> If I identify with the anger, if I think it’s me – ‘I’m angry’ – I’m very likely to pursue, and act on, the angry thought and feeling. After all, I’m just me being me. But because I’m actually the observer of my thoughts and feelings – because I’m separate – I can think: ‘There’s anger in me.’
Ah, mis-step here. You just said that thoughts and feelings are things one cannot have, but merely observe.
You cannot think, "There's anger in me." Without a consciousness that independently generates thoughts, which violates the thesis statement:
> I know that ‘I am’ because I am aware of thoughts, emotions, external objects, not because I think.
Can't have it both ways I'm afraid.
I'm a bigger fan of framings that allow for different abstraction levels or lenses of thought, all of them belonging to the same consciousness. "Emotionally I feel this, but logically I think this, and instinctually I believe this."
> I'm a bigger fan of framings that allow for different abstraction levels or lenses of thought, all of them belonging to the same consciousness. "Emotionally I feel this, but logically I think this, and instinctually I believe this."
Any sufficiently advanced robotics project becomes essential a “sensor fusion” problem. It makes complete sense to me at least that consciousness is the internal mechanism of sensor fusion coupled with an unprecedented (in the animal kingdom) amount of raw compute.
We have emotional sensors and electromagnetic sensors and audio-visual sensors (and feedback loops for all of those) and all consciousness is is the picking and choosing and weighting and considering of those sensors. Anyways, I agree!
You can break it down even further than "I feel this", "I logically think this". Even thinking there is 'logic' is already missing that there has to be a place where the logic 'comes from' or 'arises'. This article did play fast and loose with terminology. I'd suggest reading up on Schopenhauer and Phenomenology, for historical background, and then for modern neuroscience, "Being You" by Anil Seth. They try to get at same thing, our 'subjective' experience is just how our brain interpret inputs, and with meditation you can grow the ability to observer how the brain reacts. But in the end the reactions happen from somewhere, even a 'logical thinking' comes from somewhere before the 'thinking' can take place. You can think what you will, but how do you decide to think about what you want to think about.
Actually, forget it. I'm trying to explain this article, but I thought it was a bit confused to begin with. Guess its basically long and winding way to say 'be in the present movement'. But that's pretty generic.
I don't think it's so complex a point. The article's (and other framings') "observer" is a mechanism of self-reflective meta-thought.
My point is that this meta-thought is itself a thought, it arises from the same place as all other thoughts. The observer is not a separate, passive system from the thinker. It is the thinker, or an element of it, a feedback loop inside the mechanism of the thinker, allowing the thinker to think about the ideas it is contemplating and the process of contemplation itself ("think about thinking").
It allows the thinker to observe in completeness its own contemplative state, and if desired, modify it. In this simplified framework the system is not significantly different from say, industrial control theory.
I believe the author's point is not that you can't have thoughts (how can you not?), but that they're not identical with identity, and that awareness is more fundamental to identity, a great insight of Eastern philosophy.
I have wondered if Socrates had this insight. Judging from Plato and Xenophon's writings about him he may have not had such a clear view of it, but he does speak of his bodily feelings as being separate from himself (e.g. in Plato's Phaedo, while sitting in prison he remarks that if it was up to his legs he would be in earnest flight from Athens.)
I think the author is pretty close to the truth of things; however, things like anger and "addiction to thinking" are not so easily overcome (at least in my experience), but awareness of them seems like a necessary first step.
Why? I mean, it's logically inconsistent, but human beings are pretty good at that. The irrational is entirely within our capabilities.
You can argue that we shouldn't, but if it's an argument against something designed to produce better outcomes, you've already thrown out basically all of utilitarianism and consequentialism. You can bring in schools of deontology, but they're ultimately irrational at their core as well.
That's pretty much it. If you say 2+2=4 and then in the following sentence say 2+2=5 without any change in definitions or axioms, something is fucky with your theory.
It's got nothing to do with efficiency or utilitarianism. You can define a horribly inefficient system which has an explanation that makes some sort of sense.
I can accept "the sky is red," and I can accept "the sky is blue," but if you tell me the sky is blue and then in the next sentence tell me the sky is red with no intervening information you probably made a mistake somewhere.
> If you say 2+2=4 and then in the following sentence say 2+2=5 without any change in definitions or axioms, something is fucky with your theory.
Sure, but assuming 2+2=5 has some really bad external outcomes you can point to. For example, if you try to build a plane assuming that 2+2=5, it will almost certainly fall out of the sky.
> I can accept "the sky is red," and I can accept "the sky is blue," but if you tell me the sky is blue and then in the next sentence tell me the sky is red with no intervening information you probably made a mistake somewhere.
