owl of Minerva wrote: ↑Sat Dec 11, 2021 4:16 pm
Your world view is empirical: the origin of life was physical, evolution was physical, sensation and consciousness emerged from it to awareness, as you say, to internal awareness and by experience; to sentience.
Existence is a predicate to consciousness. There is no consciousness without existence, for you that would mean there is no consciousness without physical existence, because consciousness, in this case self-consciousness is a derivative of matter and forces; the physical world.
I am not claiming the empirical is absolutely physical, rather it is just empirical within the empirical framework.
Basically my approach is
top-down and inferred from what is experienced and observed of reality where 'consciousness' [as defined] is inferred as an emergent.
Naturally I'll explore [as a scientific pursuit] how consciousness emerges but I am not interested in where consciousness originally arise from 'something' as with a bottom-up approach.
I have argued 'existence' is not a predicate, so it cannot be predicated to anything, thus not to consciousness.
To assert Consciousness [subject] exists as existence [predicate] sounds ridiculous.
Yours is a
bottom-up-approach where you
assume there is an original source where consciousness is. Note this is merely an assumption you are making.
With a bottom-up approach there is no way your assumption [being so] can ever be true and realistic.
You'll need to understand why you are resorting to the 'bottom-up' approach in this particular case instead of the default 'top-down' approach.
My world view is different. Consciousness is metaphysical and fundamental. In the external world it evolved to vitality in plants, sensation in animals, and intelligence in humans. By evolved I do not mean that it became something other than it already was, I mean it was unsheathed with each advance, another way to express it would be to say, it emerged.
Note I mentioned yours is a bottom-up approach and the best you get is an assumption.
I said consciousness is metaphysical because it is. What is your view of the future? Does everyone get mindful and learn to behave and that will bring a better world or it will always be as it is, a dualistic enigma, or will science be our savior?
I have been reading Carlo Rovelli's book re Time and to Rovelli
ultimately [bottom-up] there is no past, present nor future in quantum terms [re Planck's time].
From a top-down approach there is a past, present and future but they are conditional relations and events thus not absolutely absolute.
I will give an analogy here. Imagine we have ego and intellect but not a sense mind: no sensation. We have to infer everything about our bodies as we have no sense of hunger, thirst, tiredness, etc. Our bodies would be an object, objectively viewed and inferences would have to be made of when to eat, to sleep, etc. because otherwise we could die. We would make all kinds of mistakes and have to be careful to avoid disaster.
This can be explained using the top-down approach subject to nothing final but should be coherent, make sense and useful.
Our relation to the unknown; to the cosmos, is the same as the above example. As knowers we have a process of knowing, but what is to be known is other, objective, we get to know it by inferences from data, abstract thought, and research. We have no sense of it, we do not feel what it is. So from your perspective there is no solution to what as with Pantheism is a closed system, similar to fish in an ocean, the ocean is all there is, when it eventually will end, as science says it will, mindfulness may have made it better, caused less suffering, but to what purpose?
Your "what is to be known ultimately" or the unknown, is merely an assumption that cannot be verified and justified as real.
If we have a process of knowing and something to be known at what point will we be the knower. Science has theories, philosophy has inferences, abstract thoughts, ideas. At what point will they know the nature of reality; be aware of it, as for example we know that we need to eat or sleep without having to infer or research to find out. That is where Consciousness comes in, without it there is no awareness. Whether awareness is subjective, awareness through our sense minds of our bodies or objective, inferences in relation to the environment; the cosmos, it is limited.
Based on the top-down approach, there is no need to bother the ultimate nature of reality because there is no such thing in the first place. The yearning to 'know' such thing is merely a psychological impulse of impossibility.
Life can be a process of knowing without ever knowing, “awareness of internal and external existence.” There is awareness of internal existence only, there is no subjective awareness of external existence, only an objective awareness of external existence. That awareness is a consciousness that is derivative, not Consciousness Itself.
Not too sure of your point re Consciousness-Itself. My view is there is no such thing as thing-in-itself [Kantian], therefore no Consciousness-in-itself.
Life is a process of knowing of knowledge within specific framework of knowledge without any concern for the absolutely-absolute source of knowledge re the top-down approach.
What is critical is that such knowing and knowledge [the majority] will contribute to the optimal well-being to the individual[s] and that of humanity.