Real epistemology

This letter from Stuart Resnick to Ray Kurzweil does a nice job summarizing my view of true epistemology. Stuart is referencing Buddhist philosophy, but I think the points he makes apply to any conceptual approach to consciousness. Here are the relevant excerpts:

Buddhism uses the word "consciousness" as follows. If a factory makes animal crackers out of dough, you could say that "dough" is a name for the substance common to all the animal crackers, regardless of their differing names and forms. In the same sense, Buddhism uses "consciousness" as the name for the substance of all things without exception. Though this definition may seem somewhat different from the one you use, it's still adhering to the understanding that "consciousness" is a synonym for "what you're experiencing right now."

According to the view of "consciousness" assumed in your debate with Searle, you could doubt that it's a property of a chair. But you'd hardly doubt that a chair appears IN consciousness. And in fact, anything you could possibly perceive, experience, or imagine appears in consciousness. For instance, if you can "imagine" something, it's (by definition, by both definitions) in consciousness. You could speculate, "A long time ago, a universe existed in which consciousness had not yet arisen." That speculation itself would be one more thing appearing in consciousness.

So far I am pretty much in full agreement.

To say "consciousness is the ultimate substance" is a way of expressing this conclusion that all things appear in consciousness. It follows that "consciousness" has meaning only as a name for this substance. That is: since nothing could be outside of consciousness, there's no meaning to the idea of "having" or "not having" consciousness. So the Buddhist view is: the very idea that there are things that "have consciousness" (i.e. "sentient beings") is along the lines of a dream, a delusion, or mere jugglery conjured up by some magician.

I would not go as far as Resnick that the idea of things "having consciousness" is necessarily a dream or delusion. However he is certainly correct that we cannot ever hope to know of a world of unconscious materiality. Everything we do, see, or think about is known only insofar as it is registered by consciousness. And this is the foundation of epistemology, which materialists so very often lose sight of.

The relevance to this blog is to notice that the ultimate composition of the only world we can know, is subjective. Objective reality is just another subjectively experienced set of concepts and models for predicting the (subjectively experienced) results of investigations. It may be "true" or not, but its epistemological foundation is exactly the same as belief in Zeus, crystal healing, geocentrism or telepathy. In all cases we are talking about beliefs and models, experienced subjectively. This even goes for beliefs like Dennett's and the Churchlands, who are convinced that subjective experience is not real, and attempt to flog this porridge among their materialist fellow-travellers.

What is consciousness?

I was asked this on another blog, and wrote a long response. I thought readers of AMNAP might find it of interest:



Let's leave behind conceptual ideas of matter and brains for a second, and go back to first principles.

There are thoughts, sensations, and emotions. This is the raw material for the contents of consciousness. Everything we know can be reduced to one of these basic contents of consciousness. Even materialism itself is a conceptual thought, grouped with a series of other conceptual ideas (atoms, the universe, me, my brain, etc.) Closely associated with thoughts are emotional responses to those thoughts. And the raw material for all these contents are sensations -- light and color, touch, smell, taste and hearing. For the most part, thought is composed of the memory of particular sounds (unless you happen to be deaf) -- even when you read, the words are mentally "heard" to a degree.

So, amazingly enough, even hard-core, reductionistic materialism, is ultimately mind-stuff, just symbols being "heard" within consciousness.

And consciousness is the "space" in which all these thoughts, sensations, and emotions are witnessed. Consciousness (or in other words, pure subjectivity) is all we know, and all we can ever know. The idea of an objective universe (whether it is true or not, let us not concern ourselves with that detail for now) is itself that "squishy" thought-stuff, being witnessed by consciousness.

So the best definition for consciousness that I have is the present moment / present space in which all of the different phenomena are perceived to be unfolding. It cannot be understood by thoughts (because thoughts, after all, are objects which are perceived by consciousness). A thought itself is simply a series of words, which ultimately are simply a stream of sounds pointing at abstractions of reality ("entities").

But always remember what a thought is, and how limited it must therefore be. At best, thoughts can only point at the nature of reality, and experiencing life directly is a more real way to go.