Anton Rogachevski

@Leo Gura Your post about Hitler, the best one yet. Very accurate. The question at the end is just Endgame. "What are the major flaws of Nazism and Communism?" Should be the first and most basic question any politician should answer to qualify.

@zurew "What is ultimately Real? or What actually Exists?" What an amazing question. I really don't know at all, and I'm deeply fascinated by it. Reality or Existence are interchangeable aren't they? I am not talking about the reality of the physical plane at all here, I say that we can't actually access it, but through ideas and beliefs about it. (And it's probabilistically alright and useful for sanity). So, yes I do believe in the physical realm and I'm not an idealist. Experience does seem to exist as pure experience and is real in that sense for us. In that sense Maths can exist as an experience of numbers and equations. Love exists for us. So all the most important things exist for us as experience, and it does seem to correspond with physical stuff so it's very practical too. You don't actually sit on chairs you imagine it phenomenologically speaking. There's no one to sit, and there's nothing to sit on. There's no such thing as "sitting" too. There is a belief of a "person sitting on a chair" and all the supporting notions, while the undefined and unknowable physical realm is doing its thing. The brain has to do that to keep us sane and functional.

@zurew I do not assume that I know or can ever know anything about "existence" it's a completely deconstructed notion for me. I can on the other hand see that there is experience which I may access, and that's my field of study.

@zurew So for me "simples" are experience - in that sense words always point to some experience. I can see how that might be confusing, and that's because I ground my epistemology in a "solipsistic phenomenological humble unknowing". (The look from inside the cave of Plato, where there can't be actual access to the outside. I have talked about it extensively in my posts about the nature of experience and about deconstructing reality in my blog.) I was trying to say that this fallacy exposes something deeper about the nature of experience and the most basic foundation of epistemology: That if mereological nihilism is granted, then the arbitrary nature of labeling is exposed, and so that means that there aren't any objects at all anywhere. So all words are pointing to imaginary bounds. Can't you see that it actually means there is actually no such object as a "chair" anywhere except as an idea? So what we are doing is pointing anywhere and making ape noises and pretend like there are things there. The stuff of which the "chair" is made of is also another idea, and so on. Phenomenologically speaking (which means not actually but from our perspective as an experiencer looking at pure experience) the basic substance of the chair is pure experience or "God" as Leo would put it. We can put it another way. All words are pointing at one thing: Experience. Phenomenologically speaking only experience exists. (More on that in my post about experience.)

Haha yeah. You had a counter argument why don't you post it here too. I think that the fact that language has many synonyms gets us to imagine that each of these words have a correlated phenomenon. If we look at it from the perspective of a mind arbitrarily dissecting and labeling different parts of experience as different "objects", it's obvious that a mereological nihilism is quite evident. Meaning there are no actual bounds and separations in pure experience, except those we imagine into "existence".

An experience and a memory of an experience are both types of experience. One is direct and the other indirect. The brain is exceptional at mixing these two channels seamlessly, as it does with all the different types of senses. There is just experience and nothing else, and What is experience? - Mu! (Phenomenologically speaking) We can't know that actually. Only what was experienced. There's no one to go through an event. Nobody is going "through" it, experience is just playing out to itself, it's self aware.

@UnbornTao Yep a video of an event is not the event. A memory is a recording. I don't know but presume that a hardcore non dualist like Leo would say here that this distinction, between memory and actuality, can also collapse, and you can see that both are God and real in that sense. Although non duality can show that all distinctions are imaginary, they are still useful to mere mortals like us : ) Our conversation has helped me come up with a new ontological fallacy: The Word Realism Fallacy where one imagines that all words should have a corresponding object or phenomenon in existence.

A concept is experience crystalized, it's the same substance and it also occurs now. It's a complex structure but still it's fundamentally experience. You can't evade concepts completely ever, or we couldn't discuss anything. You are trying to go fishing without a net. You will see a lot of fish, and it's nice, but we gotta catch something sometimes.

@Reciprocality I really loved your prose! Such rich and colorful words. It does seem at times like you almost touch the untouchable while dancing so beautifully around it. I think that "time" is an illusion created by memorised experience. It's hard to even imagine time existing phenomenologically without memory. And I do think that a major component of consciousness as we know it is memory. Sure we can only know about memory because we first experience it, so it seems paradoxical to assume that experience requires memory to do anything at all, when in fact experience is prior to remembering.

Yep that I agree with, "Human" is surely not the center of it all. Paraphrase of a famous quote by Alan Watts

@UnbornTao As an unenlightened being my experience is pretty much the same as anybody elses, I still believe in the physical realm and think that we should leave ontology entirely to phisicists. I would say my main field of study is phenomenology and that is the study of experience from the inside. For me experience is pure sensual data, I actually don't know what it is, it's purely mysterious for me. I also highly doubt the field of non-dualism you can read my post in the blog about debunking enlightenment. I think that humans give their monkey brain too much credit, but actually it's a banana seeking device, and not an ontology deriving device Btw I have a compulsive editing tic - I have a million insights after posting the text and re-edit it so much I hope Leo's server doesn't crash So you may go back and see new stuff in my past comments. --- Some more thoughts about experience: Experience trying to understand itself is like water trying to wet itself, fire trying to burn itself or a knife trying to cut itself. You can't touch the point of your finger with the same finger.

