But according to Blackmore, there is no "me" to have the illusion. "Me" IS the illusion.
Salyavin, who/what has this illusion? You. Who is being deluded? You. Unless there's someone else in their you haven't told us about.... For there to be an illusion, somebody has to be having a conscious experience of it. As I say, it's self-refuting. There can't be an illusion without a conscious mind to entertain it--but that's what she's saying is the illusion. (Understand that I am not approaching this from a TM perspective. I'm talking about ordinary waking-state consciousness. Don't confuse my argument with Lawson's; he and I are talking about very different aspects of Blackmore's work.) Blackmore is not the only eminent scholar of consciousness to fall into this trap. It's a very peculiar blind spot concerning something that should be screamingly obvious. John Searle says: "You can’t refute the existence of consciousness by showing that it’s just an illusion because the illusion/ reality distinction rests on the difference between how things consciously seem to us [i.e., via consciousness--JS] and how they really are. But where the very existence of consciousness is concerned, if it consciously seems to me that I’m conscious, then I am conscious. You can’t make the illusion/reality distinction for the very existence of consciousness the way you can for sunsets and rainbows because the distinction is between how things consciously seem and how they really are." She's quite right that neural correlates of conscious experience don't tell us anything about what consciousness or mind is or how it works, by the way. That isn't the problem with her theory. The problem is that she hasn't thought clearly about her own consciousness. I bet she has... And yet incredibly she has spent a career writing and lecturing on consciousness, including a book all about the "hard" problem in which she interviews consciousness researchers worldwide about their research into that very idea and other ways of understanding the mind. Could it be that she's one step ahead of you? Could it be that this article, which is about the illusion of dualism, has already gone beyond what you are saying? The "illusion" she refers to is the illusion we have that our sense of self is somehow qualitatively different from everything else that is going on in there. ---In [email protected], <authfriend@...> wrote : She needs first to realize she's making a gigantic cognitive error in saying consciousness and the sense of self are an illusion. She can't possibly get anything else right (including TM pure consciousness research) if she doesn't see that the "illusion" idea is self-refuting. Doesn't really have anything to do with TM; it's just an incredibly stupid mistake about the nature of ordinary waking-state consciousness. As I said, she doesn't see any value in the TM Pure Consciousness research so she doesn't take it into account and consider the implications of a state of alertness in the brain without any content to be alert about. L ---In [email protected], <authfriend@...> wrote : Who has the "false idea" of the persisting self? Who is deluded by this illusion? Susan Blackmore has a new essay about consciousness research on her website. Food for thought: "Consciousness is not some weird and wonderful product of some brain processes but not others. Rather, it is an illusion constructed by a clever brain and body in a complex social world. We can speak, think, refer to ourselves as agents and so build up the false idea of a persisting self that has consciousness and free will." http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25457 http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25457
