---In [email protected], <anartaxius@...> wrote :
I would love to get into this particular discussion but probably could not devote the time to extended discussion. I think you did just fine there Xeno, you seem to have got into it rather well! Most interesting perspective. I shall ponder and respond. But I would like to drop a few bombs. Lawson said: '...PC is without any kind of perception at all -sensory, thinking, intuition, whatever.' I never liked this idea of PC, I had loads of experiences of what I would call Pure Consciousness and they didn't involve being unconscious, rather like a giant mirror reflecting nothing. When I got the hang of it I could decide whether to have thoughts or not. Don't say that it can't have been PC if I could have desires, like everything in that state it all lays dormant until you want it back, but as soon as you become aware of something in the environment or your body (such as not breathing) the spell would break. More later. Now when I was in the hospital many years ago, I had that very experience under anaesthesia, so was I experiencing PC at that point? If PC has no kind of perception at all, then all states like this are experientially undifferentiated. I recall that PC really has something like a tiny self-referral loop. It also involves memory because you could never tell if you experienced it if you could not remember it happened. So I think of PC as the mind being still. The moniker 'pure consciousness' is kind of misleading. Even the thought 'I was experiencing pure consciousness' is a contradiction. Because it implies something conscious is experiencing consciousness, the way homunculus theories of the way the brain works. Basically PC is a description that can help when you are learning meditation etc., but at some point you have to leave it behind because it ultimately does not make any sense. The crux of this problem is dualist thinking. Remember Maharishi said 'infinity at every point' (unity), that consciousness was essentially completely delocalised, decentralised. Consciousness neither expands nor changes, and would seem to be incorporeal, although I do not intend to get into that argument. Therefore because of those 'properties' it can never be measured nor can it ever have correlates as a result. This problems comes of thinking of consciousness as something like a sensor, like the digital sensor in a camera, that picks up data from the world and from inside the body. The brain and senses are basically a central processor with sensors attached just like a computer with a microphone and video camera and speakers. What is being measured is the mechanics of the processor and and the pathways and mechanics of the sensors and output devices. This has nothing to do with consciousness except in every possible situation, there is the being of that situation, its ontological existence. I am saying that consciousness cannot be investigated scientifically as public experimental knowledge. It is not an entity, a thing, or really, even a field. It's mysterious yes. What we do when me meditate, by whatever method is we are reprogramming our central processor system to alter its appreciation and interpretation of the concept of consciousness; consciousness itself remains untouched by this. As Maharishi said (1967), consciousness does not expand, mind expands. I practiced TM the whole time except for the first few years. I am aiming at my sixth decade, and I would say my experience pretty much confirms what Sue Blackmore (with her Cool-Aid coloured hair) says. Blackmore, as far as her manner of expression, seems to me to be influenced by philosopher Dan Dennett, whose understanding of consciousness seems rather murky. Blackmore though, does meditate (Zen), and her view of the consciousness problem is far more multifaceted than Dennett's, or in fact, of the way TM meditators tend to view this situation. If my meditations now sometimes resemble Zen-like meditation, it is because TM brought me to that experience, it irrevocably shifted the way my brain interprets experience and interprets the terminology used to describe experience. The idea of there being no self is the central linchpin of Buddha's description of reality. But this is isomorphically equivalent to Maharishi's 'infinity at every point', or the Upanishadic 'self' becoming the 'Self', for then the 'self' is no more. Characterising unified experience as 'Self' though seems misleading. Atman = Brahman might be better because in English at any rate the words do not quite so much imply some kind of entity. This is equivalent to saying 'I and my Father are one' (Jesus). The words are symbols of experience, not the realities of experience. That is isomorphically the same as saying when you meditate, by whatever successful method (there are some methods that do not work very well), the experience of being a localised, centralised something that observes the world defocuses via reprogramming the brain until there is the experience of the mind, body, and world as essentially a single thingy that is not thing like at all. As the mind clears out much of its conditioned programming there is the feeling of expansion. Like being in a cluttered room, if you clear some space around you, there is a feeling of more freedom, expansion, space. This is clearing out process is sometimes interpreted as 'expansion of consciousness'. As the conditioning clears away by means of meditation the experience becomes more like awake empty space and with time it expands outward into the sensory experience as well, like the bow shock wave of an explosion, until it encompasses all your experience. What is being measured scientifically is the correlates of the brain changes etc., associated with this clearing process (as it is experienced subjectively). Consciousness is not being measured at all. The TMO problem with research is it is trying to prove Maharishi's intellectual models of experience as empirical data rather than just find out what's happening and then create an empirical model to explain it, which is the way science proceeds. In this way the TMO is doing what Biblical archaeologists do: 1) the Bible is true, 2) our scientific results must prove it. This is not how to do science. And this is why movement science has a good reputation mostly only within the movement and among others ignorant of scientific procedure and philosophy. Maharishi's models, taken in their best light, were to help us navigate our own experiences as a result of the practice of mental techniques. As far as scientific investigation of these processes, the movement is hampered by using a religious mental model of truth and not a scientific one. The issue of truth as regards 'enlightenment' is a different issue, something each mind has to find out, or fail to find out, on its own. Blackmore's book is a very worthy read, one of the most fascinating books on the subject of consciousness I have ever read: http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-An-Introduction-Susan-Blackmore/dp/144410487X http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-An-Introduction-Susan-Blackmore/dp/144410487X Put this one other way. If consciousness is physical, it can be measured and found. If it is 'unmanifest', then there is no hope in heaven or hell that science can discover anything about it. This whole argument here depends on some people thinking of consciousness as an embodied phenomenon and some not thinking that ('me' for example). I agree with Blackmore's conclusion here: 'When we finally have a better theory of consciousness to replace these popular delusions we will see that there is no hard problem, no magic difference and no NCCs.' It all boils down to what we understand the words 'I', 'you', 'who', and 'consciousness' signify, or whether they signify anything at all other than a practical way to distinguish physical bodies with their input sensors and output mechanisms, and the behaviour of those bodies from one another (like mine from yours from my perspective and yours from mine from your perspective). One of the old spiritual practices is to ponder the question 'Who am I?' That is to seach internally for what the 'who' and the 'I' in that sentence is. It is an unanswerable question, but if pondered long enough the mind might break out of the conceptual box it is in.
