We understand that the objects that seem so solid to us, including our own bodies, are mostly empty spaces, sparsely filled with atoms and molecules if viewed on a finer level of magnification.
You say "matter is not always present in experiencing, for example when we are dreaming", but matter can't be experienced either, we don't experience the world only the perceptions we have of it, so your statement is wrong, of course, our perception of the world isn't there when we are dreaming. If you look closely at this concept you will realize what you call experiencing is not consciousness (as if you could had a direct notion of what consciousness even is), what you call consciousness and experiencing is your perception, in which the world (another perception) appears within. Following this thread, most certainly, "matter", a perception of the world is indeed within "consciousness" a basic perception, and consciousness is prior to matter. But it's all conceptualization from your own experience. My thoughts are that from my personal view I see when you talk about consciousness or experiencing being prior to matter, you are just talking about the functioning of the front parts of your brain in interaction with the back parts of your brain because at last that's all you can know. Otherwise this conceptualization just doesn't make any sense. What we have always called Spiritual Realization is just the freedom from judgement, interpretation, observation, the sense of I, the sense of time, the sense of space, and from so called aliveness, and in my opinion it all comes from the brain. We can just talk that far about our perception, thoughts, and feelings. Hope you're quiet about this topic, I've seen most people who are arguing this are very anxious about it, the very result of the effort to understand life so hard. If we are honest and in truth, we don't really care about understanding life, we care about understanding ourselves with the only purpose of finding peace and live better, but if there is not enough calm, the cause or root for that lack of calm, might be other than spiritual realization. Spirituality doesn't solve any problem really and it just gives you freedom from the conditioned mind, so that is the crux of all this topic and not consciousness or matter. It's just that spiritual masters are not honest, although some are, like for example Jiddu Krishnamurti talked a lot about freedom of conditioned mind specifically.
Yes. Matter can't be experienced, but only believed in or not was an idea of Hegel's that I referenced in this essay. Our experiences are never direct perceptions of reality--whatever THAT is (we don't know what it is). So-called "direct experiences" are ultimately incoherent because perception always takes place in a cognitive/conceptual context.
Hello. You talk about holding 'beliefs uncritically', and then proceed to share your beliefs about consciousness being emergent. Materialism is based on this belief - that consciousness emerges from matter, despite the famous 'hard problem'.
There is no evidence, even in theory, as to how consciousness could emerge from matter. This is a fact. As is the recognition that no one could ever experience anything outside consciousness/awareness (including matter, which is always an appearance within consciousness). Yet to suggest that consciousness is primary, which is everyone's direct experience, is portrayed as being a 'spiritual handhold'.
I enjoy your writing, but I'm going to go with legendary physicist Max Planck, who says, "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness"
This isn't wishful thinking, but more in line with our experience and recent scientific discoveries, including the nobel prize winning discovery of 2022.
I think you have misread or misunderstood this essay, Simon. I specifically said that I was not sharing any "beliefs," and that I do not know what any of this is or isn't.
Quoting Max Planck is a logical error known as an appeal to authority. He had his opinion, but he did not KNOW either. In this matter, no one does, which was the point of my essay.
It is you who wants to insist on what you believe, not I.
Perhaps I have. It seems to me from this post that you view consciousness as likely emergent. I view consciousness as likely primary. Neither of us know for sure, and nor does anyone else.
I mentioned emergence because it is one way that consciousness could have arisen, but that is not a "belief."
If one believes in idealism, that demands believing that the material world does not exist and that consciousness was always here. That raises the question of how it got here.
The idealistic argument, in my view, is like the foolish creationist argument for the existence of God. In that conception, God must exist because something must have created the heavens and the earth. But that raises the question of who created God. The usual answer is that God was always here.
In either case, idealism or naturalism, an unsupported assumption is required--a rabbit out of a hat. In idealism, it must be assumed that consciousness was always here and matter is a dream. I consider it more likely that matter was here going back to the Big Bang, and consciousness evolved from that. But, as you say, no one knows.
I would suggest that we only ever definitively experience being conscious and conscious experiences. That is not a belief, it is in my view an experiential fact.
So why assume experiencing/consciousness has emerged from something, if in experience it is always primary? (I am not talking about what we experience - like thoughts, feelings, perception etc)
Let's put words like idealism/ materialism/ physicalism to one side and stick with the specific point as to whether consciousness is emergent or not.
To disregard direct experience and assume emergence at some point in time (specifically in the distant past following the 'big bang' - which is itself not a fact but a best scientific theory) implies belief: a belief in something other than the only 'thing' anyone can ever actually be sure of. Namely consciousness.
