Multisense Realism

Yes 🙂

Consciousness as an awareness of awareness is not a tautology. It is the same as saying that an image is visual grouping of visual groupings. I am specifying that terms like consciousness, awareness, perception, feeling, and sense are all quasi-interchangeable references to the quasi-spectrum of phenomenology.

The same goes for my nested usages of perception and sense. That is the nature of all of phenomenology – a self-bootstrapping meta-juxtaposition…of what? Experience. Detections and participations. They are the same thing in one sense, but they define each other in another. This isn’t tautology, this is the absolute root of cosmos and psyche.

“Unless you are able to correct your use of tautologies, your model is empty. I ”

Unless you stop giving me ultimatums, I will assume your criticism is rooted in ego and emotion rather than reason and open minded skepticism.

“But, if you are to be taken seriously (and another jcs-online member noted the problem, so its not just me) you will have to address this issue.”

It’s not uncommon to get this kind of criticism when you present a view that is new. I understand that it is unsettling and provocative, inflammatory, etc. There’s not much I can do about how other people interpret what I am saying. I am always happy to explain and answer questions, but I see no reason to be concerned in any way by other people’s emotional reactions and misunderstandings. You seem to get what I am saying to a fair extent. Some get it more. I have addressed the issue you remark on, but you seem to be clinging to it anyhow as some kind of evidence which equates unpopularity of new ideas with their untruth. As far as being relegated to the dust bowl of history, that is not up to me, and to be honest, I don’t particularly care. If people want to understand what consciousness actually is, I think that they can use parts of what I have written already to help them figure it out as I have, for myself. If we are going to look to the slow learners and the fearful, and to what history has seen fit to elevate, then we can kiss any chance of solving the hard problem goodbye. Fine with me. It won’t surprise me in the least.

“In the absence of something else, sense is not. In order to know what something is, you must know what it is not.”

Only if you must adhere to making sense. It is your statement that is a tautology. You are saying that sense must make sense in the way that you think it should, otherwise sense doesn’t make sense. It does make sense though, because sense includes its own presence on one level through its absence on another. That is what sense is and what it does.

I use the “?” character to refer to what is not sense. It is ‘chance’, or that which has not been detected. What is hidden from one layer of sense or distorted by another.

Not at all. Yours is the ad hominem attack. I am saying that it is perfectly reasonable and unsurprising that others would reject my ideas for unscientific reasons. Is it ad hominem for Galileo to say that it makes sense that the church would oppose him? How much more reasoned of a response could anyone provide?

“You fall back on using another tautology to say you are not using tautologies?”

Not at all. Is it not clear how images are visual groupings of visual groupings?

Once you understand that the fabric of the universe is experience itself, then any discussion of ultimate origins inevitably leads to non-wellfounded sets. See my post from today:
http://s33light.org/post/31338986801

Tautology itself has to exist within a context of sensemaking though, which is the context which we are addressing. We have to first be able to make some kind of sense of something before we can determine whether that sense agrees with other propositions we have made sense of. You can’t get underneath sense – it is absolute and primordial.

What other people think of me is none of my business – Eleanor Roosevelt

Everybody gets the Timothy Leary that they deserve – Timothy Leary

What a charming corroboration of misinterpretation.

Why would truth be an empty tautology. The Earth revolves around the sun. Species evolve through natural selection. These truths are not tautological. They don’t need to generate joy to be true.

“It seems to me you would want to be sure yours is not just a case of self-justification.You know, not true.”

It seems to me that you would give me the benefit of the doubt that I have already done that. The thing is, I never hear anyone give me any good reason why my model doesn’t work – only reasons why I should change my approach to presenting it, or that they think that ideas like mine have been tried already. When pressed though, it all seems like all of these criticisms are really empty and this encourages me, since if there were any real problem with my hypothesis, someone would be able to spell it out in a meaningful way.

Sure it could be false. Consciousness could be a monolithic computation or spontaneous reflexes in isolation, or anything. I am asserting that the idea of a nested, autopoietic relation is at the heart of what consciousness is.

“Now that does not make sense. ”

That’s what I’m saying. There is no getting around sense. It is at the very bottom and top of all possibilities.

“in order to know what sense is, you must know what is non-sense. I do not make circular statements like, “… sense must make sense..”

To say that you need to know what non-sense is to know what sense is means that ‘sense must make sense’ already. The possibility of non-anything presupposes sense. That’s what sense does is let us discern differences using concepts like ‘not’. Without sense to begin with, there is no ‘not’.