Alright, but what if I told you that "this random number generator returned 4" and then "this random number generator returned 5" with no intervening information?
Your line of thinking works quite well for external, verifiable phenomena, but it does not automatically follow that it can be applied to internal non-verifiable processes, and I've yet to hear you make a case that it is proper to do so.
> Alright, but what if I told you that "this random number generator returned 4" and then "this random number generator returned 5" with no intervening information?
Sure, totally cool, but that's not the style of claim being made here. There are two axiomatically incompatible claims made:
> There is an observer and that which is observed, the thought. I am the observer, not the observed.
Lots of examples are provided for this, thoughts are telegrams or clouds, generated and passing independently. The sky gazer does not make clouds, it simply passively observes them.
But later:
> But because I’m actually the observer of my thoughts and feelings – because I’m separate – I can think: ‘There’s anger in me.’
This is incompatible, we've established one clear rule: the observer does not create thoughts, it does not think, and "I" is the observer ("I am the observer, not the observed.")
This isn't a random number generator, it's just an incongruous statement. A logical error.
Ahh, I see. I originally thought you were trying to smuggle in a fully general argument against willful inconsistency, which so far as I've seen, produces very bad results.
But (and correct me if I'm wrong here), your problem seems to be more of a category disagreement. That is to say, your complaint is that the meta-thought (the thought about the thought), doesn't belong in a separate category from the original thought. And therefore the process of observing thoughts also generates them, and is fundamentally different than other types of observation. Do I understand you so far?
Is there still room, in the way you're conceiving things for, say, an amped up version of mind/body dualism to separate a sub-set of thoughts into a category of "thoughts that come from the body" as opposed to the meta-thoughts as "thoughts that come directly from the mind"? I think the ancient stoics called these "impressions" (or, more accurately, they called them the greek word for impressions, but I cannot recall it at the moment) to get around the category problems you're talking about.
Ya absolutely, and thus my preference for "lenses" or "abstractions" of thoughts. I think people are expressing something real and felt when they talk about their "lizard brain" doing something independent of their "human brain".
I'm quibbling with the authors rejection of Descartes. "I observe therefore I am" and "I think therefore I am" are isomorphic, as an unthinking observer, a truly passive mechanism, would be unable to express or even meaningfully experience the former.
A rock is a passive observer, shaped by its environment purely experientially without reflection or commentary. A human mind and consciousness, whatever set of forms you might want to fit it in (dualism, materialism, whatever the hell Chalmers is doing), is not passive, it is reflective.
Now, the mechanisms by which qualia are passed to that reflective mind are passive or at least involuntary, and these give rise to certain involuntary thoughts, experiential thoughts.
I cannot refuse the thought of the form "the air is hot", because I cannot refuse the experience of being hot. For that I'm just along for the ride. But when I reflect on how I nickelpro will logically place my self-satisfaction due to the heat, that's not a passive act. And all of these reflective and experiential thoughts are mixed up in the soup of my single consciousness, not strictly delineated within my narrative.
`There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.’ (Hobbes, ‘Leviathan’, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.41)
> This is fundamentally wrong
The author has an axe to grind. You might disagree with the statement by Hobbes or you may agree with it. Either way, it's not the kind of thing you can say is fundamentally wrong. It's a philosophical statement about the mind.
Besides which, it seems true to me, you can not be perpetually at peace. Eventually you're going to get hungry and whatever your process of gaining nutrition it is unlikely to be mediative.
"This is why the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins was so wrong when he wrote:
‘We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.’ (Richard Dawkins, ‘The Selfish Gene’, preface to 1976 edition, Oxford University Press, 1989, p.v)
We are not ‘blindly programmed’ at all. We are aware of the thoughts, passions and instinctual programming that drive us."
Author lost me there when they failed to understand what Dawkins is saying here and insufficiently refuting Dawkins (probably due to lack of understanding it).
Observationally we have become aware of our base instincts over time (through science) however we're pretty much at their whim.
We don't choose or control or have any real influence other than following our programming as to what we find sexually attractive or not.
I don't even think that this person should be disagreeing with the Dawkins quote, because to the extent that I can find a thesis, Dawkins' blind robot vehicles support it.
If you realize that "we" are observers of our thoughts, and not necessarily thinkers, it's weird to overvalue the worth of introspection. Introspection is a liar. It seems like the beginning of this thing is proposing some sort of therapeutic dualism, where you can have a thought that you object to (why do you object to it?), and assign that thought to your body through another thought (the realization that the thought is not me), and peacefully live thought-free. Now it's not a mind-body dualism, but a thought-metathought dualism that is even less likely.
The reason these people were and are great thinkers is because of their comfort in abstraction and objectivity, and their disdain for introspection. You can't transcend thinking by thinking harder.
