--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Susan" <wayback71@...> wrote: > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <authfriend@> wrote: >> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Xenophaneros Anartaxius" >> <anartaxius@> wrote: >> (snip) >>> Now if we suppose this is what happens, and the 'rich inner >>> life' of experience goes by the wayside, what does this mean >>> in terms of the hard problem? >> >> Nothing, because it doesn't "go by the wayside"--it can't, >> or you'd be a zombie. Your "rich inner life" may well >> become *poverty-stricken*, but it doesn't disappear. So >> the "hard problem" doesn't go away either. >> >> (snip) >>> If I understand [Dennett's] view, then it is impossible to >>> discover there is such a thing as consciousness objectively. >>> Subjectively, it is an illusion created by the mind's >>> interpretation of experience. >> >> For there to be an illusion, there has to be something >> being deceived by it, so you can't dispense with >> consciousness (or the hard problem) that way either. >> > Judy, this last sentence made me think (and forgive me if you all already > went over this, I am only now tuning in to a long running discussion). Isn't > it possible that the brain is like a machine, and so the illusion is merely > deceiving a sensory machine, not a consciousness. It could be that it is the > sense of conscious I-ness that is the deception, the illusion. Underneath > that, there is functioning but not an I or a witness or Consciousness to be > deceived. So it is the illusion itself that deceives itself, in a way. Once > that goes, there is nothing to be deceived. > These argument are in the realm of 'ultimate answers', like the infinite regression of the 'first cause' argument. You know, everything must have a cause, but there has to be a first cause. But that first cause is just an arbitrary stopping point. In the argument for the existence of God, the mind stops at the concept of God, but the question 'Who made God?' continues the argument. The concept of God is just an emotional stop for some people that ends the argument for them, but it works not, for others.
Brahman is both an intellectual concept and an experience that, while it includes intellect, cannot be contained by intellect. Brahman is the experiential equivalent of the more abstract intellectual versions of the concept of God; in the West, 'Brahman' probably has fewer varieties of connotation than the word 'God', perhaps more neutral, unless you are a religious nut. Brahman is an experiential stop, but not an emotional one in the manner people have an emotional stop when they talk about God intellectually and emotionally, and with it, the intellect's shortcomings are experienced. This experience is not dual. There are no two things in opposition, nothing is in opposition. But the intellect, which bifurcates everything can still spin an endless regression. In this case, it creates the duality of observer and observed, an illusion and something that can be deceived by illusion. But with Brahman, the illusion is identical with existence, there is no separation or process going on in the way the intellect can conceive. The hard problem goes away experientially, but the mind can spin the problem back into existence intellectually, and it can never be solved on that level. In Brahman there is nothing but pure existence, and the material and spiritual, matter and consciousness are not separate entities. There is no observer and there is no observed. There is just experience plain and simple, and it is just there. No one has the experience. The intellect cannot formulate a way to say this in any way that is not metaphorical or logically incoherent. It can create imaginary systems to try to explain it, such as metaphysics. In Brahman you do not even have the concept of Brahman, or unity, or non-duality. You do not have matter. You do not have consciousness. They are amalgamated without losing difference in perception of objects. At best you can say only: there is existence. Now that may seem rather drab. But it is no different than the ordinary life everyone lives, in happiness or terror, however it goes for them. So joys do not depart, sadness does not depart, nothing is lost, but the ocean of experience becomes as if transparent and the waves of change become more like ripples on that transparent sea. Dynamic and static at the same time, and you do not think there has to be an explanation for it because the experience is the explanation; you know it, but you can never say it. You live an ordinary life, and leave it to the philosophers to troll their way endlessly through those arguments about whether this is that, or not.
