but as I said, in the end Parmenides does say that our experience of changing reality is illusory contrasted with his ultimate monistic reality, doesn't he? Isn't his conception of the world like a homogenous sphere? I agree with them in that discreteness is a human abstraction and cannot describe the world as it is, but I don't think this entails that it's a homogenous unit. Instead saying that the multiplicity of beings continously blend with one another in space and time solves the problem just as well, and this way our perception isn't illusory.

>>18938135
Good post.

>>18937022
>Okay I think we are going in circles now, I understand your view but don't agree with it, and I think I presented mine clearly, to me both of them work as a concept but neither can disprove the other, but you sound too dogmatic to consider alternate explanations.
I am not trying to be dogmatic. When people present alternative (relative to mine) understandings of consciousness, I genuinely try to consider and understand them. However, when I consider yours, it seems incorrect to me because I can identify what I consider to be direct proofs that contradict it, and which signal the correctness of my perspective over yours. I don't see it as being two equally plausible interpretations, but I see things that seem to directly contradict yours.

>Again, you concieve of moments of experience as instants coming after one another (separate points/moments) and then postulate the pure consciousness (an unchanging line) running through them, holding them together and accounting for the continuity of experience.
Actually, I'm not committing myself to any position on this, but for the sake of simplicity in presenting my argument, I described time as being comprised as a series of moments. This conception of time is not necessary for my position though; because even if time is a flow with no separation into discrete moments, consciousness would still need to be unchanging in order to perceive change. Even if there is simply just impartite flow, if consciousness was only momentary, it would not last long enough to perceive that flow. Each instance of momentary-consciousness would just perceive its own instant mental snapshot of the flow without any opportunity for those snapshots to become the perception of change.

>For me moments of experience come like moving a point in a direction as it draws out a line (non-separate moments), so there is no need for anything to hold them together, and consciousness and its contents cannot be separated, and change together without breaking continuity, in deep sleep this moving point comes to a near standstill, there is near zero change/content/consciousness.
1) Awareness can either change or not change
2) Awareness is partless and lacks no distinguishing features or characteristics that could change aside from its centrally defining nature as awareness
3) So the only way that awareness can change is by ceasing to be aware, by no longer existing as awareness
4) Hence, because of 1-3, if you deny that consciousness is unchanging, this amounts to a de facto endorsement of the position that consciousness or awareness is momentary, that it exists and then ceases to exists, that awareness fades in and out of existence.
5) If awareness is fading in and out of existence, it cannot produce the unity of uninterrupted awareness, the continuum of presence that we all possess and experience in every moment, there would be no continuity to begin with.

>>18939323
>>18937022

6) One can plausibly maintain the premise that consciousness and its contents cannot be separated as being two different and distinct experiences, since contents never occur without consciousness (since there is nobody aware of them), because they occur at the same time, but the claim that consciousness and its contents cannot be distinguished as being qualitatively distinct or as two distinct things happening at once that become integrated in a united experience, is indefensible, and this position is indefensible because we never experience the tree being aware of itself, or sounds being aware of themselves as sound or the color blue being aware of itself as blue, but instead we always experience those things being presented to awareness.

So it's obviously wrong to say that consciousness and its contents cannot be separated full stop, since contents never present themselves to themselves, but they always present themselves to awareness. So, we have direct evidence in every moment of that position being completely wrong, whereas we don't have direct evidence that contradicts consciousness being unchanging. So, this point in combination with the impossibility of a momentary consciousness perceiving change is why I don't see your and my positions as being two equally plausible theories. I did examine yours in good faith though and explained exactly why I see it as wrong and cited what I see as the evidence for my position over yours.

>>18939360
>>18939323
I maintain that consciousness is always consciousness *of* content, and content is always content *of* consciousness, they are inseparable, and there is no fundamental split between them, my conception is something like William James's idea of "pure experience", which precedes the subject-object distinction. I simply called it change here because basically that's what it is, in deep sleep there is near zero change, which means that consciousness/content is minimal, to the point that this distinction doesn't even arise, and I would argue that in normal dreams it doesn't arise either, that's why becoming lucid in a dream is such a weird experience, it's basically the experience of the split between subject and object from the unsplit field of change. I also believe that most other animals don't experience this distinction either because they function on a lower level but anyway, I hope this concept is clear now. As for your second objection I guess it's true that my conception of change/consciousness-content is momentary, but I think that's heavily supported by evidence, we are always conscious in the present moment, but again I stress that this is a non-separate moment, so it doesn't fade in and out of existence but stays precisely in existence, it *is* existence, and this one moment changes continously, as existence. What accounts for the continuity of experience is memory. Because of the non-separateness, the previous version of the moment doesn't pass by in a binary way, like switching off a lamp, but sort of fades out so it can leave a partial trace of itself in the upcoming version of the moment, this is its memory, and this is how the continuity of past, present (and future) can be experienced in the present field of change.

