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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8

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“Joseph Kosuth, No Number #6 (On Color, Blue) (1991), neon tubing with argon gas and mercury. In the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art's permanent collection: "I am only describing language, not explaining anything." (neon on wall, circa 1997, displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the original neon is blue) A succint definition of Conceptual art, in "Inquiry into the foundations of the concept 'art', as it has come to mean," given by Joseph Kosuth, requires "a linguistic rather than plastic context."

I like it ... I really enjoyed the Taylor Carman paper and I'm getting more out of Dreyfus' lectures this time too.

I will have to post some things on "kinetic" and robotic art/interactive art, there are some very good things out there in this area.
 
This paper on developments in modern art toward abstract expresssionism, conceptual art, installation art and their phenomenological roots can help us enter into the crossing between/ the chiasm of the nature of our being and physically evolved nature as we experience it in our local worlds, thus sensing the integrated plenum from which we and our worlds arise.

Extracts:

"Zen and the Everyday Installation art's ready acceptance of the quotidian, ranging from the everyday materials used for building and for furnishing public and private interiors to the ephemera of daily living, can be considered a natural extension of phenomenology. In addition, this art can be regarded as an appreciation of the significance of everyday reality that is one of Zen's major contributions. Admittedly, post-World War II Zen in the West is different from its japanese counterpart. Chiefly promulgated by D. T. Suzuki, who employed such terms as keiken and taiken (which are rarely found in pre-twentieth-century religious literature) to connote direct experience, western post-war Zen was far more pragmatic and far less doctrinal than its eastern counterpart.'7 Suzuki's early introduction to western thinking while he was stil.lliving in japan, in addition to his later self-appointed role as the japanese spokesperson for Zen in the West, made him susceptible to its desire for a life-changing form of enlightenment. Satori (meaning sudden understanding) and kensho (coming to terms with one's original face) seemed to fil.l a western desire for unmediated experience in an overly mediated world. Such terms as satori and kensho are consistent with Merleau-Ponty's concept of preobjective vision. In addition to these interpretations of kensho and satori, which in· corporate western ideology within a distinctly eastern orientation, this hybridized form of Zen shares with its eastern counterpart an interest in embodied perception that has made it particularly appealing to both installation artists and phenomenologists. Zen's emphasis on integrating the body with the mind and spirit is evident in the types of pursuits undertaken by initiates who often choose to learn this belief system indirectly as part of their training in archery, calligraphy, and flower arranging. In undertaking these activities, they seek an inner harmony between themselves and their acts, so that the limitations of the ego are surmounted and an indefinable "it" that superintends the archer, the bow, the arrow, and the target takes over when the bull's eye is hit time after time.' 8 Such transcendence of the self is akin to Merleau-Ponty's desire to move beyond personal subjectivity and find a pre-personal- and even anonymous-being. As he pointed out in his preface to Phenomenology of Perception, "The world is not what I think, but what I live through."'9

"In Stockholder's words, 'The real elements and the painted elements are of equal value . ... Mixing things which feel as if they are immiscible causes doors to open where there were none before. How we see informs how we are.'"

"Both phenomenology and Zen supported the development of new art forms predicated first on multisensory perceptions that involve the human body and its surroundings. Most importantly, both of these theoretical constructs diminish the role of the artist's ego in support of a new type of interactive looking that synthesizes the viewer and the view. The possibilities of this new mode of perception have been of the utmost importance to installation artists since it has enabled them: (1) to reject the intentional fallacy and counter the residual romantic belief that works of art are mere bridges connecting the minds/spirits of artists with those of viewers, (2) to invoke a new directness in line with a rapidly changing, media-dominated world, (3) to develop the theoretical basis for an open-ended art capable of responding to these changes, and (4) to create new forms of interactive works, combining aspects of painting, sculpture, and architecture without being bound to elitist canons that channel looking along predetermined lines. . . . . "

http://roberthobbs.net/essay_files/Merleau-Pontys_Phenomenology.pdf
 
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Concluding paragraphs are also helpful:

"Suture

In order to comprehend more clearly the persuasiveness of installation works and their mode of implicating viewers, it helps to recognize the usefulness of the term "suture," which Jacques-Alain Miller originated in the late 1970s, and which has since become an accepted mode of interpretation in film criticism." If one thinks of suturing in its surgical sense of stitching together the two sides of a wound or incision, one comes close to Miller's use of the term. Suturing is not only a means by which a viewer identifies with a given work of art, it is the agency by which an onlooker is called into being as a subject so that he or she assumes a subjective role through it. As MerleauPanty pointed out, "Seeing is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me for being absent from myself . .. ." We might think of this absence as analogous to a viewer's wound or a break in identity which the subjectivity of a given work of art both catalyzes and also helps to heal, even if only briefly. In this way, viewers are induced to undergo the experience offered by the work in order to come to terms with the new identity it holds out to them.

