Glad to read your posts again! What I remember from the classical Indian theories of consciousness is that there were mainly two models. (That's without going into things like non-dualism.)
The first is the screen or container model. Consciousness is like a neutral container on which mental and sensory phenomena project themselves. Traditional images for that are like a transparent crystal, a blank screen or an empty vessel.
The second model is that the string of patches of conscious phenomenality *is* what we call consciousness itself, without a separate container-like principle to hold it.
Do I understand right that the approach you are presenting is of the first type? If so, does the second type have a Western equivalent or a name?
It seems to me like the second approach would be a better starting point for physicalist attempt at making sense of consciousness.
So I definitely don't have any particular knowledge of your sources here (if you have a book recommendation though, please share!), but it seems to me that the two positions you've outlined correspond pretty closely with the atman and anatman positions, the first of which is prevalent in Hindu and Jain thought, while the latter is the position, broadly speaking, within Buddhist philosophy.
Now I would certainly agree that for a physicalist, only the latter position seems tenable, and though Western philosophy of mind has not tended to discuss consciousness in the way that classical Indic thought has (largely to our impoverishment, I think) I think it's fair to say that the atman position is broadly compatible with western idealist philosophy. Meanwhile, the anatman position is comparable both to "classical" Enlightenment-era empiricism, as well as more contemporary positions like epiphenomenalism.
For me, though, I think the big issue is that we have to be careful to not get sucked into thinking of consciousness as either "a thing like other things" or "nothing at all". Each of these attitudes makes the basic category error of thinking that consciousness is some kind of entity in the same way that, say, tables or brains are entities—definable things extended in space and time. This is certainly the error, I think, that nearly all analytic philosophy of mind falls into, because if you see truth as nothing but a series of propositions about things, then everything needs to be a thing about which you can make propositions.
But I'm not so sure consciousness is such a thing—as I outline in the post above. As you suggest in your comment, we might think of consciousness as a sort of "screen" upon which phenomena present themselves. As long as we mean this analogically, I think this can be a helpful idea to consider. But of course, there is no "thing" which phenomena present to; consciousness is more like the condition of possibility of there being any phenomena, rather than something that they somehow interact with.
But, I certainly don't think that that makes the anatman position more plausible, since there seems no reason at all, on physicalist terms, to think that phenomena would need to arise or present at all. There are some basic "features" of consciousness, like its seeming unity, its intentional structure, etc. for which such a position, or its western corollaries, cannot provide any rationale or explanation. In short, consciousness may not be any kind of thing, but that's because it's *more* real than any thing, rather than less.
All of this means that I am most sympathetic to some position in the vaguely idealist camp, so to speak, but of course that may give accuracy without precision: "idealism" encompasses a vast array of positions (most notably, the non-dualist Vedantin positions you mention above, as well as Neoplatonist positions). And of course, any mode of idealism has its own difficulties in explaining basic features of reality, though I do think it has a better shot than any mode of materialism. I hope to have more to say on this in the future...
I can't really recommend a source because I've mostly learned these things from within the tradition, and sources are very scattered. I've read some amazing specialized scholarship (ex. Recognizing Reality by Georges Dreyfus, most of which went quite above my head), but I can't think of a good, modern overview. That's why I was just giving some street-level simple descriptions and wondering aloud if these positions have well-known Western counterparts.
Yes, the container-less model is basically the original Buddhist model; it's a dualistic reductive model with both matter and mind "atoms", collectively called dharmas (an overloaded word if there was ever one). And old, probably outdated reference on that is Theodor Stcherbatsky's "The Central Conception of Buddhism". Modern Theravada is probably a good example. I didn't bring up the traditional affiliations because it gets messy quickly; Mahayana Buddhism also affirms anatman but in some cases they come close to a container-like model for the subtlest or ultimate consciousness, e.g Nichiren's "ninth consciousness" is virtually indistinguishable from an atman.
> because if you see truth as nothing but a series of propositions about things, then everything needs to be a thing about which you can make propositions.
That's one sentence I can fully get behind!
> All of this means that I am most sympathetic to some position in the vaguely idealist camp, so to speak
Me too, I quite share this sensibility.
But given the unreasonable accuracy of mathematics at describing the physical world, I tend to think that on top of mind and matter, a third realm of platonic logical-mathematical truth also deserves consideration. In fact in my pet metaphysics, the appearances of the physical world result from the interaction between an "actual" principle of primordial consciousness, and a "potential" realm of platonic mathematical truth. But that's a story for another day :)
Have you done much reading in the sub-field of the philosophy of mathematics? I have only come in contact with it tangentially, but I know there is a debate between mathematical realists and mathematical non-realists that might interest you.
