/lit/ - Literature

>>21863500
There is pure experience
All qualia are pure experiences
The character of pure experience is Being
All qualia are monads
when a Manifold uses its capacity for self interaction to perceive itself as a monad, it is called "consciousness" and the perceiver becomes perceived.
in fact there is no differences between the perceiver and the perceived until "self reflection" is created. "Consciousness" is just a particular type of qualia.

hope that helps.

>>21863507
also I should clarify that the manifold (the self) is only perceiving some part of itself at a time as a monad, since if it experienced its whole self as a monad, then there would be no distinction between perceiver and perceived and therefore it would not be conscious.

the way that a manifold is perceived as a monad (and therefore the way that manifolds can form qualia) is through a quirk in the logic of relations.

read the elements of theology by Proclus, the monadology by Leibniz, essays in radical empiricism by william james, the fragments of parmenides, the ten principal upanishads (yeats translation), etc

>>21863500
No one knows and virtually no progress has been made on it.

People will play up neuroimaging studies and mistake the complexity of the findings for being an actual explanation. It isn't. We've always known that the body influenced consciousness. That is apparent from the first time you stub your toe and feel pain, or from the realization that if you cover your eyes you don't experience conscious sight. We've known that, if the body is disputed, these linkages break down since the first man injured in battle picked up his own severed hand and didn't feel anything from the hand. Neuroimaging has told us a lot about the brain and not as much as people think about consciousness qua first person perspective.

But the real question is: how do physical components create first person subjective experiences? Given a physical system, what traits must it have to generate such perspective? How would we know when something in conscious?

Virtually no headway has been made on this, as evidenced by the fact that the mainstream science/philosophy of this issue is going on all different directions, from computation theories to panpsychism to quantum woo, to idealism (e.g. cognitive scientists Donald Hoffman arguing for idealism). Probably the best indication of the insolublility of the problem is that eliminitivism, denying that consciousness exists, has appeared as a way around having to deal with it.

So, sorry, but you won't get any answers actually supported by empiricism.

>>21863521
>>21863521
sorry chud, it was solved in the fifth century by Proclus Diadokhos when he said "every manifold in some way participates unity." the question can't be solved by what you call "science" or "empiricism" (which is really the thing called "idioscopy"), it can only be answered by logic and phenomenology (phaneroscopy) because consciousness is not one of the "special observations" that idioscopy deals with, but something that exists only in our direct experience, therefore we will have to draw from direct, everyday, ordinary experience, the structure and logic of our own experience, not special observations of brain scans and whatever, to solve it.

>>21863507
Pure experience has no definiteness and no content and so is pure abstraction, no different from nothing.

The same thing can be said ontologically of the conception of pure being. The existence of being presupposes non-being, experience that of non-experience. The one passes into the other in its pure form, as it lacks all content.

Being sublates nothing, negating it even as it takes attributes of it into itself. Hence our experiences world of becoming, where the being of the present continually passes into non-being of the past.

The external, "objective" world presupposes the internal, "subjective" world. One cannot exist without the other. Being as knowledge, truth, cannot be except representationaly. This can be shown formally in category theory as the way in which the existence of one object acts as the proof of another, or through the logic of information theory, where information only exists relationally. Thus, advanced in the understanding of physics, Wheeler's "It From Bit," can be seen in part as the empirical theoretical verification of the intuitions, far ahead of their time, of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Frederick Hegel. Hegel himself was indebted to Jacob Boehme, and Spinoza, as well as Aristotle and Heraclitus for these insights, and was followed by that greatest of American thinkers, C.S. Pierce in filling out the bones of the pansemiosis that is now so popular in theoretical physics. But the full realization is still wanting.