Sorry I normally wouldn't post this kind of thing here but this video of Eckhart Tolle talking about "I" put to music is very relevant to this and very cool I think:
A person's mind or quality of consciousness is a work in progress. It evolves and develops over a lifetime. We can in fact self-referentially make choices that affect the trajectory of our mind's development. A meditation practice is one such choice that I have personally found helpful. My hoped-for trajectory is toward the following: thoughtful, mature, wise, sane. The opposites provide a useful contrast: unthoughtful, immature, unwise, insane. Other characteristics on the hoped-for trajectory: calm, aware, caring.
However, this all poses an evolutionary quandary. If a company or movement or institution wants to spread, one highly effective means is to facilitate a consciousness in the public that is manipulable, reactive, ignorant, and controllable. Advertising sometimes seems to be dual-purpose: convince consumers to buy products, and also, more subtly, shape consumer consciousness so that it is more amenable to manipulation.
Bad religion, bad companies, and bad social movements very effectively use this strategy. And they succeed. Good religion, good companies, and good social movements also exist. But these often seem less effective and less successful, at least in the short term.
It is a paradox: How does an institution encourage and facilitate inner freedom, wisdom, and all of those good things, and also get people to do what it needs them to do in order that the institution itself can survive and continue to exist?
"Obviously, the past does not exist; it is a collection of mere memories, impressions in the mind. But the future also does not exist; it is a collection of ideas about what should or might happen"
It's been proved beyond reasonable doubt that time is as real as space and what is an illusion is the flow of time. There is no "present" moment. Every moment and place exists in time-space with different versions of you thinking they are in the present. So it's exactly the opposite.
You could say that taken one of those points in time and named it "present" you can say that the past and future do not existent within that moment. But because of the relativity of simultaneity you now also have to pick an arbitrary frame of reference to define "preset".
Because you simply can't define "preset" in absolute terms. Two events that happen at the same time in my frame of reference might happen one after the other in your frame of reference.
If the past nor the future exist and you first see one of the things happening, then the other, but I see them happening at the same time I'm seeing things that shouldn't exist in a single moment.
Okay, want I cannot directly agree with in your original post is the notion that flow of time is an illusion and that it follows from the argument. Obviously, as you argue, with relativity, it is not possible to have an absolute 'now'. But isn't it possible to have a local flow of time? All things you perceive are not the events themselves (happened in your past), but their effects on your now.
> But isn't it possible to have a local flow of time?
You can use a clock to measure time, but I think it's better to say that matter and energy move through time, just like they move through space instead of saying that time flows, because flow implies time which makes the definition circular.
So I would just say that if you consider any frame of reference you can define time with respect to it. But still there is no real "present" in time just like there is no "here" in space. You can just take any point in space and say it's your origin.
> "What is an illusion, is the flow of time. There is no
'present' moment.
So We don't choose to control, or have any influence?
> If you realize that "we" are observers of our thoughts, and not necessarily thinkers, it may be weird to value the worth of an (one only!) introspection.
But you can have a thought that you object to, or a thing, something materialistical and assign that thought another thought?
Hint: 2nd Art Law, 'Mass can be trained around Informationpoints of a Reality'
> A 'metathought' dualism -or you may call it a kind of 'mechanistic-thinking'
I came up with a word of advice at work because of something that happened to me, "If you want to screw the company, that's none of my business, but don't screw me because I won't screw you." I know this is overly simplistic, however it speaks to the idea that if you come up with some action or idea, consider how it may affect others. Selfishness is a huge root of all evil.
And yes, after giving my advice, I also tell them screwing the company was a bad idea.
The joy is in the doing. Darwin was rescued by the doing; Mill by doing differently. I have no particular opinion on meditation, but it just seems like some form of "doing" too. Provocative, but let's not be calling everybody wrong, when they're just doing as best they can.
I concur. Meditation is training a mental muscle if you will. It is a very useful practice.
First time i noticed its effect were subtle but profound. In an argument with my ex i noticed the anger. In the past i would have reacted and entered fight mode on autopilot. I stayed calm. Later i realized this was the first time i could choose myself how to act.
Ah, mis-step here. You just said that thoughts and feelings are things one cannot have, but merely observe.
You cannot think, "There's anger in me." Without a consciousness that independently generates thoughts, which violates the thesis statement:
> I know that ‘I am’ because I am aware of thoughts, emotions, external objects, not because I think.
Can't have it both ways I'm afraid.
I'm a bigger fan of framings that allow for different abstraction levels or lenses of thought, all of them belonging to the same consciousness. "Emotionally I feel this, but logically I think this, and instinctually I believe this."