On Sunday, October 4, 2020, Deepak Loomba <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
############################I have some sensible understanding of Vedanta, especially Mandukya, Keno, Tittaraya that highlight the Advaitya. Will be happy to join.
TY
DL
On 10/4/2020 11:16 PM, Nicholas Lattanzio wrote:
So, in my presentation at the beginning of next month I'll be covering the meditative 'non-practice' called self-inquiry. It is from this practice (the experiences and changes in awareness,consciousness, mind, whatever, etc., that it cultivates) and from advaita vedanta that I draw the basis for any claims I will make. Not to give away the 'good stuff' of my presentation, but the practice is essentially a tracing back of our direct experience. If one is looking out from behind the eyes and between the ears, they experience a world full of stimuli, each presenting uniquely as they correspond to the human brain in general and in it's specific individual differences through epigenetic neuroplasticity (to say the least). If you remove all of that you still have thoughts (tying into full on schemas), memories, vague mental objects/images/representations (which would label and categorize stimuli, among other functions), and other ill-defined phenomenological 'things.' If you remove all of that you have pure processes, which we cannot be conscious of because these processes are those that generate and facilitate the integration and representation of conscious experience. While we cannot be conscious of these experiences we can indeed still be conscious, everything before this state I would loosely consider "mind." Do you need your mind for you to be here (whatever "you" are)? No. Does your mind need you to be here? Yes. You can exist without the mind but the mind cannot exist without you.
From here we naturally get phenomenological, especially in terms of identity. When you go to sleep and enter into a dream state you are still accessing consciousness, because in your dream you have a conscious experience, remember we have removed all stimuli from the external environment so this is approximately half of one's mind on the level of experience. In deep sleep you disappear and fully cease to exist. When I am in a dream I am definitely there, but I am not necessarily Nicholas, I am a dreamed character of Nicholas or a different dreamed character altogether. In deep sleep, there is no "I," there is no one, no sense, no time, no space, NO THING, yet if I were to ask you if you in your existential essence disappear in deep sleep the obvious answer is no. This is one of the Advaitist 4 states of consciousness which is very very close to Turiya (the experience of the unity of all things).
So if what you are persists beyond any conscious experience in a sort of 'mental way' does it do so in a physical way? Yes, and this is where I'll likely get the most push back and my Upper Leftness will shine like a star. The answer would appear to be yes because, in the example of deep sleep your phenomenological existence comes to a time-limited interval in which it ceases to exist, while from the exterior, upper right, 3rd-person perspective your body and brain are still functioning and the unconscious processes are still functioning as they would (although perhaps in different ways) as if you were conscious in waking or even dream states. I argue here that this is the boundary of consciousness because after this consciousness cannot exist (as will be shown), meaning that consciousness is interdependent on the apparently external world's relative existence. To those who draw the line here I would throw out the thought experiment "How do you know that you aren't dreaming right now?" Which cannot be verified except by waking up (but not by an inability to wake up).
I argue the answer to can you be here without your body being here is yes because even in deep sleep you exist, just not you as an identity corresponding to the external world. All of that is dissolved in this state, it collapses into itself and you are more or less one with your experience, outside of time and space, and without quality. This is awareness with nothing to be aware of. Any experience of you existing is through the 1st person waking experience of others, who by this definition of awareness no longer exist separate from you because you are essentially one with your self and have no self and other to differentiate despite their relative existence. Their experience is in a different state, the waking state, meaning that they are at a less fundamental (not lesser) level of consciousness than you in deep sleep. In quantum mechanics this is a type of quantum entanglement, 2 things, you and another person, existing in 2 different places exhibiting paradoxical behavior (you asleep and they awake) that have an interdependent relationship and direct effect on the other. The other way that you exist without your body is that your body is not actually there, it just appears to be on this level of manifestation of reality, whereas if you looked at the same scene with a microscopic lens there would be no 'you' there, never has been, never will be (that is where we really don't know shit and all arguments for anything inherently fail). It is this level of manifestation that we are not conscious of in any way, but are aware of as facilitating our beingness itself, as a part of ourselves that transcends even the biological organisms of the brain (removing that debate) and dissolves the apparent paradox of 1st and 3rd person experience. The simplest way to address this is "I Am That."