>>21863541
>>Pure experience has no definiteness and no content and so is pure abstraction, no different from nothin
yes, that is precisely why it can serve as the primordial most abstract stuff that the universe is made of. If you understand that the idea of nothing as a complete and total negation of the "thing" concept does not exist, then you will re-evaluate your idea of nothingness and realize that nothingness is the only true substance there is.
>The one passes into the other in its pure form, as it lacks all content.
Experience and Being do not exist at all without their content. They are defined by their content. There is no subject-object distinction, and when we say "pure experience" and "being" what we are referring to is the realm of all hypothetical qualia and all relations between them and to Plotinus's realm of intellect. despite the innumerability of its instances, the realm of intellect exists as a unity, and that unity is called Being itself, which can be divided into various forms only from a temporal perspective.
>The external, "objective" world presupposes the internal, "subjective" world.
they are both the same, and the intuition of space that allows the distinction between external and internal is only a particular type of qualia that in no way determines the character of all qualia. because humans are trapped in time and space does not mean that Being is.
> Being as knowledge, truth, cannot be except representationaly
then there is nothing except representations.

>>21863534
This

bump

I hope a materialist isn't trying to conquer a metaphysical question.

>>21863500
>Where is awareness?
The brain.

>It is what?
An up-jumped African hunting computer.

>When will it finally be over?
After catastrophic metabolic collapse.

>Where does it go after we pass away?
Away.

>How do we sleep?
By entering a low-work state for some components.

>How does it take up our entire being without actually being there?
It is there. Its what it feels like to be an advanced hominid brain. You're just "othering" it with an advanced language abstraction.

>But who exactly are we, exactly?
Primates, class of mammal, consequence of molecular reproduction.

>>21864841
Ahriman isn't sending his best

>One of the developments in which Ahriman's impulse is clearly evident is the spread of the belief that the mechanistic, mathematical conceptions inaugurated by Galileo, Copernicus, and others, explain what is happening in the cosmos. That is why anthroposophical spiritual science lays such stress upon the fact that spirit and soul must be discerned in the cosmos, not merely the mathematical, mechanistic laws put forward by Galileo and Copernicus as if the cosmos were some huge machine. It would augur success for Ahriman's temptings if people were to persist in merely calculating the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, in studying astrophysics for the sole purpose of ascertaining the material composition of the planets — an achievement of which the modern world is so proud. But woe betide if this Copernicanism is not confronted by the knowledge that the cosmos is permeated by soul and spirit. It is this knowledge that Ahriman, in preparing his earthly incarnation, wants to withhold. He would like to keep people so obtuse that they can grasp only the mathematical aspect of astronomy. Therefore he tempts many people to carry into effect their repugnance to knowledge concerning soul and spirit in the cosmos. That is only one of the forces of corruption poured by Ahriman into human souls.

>... Another of his endeavors is to preserve the already widespread attitude that for the public welfare it is sufficient if the economic and material needs of humanity are provided for. Here we come to a point that is not willingly faced in modern life. Official science nowadays contributes nothing to real knowledge of the soul and spirit, for the methods adopted in the orthodox sciences are of value only for apprehending external nature, including the external human constitution. Just think with what contempt average citizens today regard anything that seems idealistic, anything that seems to be a path leading in any way to the spiritual. At heart they are always asking: What is the good of it? How will it help me to acquire this world's goods? They send their sons to a private school, having perhaps been to one themselves; they send them on to a university or institute of advanced studies. But all this is done merely in order to provide the foundations for a career, in other words, to provide the material means of livelihood.

>And now think of the consequences of this. What numbers of people there are today who no longer value the spirit for the sake of the spirit or the soul for the sake of the soul! They are out to absorb from cultural life only what is regarded as “useful.”

>>21863500
>Where is awareness? It is what?
There is no satisfactory answer to this because awareness is the totality of all being, everything there is. Anything you have experienced in your life was, by definition, immersed in consciousness. The possibility of there being a thing outside of awareness ("material world", "thing in itself" etc.) is another idea that you are experiencing and is contained in your awareness.
>When will it finally be over?
Time is an aspect of the material world, and therefore does not exist in a metaphysically significant sense. Awareness is always an instantaneous snapshot, a "now". Memories of the past and expectations of the future as subsets of the present. The possibility of death, as the eventual cessation of consciousness is merely another idea. We are immortal by Occam's razor.
>How do we sleep?
Sleep is of the same metaphysical order as "waking reality". Awareness unfolding.The fact that life appears contiguous is an inessential aspect of the idea of material world.
>But who exactly are we, exactly?
The reality is a singleton - a set with one element, and we are it.