Case -- Honestly, I'm amazed that you continue to talk to me. Our perspectives are about as contradictory as one can imagine.
You asked: > Isn't "awareness without an object" just awareness, > or awareness of awareness?. I said: > Awareness of awareness is a mirror looking at its own image. > Such a tautology does not exist. (Actually, tautologies are absurdities -- verbally-concocted premises that have no existential equivalent.) [Case]: > Such tautologies do exist. You just mentioned facing mirrors. If you plug > your camcorder into a television and aim the camera at the TV you will see > the same kind of effect. It's call video feedback. ... Yes, I'm familiar with audio and video feedback and its weird effects, such as infinite looping. I also realize that "introspection" is sometimes considered a conscious analog of this effect. But your problem, as with most objectivists, is the failure to understand subjective awareness as the central core of existential reality and not just an "effect". Man is not just a "mirror on the world"; he is its creator. The world of differentiated objects appears BECAUSE we experience it. Absent awareness and there is no world. Stanford astrophysicist Andrei Linde expressed this concept when he said, "I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. It's not enough for the information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to anybody. It's necessary for somebody to look at it. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead." [Case]: > I see no problem with awareness reflecting on itself. I experienced this > kind of feedback every waking moment. I don't think the "object" of my > awareness is "other" either. More often than not the object of my > awareness > is entirely self referential. I reflect on memories and reshape them into > plans for the future. I manipulate symbols and images and other sets of > relationships that have no tangible existence at all. These maybe objects > in > some abstract sense but it is hard for me to see them as "other". Where do these symbols and images come from if not from your experience of otherness? Even the concept of relationships - things relating to each other - is derived from you experience of otherness. That includes your perception of yourself as a being relative to other beings. The notion of beingness itself comes from experiencing other. [Ham, previously]: > If existence is the experience of objects and events in time and space, > and the physiological self is one of the objects, then everything that is > experienced exists except for the subject that is aware of it. [Case]: > This is like saying horsepower is not part of an automobile. Or that sound > is other than airwaves. Or red is not part of an apple. Objects have all > manner of properties defined by relationships external to themselves. > Memory > is a property of human beings. We remember what we experience. Experience is our awareness of other. Horsepower is not "part of an automobile"; it is an intellectual construct based upon physical principles of applied energy and force -- "manipulated symbols" that constitute the objects of our thought. Likewise, red is not part of an apple; it's the mental image that we see when light reflected from an object is missing certain portions of the color spectrum. In fact, when you say "properties defined by relationships external to themselves", you are making my point that they are properties of otherness, whether we are aware of them as "memories" or experiences. [Case]: > I agree completely that there are public events and private events. But > private awareness is a product of physiology. Just as biology emerges from > the inorganic, awareness emerges from the biological. Awareness is > measurable and quantifiable. Granted measurement technique are still > somewhat crude but EEGs, PET scans, lie detectors, reaction time studies, > Myers-Briggs tests, even surveys in Cosmo all measure forms of awareness. Again, what is measured by mechanical devices is "effects" not awareness. EEGs, PET scans, lie detectors, and the like monitor and track blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, and perspiration. These are not awareness. Intelligence tests compare recalled knowledge and comprehension against normative standards. The are not "forms of awareness"; they are applied skills. [Case]: > Awareness also consists of integrating values. Discrimination and > generalization are fundamental psychological processes and the have been > studied extensively. Emotion and ideation are the products of our inborn > physiology, our personal histories and what is in front of us at the > moment. > There are specific regions of the brain that produce emotional responses > and > specific regions that produce language to describe them. I do not dismiss the biological and neural complements of proprietary awareness. After all, awareness is a complex of physiological and psychic responses. What I'm objecting to is the idea that awareness can be objectively measured or quantified. Brain scans and hormonal activity can plot the physiological effects of conscious awareness, but such data do not analyze or confirm awareness per se. [Case] > It seems to me a pre-experiential state would be sleep where the brain is > active, just a bit fuzzy about storing the experiences. But I also think > that what you are calling pre-experiential is sensation where as awareness > is perception, that is, sensation integrated into memory. For once, I'm inclined to agree with you. However, I regard pre-intellectual sensibility as primary to proprietary (individuated) awareness, rather than a state of sleep. [Case]: > You are turning nothingness into an active agency. Nothingness can have > no self. Nothingness can not seek. Consciousness and the self arise in > infants as the nervous system develops and the baby's neural network is > stimulated. > The network has evolved biologically to respond positively to things that > enhance it and negatively to things that threaten it. As it matures it > remembers the good and bad. It can differentiate the two. It begins to > generalize similar things and events and to classify them according to the > responses they produce. This is how the neural network is programmed. > Through its interactions with the environment the infant learns. This "environment" that you have elsewhere called "external" is what I mean by "otherness." It is our objective counterpart. I accept the fact that most, if not all, of our awareness is experiential recall. But that doesn't refute its source in otherness. [Case]: > It seems to me what you have described so far can easily be > accounted for through conventional explanations. Except that conventional explanations do not account for the subjective factor whose origin is value sensibility. Essentially still yours, Ham moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