There is nothing that isn’t sense, but using sense you can project the abstraction of ‘that which has not been detected’ or something like ‘that which we can’t know if we can’t know’.

“You do not know what it feels like to make sense, because you do not know what it feels like to not make sense. ”

No, that’s the thing about sense, it is translucent. It is made of hints about itself. Logically we shouldn’t know how to make sense of anything, but because sense is primordial unity, it isn’t possible for anything to live in a universe which doesn’t make sense or contain sensation.

“There is only this pure, unseen, unheard, unobserved, and therefore unknown-to-anyone-else sense.”

No, you have it exactly wrong. Sense is the impure, seen, heard, observed, and therefore known to everyone everywhere sense. Sense is the most ordinary thing in our universe.

From my view, you aren’t listening. The idea that energy contains consciousness would be true if energy was a concretely real entity. What you are telling me is New Age cosmology 101. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just that I have been well aware of this trope for probably 30 years. What I am suggesting to you is that it is not energy that contains consciousness, but consciousness which contains everything, including matter, the sense interaction of which we call energy. Your model has it backwards (as does everyone else’s…remember, from my perspective, my model is completely new as far as I know). Your description is confused because you say on one hand that consciousness works and creates the universe (which is implicit in my model) but then bring ‘energy’ into it out of nowhere. Energy doesn’t contain consciousness, energy is nothing BUT consciousness.

2) Truth is all that matters to ME in this context of understanding consciousness. I never said that truth = all that can possibly be significant. Likewise I have never said that I have done anything single handedly. I present a possible proto-TOE that I have not seen elsewhere, that is all. I don’t understand why you claiming that I don’t factor in energy. Have you seen this? https://multisenserealism.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/aslide4.jpg

I show there, in a very straightforward way, exactly how energy relates to the multisense realism cosmology. As you can see, it is the antithesis of time, space, and matter, and the underlap between sense and motive.

“Joe: You seem to have a problem thinking something is real if it is not matter, i.e. concrete.”

I don’t though. I see perception and participation as being concretely real, and matter as the perception of the exterior side of perception, but energy is not perceived, it is inferred. The effects of energy on matter are concretely real, but there is no actual energy there as an independent entity which can make changes to things other than matter. Energy is nothing but what matter does to matter.

“Joe: New Age cosmology is Old Age cosmology in new clothing.”

Yes, that was my point, it isn’t some new concept that I might not have heard of yet. I didn’t read classical philosophy, so to me, my access to it has been through familiarity with New Age cosmologies.

“Joe: How did you come to believe that? My beliefs are based on my experience and my feelings. These are what I factually and intuitively know.”

I’m confused. Does that relate to energy?

“Joe: Do you ever listen to what you are saying? This is the everyone else is wrong but I am right argument. It sounds like the liar liar pants on fire argument.”

It’s not my argument, it’s just my experience. I have seen other theories which overlap with mine in different ways, but still the underlap is significant. If I didn’t think everyone else was wrong I wouldn’t be bothering with trying to write about this stuff.

“Joe: Let me clarify: it is the individual (a Gestalt of consciousness) that create his or her own universe.”

We co-create our experience and contribute to the experience of others in the universe, but it’s ultimately pathological to put the idea of solipsistic omnipotence into practice.

“Joe: I thought I made it clear that energy is the inside vitality of the inner universe, truly nowhere, no time and no space.”

I don’t use the term that way, because 1) It mistreats a perfectly good term that serves physics and engineering 2) It is indistinguishable from other equally vague terms like spirit, elan vital, chi, prana, ‘light’, mana, and The Force. 3) All of those terms imply a distant mystery or pseudo-substance. My contrast, my approach is to talk about what it actually is without implying some special glowing phenomenon. What you call ‘energy’ I call efferent phenomenology or motive. The active and extroverted mode of sense.

“Joe: You still have not said (or I have not read) how you have come to believe that, and what evidence you give? Why should anyone believe you?”

Nobody should believe me. They should see for themselves. I’m not making a claim that requires evidence, I am taking the most fundamental incontrovertible descriptions of the universe and consciousness and putting them all together in a way that seems to make perfect sense. If it doesn’t make sense, all anyone has to do is point out what it is that doesn’t work and why.

“Joe: You did not say that the first time. So, this is a new clarification then?”