"we only ever definitively experience being conscious and conscious experiences."
This is a meaningless tautology often trotted out by idealism fans.
Consciousness and experience are the same thing, so to say that you "experience" consciousness means nothing except that you are awake and not unconscious, as you might be when anesthetized, knocked out by a blow to the head, or otherwise rendered unconscious during which time there is no experience.
"This is a meaningless tautology often trotted out by idealism fans."
A tautology it may be, but that doesn't mean it is meaningless (or indeed trotted out). It is an attempt to point out what is undeniable using limited language. But point taken, I shall try again.
We agree that consciousness and experience are the same thing. Let's call it 'experiencing'.
All there is, is experiencing. When we are 'unconscious' at night, there is still the experience of dreams. As far as anyone knows, even under GA there may still be experiencing. When pilots are knocked unconscious by G-forces, they have reported vivid experience, even when 'out cold'. So to claim being unconscious means no experience is again a belief, not a fact.
Experiencing is all that is ever going on. I suggest that implies that experiencing is the likely fundamental reality, as no one has ever or could ever experience non-experience. You suggest experiencing is emergent from something, and from something that is experienced.
Neither of us know for sure. I respect your viewpoint as it's clearly sincerely held, and mine is too. We don't know, but it is fun to speculate. To hold too hard to a particular viewpoint is foolish, as I wrote in my recent post about doubt: https://simonmundie.substack.com/p/doubt-and-why-its-a-good-thing?r=2x84gt
I also enjoyed your 'what's wrong with ND' article, as with all your posts. I found the last line particularly interesting: 'Do you really believe beyond any doubt that unless a human notices it, the moon does not exist? If so, you'd better have better proof than x is equal to x.'.
And finally, I don't agree ND is a religion. And if it is, so is materialism. I am agnostic, but lean towards mind/experiencing being the fundamental reality, as opposed to matter.
"We only ever definitively experience being conscious and conscious experiences" "In experience consciousness is always primary" "Matter is always an appearance within consciousness" There's no way you can really know that, I don't personally understand why would you even try so hard to believe in something like that... Is matter really "within" consciousness? How can you objectify consciousness? Where you do it from and Who is even able to do that? All of those claims of yours are simply perceptions you want to create a philosophy around. How do you know consciousness is always primary? The claim in itself doesn't hold water... How can you divide consciousness from matter, distinguish between the two, and say one is before the other? If you are honest, that will be pure conjecture, a hard effort to intellectually understand what consciousness and the world is. Put your intellect aside and you will see that what you call matter and consciousness are just your thoughts, beyond all that there is no way to distinguish between consciousness and matter, ultimately those are just concepts.
Thank you, Hektor. Yes. Conceptual approaches certainly fail to touch it, and even so-called direct experience will never reveal the actual nature of reality. We are what we are and have no way to stand apart from that to observe it and know what it is.
So, can your separate matter from experiencing? No.
To use your logic, why believe in something that has never and could never be experienced? ie. matter apart from experiencing/consciousness.
I am not objectifying consciousness/experiencing, as to do so would mean that it wasn't primary. I am also not saying it definitively is primary, I am arguing that the evidence suggests that is more likely than it being an emergent property of matter., from my point of view.
As to your conclusion. Thoughts come and go. Experiencing does not.
I do agree that consciousness and matter are inseparable. But matter is not always present in experiencing - for example when we are dreaming. And if they are inseparable, I don't understand why the need to make a leap and claim the former emerges from the latter.
I am not trying to create a philosophy, I am talking about a specific point. Is experiencing emergent or not. We have different views, neither provable.
You say "matter is not always present in experiencing, for example when we are dreaming", but matter can't be experienced either, we don't experience the world only the perceptions we have of it, so your statement is wrong, of course, our perception of the world isn't there when we are dreaming. If you look closely at this concept you will realize what you call experiencing is not consciousness (as if you could had a direct notion of what consciousness even is), what you call consciousness and experiencing is your perception, in which the world (another perception) appears within. Following this thread, most certainly, "matter", a perception of the world is indeed within "consciousness" a basic perception, and consciousness is prior to matter. But it's all conceptualization from your own experience. My thoughts are that from my personal view I see when you talk about consciousness or experiencing being prior to matter, you are just talking about the functioning of the front parts of your brain in interaction with the back parts of your brain because at last that's all you can know. Otherwise this conceptualization just doesn't make any sense. What we have always called Spiritual Realization is just the freedom from judgement, interpretation, observation, the sense of I, the sense of time, the sense of space, and from so called aliveness, and in my opinion it all comes from the brain. We can just talk that far about our perception, thoughts, and feelings. Hope you're quiet about this topic, I've seen most people who are arguing this are very anxious about it, the very result of the effort to understand life so hard. If we are honest and in truth, we don't really care about understanding life, we care about understanding ourselves with the only purpose of finding peace and live better, but if there is not enough calm, the cause or root for that lack of calm, might be other than spiritual realization. Spirituality doesn't solve any problem really and it just gives you freedom from the conditioned mind, so that is the crux of all this topic and not consciousness or matter. It's just that spiritual masters are not honest, although some are, like for example Jiddu Krishnamurti talked a lot about freedom of conditioned mind specifically.