Sometimes installation art, in a similar way to classic film, assumes a coercive stance in relation to its viewers. In installation art, a variety of provisional and discontinuous subjectivities await viewers: in this genre viewers may be recruited as subjects, but their roles depend on the dynamics resulting from a synthesis formed between themselves and the special environment awaiting them. 23 These subjectivities are even more discontinuous than in classic films: they are negotiated and then renegotiated in the time necessary to move through the installation. Matthew McCaslin pointed out in his statement for 16 On Center (a 1990 installation at the Mattress Factory), "The inbetween, to be somewhere, to be in a room, to be in a wall, to be in your mind, to be in my mind. A work place. A domestic place, any place, every place. The journey, the continual, letting go to find out from within."


Robert Hobbs, Ph.D., holds the Rhoda Thalhimer Chair of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University. Richmond. He hos published extensively in the areas of modern and contemporary art and has curated exhibitions throughout the world, including a retrospective of the work of Robert Smithson at the American Pavilion of the 1982 Venice Biennale.
 
@Ufology has changed his avatar to “Usual Suspect” and wrote the following yesterday in response to a post of mine in response to one of his. (Note to the person formerly known as Ufology: it is not 'you' that we suspect, but rather your presuppositions about the nature of reality and mind.)

Since you've changed your avatar I can apparently no longer link back to your last post to me here under the name Ufology. Fortunately I saved it in part in Word for reference in writing a response, which I quote here:

OK Thanks. The above implies a model in which there are four main components:

  1. The external world
  2. Sensory perception ( information about the surrounding environment or situation obtained by the senses )
  3. A perceptual interface between sensory perception and consciousness
  4. Consciousness ( the experiencer of the perceptual interface )
If you see it differently than in the 4 points above, it might help if you could identify where and how the above differs from what you were trying to get across.


These are the respects in which your enumerated statements depart from my understanding and viewpoint:

1. I believe that I live in a physical world external to/beyond my own existence.

2. I know that I experience aspects of this world via my senses and also through my consciousness and mind.

3. As I see it, with the phenomenological philosophers, I experience -- preconsciously and consciously -- an experiential interface with the world I live in (i.e., the natural world and the cultural world in the time of my situated existence). This interface is not simply a matter of sensory perception but of bodily, emotional, mental, spiritual, and intersubjective involvement with, and consequent caring about, the world I live in and the other beings that inhabit it.

4. Consciousness [which includes my own subconscious mind and the collective unconscious as described by Jung] enables my experience in and of the situated local ‘world’ in which I find myself existing. It also opens up the actual being-of-the-world to me and discloses to me my own being within it. Consciousness is not an operandum that enables a mere ‘perceptual interface’ with the world. It is a fluid and permeable boundary across which I commune with and participate in “that which-is” as I can perceive it through its phenomenal appearances to me as a conscious entity, physically and mentally open to it through the sensory and other affordances provided to me by nature – a permeable boundary across which "that which-is" in this local instance and expression of Being enters my own being and makes justifiable demands of me. It is what makes it possible for me to be at home in 'this world' despite my lack of access to knowledge of the World as a Whole {ontological Being}. The latter 'ontological reality' has produced, out of layers of physical evolution and human cultural development, the actual existential 'world' I experience, in which I can and do sense many layers of reality for which I cannot provide purely 'objective' evidence.
 
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Here are some extracts from @Soupie's posts to which I wanted to respond {Soupie's comments in black, my reponding comments in blue}:

“Why is described so important? Because at the heart of physics, we don't know why the processes we observe are happening, we are merely describing them. We can importantly make very accurate predictions based off of the patterns we've described, which I don't mean to diminish in any way, but why the described physical laws of the universe are as they are is ultimately a mystery.”

Yes, I think that is correct and vitally important to understand.

“On the one hand we can think of consciousness as pure, content-less awareness. But wouldn't contentless awareness be nothingness? Even if we say pure awareness is "awareness of awareness" we are inserting a content, a something. An awareness "of" something. A reflexive or self awareness is still an awareness of something. ergo not contentless.”