It sounds like it’s a clarification that is new to you, yes.

“Joe: First, in what I have read of yours, you do not cite references for your ideas, and second, you did say, “my model is completely new as far as I know”. Both have lead me to infer that your work is all you.”

I don’t infer that anyone’s work is all theirs. “I stand on the shoulders of giants” (even if sometimes I didn’t know I was standing on them). I think that I have used ideas that have been circulating in the world for a long time, many of which I stumbled on after “discovering” them on my own, but as far as I know, the overall picture that I am trying to describe is not something that I have seen elsewhere.

“Joe: Like I said, its all you, unless you state otherwise.”

I’m not plagiarizing anyone else, if that’s what you mean. I am influenced by many ideas, most of which have been expressed by many philosophers etc also, but I am trying to make a new contribution as well. Maybe this is where the ‘all that matters is the truth’ confusion came in. I just don’t see how any of these issues have anything to do with my ideas. I don’t care where they come from. Ideas about he nature of the universe don’t have a pedigree as far as I’m concerned.

“Joe: So O.K. just get me a copy of that evidentiary support, and O.K. ‘Peace’ (in the New Age way) index and middle finger forming a V.”

You already have the original evidentiary support, you just aren’t looking at it. Everything that I am saying can be verified by anyone who chooses to examine the nature of their own experience and common scientific knowledge. Consciousness requires no evidence, because it is only to consciousness itself that any evidence can be proved.

Perception and inference are both types of sense. Sense isn’t a type of anything else. Inference supervenes on perception which supervenes on sense. Sense is the bottom (or top, least, most, etc. superlative by definition in any…sense).

Perceiving is the same thing as sensing, except that perception has a connotation of sensing something outside of yourself, so I use it that way in this context. Likewise, inferring is the same thing as sensing, except that inference has a connotation of making sense of something cognitively. Sense is implicit in both terms.

It’s true that in practice any given perception is conditioned by expectation, but they are expectations derived from previous perception. In an ultimate sense, you can’t infer something that you have no way to perceive. Take color for example. What do you infer that the color of radio waves or X-Rays would ‘actually’ be? We agree I hope that this can’t be done. What we can do though is infer what a combination of what a tree would look like with a green trunk and pink leaves, even though we may not have seen a tree like that.

“How is it that there are types of sense? What is the nature of sense such that it has types?”

I like the word sense specifically because it can be used to mean ‘type’ (“in what sense?” = of what category or type of context should I fit this in?). The nature of sense is that it is an experience of meta-discernment. Types arise from the discernment of the meta aspect. Eventually you get channels of sense qualia, visual, olfactory, etc.. Mind is a meta-perceptual qualia. Another channel of sense which can discern and transcend other channels of sense.

“How would you characterize the experience of sensing sense? ”

All experiences are nothing but experiences of sensing sense. You experience these words as a visual pattern in one sense. You also experience them as non-visual cognitive expressions. Through an experience of accessing knowledge and exercising reason, you can infer that the words are made of the English alphabet, or pixels on a screen, or micorelectronic computations, or neurological stimulation, etc. Any level of description you focus on can potentially enhance or alter another. This is consciousness.

“is there anything you can sense about sense that would help you explain how there can be two types of sense? ”

Yes, sense is discernment. Nothing vs something. In vs out. There are more and more types of types of types of sense. That’s what the universe is – a machine that creates significance (sense accumulation through time) and excretes entropy (material attenuation across space).

“Why does the experience of sensing sense lead you to believe that sense is fundamental? ”

Because I think it is the only possible experience that can’t be explained by any other means, and that every possible experience can be described entirely as a sense experience.

“When one senses sense, how can they be sure they sensed the whole sense, not just a part of sense?”

It’s always only a part of it. You make it sound like some magical event though. Picking your nose is the sensing of sensing of sensing of sense. It’s all the same thing. It’s just experience. Participation in a perceptual tableau. It has layers for us because we are very complex and layered. Newcomers to the universe.

“When you objectively perceive a wooden chair, you do not perceive the cells of the wood, or the molecules.:

You don’t perceive them with your eyes, you infer them with your knowledge of molecules. It’s a different kind of sense – cognitive qualia that you can use to enrich your experience of and control over the chair. Your mind amplifies your sense receptivity and motive projection.

“Why would you be confident that when you sense sense, you have sensed all there is to sense about sense? ”

Confidence is just another qualia. The more channels of sense that we can access which are in agreement, the more realism we experience and the more we can extend confidence about the sense we make of it. That is all there is. There is no certainty beyond the extentsion of experiential consensus.

