consciousness
wtf?
Reading time...
In the end, what can ultimately be said about this life? What can we know for sure? Not very much, I'm afraid. Science can tell us a lot, of course, but never about the living reality of this moment, here and now. Science can study parts of life in isolation. It "freezes" something, takes it apart, and studies the parts. It sets up imaginary boxes of space, time, and causality. It measures, compares, evaluates, and theorizes. It's a powerful and successful method. But it cannot pin down life, this universe, this experience. And it cannot reach beyond experience — cannot know whether anything absolutely objective exists. Life cannot see life, because there is nothing outside of life. You can't put a box around it.
We can, of course, speculate about the ultimate nature of life and the universe. Is all of it physical — arising from particles and fields? Or is everything, including bodies and brains, an appearance in mind — in "consciousness"? Or perhaps mind and matter are expressions of something deeper still.
It's natural to ask these questions. Exploring them can be informative and even playful. But believing in the answers takes us out of science and into religion. There are many possible answers to ultimate questions — and no way to determine which one, if any, is true.
“Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds and fanatics. It is, for scientific folk, an unattainable ideal.”
We cannot know if there is a world, subjective or objective, independent of our own brain. We don't see the world. We see a world — our world. That's not solipsism. It's simply the realization that I cannot know your world as I know my own.
Many non-dual philosophies say that everything is just an "appearance in consciousness". Some even claim that the world is a dream. A famous Zen story addresses this belief:
“A student, trying to impress his master, ranted about reality, insisting that waking life was nothing but a dream. The master listened, then suddenly delivered a swift kick to the student's shin.
'Ow! Why did you do that?' cried the student.
'How do you like THAT dream?' replied the teacher.”
As Robert Saltzman comments:
“In a sense, we are dreaming the world — because our perceptions depend on the nervous system doing the perceiving, the enculturation it has undergone, and the experiences it's had. At best, we see a world, not the world. There may be other factors beyond our ken, but we do not know what they are. When claims are made, you have religion — not knowing.”
I don't really understand what many people mean by "consciousness" or "awareness." These words often sound like nouns — like subtle substances or containers in which experience occurs. But I see them more as functions, like temperature is a function of molecules moving in a space. I understand what it means to be aware of something. But I don't know what awareness is a property of. How about "mind"? Or "brain states"? These are just placeholders for mystery. No one knows what it is that is alive and aware, or what it is that is more or less conscious.
If "everything is consciousness," then what are we really talking about? The term becomes meaningless. And if no one knows what experience truly is, what life is, or what the universe is — there is no ("hard") problem. It doesn't need solving. It is lived.
“We are not only spectators. We are participators. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe.”
...how about some fries on the pier?