Let's not forget that we cannot mistake the map for the territory and that any idea or concept, no matter how brilliant, is the thing itself we are trying to describe, and that any such conception is happening inside the absolute of subjective experience which cannot be proven to not be a dream anyway. IMO to those who say they have a model that can resolve the we simply don't have the understandings in any sort of science
I know a lot of people are chiming in on this post and this was not necessarily a response to anyone in particular, especially not the 6 posts since I started typing. I also do not purport this to be a truth, but a very rough model based on ontological and epistemological truths (that I recognize are not the most popular). IMO to those who say they have a model that can resolve these truths, we simply don't have the understandings in any sort of science to verify what consciousness, awareness, mind, etc., are except by arbitrary operational definitions that we don't have a way of knowing whether or not they are anywhere near accurate. The brain is a lot smarter than neurology.
Fascinating discussions as always.
Regards,
Nicholas G. Lattanzio, Psy.D.
########################################################On 10/4/2020 7:34 PM, Nicholas Lattanzio wrote:
I would first argue that most casual references of consciousness do refer to aspects of awareness that we are conscious of, largely being perceptual and cognitive images (versus the actual processes of perception and cognition/thinking). One always has operations of consciousness that are not in one's attentional field, and we can direct our conscious attention to bring things into consciousness and in the same throw lose consciousness of others. We have loose correlational research to suggest that consciousness and attention are different but related, and probably interdependent processes, I have yet to see anything close to compelling about awareness.DL: 'Awarness & Consciousness - Distinction, Discovery & Evolution. The New Upanishad' (https://www.amazon.in/
Awareness-Consciousness- ) is all about awareness being distinct from consciousness. With clean objective easy to comprehend, calculable mathematical description of awareness.Upanishad-Deepak-Loomba/dp/ 1692201220
Yes attention is linked to awareness. Awareness has three components - Stimuli (6 types), Processing (3 types) and Response (4 types). Attention is salience of response. The book describes why attention physically doesn't exist. What we term attention is actually an inverse of physically existing "distraction". Distraction (inverse attention) has 4 states - Chaotic (gaseous), Fluid (ordered), Icy (Unity) and Anticipative (Vacuum). Each state has been discussed in detail.
DL: Consciousness is not just experience. Will the heart/body experience stress on being injecting with dobutamine while the patient is unconscious (I know it will not be administered to an unconscious patient)? Yes it will, though one is unconsciousness.
In my experience (I.e., in my consciousness),
DL: 100%, fully with you on this, assuming 'existence' means 'life'! See the image enclosed it distinguishes between, awareness, life, cumconsciousness & consciousness. Why to be? & who to be ? have also been addressed as an outcome of ALCCO.awareness seems to be more fundamental to existence than consciousness. One can be asleep (unconscious) but we still have a bare sense of existence, which I argue is what awareness 'is' and is what we fundamentally 'are.'
DL: ALCCO is closest among all in resolving it. Because it addresses the most critical question first - how did intent evolve from spontaneous processes like atoms & electrons, in which it is unique. Awareness stands completely resolved. I will be very happy to receive a challenge or critique on it. I am yet to. The definitions of awareness & consciousness along with the distinctions, provides theoretical resolution to most of the neurocognitive issues like distinguishing deep sleep unconscious, unconscious by collapse, anesthesia-induced unconsciousness, alien hand syndrome, bipolar syndrome differences between trichromats & tetrachromats & many more. Jointly, with premier most NIMHANS (National Institute for mental health and allied sciences), Centre for Consciousness, in Bangalore, we are starting to work on verification of components of ALCCO. It will be a long drawn process of course. I would recommend to read the book.
My perspective is highly nondual and phenomenological in nature, and I truly don't believe we have the scientific means to say we can define consciousness and awareness, or even mind in a precise or empirically reliable and valid way. I'm sure others on this thread with share more technical theories, but short of solving the hard problem of consciousness (if we even understand the question correctly), theory is all we can say we have.
Regards,
Nicholas G. Lattanzio, Psy.D.
############################Hi All:
Can someone please suggest definitions for “consciousness” and “awareness”. Is anyone here arguing that these are two different processes? I’m not sure what it means to say that an organism can be aware but not conscious (unless consciousness means “self-conscious”).
M.
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