Idealism

[Reciprocality]

Over a period of a few years I have been taking the idea that consciousness is singularly fundamental to reality seriously. It reached a point where I became identical to my perceptions or where the self would be mostly absent for hours at a time for days on end. It were a presence without much discernment, it were raw experience.

Looking back at it I think it has been something I have needed, a reminder of not being the centre of the world but also a reminder that very little is intelligible without that information going through my sense of self as opposed to existing out there in the world itself, that however deep I analyse a given situation it is I and my own past which produces the content of that analysis.

With all that said, it is undeniable that idealism in the form "everything is consciousness" or "consciousness is fundamental to existence" is delusional, if by the essence of consciousness we mean things spontaneously acting or thinking, notice that if you mean something different from this by the concept of consciousness then your concept may constitute a conjunction of essences that makes the two statements above tautological and inconsistent with a. culturally inherited semantics or what philosophers call descriptive definitions and b. actual debates about these topics under those definitions.

I am not saying that non-spontaneous things could exist without consciousness (without spontaneity), I am not saying that there exists a physical world with time and matter which is more fundamental than consciousness, instead I propose not only that 1. these distinctions are contingent on a self-distributed real difference between the things we refer to by spontaneity and non-spontaneity, but also that 2. the two are in eternal disharmony and that 3. the formation of self-identity (in the child as well as in the elderly) is the natural attempt at unifying them, and that unity is reality, reality is not the absence of personal self but the presence.

The end point is this: physicality is weirdly the most important aspect of our self-identity and it could potentially be for the better to leave it alone, allow therewith the sense of self and reality to be enriched.

 

And to moderators: I am unsure if I should post this in the consciousness sub-section of personal development sub-section so here it went.

[Leo Gura]

6 hours ago, Reciprocality said:

if by the essence of consciousness we mean things spontaneously acting or thinking,

What the hell does this mean?

Whatever your ideas of consciousness are, it's safe to say they are wrong.

Edited March 20 by Leo Gura

[Reciprocality]

@Leo Gura I am referring to spontaneity in its widest sense, not just when you are feeling "spontaneous", surely we can agree that there is some degree of whatever is happening when you "feel spontaneous" also when you don't, to showcase this I would ask you to imagine a state of complete non-spontaneity and what have you?

Let us imagine the subjective sensation of eye-movement in the absence of eyesight, wouldn't make much sense would it? This implies that the movement is partially conditioned on something different from itself. What can be said about this kind of movement in addition to it being a movement? That it acts spontaneously as opposed to merely inertly and reactively.

Edited March 20 by Reciprocality

[Reciprocality]

@Leo Gura Do you imagine that the thing on which the spontaneity is conditioned, the eyesight for instance, could be perceived without any spontaneity at all?

[Leo Gura]

I don't know why you bring up this spontaneity concept. It is irrelevant to consciousness.

If you're trying to use some kind of free will argument to understand consciousness, that's gonna fail.

Edited March 20 by Leo Gura

[Reciprocality]

13 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

1. I don't know why you bring up this spontaneity concept. It is irrelevant to consciousness.

2. If you're trying to use some kind of free will argument to understand consciousness, that's gonna fail.

@Leo Gura

1. Is that right? So consciousness is everything but also everything except spontaneity? Also, I am not merely bringing up a concept as you suggested, I were providing experiential examples of it.

2. There are many possible degrees of free will, but I am not talking about that here. 

Edit: changed "in principle" for "possible".

Edited March 20 by Reciprocality

[Leo Gura]

4 minutes ago, Reciprocality said:

So consciousness is everything but also everything except spontaneity?

Consciousness dreams up spontaneity and anything else you can say.

[Reciprocality]

21 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Consciousness dreams up spontaneity and anything else you can say.

@Leo Gura This goes back to my post where I referred to the self-distributive nature of the contents of perception, the redness above your image and the purple in mine are there together with the movement of our eyes upon them. The duality is perpetually reified. 

But the two are actually one and could never not be. 

Edited March 20 by Reciprocality

[Reciprocality]

@Leo Gura Consciousness without spontaneity would be the red and purple with mere inert movement, such a movement would have no reason to connect to thoughts and self and be purely theoretical, indeed fantastical.

excuse the edits.

Edited March 20 by Reciprocality

[Reciprocality]

@Leo Gura To be sure I am using the concept of consciousness under the very definition I have denied in the post (that it is everything) to make this conversation even possible, if this is not taken into account then stark contradictions arises between my last comment above and the denial of idealism.