Right again, in my opinion. Some commentators on consciousness, including those who write from mystical and/or meditational perspectives, refer to consciousness as the recognition of ‘nothingness’ as the nature of consciousness and the physical world. I’ve never been able to accept those claims for the same reason you articulate {and which Husserl first demonstrated}: that consciousness is always consciousness of something, be it a tree, a forest, an animal, another being apparently conscious as we know ourselves to be, a social phenomenon, a work of art, or an idea constructed within philosophy or science or out of our own creative imaginations. I don’t think Kafatos entertains the notion of ‘nothingness’. I think what the commentators I referred to above are actually attempting to describe is a recognition via deep meditation or by virtue of some psychic or paranormal experience that being/Being extends beyond that which is directly sensible or perceivable. Such experiences are in my view not ‘empty’ but register a level of being beyond our ordinary understanding as it has developed in our embodied ‘reality’ which inclines us toward dualistic thinking and interpretation of ‘what-is’.

You went on to write:

“We can discuss this at length some more if you'd like, but contentless awareness doesn't seem possible to... conceptualize.

So, I submit that the conscious substrate/process that arises from UT must therefore be self-interactive and able to differentiate within itself.

Aware of awareness implies self-interaction and differentiating. Otherwise nothingness.”

The paradox we seem to encounter in consciousness is the aware organism’s sense of its own being arising in interactions with things and others beyond its own embodied being. This ‘bipolar duality of what is sensed’ has led in our species to reifications of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ as separate rather than intertwined, “codependently arising.” Kafatos thus recommends the pursuit of psychic experiences and paranormal phenomena as paths to greater understanding of that which we experience.

You went on to add:

“There may be more and more layers of reality! We identify problems with current paradigms and propose paradigms that are more explanatory. The HP, QM, Critical Realism point to a reality not grounded in classical, billiard-ball, macro physics.”

Yes, and it is the materialist/objectivist paradigm that must be overturned, is being overturned, to various degrees by those and many other hypotheses developed in Consciousness Studies and, as Kafatos shows, in currently developing science. My particular problem with Hoffman’s ideas [and those of some others pursuing cognitive and computational neuroscience] is the reduction of the complex experiential interface of beings aware and increasingly conscious in and of their given ‘worlds’ to a matter of 'perception' alone to be understood as a product of the neural nets of the brain. Perception cannot be fully understood without comprehension of the phenomenology of perception in embodied consciousnesses that carry their own felt histories -- and the felt histories of our evolutionary forebears in the collective unconscious available to our subconscious minds -- into their own ongoing temporally unfolding experiences in the world. Embodied consciousness is continuously open to the world in which it is embedded and enactive, moving beyond the given, thinking beyond what has formerly been thought.

You also wrote in another post:

“I've said that if we cannot use the scientific method (empiricism) to determine the origin and nature of consciousness, then we must rely on phenomenology, philosophy, and mathematics to attempt to get a grip on it.

Obviously there will be major resistance to steering away from empiricism. It's dangerous to do so.

But the reality is that consciousness is invisible to empiricism and the scientific method. As powerful as those tools are, it's time to augment them (as many have always done).”

Yes, William James for one, for whom empiricism possesses a very different meaning than that which is applied in presuppositional materialism/objectism.

“So, I'm not suggesting my metaphysical yammerings are going to get anywhere. Those yammering are merely a "hobby" on my part.”

Au contraire, your metaphysical thinking is essential to an understanding of what we are as conscious beings experiencing the ‘world’ we live in and contemplating the larger World of which we sense we are an integrated part or expression. Physics without metaphysics cannot pass beyond naieve reification of processes we think we understand but do not understand fully, nor can it contribute to any comprehension of what consciousness is without abandoning its former presuppositions.
 
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These are the respects in which your enumerated statements depart from my understanding and viewpoint:

