Perhaps it’s worth looking at from a different direction. To see the world and all the things in it as vehicles. Objects of travel, but which are interconnected and reliant on the whole universe of vehicles for their continuation. And consciousness as the traveller riding the vehicles. That consciousness relies on the movement of the vehicles to move from one moment to the next, otherwise, there would be no movement and therefore no consciousness. Fortunately, the whole universe and all the vehicles are continuously in motion.
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I like that. Our individual views might not be so distant, despite the variance in style.
This reminds me of Vedanta. I’m no expert on it, but it’s discussed by Fasching and Schrödinger in some great books/papers.
I think we tend to live with a faith that the rose is red for me as it is for you. We can learn to question this, to recognize it as a faith. But then we get to taste in music or the deciphering of texts and our situatedness becomes emphatic. Ugly for so-and-so but beautiful to me. Nonsense to so-and-so but profound for me.
Yet language is mostly reliable as an ontological glue.
That is a nice poetic metaphor. I think that to take it literally and believe it as such would be to accept metaphysical dualism. Personally I cannot accept dualism because it involves what I see as incoherencies. But that’s just me, of course―I understand that others will disagree.
I don’t get into the dualism, monism, debate, as it’s clear we only have a partial, at best, understanding of how our world is constituted and therefore any distinction between the two is only a partial theory. Whatever conclusion we might finally reach on the issue, might be describing something which from a greater perspective might actually be the opposite.
I presume you mean substance dualism. Any incoherencies may be due to our partial understanding of the issues. Also, I consider the possibility that the way the world is constituted may not align with our logical, or otherwise, ways of interpreting it. The reality, if presented to us, might seem ridiculous, or absurd, while still being correct.
You might see where I’m going with this, My position amounts to mysticism. So I will always end up saying, we haven’t got the foggiest idea, while also saying that the answer is starring us right in the face, were we but able to see it.
Yes, that’s where I’m coming from, via Theosophy.
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I don’t see the point of debate either. I think reality, including experience is really non-dual, so for me dualsim is simply the result of reifying abstract dualities―and as such is “not even wrong” but is irrelevant outside the restricted area of abstract distinctions. purporting to be able to apply dualism in a metaphysical context is like claiming we can fit a square peg in a round hole.
I don’t believe there is any propositional “greater perspective”, although I do think there are greater affective (and effective) dispositions.
We differ here―I don’t think there is any “answer”, but as I said above there are merely more fruitful affective and thus effective dispositions. I think an essential part of such dispositions is having the wisdom not to get bogged down in abstract reifications―which means to realize the inadequacy of propositional language beyond the “everyday” practical context, that is the paucity of dualistic thinking when it comes to what really matters.
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I like this, and it assures me that we agree on the basics.
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Quite.
A cat has a greater perspective than a mosquito. Or a person has a greater perspective than a single cell in their body. If we then extend this idea such that the person is the smaller perspective in a comparison, then there would be a greater (or bigger) being who has a greater perspective than a person. Or another way of seeing this is to accept that there are other beings (than the human, or what the human is aware of), who may be fully cognisant of the constitution of our world.
Where I use the phrase answer, I am not thinking of an answer out there, somewhere else, or that we don’t already know. This is how mystical thinking works, by realising that one already knows the answer to the question asked, or presented. Rather like the point I made about religious fulfilment being over there in heaven, or nirvana. In a sense, the question is the answer to itself, were we but able to see it. This is the idea of inner sight.
Yes, rather like reductionism.
I can see where you are coming from but I don’t think in terms of greater or lesser perspectives. Also, even if it were granted that the human perspective is the greatest we are aware of, it doesn’t follow that there must be an even greater. I would grant the idea of “greater” only in terms of conceptual complexity. Would that equate to richness? Perhps, but we have no way of measuring the richness of other experience.
I know, we really don’t know, but we also don’t know the implications around it either.
Yes, that works for me. But we are blind again, because we don’t know what that richness entails and may be blinded by our own version of it.
Yes, however what we do know, is that us as more conceptually complex beings, know more about our world (have richer knowledge) than those beings lower down on the scale of complexity.
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One mistake. Consciousness does not exist in the moment we call now, consciousness IS the moment we call now. Like you, I had come to the conclusion that consciousness was somehow IN the moment we call now and then out of the blue when I was not even thinking about it a thought thought me ‘consciousness IS the moment we call now’ The thought was ‘Oh wow!’ Like reading everything about, say, chocolate but then suddenly tasting it and the experience outweighs the academic knowledge. O.k. Now for some metaphores on how it hit me. Consciousness doesn’t exist in your head or ‘out there’, it is the process of becoming. You are a surfboarder riding the crest of the wave of unfolding reality. You are not in the river of time, you ARE the river of time. You are a traveler traveling the static fixed landscape of the block universe. You are the water as it tumbles over the waterfall. The traveler and the process are one and the same. You are neither the piano or the pianist, you are the music. I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body. To me, spirituality is B/S. The metaphores I have used are simply how it ‘exploded’ in my mind
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The fact that your physical brain has to play catch up doesn’t detract from the unfolding process
It kind of makes sense to me.
Although I use the term qualia for that moment of now.
What’s special about Qualia? I’m always left with the sense of the living moment of Now coursing through my body.
I am, and while I am living this moment, my body is busy processing the incredible firehose of information the living moment is projecting at my body/brain. Internal biology is actually a noisy crowded place with dynamic physical systems that possess mass and momentum, they project influence and are influenced by neighboring systems, all of it needing exquisite coordination and timing.
Qualia is the fleeting Living Moment of Now within which our biological lives unfold.
Shouldn’t it feel unique? Metaphorically, it seems to me similar to the difference between being there and looking at a postcard.
source Chalmers’ Hard Problem and the Living Moment of Now.
My mind’s eye imagines a tall grass prairie, on a hot day, with an advancing wildfire line. Before it the golden fields of potential, behind it the black of finality.
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I’m with you.
Consciousness “is” time — is the unfolding world itself (in a “from-a-point-of-view” fashion.)
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