Water is only a simple example of emergence and how a new quality can come from blending elements none of which had that quality in and of themselves. A better example is an ant colony. The colony is composed of several distinct classes (castes) of ant: soldiers, excavators, foragers, garbage collectors, and gardeners. Each ant has a very limited repertoire of methods to interact with other ants and their environment. Ants have poor hearing and sight. They communicate with a few signals involving touch, but mostly communicate by producing trails of distinct chemicals (pheromones). Each organic molecule is identified with a specific message such as follow this trail, detection of food, presence of an enemy, or danger.
For an ant colony the components are simple and the interactions between the parts are simple. Nevertheless, complex structures such as bridges and tree houses emerge. There is no chief engineer directing the construction of these structures or a blueprint drawn up by an architect. The queen is not a dictator mandating that the colony must last for her lifetime, which covers many generations of worker ants.
Ant colonies have characteristic properties of emergent systems. The system has properties that the individual components do not. Complex structures can emerge from a system with simple components and interactions. The properties that emerge are hard to predict a priori. That is if one only knew about the properties of individual ants and how they interact, and not the properties of the colony, it would be hard to predict that they could achieve what they do.
That said, the point of my mentioning emergence was not to argue that consciousness emerged from matter but that it could have. Those who dismiss out of hand what they call "materialism" and I call "naturalism" seem to think insisting that consciousness always existed is a better explanation. I do not agree.
You say "matter is not always present in experiencing, for example when we are dreaming", but matter can't be experienced either, we don't experience the world only the perceptions we have of it, so your statement is wrong, of course, our perception of the world isn't there when we are dreaming. If you look closely at this concept you will realize what you call experiencing is not consciousness (as if you could had a direct notion of what consciousness even is), what you call consciousness and experiencing is your perception, in which the world (another perception) appears within. Following this thread, most certainly, "matter", a perception of the world is indeed within "consciousness" a basic perception, and consciousness is prior to matter. But it's all conceptualization from your own experience. My thoughts are that from my personal view I see when you talk about consciousness or experiencing being prior to matter, you are just talking about the functioning of the front parts of your brain in interaction with the back parts of your brain because at last that's all you can know. Otherwise this conceptualization just doesn't make any sense. What we have always called Spiritual Realization is just the freedom from judgement, interpretation, observation, the sense of I, the sense of time, the sense of space, and from so called aliveness, and in my opinion it all comes from the brain. We can just talk that far about our perception, thoughts, and feelings. Hope you're quiet about this topic, I've seen most people who are arguing this are very anxious about it, the very result of the effort to understand life so hard. If we are honest and in truth, we don't really care about understanding life, we care about understanding ourselves with the only purpose of finding peace and live better, but if there is not enough calm, the cause or root for that lack of calm, might be other than spiritual realization. Spirituality doesn't solve any problem really and it just gives you freedom from the conditioned mind, so that is the crux of all this topic and not consciousness or matter. It's just that spiritual masters are not honest, although some are, like for example Jiddu Krishnamurti talked a lot about freedom of conditioned mind specifically.
Yes. Matter can't be experienced, but only believed in or not was an idea of Hegel's that I referenced in this essay. Our experiences are never direct perceptions of reality--whatever THAT is (we don't know what it is). So-called "direct experiences" are ultimately incoherent because perception always takes place in a cognitive/conceptual context.
Sorry, it was a reply to Simon, but seems like I failed clicking on "reply" lol, I re sent it.
Good one.
Hello. You talk about holding 'beliefs uncritically', and then proceed to share your beliefs about consciousness being emergent. Materialism is based on this belief - that consciousness emerges from matter, despite the famous 'hard problem'.
There is no evidence, even in theory, as to how consciousness could emerge from matter. This is a fact. As is the recognition that no one could ever experience anything outside consciousness/awareness (including matter, which is always an appearance within consciousness). Yet to suggest that consciousness is primary, which is everyone's direct experience, is portrayed as being a 'spiritual handhold'.