1. I believe that I live in a physical world external to/beyond my own existence.
OK. I don't see a departure there.
2. I know that I experience aspects of this world via my senses ...
OK. This is where perception enters, and so far I'm still with you.
... and also through my consciousness and mind.
OK that makes sense. Strictly speaking we're not diverging yet.
3. As I see it, with the phenomenological philosophers, I experience -- preconsciously and consciously -- an experiential interface with the world I live in (i.e., the natural world and the cultural world in the time of my situated existence). This interface is not simply a matter of sensory perception but of bodily, emotional, mental, spiritual, and intersubjective involvement with, and consequent caring about, the world I live in and the other beings that inhabit it.
At this point if you had still thought we differ, it appears to be mostly in how we're describing things, things that are the same, but from two slightly different vantage points.
4. Consciousness [which includes my own subconscious mind and the collective unconscious as described by Jung] enables my experience in and of the situated local ‘world’ in which I find myself existing.
Here we diverge to some extent because I'm not looking at unconsciousness as having properties of consciousness other than in the case of situations like lucid dreaming. In my view, consciousness requires awareness. I'm also not so sure about everything Jung theorizes. But I like the general attitude that something larger than ourselves as individuals seems to play a part in connecting us all on some mystical level. But that's something to return to later if you're interested.
It also opens up the actual being-of-the-world to me and discloses to me my own being within it.
Not sure I'm following you there. There is the concept of being-in-the-world ( Heidegger ), but "of the world" implies some direct knowledge of the world, which is fine if you mean your perceptual world, but not fine if you assume to have direct knowledge of the external world.
Consciousness is not an operandum that enables a mere ‘perceptual interface’ with the world.
On that we can both agree.
It is a fluid and permeable boundary across which I commune with and participate in “that which-is” as I can perceive it through its phenomenal appearances to me as a conscious entity, physically and mentally open to it through the sensory and other affordances provided to me by nature – a permeable boundary across which "that which-is" in this local instance and expression of Being enters my own being and makes justifiable demands of me. It is what makes it possible for me to be at home in 'this world' despite my lack of access to knowledge of the World as a Whole {ontological Being}. The latter 'ontological reality' has produced, out of layers of physical evolution and human cultural development...
Up to this point you still sound to me like you're talking about the interface, and I really do love this phrase, "... a fluid and permeable boundary across which I commune ...", to me that is an absolutely beautiful way to describe the interface. It should be in a poem or a song. Are they your own words?
... the actual existential 'world' I experience, in which I can and do sense many layers of reality for which I cannot provide purely 'objective' evidence.
At that point is where in my view, the interface ends and consciousness begins ( at least in our experience as humans ). So the only significant difference so far between our views is that I posit that consciousness requires awareness, because without awareness, there can be no experience, and because consciousness = experience, without experience, there is no consciousness. The unconscious mind and the subconscious mind are IMO only states of processing that represent possibilities for conscious experience, but are not consciousness in and of themselves.
 
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Sunyata or "emptiness" ... in Buddhism:

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there's anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it's empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that some of the more abstract questions they raise — of our true identity and the reality of the world outside — pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. Thus they get in the way when we try to understand and solve the problem of suffering.

Emptiness

Two points I would emphasize:

1. "dropping the story-line" is a common exhortion in Buddhism in the pursuit of equanimity: if you feel anger, drop the story line and focus on the experience of the emotion and notice that it rises and falls and fades away, is not permanent

2. Buddhism is very focused on one problem: that of ending suffering and it is pragmatic in its approach. I think this has to be kept in mind when making comparisons with Western philosophy.

The Heart Sutra says, “all phenomena in their own-being are empty.” It doesn’t say “all phenomena are empty.” This distinction is vital. “Own-being” means separate independent existence. The passage means that nothing we see or hear (or are) stands alone; everything is a tentative expression of one seamless, ever-changing landscape. So though no individual person or thing has any permanent, fixed identity, everything taken together is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing.”

Emptiness: The Most Misunderstood Word in Buddhism | The Huffington Post

 
Absolutely I am.

There are empirical and logical reasons to doubt that consciousness emerges from physical processes.

There are empirical and logical reasons to believe that consciousness is at an ontological level below physical, classical reality. That physical reality is a subset of conscious reality (conscious experience).

So if consciousness does not emerge/arise from physical processes what is its origin and nature?

I've said that if we cannot use the scientific method (empiricism) to determine the origin and nature of consciousness, then we must rely of phenomenology, philosophy, and mathematics to attempt to get a grip on it.

Obviously there will be major resistance to steering away from empericism. It's dangerous to do so.

But the reality is that consciousness is invisible to empiricism and the scientific method. As powerful as those tools are, it's time to augment them (as many have always done).

So, I'm not suggesting my metaphysical yammerings are going to get anywhere. Those yammering are merely a "hobby" on my part.

But I do think the phenomenologist, theorists/philosophers, and mathematicians have got to jump in and save the empericists.

As I've noted—and I've only come to this conclusion recently as you know—I agree that naive realism is an impediment to progress. We must move beyond the billiard-ball, macro, classical model of the universe given to us phenomenally by the underlying perceptual system, and use phenomenology/meditation, philosophy, and math to identify patterns and relationships that aren't apparent empirically/objectively.