“Why would one say that they sense sense, instead of just say they sense?”

Just sense. Or feel, see, know, think, figured it out, solved the problem, got to the point, etc.

Hah! Cool, stealth-Otmar. See you there…

” Isn’t it usually the case that we define things in terms of words we are more familiar with”

I think that when talking about consciousness, the best way to proceed is to take what is usually the case and ask what is the opposite. Nothing can be like consciousness and nothing can be unlike consciousness. There is nothing more familiar than awareness – it is familiarity itself.

“I have a good idea of what you mean by “visual grouping”, but not very clear on “awareness”, or “consciousness””

Instead of ‘visual’, substitute any sense. Now think of cognition and emotion as senses too. Awareness is the grouping of anything that can be detected or the detection of anything which can be grouped. They are the same thing. Sensation is the making of sense and sense-making is rich sensation.

“Do you think, that by embedding the hard problem “perceptual presentation”, the Cartesian Theatre, with “continuity” (the binding problem) you are defining “identity”?”

Multisense realism assumes the opposite of the Cartesian Theater. Perceptual presentation is not the hard problem, it is the soft solution. Binding is not necessary because perception is a window on the totality of experience, not a mechanism which produces an effect. I day that identity is a continuity of perceptions because that is all that it is. Experiences build significance through continuity, and identity plays off of significance.

Joe: [Sense] nested within [phenomenological perception juxtaposed with objective realism], right?

They are the same thing. All forms of sense (feeling, emotion, cognition, perception, awareness, consciousness) are the capacity to infer or embody juxtapositions.

Craig: Experience.

Physically our body has a stance in space and time.

We can apply spatial measurements to our body, but time is an interior experience of expectation and memory. From the multisense realism perspective, neither space nor time are a plenum which anything can have a stance within. Spacetime is the expanding semiotic interface between private phenomenology and public realism (anti-phenomenology) as they diffract and refract into each other. Like the point of contact where the Ouroboros snake’s mouth gobbles its own tail.

We can speak of primary and secondary experience. Let us call primary experience that which exists immediately in SENSE terms, in a moment of time -the contact of the body with the environment, what Block calls phenomenal consciousness. Secondary experience is information that comes through, say, reading, discussion, and so forth, access consciousness.

My approach is radically different. I see the whole appearance of ‘information’ as a distant afterthought, having nothing to do with consciousness until we get to human cognition. I see that time does not occur in moments, that’s an abstraction. Experience warps and stretches phenomenal time like gravitational mass seems to warp spacetime. “Time flies when you’re having fun…” “It was the longest three hours of my life”… This is the true nature of time. All externalizations of time is a conversion to public space topology. It becomes clocking and calendaring.

I would say throw out the primary secondary distinction completely. The reality of consciousness is a fugue of experiential influences and expectations on many figurative semi-levels. The body is perpetually in contact with the environment and our discussions and opinions shape and distort our perceptions at the sense level (for example, you see these squiggles as letters and words).

The multisense view is that we can divide the picture in many ways, and they will all seem to make sense, but the most powerful and revolutionary way to model it is private phenomenology juxtaposed against public realism. Timespace and spacetime follow respectively as the private view of public realism and the inferred (depersonalized) public view of the self.

The second kind of experience is largely symbolic. Reading about a war on a quiet sunny afternoon is not the same as being in the war. The map is not the territory, as Robert DeNiro says in Ronin.

Yes, but symbolic experiences are just primary experiences on the cognitive level. The experiences which can be recovered through the cortex are subsidized not just by the physiology of the human body, but the protection of human society so that it is free to discover qualia of a more frivolous and fictional nature. The map is not the territory that we associate it with as map readers, but I propose that every map is also a territory in and of itself, as is every territory usable as a map by some other reader. It’s all multiplexed, intertwined, and specular. So yes, you can have an experience with symbolic content, but no experience is only symbolic and no symbol by itself is an experience.

If, under conditions naturally safe in terms of primary experience, you become overwhelmed by unsafe signals from secondary experience -from reading or CNN – you often can show a lack of discrimination. You are not able to differentiate between the physically safe present situation, and the imagined, perhaps unsafe situation, calling forth the alarms of danger.

The body mechanisms become highly disoriented. The signals to the body are very contradictory, so that after a while if such conditions continue, you can no longer tell if you are in actual danger or imagined danger.

