• for: quote - consciousness, quote - mind body problem, quote - hard problem of consciousness, quote - Thomas Nagel

• quote

  • Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

• comment

  • consciousness is primordial and
  • stable, observable patterns that emerge in our field of consciousness is also primordial
  • the primordiality of these two, awareness and stability of observable patterns WITHIN awareness itself, are the two pillars that constitute the mind-body problem
  • in particular, the pattern of "other consciousnesses" is also another pattern that arises from within consciousness itself
  • The brain is a construction, a synthesized idea that emerges out of a dynamic amalgamation of countless accumulated patterns
  • In this respect, it is no different in quality than other complex constructed ideas we humans create, it only differs by degree and by kind
  • Were we to purely sense a human brain, for instance when a surgeon opens the skull in an operation, without the vast associative network of ideas associated with it, could we even consider how brain and mind are connected except in the most naive way?
  • Language is deeply encoded in every culturally conditioned modern human. Then advanced education in a specific field of knowledge encodes even more esoteric and deeper types of language conditioning.
  • Husserl's idea of phenomenological reduction, or epoche taken to its logical conclusion results in an impossible task, for we cannot severe the deeply entangled nature of meaning that our entire lives of cultural conditioning has enculturated into us.
  • The symbolosphere is now a part of us. We cannot undo such deep conditioning easily. You cannot simply dissociate meaning from the letters and words of your native and learned languages. Indeed, it is this deep symbolic conditioning that spans the decades of our childhood and adolescence that allows us to observe a symbol and effortlessly associate meaning to it.
  • Epoche, no matter how carefully crafted cannot uncondition such deep conditioning
  • It can, however, give us insight of the unconditioned from the perspective of the conditioned consciousness
  • We cannot become feral people even if we wanted to, nor, I suspect, would we want to experience reality permanently in that state
  • This brings up the question of what the process of spiritual enlightenment is designed to achieve
  • Is it a temporary suspension, an incomplete epoche that provides us with sufficient insight to lead to some kind of permanent shift where the insight stays with us and affects our lives in a beneficial way?

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