Comment by summarybot

6 days ago

Largely I find your points reductionist and insulting to the very sacred experience that is unfolding for you and me. Consciousness is a primary or even a priori phenomenon from which all of your surmisals stem. You have got it backwards. The fact someone once saw an ape, or saw a nebula, or made a measurement of brain waves, these all had to happen within human-experience. The experiencing itself is irreducible. Consciousness as a byproduct or secondary phenomenon as you claim, is to be expected for someone brought up in the modern era where religion and spirituality were so vehemently eschewed that men leaned too far into the other extreme and became physicalist-materialists claiming the lived experience is but a mere symphony of neurological interactions without consequence. This is a disastrous view. This is basically a swift ticket to a hell-realm. The basic posture is all wrong - you must return to the fundamental facts, namely those of your lived experience. What you claim as primary evidence are in fact secondary observations. And then you use the secondary observations to make claims about a primary nature "out there" and "distinct from" human-experiencing. This is simply not the case. This view is logically untenable. One does not study consciousness by looking at pictures and drawings and photos, just like how one does not study what music sounds like by inspecting the buttons of a saxaphone unblown. The fluid nature of the energetic capacity of mind is very difficult to discern - it's not an everyday occurence, sages spend their whole lives pursuing prayer and meditation in order to catch a mere glimpse at the primal nature of experience. Everything else flows from this. Your mind is the root of all things, it is the common denominator in all moments of your experience.

You can read my other comment. You're also committing the genetic fallacy.

Yes, a hand can measure itself. Yes, consciousness as a measurement process of reality can expose to the conscious agent that its own consciousness is a merely a process in the world.

Just as a camera, in photographing a mirror, discovers that it is only a camera located at some point in space and time.

The "back to basics" pov you're talkign about is one which actually abandons everything consciousness tells you about the world, because you're afraid of what you've found.

An ape without a mirror thinks, of course, it is god. What an insult to find the face of this god is only that of an ape.

  • No, the genetic fallacy is not germane here. You are conflating the derivation of knowledge and direct knowing, which are distinct. You conflate the ingredients on the back of the label for the taste of the sweets in the pouch. The taste of sweetness is what I am indicating, not the list of ingredients. Also, you are suggesting that there is an impersonal objective spacetime irrespective of observer which is false. There is a generalized case that works for the figures projected for measuring the distances to solar bodies from other solar bodies. But you are basing your analysis on the hidden assumption that the material reality is first. This is an unchallenged assumption in modern science which leads you astray.

  • >discovers that it is only a camera located at some point in space and time.

    It discovers no such thing. It can only measure the signals coming from the sensors. That is its ground truth. If a sensor can produce a signal without having an image fall on it, then that would be what the camera sees.

    So in this case, it would perceive the image of a camera in a mirror, but that would not be the reality.

    • It doesnt perceive the image of a camera, it's sensor is that image. What it means to perceive is for that image to form. This is the second great fallacies of idealism: (1) the genetic fallacy above that the origin/product of a process must share properties and (2) this fallacy of ambiguity on the word 'see'/perceive (between the mental act of drawing attention to an aspect of a perception, and the physiological act of forming that perception).

      When I open my eye, light hits it, striking off the object which I am seeing. What it means to see is for that object to cause my perception. I am NOT seeing my perception, that doesn't make any sense -- it's incoherent because it's an infinite regress.

      When I open my eyes and see the coffee, my body changes to have the perception of that coffee as part of my structure -- I am the photographic plate. Just as the photographic plate isnt taking a picture of itself, neither is my eye or mind.

      To see is, akin to the photographic plate, to be changed by the world so that you have an impression of it. You do not see seeing, you see objects.

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