I enjoy your writing, but I'm going to go with legendary physicist Max Planck, who says, "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness"
This isn't wishful thinking, but more in line with our experience and recent scientific discoveries, including the nobel prize winning discovery of 2022.
I think you have misread or misunderstood this essay, Simon. I specifically said that I was not sharing any "beliefs," and that I do not know what any of this is or isn't.
Quoting Max Planck is a logical error known as an appeal to authority. He had his opinion, but he did not KNOW either. In this matter, no one does, which was the point of my essay.
It is you who wants to insist on what you believe, not I.
Perhaps I have. It seems to me from this post that you view consciousness as likely emergent. I view consciousness as likely primary. Neither of us know for sure, and nor does anyone else.
I mentioned emergence because it is one way that consciousness could have arisen, but that is not a "belief."
If one believes in idealism, that demands believing that the material world does not exist and that consciousness was always here. That raises the question of how it got here.
The idealistic argument, in my view, is like the foolish creationist argument for the existence of God. In that conception, God must exist because something must have created the heavens and the earth. But that raises the question of who created God. The usual answer is that God was always here.
In either case, idealism or naturalism, an unsupported assumption is required--a rabbit out of a hat. In idealism, it must be assumed that consciousness was always here and matter is a dream. I consider it more likely that matter was here going back to the Big Bang, and consciousness evolved from that. But, as you say, no one knows.
I would suggest that we only ever definitively experience being conscious and conscious experiences. That is not a belief, it is in my view an experiential fact.
So why assume experiencing/consciousness has emerged from something, if in experience it is always primary? (I am not talking about what we experience - like thoughts, feelings, perception etc)
Let's put words like idealism/ materialism/ physicalism to one side and stick with the specific point as to whether consciousness is emergent or not.
To disregard direct experience and assume emergence at some point in time (specifically in the distant past following the 'big bang' - which is itself not a fact but a best scientific theory) implies belief: a belief in something other than the only 'thing' anyone can ever actually be sure of. Namely consciousness.
"we only ever definitively experience being conscious and conscious experiences."
This is a meaningless tautology often trotted out by idealism fans.
Consciousness and experience are the same thing, so to say that you "experience" consciousness means nothing except that you are awake and not unconscious, as you might be when anesthetized, knocked out by a blow to the head, or otherwise rendered unconscious during which time there is no experience.
I covered this in detail here:
https://robertsaltzman.substack.com/p/whats-wrong-with-nonduality-304
"This is a meaningless tautology often trotted out by idealism fans."
A tautology it may be, but that doesn't mean it is meaningless (or indeed trotted out). It is an attempt to point out what is undeniable using limited language. But point taken, I shall try again.
We agree that consciousness and experience are the same thing. Let's call it 'experiencing'.
All there is, is experiencing. When we are 'unconscious' at night, there is still the experience of dreams. As far as anyone knows, even under GA there may still be experiencing. When pilots are knocked unconscious by G-forces, they have reported vivid experience, even when 'out cold'. So to claim being unconscious means no experience is again a belief, not a fact.
Experiencing is all that is ever going on. I suggest that implies that experiencing is the likely fundamental reality, as no one has ever or could ever experience non-experience. You suggest experiencing is emergent from something, and from something that is experienced.
Neither of us know for sure. I respect your viewpoint as it's clearly sincerely held, and mine is too. We don't know, but it is fun to speculate. To hold too hard to a particular viewpoint is foolish, as I wrote in my recent post about doubt: https://simonmundie.substack.com/p/doubt-and-why-its-a-good-thing?r=2x84gt
I also enjoyed your 'what's wrong with ND' article, as with all your posts. I found the last line particularly interesting: 'Do you really believe beyond any doubt that unless a human notices it, the moon does not exist? If so, you'd better have better proof than x is equal to x.'.
Well, the Nobel prize was awarded in 2022 to physicists who showed that the universe is not locally real, (meaning things like the moon don't have definite properties independent of observation, although that doesn't necessarily mean 'human observation'). A science journalist covers it in some detail here: https://dangaristo.com/portfolio/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it/
And finally, I don't agree ND is a religion. And if it is, so is materialism. I am agnostic, but lean towards mind/experiencing being the fundamental reality, as opposed to matter.