>>18939960
>I maintain that consciousness is always consciousness *of* content, and content is always content *of* consciousness, they are inseparable, and there is no fundamental split between them,
That is a contradiction, by saying one is always of the other you have identified a fundamental split or a difference between them, if there was no split, no difference, then there would be no purpose or basis for saying ‘X is of Y’. You can’t both admit without contradicting yourself that awareness is awareness *of* objects, and that objects are objects *of* awareness, and at the same time say they are inseparable with no split. Just because two things occur at the same time and in association with one another doesn't make them identical. If two things are not completely and utterly identical, then that’s a split, that’s a difference, that’s a separation of them into distinct things or categories, and by your own logic you admit them to be non-identical.

>my conception is something like William James's idea of "pure experience", which precedes the subject-object distinction. I simply called it change here because basically that's what it is, in deep sleep there is near zero change,
Even in deep sleep there is zero change, what change can you identify in consciousness there?

>which means that consciousness/content is minimal, to the point that this distinction doesn't even arise, and I would argue that in normal dreams it doesn't arise either, that's why becoming lucid in a dream is such a weird experience, it's basically the experience of the split between subject and object from the unsplit field of change.
I have lucid dreamt many times, and from my own experience I can tell you that this is totally wrong, in normal dreams your conscious experience of them is indistinguishable from waking life which is why most people believe every night that their dreams are real life. When you become lucid the only thing that has changed is your understanding of the situation that one is in. It’s not true at all that you have no distinction of consciousness/content in dreams which you say also occurs in deep sleep, even in dreams both regular and lucid you still experience yourself as a persisting presence of awareness to which is presented sequences of events, sights, colors etc. This presence which is always distinguished from the things revealed to it is the same in both normal and lucid dreams, when you become lucid this presence observes the mind understand that its actually in a dream and not in real life as it has thought previously. The sense of weirdness comes from the mind suddenly grasping that what it thought was reality is actually unreality.

>>18939960
>>18940432

>As for your second objection I guess it's true that my conception of change/consciousness-content is momentary, but I think that's heavily supported by evidence
Such as? You haven’t cited any evidence to support that while I’ve already provided evidence of the contrary.

>we are always conscious in the present moment, but again I stress that this is a non-separate moment, so it doesn't fade in and out of existence but stays precisely in existence, it *is* existence, and this one moment changes continously, as existence.
How does it change? In which identifiable way? The observed contents contained in each moment changing don’t equal consciousness itself changing in any fashion. If there is one continuous present moment which *is* existence, that’s not a change, it’s the lack of change.

>What accounts for the continuity of experience is memory. Because of the non-separateness, the previous version of the moment doesn't pass by in a binary way, like switching off a lamp, but sort of fades out so it can leave a partial trace of itself in the upcoming version of the moment, this is its memory, and this is how the continuity of past, present (and future) can be experienced in the present field of change.
This is contradicted by our experience of memory, we experience remembrance as a specific act which has a beginning and end, we encounter remembrance as distinct from rational thought and future-planning. We don’t find that we are remembering in every moment the previous moment, but rather we experience ourselves as a continuous presence, and this presence always has infallible access to the mind and watches its switch successively from rational thought, to memory, and back again. This notion of a constant remembrance of the past moment is not something we ever experience. Moreover, it would have to occur at the same time as the content of whatever we were sensing or thinking about at that very moment, but we don’t in fact find that in every moment of thought our awareness is split between that and a separate memory. We find the opposite to be true, namely that we can recognize remembrance as a mental act distinct from thinking about something in the moment.

>>18940436
It might not look like it but I'm really trying to work from the bottom up, building on actual experience with as little metaphysical speculation as possible, to me your conception of an unchanging consciousness is already too much, because I really feel like my consciousness is of contents and it constantly changes with them, when there is no change there is no consciousness and content either. In deep sleep there has to be some minimal content like the monitoring of the environment for sound, so continuity doesn't brake, change just slows down. I talk about consciousness and concept like that because once this distinction is made you have to harmonize them one way or another, this is what many philosophers put there life into, and I'm not suggesting it's an entirely made up philosophical problem, there is probably a reason why we tend to think about our experience this way, it might have been practical for the development of humans, or just a side effect of increased capacity, I don't know, but I subscribe to the idea that fundamentally there is no such split. But when they are split they are different of course, but they stem from the same whole (I might have written somewhere that they are the same, that's wrong, but they are still inseparable in this split state). Dreams are accompanied by a feeling of reality because they are based on waking life experience in general, but it does feel to me that they are this unsplit field of change that just happens, and when I become lucid that's when I start to feel like I'm a subject against objects.
I think it's pretty evident that we are always conscious in the present moment, I don't know what's your problem with that. I'm not conscious 10 minutes ago, I'm conscous now, I was conscious 10 minutes ago when that was the present. We experience the continous change of this present moment (again I'm not saying anything fancy just putting experience into words), and we experince it as a constant flow and not as a succession of separate instants. I used memory in a broad sense, as this trace that the present moment leaves as it passes by, but this is just another way of putting of how this moment flows instead of discrete moments following each other which I've gone over many times before, but anyway this is how we are presently experiencing change, and are in contact with the past, instead of perishing every moment, which still seems to be your conception of my conception, like an extreme form of amnesia where the present consciousness-content is closed into a separate instant, which would really entail your paradoxes, that's why I stress my conception of this flowing present, which is not closed but open toward the past (and future). And this is what also makes possible the deliberate mental act of remembrance, but as you said that's different from the experinece of the flowing of the present which comes without deliberation, but it also takes place in it, like every experience.