My claim is that in order to reach the basic direct experience we must deconstruct every possible concept about it and relating to the supposed idea of "perception with the senses of objects". - this is an imaginary story and not direct experience. Go back and see what my original claim is. You ask what is experience and I said "Mu!" That's it, and it's dead serious. Anything else you say about it would automatically be false, cause its nature is that you can't capture it in any finite idea. If I was the Zen master and you the student and I asked you "What is Experience?" The moment you opened your mouth I would hit you with a stick. Because you can't say anything true about it. : )

Do "objects" exist? Where? Is there a duality between perception and the object of perception? Do you see what I'm getting at? Any statement has built in ontological claims. We should be careful with unexamined claims because we don't actually know for sure all of these. My premise is that there can't be objects in a the direct experience, but only sensory phenomen.

@Aaron p Yep, eventually we confuse our abstraction with reality itself.

What do you mean by that word? Who perceives? Perceives what? Aren't sounds and colors also sensations? Let's imagine no sounds, no colors, no sensations, no feelings, what is left? Can there be any experience without these foundational building blocks? I was saying from the start that experience was ineffable and indescribable. I feel we got lost in words here a little bit - It's best to define and differentiate all of these from each other to understand what is meant here.

@UnbornTao Colors, sounds, sensations and feelings?

@UnbornTao I jump between the conceptual and actual seamlessly because I figure we already established what is what. What do you mean by "mere encounter" and by "what's there"?

While the idea of "mere" experience seems simple experience itself is an infinitely complex and fascinating structure. There is always A LOT going on, but our brain is designed to focus and filter out all the other stimuli, like a search light. There's actually no such object as a "hand", and it's not "yours".

@UnbornTao It seems that you have a philosophical mind and that's very cool. You like ideas, differentiation and complexity and to some point you might expect this complexity so much that you feel unease with simplicity like Leo's famous "just look at your hand and shut up." And my simplistic collapsing of ideas into one notion. I think that those words are useful still and can describe different aspects as different procceses and that can help with linear thought explanations. So I'm still not throwing them all out. "What's the difference between awareness and experience?" seems like a very juicy question so lets keep contemplating. Cheers

Experience is usually from direct sensation, and Awareness may be of a more complex and abstarct aspects of experience, inculding thought.

Don't know what "Knowing" is other than direct experience knowing in the now. Any other form's probably a fancy sort of belief. We do have direct access to experience. What else do you want to access? Also a layered idea on top of experience. Entails a "perceiver" of an outside world. Memory is memory, it's a recording of pure senses, but a concept is words, a story, so In a sense a concept is also a type of memory of a noise playing in the Now. A memory is yet another part of experience, which is very rich as we can see - it's much more than dumb animal senses, but a great intelligence and a thing of true beauty. But it is re-experience, or else how would you talk about it? You have an experience of it right now. You can only imagine it's in the "past" if you have a conception of "time" present. You may ask yourself: "Aware of what?" anything you may be aware of would be an experience. I do respect the wish to keep this an open discussion and keep investigating together, this is great! Thank you for the great talk. My personal approach is to keep simplifying and to keep as less synonyms of definition as possible. You can see now how calling different aspects of the same unified phenomenon: Awareness has caused us to think that all the other aspects of it are separate from it, and are different in nature. We are pure Experience that is self examining right now, quite cool I would say.

A memory is occuring in direct experience right now, but you attach a story to it and say: "it happened in the past". Awareness is another word for experience for me, because if I try to think of an Awareness that has nothing to be aware of, it doesn't makes sense. This "awareness" will not be able to know that it's aware in this case. Therefore awareness and experience are one for me. Two sides of the same coin. I ask myself: "Where is awareness? Who is aware?" And I can see that these questions can't point anywhere actually. Experience is self aware from the purely solipsistic-phenomenological perspective (from the inside of the simulation) What isn't occurring Now? Can there be such a thing?

As the old Zen quote says: "You can't peg a nail into the sky." If you truly understand the nature of experience, at least conceptually, you can understand that this question doesn't make sense. There's an infinite field that's unified in it's nature, so there's no one to point and no thing to point to.

How can you know anything? What does it mean for you to "know"? Knowing what? And following that: What is real? What do you mean by "reality"? Does it exist? What does it mean for something to "exist"? How can you know that logic can depict or describe or predict the fundamental nature of reality?

Thank you for the discussion dear sir! Yummy food for thought for sure! You can't call the basic first experience anything, it's prior to language. On the other hand all the labels we have ever had we stuck on this pure wonder, but it just doesn't do it justice. Like: "reality" "existence" "the universe" and so forth. Consciousness and experience are two sides of the same coin. Consciousness is the backdrop and Experience is the light, but they are the same stuff essentially. About the presumption of the impossibility of a direct access (access to what actually?) it goes both ways. You can either assume you can or that you can't : ) In this equation knowing = experiencing Experience is prior to "perception", since in order to conceive of this idea you have to already have some basic experience. The fact that we are discussing this seems to suggest that we can in fact investigate it from the inside whilst being a part of it. The power of conception and abstraction are forces to be reckoned with. When you try to talk about an "awareness" that's prior to experience you are back to duality and creating an imaginary thing that "perceives".