Consciousness without spontaneity can only appear to be possible inside a theoretic framework, no theoretic framework is needed to state the opposite, that consciousness without spontaneity is impossible, since all possible such frameworks is conditioned on the duality of real spontaneities and real non-spontaneities.

[Leo Gura]

I don't know what you're talking about. It sounds confused and vague. I don't see much point in disentangling it.

You will not understand consciousness without awakening.

Edited March 20 by Leo Gura

[Reciprocality]

@Leo Gura It appears initially to humans that the stuff that we perceive could exist without us perceiving them but this could only be true if the body and its sensorial apparatus existed without its spontaneous movement. (since a chair can not be a chair without sensations) (there is no spontaneity which does not develop a distinctness of self)

Amazingly this spontaneous movement is what we have come to refer to as "me" through gradual steps primarily in early childhood.

Awake? There is no depth there to have awoken to besides the substrate of direct experience and the accompanying disillusionment of narratives, the self-identity holds everything together.

Edited March 20 by Reciprocality

[Reciprocality]

Every single piece of focused information goes through the self, is discerned by the self, builds up the self. That were already how the self were built.

Every concept is purposive, all purposes refers to the self.

 

How do you have purposes, concepts, discernment, focus, eye-movement or any bodily movement, yes spontaneity itself without the centre of it all being a distinct "me"? Not just here on earth but in all foreign realities?

Edited March 20 by Reciprocality

[Reciprocality]

@Leo Gura Since you understandably brought up the concept of freedom of will in reference to spontaneity I will make some short comments on the confusion.

Will and spontaneity has an overlapping essence, is potentially identical concepts, I will use them that way in the following remarks. It could be wise to instead of going into the ontology and metaphysics here begin with what we can and can not know, we can know that physical bodies moves as a consequence of their prior coordination and inertia, what distinguishes spontaneity or will from these types of movements is that the nature and existence of their sufficient causes are unknown.

The freedom part in "free will" has to do with whether concepts or knowledge in preceding an action could out-manouevre itself, and this kind of thing becomes a necessary pre-condition for the will itself to be real for those who believes nothing besides phenomenal experience exists. (when you believe that the existence of unknown causes for will and you do not believe will to be substantial then to explain them you need to resolve to the last possibility: that abstractions could "out-manoeuvre" themselves.)

The concept I am referring to is clear as day, but to describe it in english.. not too easy, what could I mean by "out-manoeuvre"? Right now I can only hope that it rings a bell.

 

The disjunction between these three kinds of general causes presented above should be intuitive, 1.  inertia and momentum of physical bodies in arrangement/coordination, 2. unknown substances and, 3. concepts or knowledge (abstract representations). The fourth cause would be will itself, it would be absurd to list it here.

[vibv]

Dude you're way too full of mind to get consciousness.

You've got yourself lost in concepts. Drop all the concepts and then see. No concept can ever capture consciousness.

[Reciprocality]

27 minutes ago, vibv said:

Dude you're way too full of mind to get consciousness.

You've got yourself lost in concepts. Drop all the concepts and then see. No concept can ever capture consciousness.

@vibv You can only be lost in concepts if you are unaware of the experiences they represent or compliment.

There is no implication that people identifying experiences fails to "capture consciousness".

You read one sentence after the other and fail to keep track of where you get lost, thereby disabling yourself from asking the question of why they connect and resort to projecting that it must be the writer who is lost.

[vibv]

7 minutes ago, Reciprocality said:

@vibv You can only be lost in concepts if you are unaware of the experiences they represent or compliment.

You can still very much get lost in concepts, especially if you think that you're immune to that.

[Reciprocality]

@vibv  Okay interesting, your hypothesis is that no matter how distinctly ones concepts refers to and compliments actual experiences one can get lost presumably in their composition/relation? Or do we get lost directly in the complimentary nature some concepts have to experiences (such concepts that does not refer to anything concrete), if so, which subset of these?

And if one get lost in this composition of concepts must it obfuscate from real experiences as you say, why must the latter follow from the former?

Are we talking about contradictions and recursions when we say that people are lost in the composition or complimentary nature of concepts? Do we not determine whether this is true by usage of concepts that does not contradict and does not recur excessively?

[Reciprocality]

@vibv There is also a way in which, due to the nature of a logical compliment, that one can necessarily not be lost in concepts if one knows exactly how or why they compliment experiences unless one is actually lost in experiences. This would go contrary to your first assertion in the last comment above.

[vibv]

I have no clue what you're talking about. Sounds like mental masturbation to me.