>>18941262
>It might not look like it but I'm really trying to work from the bottom up, building on actual experience with as little metaphysical speculation as possible
It’s funny that you say that, because from my perspective it seems as though you have some sort of ideological precommitment to “consciousness as change” that makes you ignore contradictory evidence to it in order that your theory holds. I honestly think that any neutral observer with no skin in the game would find my explanation to be more in accordance with their actual experience and logic.

>to me your conception of an unchanging consciousness is already too much, because I really feel like my consciousness is of contents and it constantly changes with them, when there is no change there is no consciousness and content either.
I have asked you on multiple occasions in this thread alone to provide examples of consciousness changing and you haven’t cited any, only indirectly hinted at some. If you really felt your consciousness change it would be easy to cite examples of this. If you just rely on your feelings without thinking rationally, it’s easy to be deceived. Think, try to come up with any example of consciousness changing that doesn’t amount to simply a change in the unconscious contents. You’ll find there are none.

>In deep sleep there has to be some minimal content like the monitoring of the environment for sound,
Monitoring implies directed effort, directed efforts involve volition which inheres in the mind and which is absent in deep sleep when the mind is quiescent. There is no volition/willpower present in deep sleep. That loud noises can immediately awaken one from deep sleep when you hear them indicates that consciousness is still present and there in deep sleep even when the mind is inactive, this hearing cannot be a directed action though for reasons just mentioned.

>so continuity doesn't brake, change just slows down.
What change? There is no identifiable changes in deep dreamless sleep. I already asked this question before and you failed to provide examples, so I dont know why you are speaking about the presence of change in dreamless sleep like its a foregone conclusion.

>>18941262
>>18941895

>I talk about consciousness and content like that because once this distinction is made you have to harmonize them
And you think they are not harmonized by saying one observes the other as something non-identical to it? Why?

>I don't know, but I subscribe to the idea that fundamentally there is no such split.
Why? There is no empirical evidence for that but you claim strangely enough to be working from experience.

>When they are split they are different of course, but they stem from the same whole (I might have written somewhere that they are the same, that's wrong, but they are still inseparable in this split state).
Saying they are inseparable in this split state is a contradiction. Being split is mutually exclusive with being inseparable, because inseparable things cannot be split. Do you mean to say they cannot be further removed from each other than the extent to which they are already removed or split from each other as two distinct things in an association? That’s not the same as inseparable. By being two non-identical things in a relation of presentation and recipient of presentation they are already separable as two qualitatively distinct things with different natures.

>Dreams are accompanied by a feeling of reality because they are based on waking life experience in general, but it does feel to me that they are this unsplit field of change that just happens, and when I become lucid that's when I start to feel like I'm a subject against objects.
If you try after waking to remember dreams that you weren’t lucid in, in which you believed them to be real life, you’ll find that you more or less act in them as you do in real life, that is, your actions and motivations for actions presuppose a constant presence who is the same experiencer of the past, present and future.

>I think it's pretty evident that we are always conscious in the present moment, I don't know what's your problem with that.
I don’t have a problem with that, not once have I denied that we are always conscious in the present moment.

>I'm not conscious 10 minutes ago, I'm conscous now, I was conscious 10 minutes ago when that was the present. We experience the continous change of this present moment (again I'm not saying anything fancy just putting experience into words), and we experince it as a constant flow and not as a succession of separate instants.
Yes, but the flow of time is something that is itself not sentient, its presented to awareness just like sound and color are, that you are conscious now and were in the past is the same as saying you were conscious of red and them blue, that’s not an example of consciousness changing

>>18941262
>>18941897

>I used memory in a broad sense, as this trace that the present moment leaves as it passes by, but this is just another way of putting of how this moment flows instead of discrete moments following each other which I've gone over many times before, but anyway this is how we are presently experiencing change, and are in contact with the past, instead of perishing every moment, which still seems to be your conception of my conception, like an extreme form of amnesia where the present consciousness-content is closed into a separate instant, which would really entail your paradoxes, that's why I stress my conception of this flowing present, which is not closed but open toward the past (and future). And this is what also makes possible the deliberate mental act of remembrance
We dont have empirical examples of these traces though, they are not clearly identifiable things which everybody accepts is a part of the mind like memory and thoughts. Its a hypothetical and unfalsifiable thing that has no empirical evidence for it like the flying spaghetti monster, which is just begging the question of why do you have to come up with this hypothetical and unfalsifiable thing in order to meet the outcome you already believe is correct, instead of just basing your position off of experience as it is commonly recognized by people. If your position was based on experience it wouldn’t involve things like vague “traces” which dont have any empirical evidence for them.