For instance, I think naive realism is an impediment in unifying quantum and classical physics. I don't think physicists have a good grip on which phenomena are "out there" and which phenomena are products of their perceptual apparatus. This is because no objective, scientific models even incorporate consciousness!

Only quantum mechanics has begun to figure consciousness into the equation (and not in the simplistic way that @ufology likes to argue against).

So, yes, I've begun to stumble about for a model I can hold onto that might begin to account for how consciousness could possible be more fundamental than the phenomenal world I experience within consciousness.
Absolutely I am.

There are empirical and logical reasons to doubt that consciousness emerges from physical processes.

There are empirical and logical reasons to believe that consciousness is at an ontological level below physical, classical reality. That physical reality is a subset of conscious reality (conscious experience).

So if consciousness does not emerge/arise from physical processes what is its origin and nature?

I've said that if we cannot use the scientific method (empiricism) to determine the origin and nature of consciousness, then we must rely of phenomenology, philosophy, and mathematics to attempt to get a grip on it.

Obviously there will be major resistance to steering away from empericism. It's dangerous to do so.

But the reality is that consciousness is invisible to empiricism and the scientific method. As powerful as those tools are, it's time to augment them (as many have always done).

So, I'm not suggesting my metaphysical yammerings are going to get anywhere. Those yammering are merely a "hobby" on my part.

But I do think the phenomenologist, theorists/philosophers, and mathematicians have got to jump in and save the empericists.

As I've noted—and I've only come to this conclusion recently as you know—I agree that naive realism is an impediment to progress. We must move beyond the billiard-ball, macro, classical model of the universe given to us phenomenally by the underlying perceptual system, and use phenomenology/meditation, philosophy, and math to identify patterns and relationships that aren't apparent empirically/objectively.

For instance, I think naive realism is an impediment in unifying quantum and classical physics. I don't think physicists have a good grip on which phenomena are "out there" and which phenomena are products of their perceptual apparatus. This is because no objective, scientific models even incorporate consciousness!

Only quantum mechanics has begun to figure consciousness into the equation (and not in the simplistic way that @ufology likes to argue against).

So, yes, I've begun to stumble about for a model I can hold onto that might begin to account for how consciousness could possible be more fundamental than the phenomenal world I experience within consciousness.

Obviously there will be major resistance to steering away from empericism. It's dangerous to do so.

Could you say more about this? About how it is dangerous?
 
@Constance

I think an area of conflict between your approach and my approach became clear to me while reading your exchange with @usualsuspect

I think you think of thinking and behavior as open-ended. As a result you reject deterministic models of consciousness and life. This includes not only physically closed models but computational models that are based on algorithms.

Do I have that right?

Because as we've discussed, that the metaphor of information processing (and that's what it is, a metaphor) can be used to describe neurological processes and other processes within nature is undeniable.

But this does not mean that the processing is following algorithms. There may be non-algorithmic information processing taking place within nature and life.

I recently listened to a podcast (which I can post here) about perceptual representation. There is gathering evidence that processes in the brain (and presumably the mind) operate by representing the environment and then guiding the organism. At the end of the podcast the speaker noted that representation is not the only means of learning/knowledge organism use and that associative learning is utilized as well (stimulus response). And there are likely other means as well.

I say all that just to note that when I speak of computation, information processing, and virtual interfaces, this does not mean that I think reality, behavior, and mind are predetermined, determined, and/or closed. Some information processing within the organism may be "closed" while others may be "open."

I do think there are constraints on reality, behavior, and mind but this doesn't mean they are fully determined and closed.
 
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Sunyata or "emptiness" ... in Buddhism:

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there's anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it's empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that some of the more abstract questions they raise — of our true identity and the reality of the world outside — pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. Thus they get in the way when we try to understand and solve the problem of suffering.

Emptiness

Two points I would emphasize:

1. "dropping the story-line" is a common exhortion in Buddhism in the pursuit of equanimity: if you feel anger, drop the story line and focus on the experience of the emotion and notice that it rises and falls and fades away, is not permanent

2. Buddhism is very focused on one problem: that of ending suffering and it is pragmatic in its approach. I think this has to be kept in mind when making comparisons with Western philosophy.

The Heart Sutra says, “all phenomena in their own-being are empty.” It doesn’t say “all phenomena are empty.” This distinction is vital. “Own-being” means separate independent existence. The passage means that nothing we see or hear (or are) stands alone; everything is a tentative expression of one seamless, ever-changing landscape. So though no individual person or thing has any permanent, fixed identity, everything taken together is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing.”