Human psychology and physiology are of course complex and their multiple layers are often in conflict. Media saturation can add confusion and alienation (I came up with a concept called Immediacracy to talk about how the meme-ification of all experiences onto uniform digital formats makes media invisible and blinding at the same time). I don’t know that the disorientation is unwarranted. Being part of a world that is remotely programmed by faceless autocracies may be a real enough danger to warrant alarm.

Craig: (from overview), Phenomenology and realism are not merely a dualism of separate or unrelated ‘substances’, they are the two opposite expressions of sense, and they are opposite in every conceivable way. What they share is their opposition to each other – their orthogonality, which reveals the sense that gives rise to their distinction, and to distinction itself.

Joe:The experience of the body conflating phenomenological secondary experience with real primary experience seems to indicate that the two are not opposite in every conceivable way.

The publicly real body doesn’t conflate anything. It raises blood pressure, increases heartbeat, secretes cortisol, whatever, but it doesn’t care what your interpretation behind that is. This takes some time to really retrain your mind to disconnect all of the legacy assumptions of all previous models. It really requires starting from scratch and seeing your body as nothing and the world of the body as nothing but what appears in photographs or sculptures. There is no time out there, only difference sized bodies nested within each other. All time and animation comes from the other side, the experiential side. There is no way to overstate how huge of a change this is. You would just have to be interested enough in investigating it often. Slice the universe in half and put all things that can be expressed as spatial and public on one side, and all that can be experienced as private and temporal on the other. They are both primary and they are both secondary (although phenomenology which is returned to itself through the reflection of realism is a self-image rather than a self. Phenomneology can never truly be secondary in an absolute sense, but it is necessary for it to model itself that way).

“How can nothing be like and unlike consciousness?”

Because like and unlike are conditions within consciousness. Consciousness is the outermost and innermost frame of all possibilities, so any thing that can exist, even in theory, supervenes completely on consciousness so that consciousness would be horribly constrained by comparison to any phenomenon within itself. At the same time, since every experience is made completely of experiences, you’d have to say that it is always the most common property. It is inescapable in all ways. (Not human consciousness of course – we can escape that, but the universe can’t escape being the universe.)

“Nothing is just the opposite of something, isn’t it? Or is it the opposite of sense?

You say, “There is nothing….”. In what sense is there nothing? ”

I mean that there isn’t anything that can be conceived that is like consciousness except consciousness. It isn’t like anything else (nothing else). There is no substitute. “Joe, I’ll give you $1,000,000 to try this new imitation consciousness. It’s great, everyone will love you and think that you are a great guy having a great life. The only difference is that you will never experience anything ever again. Deal?”

“To you, consciousness is one-dimensional.”

If you think that by MULTI-sense you think I mean one dimensional…or by ‘awareness of awareness’ I mean ‘there is only one kind of awareness’, then I’m not sure that my explaining to you what I mean is going to help. There are a lot of ways to define consciousness, but one dimensional is the least meaningful.

“Do you really have a million dollars to play with? ”

You’ll have to try my imitation consciousness to find out 🙂

“consciousness of self, is what you would call imitation consciousness”

No. Consciousness is what I call awareness of awareness. If I were totally engrossed in a movie I could be conscious of the movie but not of myself. Flow states are states of consciousness, not the state of being unconscious. What I mean by imitation consciousness is just what would be meant by any other kind of imitation substance – from a casual inspection from the outside, it appears to resemble the genuine article. My point was to show that this is absurd when applied to experience. You can’t almost have the capacity to experience. You can almost have the capacity to have a human experience, but not experience in general.

“There was a “time”, before time, in which I could not experience, ”

There would not have been an “I” “then”. I is always an experience.

“It could only know itself conceptually, not experientially. ”

Knowing is an experience. It doesn’t matter if what it is that you know, sense, detect, feel, etc is only yourself, you are still that experience – that stillness, stasis, insoluble solitude, solid solace, solid, strong, etc. It’s a phenomenological quality which inherently juxtaposes to the absence of that quality: receptivity, loneliness, isolation, weakness, nihilism, etc. Sol is soul. Sol is solar. Orienting, anchored. There is no ‘in the beginning’ since causality itself supervenes on time, on sequence and memory, sense of multiple experiences which can be ordered to lend significance to a ‘first cause’. Cause is not primary. Primary-ness prefigures cause.