In any case, even if we take what you say at face value and evaluate it the concept still doesn’t make sense. “Traces” are not memory, traces can either be perceived or remembered, you clearly are not talking about remembrance as a recognizable mental action which we all engage in, so you are not even talking about memory at all, you said verbatim “ What accounts for the continuity of experience is memory” and then when pressed you turn out to not even be talking about memory at all! Why even say that then? So you are instead talking about the direct perception of traces, in other words, the presentation of traces to awareness. What exactly do these traces consist of? You dont make that clear, its just more vague and unfalsifiable hypothetical things being conjured up which cannot be empirically established, in order to reach a pre-determined outcome.

These alleged ‘traces’ still wouldn’t be able to give rise to and account for a unity of experience, because consciousness doesn’t produce traces. Consciousness (awareness) is partless and has no components which can be left as traces that are incomplete images, residues or signs of the complete whole, it can either be present or absent but there is no in-between. If consciousness vanishes after a moment and is absent, there is no “trace of awareness”, if consciousness is still present, then that’s not a trace but consciousness being present in full and non-momentary.

>>18941262
>>18941911

Moreover, a momentary consciousness would have no way to recognize the supposed ‘traces’ as relating to the previous moment, because since these traces are occurring in a single moment for the momentary consciousness they would be indistinguishable from the contents of the present and would present themselves as part of this present content; it would just lead to the momentary perception of the present without any connection with the past and you are right back at square one of being unable to account for the unity of experience all over again. Its completely illogical to say that the trace from the past can account for the experience of change and the unity of experience, because if the content of that trace doesn’t differ from the present it becomes indistinguishable from the perception of the present, but if its different from the present then you are claiming in effect that consciousness perceives past content and present content in a single momentary instance which is obviously wrong.

>>18926433
>According to the Mandukya Upanishad and Mandukya Karika, it exists in every moment at the same time as everything else, it is the constant, effortless and natural basis in which everything else takes place. The self-shining presence which accounts for the uninterrupted continuity throughout waking, dream and deep-sleep. No explanation of consciousness and mind is coherent without there being a pure subject or pure consciousness. If at the end of the road there is just objects and no non-objective presence, then there is nobody to know the objects, there is nothing providing for them to be integrated into the unwavering continuum of awareness which we experience. The mind changes and is fallible, but your access to the contents of the mind like thoughts and sense-perceptions is always infallible, and this is because the ground of mental-contents coming into being is unwavering pure consciousness.
a lot of word to pretty much still say it's just nothing, you just prove >>18926042 right

>yea, why bother talking about philosophy and metaphysics
>philosophy and metaphysics
lol nondualism is the opposite of philosophy or metaphysics, is the ultimate cop out to avoid engaging with real ontological problems

>>18928506
>They were both teachers of the same philosophy.
guenonfag just got triggered hard!

>>18935290
>Why do you feel to need to repost comments on Advaita Vedanta in so many threads when you clearly have not read much of its literature?
you do the same with buddhism tho
and everytime you get owned

>>18932850
no hegel is the opposite of advaita, the advaita idea of pure awarness is anathema to hegel absolute idealism, in fact hegel provides arguments against shankara epistemology in the preface and first chapter of the phenomenology of spirit, to him that way of thinking was the most primitive way of philosophy

>>18934937
time is moronic concept made up by rationalists, and they are trapped by their own mistake because they can't think in terms of something else than time and also they can't even define time , whereas rationalists are obsessed with ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''definitions''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