Emptiness: The Most Misunderstood Word in Buddhism | The Huffington Post

Emptiness: The Most Misunderstood Word in Buddhism | The Huffington Post

Many thanks for these clarifications of the meaning of the Buddhist term 'emptiness' and the practical usefulness, indeed the great value, of Buddhist insights for improving the conditions of life in the 'world' we live in today. I want to think a bit more about this before responding to aspects of what Lewis Richmond writes in the essay you linked above, which is so clarifying I want to reproduce it here:

“Emptiness” is a central teaching of all Buddhism, but its true meaning is often misunderstood. If we are ever to embrace Buddhism properly into the West, we need to be clear about emptiness, since a wrong understanding of its meaning can be confusing, even harmful. The third century Indian Buddhist master Nagarjuna taught, “Emptiness wrongly grasped is like picking up a poisonous snake by the wrong end.” In other words, we will be bitten!

Emptiness is not complete nothingness; it doesn’t mean that nothing exists at all. This would be a nihilistic view contrary to common sense. What it does mean is that things do not exist the way our grasping self supposes they do. In his book on the Heart Sutra the Dalai Lama calls emptiness “the true nature of things and events,” but in the same passage he warns us “to avoid the misapprehension that emptiness is an absolute reality or an independent truth.” In other words, emptiness is not some kind of heaven or separate realm apart from this world and its woes.

The Heart Sutra says, “all phenomena in their own-being are empty.” It doesn’t say “all phenomena are empty.” This distinction is vital. “Own-being” means separate independent existence. The passage means that nothing we see or hear (or are) stands alone; everything is a tentative expression of one seamless, ever-changing landscape. So though no individual person or thing has any permanent, fixed identity, everything taken together is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing.” This term embraces the positive aspect of emptiness as it is lived and acted by a person of wisdom — with its sense of connection, compassion and love. Think of the Dalai Lama himself and the kind of person he is — generous, humble, smiling and laughing — and we can see that a mere intellectual reading of emptiness fails to get at its practical joyous quality in spiritual life. So emptiness has two aspects, one negative and the other quite positive.

Ari Goldfield, a Buddhist teacher at Wisdom Sun and translator of Stars of Wisdom , summarizes these two aspects as follows:

The first meaning of emptiness is called “emptiness of essence,” which means that phenomena [that we experience] have no inherent nature by themselves.” The second is called “emptiness in the context of Buddha Nature,” which sees emptiness as endowed with qualities of awakened mind like wisdom, bliss, compassion, clarity, and courage. Ultimate reality is the union of both emptinesses.

With all of this in mind, I would like to highlight three common misunderstandings of emptiness: emotional, ethical and meditative.

Emotional

When we say “I feel empty,” we mean we are feeling sad or depressed. Emotionally speaking, “emptiness” is not a happy word in English, and no matter how often we remind ourselves that Buddhist emptiness does not mean loneliness or separateness, that emotional undertow remains. At various times I have looked for a substitute translation for the Sanskrit sunyata — I have tried “fullness,” “spaciousness,” “connectedness,” and “boundlessness” — but as Ari Goldfield points out, “emptiness” is the most exact translation. “Emptiness” is also the term that my own teacher Shunryu Suzuki used, though he usually added context. Once, speaking of emptiness he said, “I do not mean voidness. There is something, but that something is something which is always prepared for taking some particular form.” Another time, speaking of the feeling tone of emptiness, he said, “Emptiness is like being at your mother’s bosom and she will take care of you.”

Ethical

Some Buddhist students rationalize or excuse bad behavior of their teacher by asserting that through his understanding of emptiness the teacher is exempt from the usual rules of conduct. One student said, “Roshi lives in the absolute so his behavior can’t be judged by ordinary standards.” While it is true that Buddhist teachers sometimes use unusual methods to awaken their students, their motivation must come from compassion, not selfishness. No behavior that causes harm is acceptable for a Buddhist practitioner, teacher or otherwise.

Meditative

Some Buddhist students think that a meditative state without thought or activity is the realization of emptiness. While such a state is well described in Buddhist meditation texts, it is treated like all mental states — temporary and not ultimately conducive to liberation. Actually emptiness is not a state of mind at all; it is, as the Dalai Lama says, simply “the true nature of things and events.” This includes the mind. Whether the mind of the meditator is full of thoughts or empty of them, this true nature holds.

