Carl-Richard

I realized there are many words for roughly the same "levels of complexity» with respect to how reality is conceptualized and experienced. This is me sharing some of those words with you. If you want an anchor: for level 3, think of humans; for level 2, think of animals; for level 1, think of rocks: 3. Thought, abstractions, meta-cognition, symbols, self-reflection, the conscious ego, internal re-representations, sapience, language, narrative, story, meta-consciousness. 2. Instinct, concrete experiences, cognition, perception, sensation, the unconscious ego, internal representations, sentience, emotion, behavior, wakefulness, dreaming, personal consciousness. 1. "The thing in itself", "Consciousness", phenomenal consciousness, qualia, objective reality, physical reality, subatomic particles, «the brain», egolessness, form, formlessness, emptiness, awareness, deep sleep, cessation, transpersonal consciousness. Some might think "perception" is identical to "qualia" or "Consciousness". To that I say that perception is a limited filtering of reality that arises as a result of evolutionary pressures, and it's intimately tied to your biological makeup. Meanwhile "Consciousness" is the unfiltered and raw reality that exists prior to your limited perception of it. For example, if you're looking at a rock and then close your eyes, even though you no longer see the rock, that doesn't mean the rock disappeared from reality. Other people can still see the same rock. The rock is still "experiential" despite you not perceiving it, and hence why this is placed together with things like "objective/physical reality" and "subatomic particles". Perception is a much more personalized phenomena, while Consciousness is a more transpersonal phenomena. Some might think "why make 1 and 2 separate at all?". Well, to combine them would be to discard a huge chunk of brilliant insights from fields like depth psychology (e.g. Freud, Jung), Western philosophical idealism (e.g. Kant, Schopenhauer) and modern analytic philosophy and cognitive science. And of course, to tackle the thought-terminating cliché of solipsism: no, this is not me "disproving" solipsism. I've simply given you a list of words that I think most intellectual traditions think is a reasonable account of what reality is and what most humans feel is an intuitive account of how they experience reality.

This is why I opened the thread with "how reality is conceptualized and experienced". You need to make sense of things like why when you leave your car in the garage, you still find it in the garage the next day. You can't be 100% certain that the car sits in the garage when you're not watching, but you're very certain that it is, and in fact you believe that it is until you see that it isn't. If you want to throw these kinds of observations out from your epistemology because it's not 100% certain, then fine: everything is infinite consciousness; there is no causality, no time and space, no subjects or objects, etc. But that is just not very useful for understanding how the world probably works.

Well, it certainly sounds like you are when you keep looping like this. There are good reasons to discard solipsism, but it requires exactly that: reasoning. If you just want to stick to what is immediately apparent and doesn't require any reasoning, you're stuck with solipsism. That is why it's a thought-terminating cliché, because it doesn't want to do any thinking. It's a cop-out of thinking.

Let's assume both of us have thoughts. Why can I not read your thoughts? Why can I not see through the wall? Those are examples of the limitations of perception and cognition. The thoughts inside your mind and the things behind the wall are technically all "experienceable", but for some reason our access to them is limited. If you don't want assume that both of us have thoughts, or that there is something resembling an objective reality that exists independent of our perception, then you're stuck with solipsism, and your ability to conceptualize reality becomes very flat. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about a very rich way of conceptualizing reality.

@Someone here I explictly said I didn't disprove solipsism.

Blink your eyes fast, the rock remains in the same place among the blips of darkness. What does that tell you about perception?

The illusion is exactly that this is not how it appears, and that to not engage with this fact is in some way to refuse to explain it. The illusion is that it appears that there is something outside of you. "It's all just oneness, infinite youness" is to dispel the illusion, not to explain its contents.

We still need to explain the illusion.

You're pointing at the interconnectedness of all the levels. And that is true: all the levels are technically rock. All biological life, animals and humans, stand on top of rock (literally and figuratively). From dust we came, to dust we shall return.

I'm saying Consciousness is like a rock.

It's made up, but you also probably agree with some of it. When you close your eyes, do you think the world ceases to exist? When you think about closing your eyes, is that the same as actually closing your eyes?

@Breakingthewall So the experience of say hotness vs. coldness is called a "representation" (an internal or subjective representation of something external or objective). It's the basis of cognition. On the other hand, to be aware of the fact that you are experiencing hotness or coldness is called a "re-representation". It's the basis of meta-cognition. I think what most spiritual traditions are referring to when talking about "transcending the ego" is to see through the compulsive activity of re-representation or meta-cognition, to the point where this activity largely diminishes. It's not about transcending representations themselves (e.g. the experience of hotness and coldness), although that can be done in cessation. Hotness and coldness are just experiences, and they may involve pleasure or pain, but they're not the mechanism that causes suffering (compulsive re-representations). By this definition of ego, most animals probably do not have much of an ego (just like humans 30-50k years ago). That said, spiritual teachers also talk about subtler processes of refinement after the initial dropping of compulsive re-representations, and that is where concepts the like the "unconscious ego" or the various types of karma come in.

What does it mean to make differentiations? Why can a sardine make differentiations while an amoeba cannot?

Do amoebas have egos?

If we define ego as the "conscious ego", or the thing that talks to itself (also called "meta-consciousness"), then dogs probably don't have much of an ego. This is a pretty safe assumption when you consider that according to this definition, humans probably didn't have an ego before 30-50k years ago. There is evidence for meta-consciousness in some animal species, but the methods for determining it are not foolproof.

That is true.

It feels like that if you're biased.

In what way does GPT-4 show sparks of AGI? It's still dumber than an amoeba at most things. It doesn't even know how to pick up a pencil.

And low in trauma, mental illness, family dysfunction, socioeconomic instability.

And a rock is a geological computer.

I swear all these new members are banned ex-members

Going to university is not such a big deal. I remember when I was 12 years old and was downhill skiing every winter, I was so envious of the bigger kids who had cooler looking jackets and skis than me. Now I look back and laugh at all the wasted mental energy I spent worrying about that trivial stuff. When you get older, university is the same thing.

Who cares?

You can know for certain that you yourself feel pain. You can then look at other humans, and you'll find that they are just like you: they have things like a skeleton and internal organs. So when they say "ouch", it's safer to say that they experience pain the same way you do than a computer program that has been programmed to say "ouch". A computer is nothing like a human.

If my rubber duck says "quack", does it have internal organs and a skeleton?