>>18941895
As I have said several times consciousness for me is always consciousness of content, content is never "unconscious content" as you say (I mean the psychological concept might make sense but we are not talking about that now). Now I'm conscious of the screen, I look up and I'm conscious of the wall, my consciousness changed together with its contents, but the continuity of the change provided me with the continuity of experience. If there would be cuts and jumps in my experience I would indeed be confused but that's not what I experience, that's something like people with dementia and multiple personalities experience and they are confused indeed, they lose their continuity of experience and self. I don't know how you would explain such conditions, of course you can go "of course pure consciousness is still there, it's constant and unchanging, they are just confused what's the deal? " but that doesn't really convince me. I would explain it as a malfunctioning of the memory, the moments don't leave sufficient traces, so the continuity starts to break down. Again, these memory traces are only another way of putting that the versions of the present moment continuously flow into one another, instead of a succession of separate moments, I don't think that's too much of a speculation, it's a pretty simple explanation of our experience.
Monitoring was a wrong word but you get it, you still hear the environment during sleep, that's a minimal change and correspondingly a minimal consciousness-content, so minimal that this differentiation doesn't even arise and it goes by in almost an instant, a sudden noise is a sudden change, which means the consciousness-content springs into wakefulness.
>>18941897
As I said my dreams feel like this unsplit field of change to me, without definite subjecthood and objecthood, they just happen, when you recall them afterwards of course you project this split on it retroactively, but originally it's not really there and you can have this experience in deep meditation too. As I said I cannot tell how or why this split came up in our waking field of change, but it's there and we can definitely talk about them. Yes they are qualitatively separable in philosophical abstraction, but you never actually experience one without the other, like when you think about consciousness as a separate entity, there is some abstract image in your mind (a content) which you are conscious of (consciousness), so I might as well say they are inseparable, for me I have never experienced consciousness without content, which is what your pure consciousness is apparently, as I said it's safe to assume there is content in deep sleep too, but so little that it goes by as an almost instantaneous unsplit field of change tying together your wakeful states in the day before and after.
1/2

>>18943280
As I said time and space cannot be entirely separated either, they too stem from this unsplit field of change similarly to subject and object, and again there is probably a reason that we started to differentiate them, but still you cannot experience one without the other.
2/2

God is dead, faggots.

But the virus is not.

>>18942720
>nondualism is the opposite of philosophy or metaphysics
Lmao, the fuck? Nondualism is a form of metaphysics.

>I don't like this so it's not metaphysics
You can't just assign whatever meaning you want to words.

>>18942741
>you do the same with buddhism tho
No that’s wrong, when I post in Buddhism threads its usually because I have specific arguments against specific Buddhist doctrines, I don’t present myself as someone who is explaining an overview of what Buddhism is about when people ask about it while getting stuff wrong about it, which is what the other anon is doing.

>and everytime you get owned
Major cope, Buddhism is full of holes and Buddhists resort to sophistry and mental gymnastics to defend it.

>>18942720
>a lot of word to pretty much still say it's just nothing
No it’s not, since nothing isn’t experienced and has no connection with experience but pure consciousness is the foundation of every experience

>>18941911
My basic foundation is only this field of change that you and I experience right now, without language or any deliberate description of its parts, the whole as it is given. In trying to explain this of course I have to resort to the classic philosophical concepts, but only to show that they stem from this whole, and how in their split state they form the whole together still. You can call this speculation, but it's the most minimal speculation I can think of, compared to your foundation, which is the assumption of an unchanging, monolithic, contentless consciousness.
>>18941954
But you desperately cling to this concept of yours so of course mine won't make sense to you, since my concept doesn't build on it, and in fact rules it out on the way. For the last time my concept is not a closed instant of present, but a flowing present, by which I just mean our experience, you don't have to conjure up a mental image just look around yourself and you experience what I'm talking about. I might have worded it weirdly at places, so yeah memory doesn't account for the continuity of experience, continuity of experience is what I take for granted since that's what I experience, this involves zero speculation and this is my foundation, this is what I called field of change, but it's basically the same as William James's pure experience. Memory and trace leaving was just another way of explaining this flow, but I think I presented it more or less understandably, of course the trace differs from the present, it's more or less the same image that you can deliberately remember and experience *as* a memory of a past moment, in the present, but separate from the present environment, the fact that you call it up from a longer time ago I think proves that it left that trace as it passed by. But again, this really starts to be speculation here so I will just say again that I take the field of change as a foundation, which involves no speculation at all, since that's literally what I experience right now.

>>18943398
you *can call it up

>>18943280
>As I have said several times consciousness for me is always consciousness of content, content is never "unconscious content" as you say (I mean the psychological concept might make sense but we are not talking about that now). Now I'm conscious of the screen, I look up and I'm conscious of the wall, my consciousness changed together with its contents, but the continuity of the change provided me with the continuity of experience.
This is wrong, because the only thing which has changed is the object-contents. You are wrongly conflating consciousness with observed contents without any good reason for doing so. In each cognition, pure awareness which lacks any parts and distinguishing features meets or exists in an association with the content, which I call "unconscious" because it has no awareness, unlike the pure awareness which knows it. It is easy to demonstrate that this is true, when you see a tree, the tree doesn't know itself, the visual data the eye produces of the tree doesn't know itself, so who knows it then? The content (image of tree) is unconscious, it has no awareness and doesn't know itself, it's known by awareness which is different from it. We know that this is true, because among other reasons if the content knew itself then a bunch of disparate self-knowing contents would not be able to give rise to a unity of experience because they would have no center and no way to communicate with and integrate with each other. The self-knowing tree image has no way to know that it is supposed to link up with other visual images or sound etc in a unified experience, nor does it have a way of doing so. Content is always unconscious because the content has no consciousness, it's not self-knowing, you yourself have already admitted that objects are objects *of* awareness instead of being awareness themselves, but then you seem to forgot what this entails a moment later.