Conclusion

Finally, since emptiness seems so difficult to understand, why did the Buddha teach it at all? It is because of his profound insight into why we suffer. Ultimately we suffer because we grasp after things thinking they are fixed, substantial, real and capable of being possessed by ego. It is only when we can see through this illusion and open ourselves, in Ari Goldfield’s words, “to the reality of flux and fluidity that is ultimately ungraspable and inconceivable” that we can relax into clarity, compassion and courage. That lofty goal is what makes the effort to understand emptiness so worthwhile."
 
Obviously there will be major resistance to steering away from empiricism. It's dangerous to do so.

Could you say more about this? About how it is dangerous?

Yes, I think we would do well to explore the different meanings of 'empiricism' in materialist/objectivist science and in disciplines studying consciousness and mind. Let's go for it.
 
@Constance

I think an area of conflict between your approach and my approach became clear to me while reading your exchange with @usualsuspect

I think you think of thinking and behavior as open-ended. As a result you reject deterministic models of consciousness and life. This includes not only physically closed models but computational models that are based on algorithms.

Do I have that right?

Yes.

Because as we've discussed, that the metaphor of information processing (and that's what it is, a metaphor) can be used to describe neurological processes and other processes within nature is undeniable.

Agreed, but with the stipulations you go on to articulate:

But this does not mean that the processing is following algorithms. There may be non-algorithmic information processing taking place within nature and life.

Indeed. My impression from reading Kafatos is that we can contemplate the evolution of interacting 'systems' in nature as 'open-ended' systems not determined by 'algorithms' determining the state of nature and conscious being within nature at any point in time. Modern materialist physics has been dominated by a belief in determinism sustained by the presupposition that the universe/cosmos is a 'closed system'. Recognizing the universe/cosmos instead as an open system [as some theoretical physicists have begun to do] should eventuate in criticism of the concept of 'algorithms' itself.

I recently listened to a podcast (which I can post here) about perceptual representation. There is gathering evidence that processes in the brain (and presumably the mind) operate by representing the environment and then guiding the organism. At the end of the podcast the speaker noted that representation is not the only means of learning/knowledge organism use and that associative learning is utilized as well (stimulus response). And there are likely other means as well.

I'm not sure what's meant by the term 'associative learning' (hope you will explain that), but I think the primary unexamined terrain in neuroscience is the presentational nature of experience in/of the environing world -- the continuous interaction of consciousness with the 'world' it is embedded in -- which is entirely missed in 'representationalist' theories.

I say all that just to note that when I speak of computation, information processing, and virtual interfaces, this does not mean that I think reality, behavior, and mind are predetermined, determined, and/or closed.

Good to hear. At the same time, it seems to be the case that determinism and closed-systems-thinking operate as unargued premises (thus presuppositions) in many neuroscientific hypotheses being put forward in our time, which are increasingly trickled down to and accepted without question by many people following developments in neuroscience.

I do think there are constraints on reality, behavior, and mind but this doesn't mean they are fully determined and closed.

Yes. In a mega-system emerging from interacting systems of different kinds, mutual constraints will and do emerge, else the holarchic system Kafatos argues for would fly apart in dissolution.
 
Hm, but are the 1st and 3rd person routes truly balanced as the author (Velmans?) implies?

I say no, at least for humans, because the 3rd person route comes via the 1st person route. For example, we can directly reflect upon our phenomenal perceptions of what-is (1st person) but we can't directly (i.e., objectively) perceive what-is (3rd person) in the same manner.

Thus, the 3rd person perspective as it is achieved by humans cannot be truly objective.

We can infer that there is an objective reality "beyond" our phenomenal perceptions of reality, but we can't perceptually experience it objectively. (But we can experience this reality directly, because we are this reality.)

But ultimately—with the clarification that objective reality should not be confused with our perception of objective reality (naive realism)—I agree that what-is seems to have the dual aspects of subject and object.

Which is why I struggle with the description of reflexive awareness by some Eastern teachers as being nondual, not having subject and object. In the case of reflexive awareness the subject is the object and the object the subject, so semantically maybe we could say that was "nondual."

But for me, I consider reflexive awareness as I understand it (having not directly experienced it) to consist of the subject object duality. Neither of which can be reduced into the other.
 
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This is a response to Usual Suspect's last post to me, which the paracast computer system will not link for some reason. See this preceding post, # 106 in this thread.:

Here we diverge to some extent because I'm not looking at unconsciousness as having properties of consciousness other than in the case of situations like lucid dreaming. In my view, consciousness requires awareness. I'm also not so sure about everything Jung theorizes. But I like the general attitude that something larger than ourselves as individuals seems to play a part in connecting us all on some mystical level. But that's something to return to later if you're interested.