I agree that for an experience of realism then ‘that which is not the soul’ has to be diffracted out or reflected back upon itself, which is why this capacity to diffract and multiply (self-juxtaposition) and to re-constitute those juxtapositions in different ways through meta-juxtaposition (levels, channels of sense or awareness) must be inherent. It is what sense is made of. You can’t have an experience unless you can tell the difference (2-1=1) between the presence (1) and absence (1-1=0) of that experience. The experience of being able to tell the difference then becomes a second experience – a memory or history of the first.

You are conflating the experience of conceptualizing a symbol with the concept of a symbol as a thing independent of an interpreter. I don’t do that. I can conceive of the letter A and that is an experience. The letter A is not having an experience and in a universe which somehow had nothing but the letter A in it would have no experience. This is the symbol grounding problem – as you said: the Map is not the territory http://s33light.org/image/30726765691

“Joe: No. I think your understanding of consciousness is one- dimensional.”

You know what they say about opinions…everybody’s got one.

“That is, consciousness has many dimensions. You are just not aware of them. ”

I agree, consciousness has many dimensions, and of course I am not aware of all of them. That doesn’t mean that consciousness can’t also be meaningfully defined as an awareness of awareness.

“You paint all consciousness with one brush, awareness of awareness. ”

If you use the word consciousness, you are already painting with one brush. If you ask me to define consciousness, you can always say that my definition is incomplete because there is nothing that is not a form or effect of consciousness.

“You have focused your consciousness totally in a different direction. How do you explain that? ”

Easily. You are aware of different awarenesses than you were when you are not watching a movie.

“If all consciousness is awareness of awareness, and if you are not aware of your awareness, as your example seems to suggest. ”

I never said that an individual is aware of all possible awareness at all times. That is the opposite of what I mean by multisense realism. Any individual’s consciousness is continuously expanding and contracting in its range of awareness. This gets more into human psychology though, not a theory of consciousness as it pertains to the hard problem and the cosmos.

“The state in which you are aware, but there is nothing else, so, no experience”

The experience is one ‘in which you are aware, but there is nothing else’. That is the experience. I could say to you “Oh man, I just was meditating and I had this experience where I was aware, but there was nothing else”…but now that experience is over and I am aware of this conversation with you, and baked beans, the absence of a napkin, and the song ‘Der Kommisar”, among other things.

“Joe Consciousness of self has no outside, no reference point outside itself, as I said.”

I agree. That’s why I am saying you wouldn’t want to blindly accept an imitation of consciousness, because an imitation can only be based on some reference point outside of itself.

“Joe: Not sure what you are saying is absurd. ”

The idea that things can be imitated.

“Joe: You can have a non-experiential state that makes experience possible. ”

No. You cannot have a non-experiential state. There can be experiential states which are not experienced by you, and which can make your experience possible, but that doesn’t mean that the state is not an experience of some kind to some thing. I don’t experience my DNA transcription, but that doesn’t mean that atoms or DNA or cells don’t have an experience which corresponds to DNA transcription.

“The consciousness of one soul, when that one soul is all there is, and there is nothing else, is not experience. ”

I think that quibbling over word definitions and hypothetical ontology is the lowest form of philosophizing. If you want to believe that there can be consciousness without experience or experience without consciousness, that’s ok with me, but trying to convince me of such a thing is just going to be a waste of your time.

“Now its not just one awareness, but a whole swarm of awarenesses. ”

You are assuming that awareness is like something else – that it can be defined as one thing or more than one thing. I am trying to explain to you that subjectivity is the opposite of objectivity. All awareness is neither one dimensional nor not one dimensional. You are trying to nail down awareness to a particular thing that I can be wrong about, but you have missed my point that awareness is beneath all forms of definition. Awareness, consciousness, perception, etc. is “this”. It is experience.

” If it has no simpler concept, how can consciousness be defined as awareness of awareness?”

Because they are all ultimately the same thing. Consciousness is a word that seems more appropriate for richer forms of awareness, such as adult human beings. It’s all nothing but playing with vocabulary though. Call it phenomenology, subjectivity, eidetic participation, feeling, being, seeming…whatever, it is all the same thing. It contains all dimensions as one dimension. It defines all definitions.

Your initial explanation begs the question (Latin petitio principii, “assuming the initial point”). You assume that there could be a ‘soul’ which is ‘conscious’ but has no experience of being conscious to begin with.