When you say "Now I'm conscious of the screen, I look up and I'm conscious of the wall, my consciousness changed together with its contents", all you have done is describe two different insentient contents occurring as presented objects to the same consciousness, you have not actually identified any change in consciousness itself, which as I have explained already would necessitate pure consciousness/awareness ceasing to exist, which didn't occur in the example you gave.

>>18943280
>>18943712

>If there would be cuts and jumps in my experience I would indeed be confused but that's not what I experience, that's something like people with dementia and multiple personalities experience and they are confused indeed, they lose their continuity of experience and self. I don't know how you would explain such conditions, of course you can go "of course pure consciousness is still there, it's constant and unchanging, they are just confused what's the deal? " but that doesn't really convince me.
Those people don't experience or report their own consciousness/awareness ceasing to exist and coming back into existence, rather their minds lose the sense of ordered structure that the mind normal imposes onto things which enables it to conceive of them as a series of ordered events. That's not actually losing a continuity of experience or self, but involves faulty memory.

>I would explain it as a malfunctioning of the memory, the moments don't leave sufficient traces, so the continuity starts to break down. Again, these memory traces are only another way of putting that the versions of the present moment continuously flow into one another, instead of a succession of separate moments, I don't think that's too much of a speculation, it's a pretty simple explanation of our experience.
From evaluating what this looks like in practice it can be seen that this is wrong, since you yourself say consciousness is momentary, that means it only has a single moment to perceive what's going on. So it only has a single moment to both perceive the present and the alleged "trace" you are proposing, but since this trace involves the content of the past, what you are saying in effect amounts to the position that the momentary consciousness perceives both the past and present content at once (if the trace doesn't convey the past content it's meaningless and doesn't do anything), which is contradictory (since it would involve, for example, seeing in the same instance an object in two locations) and which is completely unsupported by our experience. This is not the result of me trying to impose a conception of time as a series of ordered discrete moments, but it's the position that results from saying consciousness is momentary, and I'm pointing out how it leads to contradictions without myself taking any stance on whether time is a series of moments or a continuous flow. In either conception of time it leads to the exact same issue I just described, because the momentary nature you are proposing imposes its own discreteness by the very fact of its momentariness.

>>18943280
>>18943717
>As I said my dreams feel like this unsplit field of change to me, without definite subjecthood and objecthood, they just happen, when you recall them afterwards of course you project this split on it retroactively, but originally it's not really there and you can have this experience in deep meditation too.
That's wrong, I have experienced it in dreams and know it's there. If you didnt have a definite subjecthood and objecthood in dreams you would behave differently in them than you do in real life, but this isn't the case and people universally behave in dreams just as they do in real life.

>As I said I cannot tell how or why this split came up in our waking field of change, but it's there and we can definitely talk about them. Yes they are qualitatively separable in philosophical abstraction, but you never actually experience one without the other, like when you think about consciousness as a separate entity, there is some abstract image in your mind (a content) which you are conscious of (consciousness), so I might as well say they are inseparable,
It's correct to admit them as qualitatively separable because this is an obvious and immediate fact of our experience, it seems though that where you are making your mistake is taking the co-incidence of consciousness and content as sufficient justification for referring to the content itself as consciousness, which it's not in any sense.
>for me I have never experienced consciousness without content, which is what your pure consciousness is apparently, as I said it's safe to assume there is content in deep sleep too, but so little that it goes by as an almost instantaneous unsplit field of change tying together your wakeful states in the day before and after.
Why is it safe to assume that? No content presents itself in sleep unless suddenly imposed by an outside actor, but naturally there is no content there, why then would you assume content?

>>18943722
>>18943398
>In trying to explain this of course I have to resort to the classic philosophical concepts, but only to show that they stem from this whole, and how in their split state they form the whole together still.
You have not actually shown how consciousness comes from anything else, you are theorizing that consciousness and content split from something else of which they go into forming the whole, but you have not given any empirical evidence for this or logical reason for accepting this.
>but it's the most minimal speculation I can think of, compared to your foundation, which is the assumption of an unchanging, monolithic, contentless consciousness.
I don't have to assume it because it reveals itself in every moment as the foundation which allows for particular contents to be observed, without this the continuity of experience would be unintelligent. It can be empirically proven:

1) The mind is fallible, but you always have infallible access to the minds contents like thoughts etc, when the mind is awake and active, people never experience anything that prevents their awareness from knowing their own thoughts, i.e. their access to their own thoughts is infallible.
2) Because the infallibility is always true, it is unchanging
3) This infallibility is not a content in itself but is what allows for us to have infallible access to content, hence it is contentless
4) Hence it can be demonstrated that awareness considered in itself is unchanging and contentless.