I think that all of us here are interested in this question, and I recommend that you read the Kafatos paper for a comprehensive theory concerning the relationship of consciousness/mind and World/Being.

I also recommend to you Evan Thompson's book Waking, Dreaming Being: Self

and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy because it can expand your present limited concept of 'consciousness' as equivalent to the 'waking state'.


Not sure I'm following you there. There is the concept of being-in-the-world ( Heidegger ), but "of the world" implies some direct knowledge of the world, which is fine if you mean your perceptual world, but not fine if you assume to have direct knowledge of the external world.

How many 'worlds' do you think you live in here and now on Earth? You seem to believe that 'your perceptual world' exists in isolation from the actual world of nature and culture in which we find ourselves existing on this planet in this corner of the universe in this age of the evolution of the universe/cosmos. Again, the Kafatos paper linked by @Soupie will be mind-expanding for you in overcoming your currently compartmentalized, dualistic, concepts of 'reality' and consciousness. Consciousness, wherever it exists, is the path to understanding not only 'what-is' in our local 'world' but also to what-is in the World/Universe/Cosmos as a whole. The World as a whole enables the worlding of 'worlds' such as our own, in which consciousness and mind participate in what is gradually real-ized in terms of understanding, ontically and ontologically.


Up to this point you still sound to me like you're talking about the interface, and I really do love this phrase, "... a fluid and permeable boundary across which I commune ...", to me that is an absolutely beautiful way to describe the interface. It should be in a poem or a song. Are they your own words? . . .At that point is where in my view, the interface ends and consciousness begins ( at least in our experience as humans).

Your and my conceptions of "the interface" are entirely different, and that should be apparent to you in the language I used to express the
experiential interface I recognize with the help of the phenomenologists. Yes, those were my own words [I always use quotation marks when quoting others' writing], but the idea I expressed is drawn from phenomenology. If you like the sound of that description you will be ecstatic when/if you read Merleau-Ponty. Consciousness does not begin with the 'perceptual' interface as represented in Hoffman, et al. Consciousness is the interface with the palpable, sensible, world in which we live and on the basis of which we think.

So the only significant difference so far between our views is that I posit that consciousness requires awareness, because without awareness, there can be no experience, and because consciousness = experience, without experience, there is no consciousness. The unconscious mind and the subconscious mind are IMO only states of processing that represent possibilities for conscious experience, but are not consciousness in and of themselves.

Consciousness enables experience, and consciousness evolves out of awareness, which Kafatos argues is already implicit in the initiation of the universe/cosmos itself, at the Big Bang. You'll have to read others for existing insights into the subconscious mind and the collective unconsciousness, which both cross permeable boundaries with waking, dreaming, and sleeping levels of consciousness.
 
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@Constance - at the end of Lecture 1 on MP - by Hubert Dreyfus he discusses how "meditation" and "flow" are two misinterpretations of doing phenomenology, he says Evans/Thomson are mistaken in pointing to meditation - as he says this is more like a break-down case of perception, not a case of ordinary awareness and engagement with the world. A helpful insight for me.
 
I agree that what-is seems to have the dual aspects of subject and object.

Yes. I think this is the issue we need to explore here. Kafatos, Eastern thought, and phenomenological philosophy all contribute to our understanding that 'what-is' involves the development of compartmentalized concepts of 'subject' and 'object' and ultimately unifies them, overcoming dualism.
 
@Constance - at the end of Lecture 1 on MP - by Hubert Dreyfus he discusses how "meditation" and "flow" are two misinterpretations of doing phenomenology, he says Evans/Thomson are mistaken in pointing to meditation - as he says this is more like a break-down case of perception, not a case of ordinary awareness and engagement with the world. A helpful insight for me.

Is there a transcript for that lecture? If not, I'll listen to the lecture if you link it for me. As I've said before, I see limitations in Dreyfus's characterization of phenomenological philosophy. He certainly has not understood MP's development of phenomenology.
 
@Soupie, you recently mentioned a paper by Evan Thompson entitled "Reflexive awareness (self-awareness) and nonduality" and I'm unable to find a link to it online. Do you have one?
Thanks.

Also would you link again the Kafatos paper you brought to our attention? After I read it I failed to save the link and can't find it readily now in the thread.
 
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Is there a transcript for that lecture? If not, I'll listen to the lecture if you link it for me. As I've said before, I see limitations in Dreyfus's characterization of phenomenological philosophy. He certainly has not understood MP's development of phenomenology.

I've not found one - it's at 54:00 at this link and runs for a few minutes:

 
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