I actually majored in mathematics, and I much enjoyed learning about its foundations, which is as close as one gets to philosophy when studying science. But I've been out of the field for a long time.
Just went and read a few pages on it on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's a whole field so they make lots of fine-grained distinctions that would take a long time to digest. But in broad strokes, my gut feeling is that mathematical truth is a terrain that we can explore but cannot freely shape; we can only find a bridge between two areas if it's already there, and we can't blast through a hill if it stands in the way.
Beyond that I don't know; it seems like much discussion has gone into bargaining between expressiveness and ontological minimalism, such as accepting the natural numbers as "real" but not so for more abstract structures. I'm not fond of bargaining, so I tend more towards the idea that if any mathematical objects or relations are real, in whichever way they can be, then the same should apply to all of them. That would probably align with what they call Plenitudinous Platonism.
Hegel has an interesting aside on mathematics in the opening sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit. It's been a decade since I read it, but if I remember correctly, his view was that all of math could be reduced to 1 and 0, and that these themselves were really just abstract representations of being and non-being, respectively (or presence and non-presence, etc.) I am aware of at least one mathematician who agrees that mathematical entities can be reduced to just a few terms, but adds infinity to one and zero. Again, this is not my area of expertise at all—but your comments reminded me of my coming across these ideas.
I'm not sure what to think of that. All of math can be encoded into 0s and 1s, that's exactly how we put it into computers. But computers have a lot more going on than 0s and 1s; they also have the ability to loop over their instructions, among many other things.
Still, the interesting part of math is not doing calculations, but the whole question of what can be proved based on what. That's where the amazing disparity shows, between questions that can be understood by a middle-schooler, but take centuries to find an answer by the best minds (e.g Fermat-Wiles), or even questions that can be understood by a kid and whose answer still eludes us (e.g the Collatz conjecture).
That's the part that feels like there is a pre-existing terrain, quite unlike the physical or phenomenal world, but which we are somehow able to explore.
"But it is the case that, not only other peoples’ consciousnesses, their phenomenalities, their immediate qualitative experience, do not appear to us whatsoever, but also that the contents of their consciousnesses do not appear to us. This is what we outlined above in our thought experiment with the paint swatch: my experience of the quality of greenness doesn’t show up in your consciousness at all, even though you can infer it if you have the right information about my brain state. Inferring a qualitative state is not the same as actually having, experiencing, or being that qualitative state (in a similar way to how having a picture of a million dollars is not the same as having a million dollars). When we consider other people, we can assume that their brain states must generate, or at least correlate to, their own qualitative experience, but we can never actually verify this. And this is because other people’s qualitative experiences are not phenomena for us at all. Those experiences don’t appear in our lifeworld whatsoever. The brain states that are (definitely, if vaguely) linked to those qualitative experiences, certainly do (or at least can) appear in our consciousness. We can indeed measure those states, and can arrive at all kinds of useful information about other persons’ mental states from such measurements."
I believe "we can never actually verify this" is problematic assertion. It smuggles in the assumption that the phenomenal experience of 'seeing green' is limited to some kind of pure sensory experience, but upon closer inspection we find that the experience of 'seeing green' is always interwoven with the *concept* of 'greenness', and it is in fact these concepts which are shared between relative perspectives. For example if I am looking at a green table from one point in space, and you are looking at it from another point in space (obviously, since our physical body cannot share the same point in space), we undoubtedly have unique experiences of the green table from our relative perspectives. Yet we would nevertheless say we are observing the *same* green table. Why? Because we share the same concept of 'green table' that unites the unique perceptual frames of our experience into a coherent whole.
To use another example, let's say I stretch my arm to take the pen on my desk. There's a whole spectrum of conscious phenomena that are correlated in the most complicated, yet consistent ways. Physically, the motion of my arm, the nerve impulses, and the brain activity are all consistent. But these are only part of the spectrum of conscious phenomena. My idea that I need to take the pen for some purpose, which I experience as activating the will, is also fully correlated with all the other perceptions and is no less valid of a conscious experience than the others. In fact, from my perspective, it is the most important one because it is what brings into harmony all the separate frames of perception of my arm movement. It is true that the real-time idea is not a phenomenon like the sensory phenomena, but as soon as it recedes from real-time perspective, it becomes a phenomenon (a "phenomenon" can be considered anything we can potentially think about or remember, including past thoughts and intents).