>But you desperately cling to this concept of yours so of course mine won't make sense to you, since my concept doesn't build on it, and in fact rules it out on the way.
I'm not clinging to anything, I'm just subjecting what you are saying to logic and showing how in each instance it doesn't actually make sense, and that it doesn't actually align with our experience of things. You keep making the same mistake of thinking I'm reimposing a concept of time as discrete ordered moments, when in fact I'm pointing out the natural consequences of viewing consciousness as momentary, without committing to any position on what time is.

>>18943398
>>18943727
>For the last time my concept is not a closed instant of present, but a flowing present, by which I just mean our experience, you don't have to conjure up a mental image just look around yourself and you experience what I'm talking about.
Flow is mutually exclusive with momentariness, it seems like you don't understand that if you consider consciousness to be momentary, that the momentary consciousness when it arises and vanishes imposes its own ordered discreteness onto the flow of time by virtue of being separated from past and future consciousness because of it being momentary. Hence, even if time itself independent of consciousness is a flow and not a closed instance of present, the consciousness that is momentary only has its own closed instance of present because of its momentary existence, and this leads to contradictions which refute momentary consciousness like the momentary awareness perceiving past-content (in the form of traces) and present-content in the same moment which is impossible.

>I might have worded it weirdly at places, so yeah memory doesn't account for the continuity of experience
Stop saying that it does then if you don't really mean it

>continuity of experience is what I take for granted since that's what I experience, this involves zero speculation and this is my foundation, this is what I called field of change, but it's basically the same as William James's pure experience.
You are calling it change, but it is in fact the absence of change, something continuing is itself not a form or type of change, the opposite is true, namely ceasing to continue would constitute a change.

>>18943398
>>18943732
>Memory and trace leaving was just another way of explaining this flow, but I think I presented it more or less understandably, of course the trace differs from the present, it's more or less the same image that you can deliberately remember and experience *as* a memory of a past moment, in the present, but separate from the present environment
Saying "in the present, but separate from the present" is a contradiction. And as I have already pointed out, what you are saying here is completely illogical and contradicted by our experience, since it would involve the apprehension in a single moment of an object being in two distinct locations.

>the fact that you call it up from a longer time ago I think proves that it left that trace as it passed by.
How does that prove anything? That you can remember things in general does not prove that in each moment a momentary consciousness perceives both the present moment and the content of the past moment.

>But again, this really starts to be speculation here
Then stop claiming that your position is based on empirical observation and experience because its clearly not as you have just admitted here.

>so I will just say again that I take the field of change as a foundation
But this isn't even a change, according to the most basic principles of logic it is actually an unchanging thing (continuity) which you are wrongly calling change
>which involves no speculation at all, since that's literally what I experience right now.
Continuity is self-evident and requires no speculation, the issue here is a categorical error which you are making whereby you label an unchanging thing as change and then saying "well this unchanging thing which I call change for some strange reason is self-evident.... unchangingness btfo!"

>>18943727
At this rate I could write you a book and you would still act dumbfounded. I said I take the field of change as a foundation, by which I mean precisely what I experience right now, the flowing present, without any deliberate differentiation. You might say you feel like consciousness reveals itself as the foundation (whatever that means) for contents, but you cannot deny that this feel of reveal and contents are part of the whole of your present flow of experience (but of course you will say there is an underlying changeless foundation because you can't let go of that idea even as an experiment) . As I said I cannot say certainly how these feelings arise from the whole, but neither do I act like I can know it, what I do know though is that my experience is continuous and whole, so I start from this as a fact.
I haven't even speculated about noumena, I strictly talked about human phenomenal experience (although I don't really like this split either). As far as I'm concerned a tree exists, as it exists in my consciousness as a content of it. Whether this tree is conscious of itself, or the content conscious of other contents or whatever the fuck, I cannot know, and I don't care, and I haven't gone into such speculation. What I know for certain is that I am able to be conscious of the concept/image of a tree. I'm not a solipsist, I believe that there is more to the world than what I experience, but I also admit that this belief is part of my world, so human experience has a fundamentally solipsistic nature.
I said several times that our experience is like a *flowing* moment, which doesn't equal the everyday notion of momentariness, but again this is just my best attempt to describe how I experience life right now, and generally when awake, you abstracting away from it and saying it's impossible won't make my experience less real, which is all I'm trying to put to words with minimal further speculation. I also tried to put it as an "open" moment contrary to a "closed" one which you talk about, but you know what forget the word momentary and focus on change, which I said much more times, and which is what you experience right now. The "absence of change"? What are you talking about, do you really experience an absence of change right now? How are we talking to each other if you are supposedly frozen in spacetime? I experience continuous change, you can call it continuity or whatever you want, I experience it as change, I never experience anything unchanging at all, when there is no change I don't experience anything, like before I was born. In fact an unchanging consciousness underlying all experience would suggest to me that your entire life experience goes by in a singular instant.