Your example here assumes that consciousness can be like other things. I have tried to explain why it is that consciousness cannot be defined in that way. Something cannot almost be itself. There is no “I am 50 miles from being me”. Saying “I” means that you already “are”. You are experiencing the state of your own capacity to experience, regardless of the content. This is awareness. If you have a capacity to notice that you are having an experience, then you have an awareness of your awareness and are therefore conscious.

“Now you have multiple senses of “experience”. There is general experience, human experience….????”

You seem to have a habit of projecting your misunderstanding of my ideas as my ‘changing my story’. I’m not too bothered or surprised by that, but it is a kind of loaded question/ad hominem strategy from my perspective. I haven’t changed my story. I use the word experience in the ordinary way. If I am a human being, I have human experiences. If I am a fish or a paramecium, I have experiences with different qualities. To talk about experience in general means the common qualities of all experiences – awareness. Sense. Private phenomenology.

“There was nothing else to experience. I was only conscious of me. ”

Why do you day that “only me” is nothing. To me experience is awareness and awareness is experience.

“Joe: Is it?”

Why wouldn’t it be. If I know where my shoes are, then there is an experience of my shoes which I have the experience of knowing.

“Not when the only thing you know is that All I am is all there is”

It’s still awareness. It is still an experience of being, even if there is no second order reflection of that experience as awareness of being.

“All those things have no meaning before existence.”

I can see why most people would see it that way but I disagree. I think those things are what gives rise to existence. Existence is an abstraction, an a posteriori analysis/generalization of the intellect. Stasis is a concrete experiential quality which prefigures the intellect and any conceptualizations thereof.

“The only thing that has any meaning, that constitutes knowledge, is that I know that I am all there is, and there is nothing else. Since I do not exist, I have no experience.”

If you know anything about there being nothing else besides you, that is an experience, and you do ‘exist’ (exist in the sense of being an experience, not of being an object in a public materialistic sense). It is not possible to say or think ‘I do not exist’ or ‘I have no experience’, because that state of being aware of any possibilities or conditions whatsoever is already an experience that “I” am having.

I agree, but most people are incapable of entertaining a model of consciousness without some definition of it. I don’t like definitions myself, but before I had one there, the first thing a lot of people would accuse me of is not having a definition of consciousness.

That’s why ‘an awareness of awareness’ (or awarenesses of awarenesses if you prefer) is better than nothing as it pertains to distinguishing between the term ‘consciousness’ as it is typically used and subordinate forms of consciousness of awareness.

To say that ‘consciousness is everything’ is true, but it doesn’t help anyone who doesn’t already agree with that view.

Not true. Being a person by itself is an experience. Waking up by itself is an experience. It is understood that there is no such thing as feeling something without an experience of having that feeling.

That changes with symbols. Because they interface with objective realism, they are easy to confuse with objects, and as objects with interface with subjective realism, they are easy to confuse with subjects. This is the infocentric view which seems to be the most popular view among intelligent and educated thinkers at this time. Functionalism. Computationalism.

I used to subscribe to that myself, for many years. It made sense to me that everything in the universe can be reduced to ‘patterns’. I now see that while this is almost exactly right, because of the nature of consciousness and how it is unlike anything else, it turns out that it is exactly wrong. Patterns supervene on pattern recognition. It is sense making phenomenology which makes patterns possible, not the other way around. If we say hypothetically that patterns could exist by themselves, there is no possibility that experience could or would arise out of them. Experience however, naturally implies a desirability for persistence of patterns. Patterns alone can’t desire things. They are just forms.

Okay.

“you do not look below the surface of consciousness. You don’t say what it is, or why it is, or even what role it plays in the workings of the mind. You seem to deny any causal connection between the world and the conscious mind.”

Have you not seen the mural that I use? http://www.stationlink.com/art/comp7.jpg

I don’t focus on psychology or spiritual development in multisense realism. I think that those aspects of consciousness are being covered very well by other sources. What this project focuses on is explaining the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, which, as it turns out, requires a radical re-interpretation of physics. Isn’t that enough?

I don’t deny any connections between the world and the conscious mind, but I’m not trying to impersonate Carl Jung or Aleister Crowley either. I do, however say what it is (sense = experiential meta self-juxtaposition in active and passive modes) and why it is needs no other justifications (sense = primordial and prefigures causality. Roles come out of sense, not the other way around.) Consciousness is that which must be experienced to understand.