So if we return to your example, what would allow the other person to experience the 'seeing green' that I experience? Hypothetically, they would need to resonate with my inner life such that they could figure out the preferences, desires, feelings, thoughts, etc. that 'funneled down' the potential palette of colors I could choose from into the particular decision of using the green paint swatch. It is that inner life of intuitive factors, which are shared across many relative perspectives, that renders our experience of 'seeing green' a potentially shared/objective reality, while only our momentary positioning of sensory organs within 'spacetime' renders the experience unique and 'subjective'. Of course, this is not something that any ordinary person would be sufficiently developed to do, but it is still a conceivable possibility. There is no reason to assume that it is impossible to verify the inner experience from the outset.
And upon further investigation, I think we would find that we are *always* resonating with the inner life of other relative perspectives - hence we can empathize, infer, communicate, etc. - but normally that fact is obscured by our myopic/selfish attention and interests, which is what makes us feel like bubbles of consciousness with our own 'private' inner lives of experience.
Let me take your second point first: I absolutely agree that the experience of "willing my arm to move in order to take this pen" qualifies as a phenomenon of its own, even as it is closely linked with other phenomena (such as the color of the pen, the sense of its location in space, etc.). So we certainly agree on that.
As for the possibility of linking our experience of, say, a green table by referring to universal concepts: I would say I am sympathetic to this view, but not at all convinced that we can prove or verify it. In other words: I think I'd like this to be true, but I am not sure if I can show that it is.
Consider, for example, if one of us is severely colorblind. If we both look at the same green table, is our concept of that green table really the same at all? I don't see how it could be. And if that's the case, then, even though we both might refer to "that green table", the meaning of that reference, for each of us, is not the same, and if *that's* the case, then it doesn't seem that we can secure any transcendent universal to anchor our experiences and relate them.
But I would go even further, and say that even *if* our experiences can be securely referred to each other via reference to true universals, 1) it still remains the case that our immediate experiences of any given thing, even if we experience that thing through "the same" universals, are distinct instances of experience. Phenomenality, in other words, is always a concrete even of experience. And, 2), if we *are* able to locate and identify universals within our experience, it still seems important to note that we discover those universals within consciousness—not the other way around.
All that said, as I said, I am still sympathetic to the position I think you are outlining here. Indeed, it is my hope that on the other side of eternity, we will be able to have direct experiences of other conscious beings' reality as such. But I don't think we have that kind of access here and now.
Glad to read your posts again! What I remember from the classical Indian theories of consciousness is that there were mainly two models. (That's without going into things like non-dualism.)
The first is the screen or container model. Consciousness is like a neutral container on which mental and sensory phenomena project themselves. Traditional images for that are like a transparent crystal, a blank screen or an empty vessel.
The second model is that the string of patches of conscious phenomenality *is* what we call consciousness itself, without a separate container-like principle to hold it.
Do I understand right that the approach you are presenting is of the first type? If so, does the second type have a Western equivalent or a name?
It seems to me like the second approach would be a better starting point for physicalist attempt at making sense of consciousness.
So I definitely don't have any particular knowledge of your sources here (if you have a book recommendation though, please share!), but it seems to me that the two positions you've outlined correspond pretty closely with the atman and anatman positions, the first of which is prevalent in Hindu and Jain thought, while the latter is the position, broadly speaking, within Buddhist philosophy.
Now I would certainly agree that for a physicalist, only the latter position seems tenable, and though Western philosophy of mind has not tended to discuss consciousness in the way that classical Indic thought has (largely to our impoverishment, I think) I think it's fair to say that the atman position is broadly compatible with western idealist philosophy. Meanwhile, the anatman position is comparable both to "classical" Enlightenment-era empiricism, as well as more contemporary positions like epiphenomenalism.
For me, though, I think the big issue is that we have to be careful to not get sucked into thinking of consciousness as either "a thing like other things" or "nothing at all". Each of these attitudes makes the basic category error of thinking that consciousness is some kind of entity in the same way that, say, tables or brains are entities—definable things extended in space and time. This is certainly the error, I think, that nearly all analytic philosophy of mind falls into, because if you see truth as nothing but a series of propositions about things, then everything needs to be a thing about which you can make propositions.
But I'm not so sure consciousness is such a thing—as I outline in the post above. As you suggest in your comment, we might think of consciousness as a sort of "screen" upon which phenomena present themselves. As long as we mean this analogically, I think this can be a helpful idea to consider. But of course, there is no "thing" which phenomena present to; consciousness is more like the condition of possibility of there being any phenomena, rather than something that they somehow interact with.