>>18943742
>>18944255
Anyway, I think I answered all your questions, if you want to make sense of my position try reading my previous posts without any preconception, but if you conclude that it doesn't make sense that's fine with me, it makes sense to me, and I tried my best at communicating it, we can agree to disagree here.

>>18944255
>At this rate I could write you a book and you would still act dumbfounded.
I'm not dumbfounded nor am I acting like it, I am carefully considering your positions which you are elaborating and I am finding them to be lacking in both empirical support and logical consistency, and have explained why I find this to be so in detail. A dumbfounded person would be incapable of doing that.

>Whether this tree is conscious of itself, or the content conscious of other contents or whatever the fuck, I cannot know, and I don't care, and I haven't gone into such speculation.
The important point is that the complete illogicality and non-alignment with our experience of these possibilities is a very strong indication, even proof, that the awareness which knows these contents is different from them.

>I said several times that our experience is like a *flowing* moment, which doesn't equal the everyday notion of momentariness, but again this is just my best attempt to describe how I experience life right now, and generally when awake, you abstracting away from it and saying it's impossible won't make my experience less real, which is all I'm trying to put to words with minimal further speculation.
I'm not saying the sense of flowing is impossible, I'm saying that when you rationally analyze it, if the same consciousness doesn't continue as unchanged in the midst of the changing content then there is no way to logically account for how the flowing is experienced as a united continuity.

>The "absence of change"? What are you talking about, do you really experience an absence of change right now?
Yes, every single moment involves knowledge of the unchanging and knowledge of the changing, the unchanging is the constant presence of self-revealing awareness which is unchanging, continuous and completely alike in every instance of particular knowledge; this unchanging presence always (i.e. unchangingly) has infallible access to the contents of the mind. When you even say "now" you have two options, you can either refer to a single instantaneous moment, or a moment as spread out over several seconds. In the first option, there is not enough time to even perceive any change, as change like all movement requires more than a single movement, in the second option it's the same presence intuiting that moment throughout the whole moment (without which, it would be inconceivable to even regard it as a moment), so no matter how you conceive of a moment, there is an obvious, immediate and undeniable component of the unchanging in it either way!

>>18944255
>>18944493

>How are we talking to each other if you are supposedly frozen in spacetime?
Because consciousness remains unchanging and beyond spacetime while spacetime and the changing objects it contains are both alike part of the changing content presented to unchanging consciousness as something different from it. Hence, consciousness being unchanging in no way, shape or fashion prevents one from interacting with and being aware of people and changing objects.

>I experience continuous change, you can call it continuity or whatever you want, I experience it as change, I never experience anything unchanging at all
That's wrong, see above. A single instantaneous moment is completely free of change, even if you don't admit the existence of such a thing in principle, you still experience the unchanging when the presence that reveals itself in every moment is the same uninterrupted presence which reveals itself at all moments, this fact never changes and is hence unchanging. You also experience the unchanging in every act of cognition, because the infallible access of awareness to mental cognitions is demonstrably always infallible, and hence unchanging.

>when there is no change I don't experience anything, like before I was born.
Only if you say there is no change in consciousness and the insentient content alike, which I have never said once.
>In fact an unchanging consciousness underlying all experience would suggest to me that your entire life experience goes by in a singular instant.
Only if you are confusing consciousness and the content, if consciousness is completely unchanging and the flow of time and changing objects are presented to it in a sequence or order, then there is no reason whatsoever that my entire life experience would go by in an instant.

>>18944268
It was not my preconceptions that made me disagree with your position, the reason for my disagreement is what I see as your failure to adhere to consistent logic and your failure to show how your position is supported by empirical experience, when evaluating your position to see if it was logical or supported by experience, I disregarded my own preconceived notions and just evaluated your view on its merits or lack thereof alone. We can agree to disagree though. I recommend you read the published articles of Wolfgang Fasching on consciousness.

>>18944493
>>18944508
Okay you answered some of my questions you haven't before. As I said I take for granted this field of change that I experience, because that is what's given. Postulating from this that behind these spatiotemporally changing contents there lies a consciousness beyond spacetime that somehow reveals itself in continuity is too much of a speculative jump for me no matter how logically you present it. As I come from a strictly subjective perspective, I don't assume an absolute cartesian space and time existing independent of me, space and time reveal themselves through this field of change (or "pure experience"), similarly to consciousness and contents. So in this view, constancy, which is lack of change, means lack of experience, no space nor time, no consciousness nor content, which is what I (non-)experienced before birth as far as I can tell, it isn't that I had to wait an eternity to be born, I didn't experience anything before me, this field of change just expanded from a (near?) singularity and that's when my life started, by starting to change.
Anyway thanks for the rec, will look into it.