"We only ever definitively experience being conscious and conscious experiences" "In experience consciousness is always primary" "Matter is always an appearance within consciousness" There's no way you can really know that, I don't personally understand why would you even try so hard to believe in something like that... Is matter really "within" consciousness? How can you objectify consciousness? Where you do it from and Who is even able to do that? All of those claims of yours are simply perceptions you want to create a philosophy around. How do you know consciousness is always primary? The claim in itself doesn't hold water... How can you divide consciousness from matter, distinguish between the two, and say one is before the other? If you are honest, that will be pure conjecture, a hard effort to intellectually understand what consciousness and the world is. Put your intellect aside and you will see that what you call matter and consciousness are just your thoughts, beyond all that there is no way to distinguish between consciousness and matter, ultimately those are just concepts.
Thank you, Hektor. Yes. Conceptual approaches certainly fail to touch it, and even so-called direct experience will never reveal the actual nature of reality. We are what we are and have no way to stand apart from that to observe it and know what it is.
Hi Hektor, thanks for your reply.
So, can your separate matter from experiencing? No.
To use your logic, why believe in something that has never and could never be experienced? ie. matter apart from experiencing/consciousness.
I am not objectifying consciousness/experiencing, as to do so would mean that it wasn't primary. I am also not saying it definitively is primary, I am arguing that the evidence suggests that is more likely than it being an emergent property of matter., from my point of view.
As to your conclusion. Thoughts come and go. Experiencing does not.
I do agree that consciousness and matter are inseparable. But matter is not always present in experiencing - for example when we are dreaming. And if they are inseparable, I don't understand why the need to make a leap and claim the former emerges from the latter.
I am not trying to create a philosophy, I am talking about a specific point. Is experiencing emergent or not. We have different views, neither provable.
Best wishes, Simon
You say "matter is not always present in experiencing, for example when we are dreaming", but matter can't be experienced either, we don't experience the world only the perceptions we have of it, so your statement is wrong, of course, our perception of the world isn't there when we are dreaming. If you look closely at this concept you will realize what you call experiencing is not consciousness (as if you could had a direct notion of what consciousness even is), what you call consciousness and experiencing is your perception, in which the world (another perception) appears within. Following this thread, most certainly, "matter", a perception of the world is indeed within "consciousness" a basic perception, and consciousness is prior to matter. But it's all conceptualization from your own experience. My thoughts are that from my personal view I see when you talk about consciousness or experiencing being prior to matter, you are just talking about the functioning of the front parts of your brain in interaction with the back parts of your brain because at last that's all you can know. Otherwise this conceptualization just doesn't make any sense. What we have always called Spiritual Realization is just the freedom from judgement, interpretation, observation, the sense of I, the sense of time, the sense of space, and from so called aliveness, and in my opinion it all comes from the brain. We can just talk that far about our perception, thoughts, and feelings. Hope you're quiet about this topic, I've seen most people who are arguing this are very anxious about it, the very result of the effort to understand life so hard. If we are honest and in truth, we don't really care about understanding life, we care about understanding ourselves with the only purpose of finding peace and live better, but if there is not enough calm, the cause or root for that lack of calm, might be other than spiritual realization. Spirituality doesn't solve any problem really and it just gives you freedom from the conditioned mind, so that is the crux of all this topic and not consciousness or matter. It's just that spiritual masters are not honest, although some are, like for example Jiddu Krishnamurti talked a lot about freedom of conditioned mind specifically.
Love these discussions. Ultimately everything comes down to speculation. Great fun.
Indeed! Thanks John
Hi, Crispin.
Water is only a simple example of emergence and how a new quality can come from blending elements none of which had that quality in and of themselves. A better example is an ant colony. The colony is composed of several distinct classes (castes) of ant: soldiers, excavators, foragers, garbage collectors, and gardeners. Each ant has a very limited repertoire of methods to interact with other ants and their environment. Ants have poor hearing and sight. They communicate with a few signals involving touch, but mostly communicate by producing trails of distinct chemicals (pheromones). Each organic molecule is identified with a specific message such as follow this trail, detection of food, presence of an enemy, or danger.
For an ant colony the components are simple and the interactions between the parts are simple. Nevertheless, complex structures such as bridges and tree houses emerge. There is no chief engineer directing the construction of these structures or a blueprint drawn up by an architect. The queen is not a dictator mandating that the colony must last for her lifetime, which covers many generations of worker ants.
Ant colonies have characteristic properties of emergent systems. The system has properties that the individual components do not. Complex structures can emerge from a system with simple components and interactions. The properties that emerge are hard to predict a priori. That is if one only knew about the properties of individual ants and how they interact, and not the properties of the colony, it would be hard to predict that they could achieve what they do.
---https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLBDVXLiWxQ
That said, the point of my mentioning emergence was not to argue that consciousness emerged from matter but that it could have. Those who dismiss out of hand what they call "materialism" and I call "naturalism" seem to think insisting that consciousness always existed is a better explanation. I do not agree.