But, I certainly don't think that that makes the anatman position more plausible, since there seems no reason at all, on physicalist terms, to think that phenomena would need to arise or present at all. There are some basic "features" of consciousness, like its seeming unity, its intentional structure, etc. for which such a position, or its western corollaries, cannot provide any rationale or explanation. In short, consciousness may not be any kind of thing, but that's because it's *more* real than any thing, rather than less.
All of this means that I am most sympathetic to some position in the vaguely idealist camp, so to speak, but of course that may give accuracy without precision: "idealism" encompasses a vast array of positions (most notably, the non-dualist Vedantin positions you mention above, as well as Neoplatonist positions). And of course, any mode of idealism has its own difficulties in explaining basic features of reality, though I do think it has a better shot than any mode of materialism. I hope to have more to say on this in the future...
I can't really recommend a source because I've mostly learned these things from within the tradition, and sources are very scattered. I've read some amazing specialized scholarship (ex. Recognizing Reality by Georges Dreyfus, most of which went quite above my head), but I can't think of a good, modern overview. That's why I was just giving some street-level simple descriptions and wondering aloud if these positions have well-known Western counterparts.
Yes, the container-less model is basically the original Buddhist model; it's a dualistic reductive model with both matter and mind "atoms", collectively called dharmas (an overloaded word if there was ever one). And old, probably outdated reference on that is Theodor Stcherbatsky's "The Central Conception of Buddhism". Modern Theravada is probably a good example. I didn't bring up the traditional affiliations because it gets messy quickly; Mahayana Buddhism also affirms anatman but in some cases they come close to a container-like model for the subtlest or ultimate consciousness, e.g Nichiren's "ninth consciousness" is virtually indistinguishable from an atman.
> because if you see truth as nothing but a series of propositions about things, then everything needs to be a thing about which you can make propositions.
That's one sentence I can fully get behind!
> All of this means that I am most sympathetic to some position in the vaguely idealist camp, so to speak
Me too, I quite share this sensibility.
But given the unreasonable accuracy of mathematics at describing the physical world, I tend to think that on top of mind and matter, a third realm of platonic logical-mathematical truth also deserves consideration. In fact in my pet metaphysics, the appearances of the physical world result from the interaction between an "actual" principle of primordial consciousness, and a "potential" realm of platonic mathematical truth. But that's a story for another day :)
Have you done much reading in the sub-field of the philosophy of mathematics? I have only come in contact with it tangentially, but I know there is a debate between mathematical realists and mathematical non-realists that might interest you.
I actually majored in mathematics, and I much enjoyed learning about its foundations, which is as close as one gets to philosophy when studying science. But I've been out of the field for a long time.
Just went and read a few pages on it on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's a whole field so they make lots of fine-grained distinctions that would take a long time to digest. But in broad strokes, my gut feeling is that mathematical truth is a terrain that we can explore but cannot freely shape; we can only find a bridge between two areas if it's already there, and we can't blast through a hill if it stands in the way.
Beyond that I don't know; it seems like much discussion has gone into bargaining between expressiveness and ontological minimalism, such as accepting the natural numbers as "real" but not so for more abstract structures. I'm not fond of bargaining, so I tend more towards the idea that if any mathematical objects or relations are real, in whichever way they can be, then the same should apply to all of them. That would probably align with what they call Plenitudinous Platonism.
Hegel has an interesting aside on mathematics in the opening sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit. It's been a decade since I read it, but if I remember correctly, his view was that all of math could be reduced to 1 and 0, and that these themselves were really just abstract representations of being and non-being, respectively (or presence and non-presence, etc.) I am aware of at least one mathematician who agrees that mathematical entities can be reduced to just a few terms, but adds infinity to one and zero. Again, this is not my area of expertise at all—but your comments reminded me of my coming across these ideas.
I'm not sure what to think of that. All of math can be encoded into 0s and 1s, that's exactly how we put it into computers. But computers have a lot more going on than 0s and 1s; they also have the ability to loop over their instructions, among many other things.
Still, the interesting part of math is not doing calculations, but the whole question of what can be proved based on what. That's where the amazing disparity shows, between questions that can be understood by a middle-schooler, but take centuries to find an answer by the best minds (e.g Fermat-Wiles), or even questions that can be understood by a kid and whose answer still eludes us (e.g the Collatz conjecture).
That's the part that feels like there is a pre-existing terrain, quite unlike the physical or phenomenal world, but which we are somehow able to explore.
"But it is the case that, not only other peoples’ consciousnesses, their phenomenalities, their immediate qualitative experience, do not appear to us whatsoever, but also that the contents of their consciousnesses do not appear to us. This is what we outlined above in our thought experiment with the paint swatch: my experience of the quality of greenness doesn’t show up in your consciousness at all, even though you can infer it if you have the right information about my brain state. Inferring a qualitative state is not the same as actually having, experiencing, or being that qualitative state (in a similar way to how having a picture of a million dollars is not the same as having a million dollars). When we consider other people, we can assume that their brain states must generate, or at least correlate to, their own qualitative experience, but we can never actually verify this. And this is because other people’s qualitative experiences are not phenomena for us at all. Those experiences don’t appear in our lifeworld whatsoever. The brain states that are (definitely, if vaguely) linked to those qualitative experiences, certainly do (or at least can) appear in our consciousness. We can indeed measure those states, and can arrive at all kinds of useful information about other persons’ mental states from such measurements."
I believe "we can never actually verify this" is problematic assertion. It smuggles in the assumption that the phenomenal experience of 'seeing green' is limited to some kind of pure sensory experience, but upon closer inspection we find that the experience of 'seeing green' is always interwoven with the *concept* of 'greenness', and it is in fact these concepts which are shared between relative perspectives. For example if I am looking at a green table from one point in space, and you are looking at it from another point in space (obviously, since our physical body cannot share the same point in space), we undoubtedly have unique experiences of the green table from our relative perspectives. Yet we would nevertheless say we are observing the *same* green table. Why? Because we share the same concept of 'green table' that unites the unique perceptual frames of our experience into a coherent whole.
To use another example, let's say I stretch my arm to take the pen on my desk. There's a whole spectrum of conscious phenomena that are correlated in the most complicated, yet consistent ways. Physically, the motion of my arm, the nerve impulses, and the brain activity are all consistent. But these are only part of the spectrum of conscious phenomena. My idea that I need to take the pen for some purpose, which I experience as activating the will, is also fully correlated with all the other perceptions and is no less valid of a conscious experience than the others. In fact, from my perspective, it is the most important one because it is what brings into harmony all the separate frames of perception of my arm movement. It is true that the real-time idea is not a phenomenon like the sensory phenomena, but as soon as it recedes from real-time perspective, it becomes a phenomenon (a "phenomenon" can be considered anything we can potentially think about or remember, including past thoughts and intents).
So if we return to your example, what would allow the other person to experience the 'seeing green' that I experience? Hypothetically, they would need to resonate with my inner life such that they could figure out the preferences, desires, feelings, thoughts, etc. that 'funneled down' the potential palette of colors I could choose from into the particular decision of using the green paint swatch. It is that inner life of intuitive factors, which are shared across many relative perspectives, that renders our experience of 'seeing green' a potentially shared/objective reality, while only our momentary positioning of sensory organs within 'spacetime' renders the experience unique and 'subjective'. Of course, this is not something that any ordinary person would be sufficiently developed to do, but it is still a conceivable possibility. There is no reason to assume that it is impossible to verify the inner experience from the outset.
And upon further investigation, I think we would find that we are *always* resonating with the inner life of other relative perspectives - hence we can empathize, infer, communicate, etc. - but normally that fact is obscured by our myopic/selfish attention and interests, which is what makes us feel like bubbles of consciousness with our own 'private' inner lives of experience.
Let me take your second point first: I absolutely agree that the experience of "willing my arm to move in order to take this pen" qualifies as a phenomenon of its own, even as it is closely linked with other phenomena (such as the color of the pen, the sense of its location in space, etc.). So we certainly agree on that.
As for the possibility of linking our experience of, say, a green table by referring to universal concepts: I would say I am sympathetic to this view, but not at all convinced that we can prove or verify it. In other words: I think I'd like this to be true, but I am not sure if I can show that it is.
Consider, for example, if one of us is severely colorblind. If we both look at the same green table, is our concept of that green table really the same at all? I don't see how it could be. And if that's the case, then, even though we both might refer to "that green table", the meaning of that reference, for each of us, is not the same, and if *that's* the case, then it doesn't seem that we can secure any transcendent universal to anchor our experiences and relate them.
But I would go even further, and say that even *if* our experiences can be securely referred to each other via reference to true universals, 1) it still remains the case that our immediate experiences of any given thing, even if we experience that thing through "the same" universals, are distinct instances of experience. Phenomenality, in other words, is always a concrete even of experience. And, 2), if we *are* able to locate and identify universals within our experience, it still seems important to note that we discover those universals within consciousness—not the other way around.
All that said, as I said, I am still sympathetic to the position I think you are outlining here. Indeed, it is my hope that on the other side of eternity, we will be able to have direct experiences of other conscious beings' reality as such. But I don't think we have that kind of access here and now.
But I'd be happy to be proven wrong!