The English language lacks the concept of “being aware from a sensation”, actually, the English language lacks any concept around “sensation” other than “experiencing it”.
Not sure if I’m understanding you correctly, but that sounds like it might be part of the exact issue I’m pointing at? That the concept of a sensation is something that one experiences (“being aware of”), but that in the phenomenological experience something happens to make the experience into one of something that we don’t have a word for (“experiencing from”) - and which doesn’t even really make sense when you think about it.
I acknowledge that “being aware from a sensation” isn’t an expression that exists, in standard English—exactly because the concept is incongruent. But if I am trying to suggest that the mind tends to create an experience that is logically impossible when you think about it, I’m not sure how to do that without using an expression that doesn’t exist in standard English exactly because we don’t usually talk about logically impossible things?
When you say that I am making mistakes that usually go unnoticed because they don’t usually matter so we don’t pay close attention—that’s kind of similar to what I’m saying is happening in the mind. That the mind usually makes some mistaken assumptions which generally go unnoticed because one doesn’t stop to closely examine them, but once one does start closely examining their own experience, one may start noticing something odd.
Often what happens is that the confusion kind of shifts around—since the mistaken assumption implies a logical impossibility, an attempt to look at it shifts the assumption to a slightly different location, that you are not currently looking at… but you can at least become aware of the fact that your experience was just modified on-the-fly to hide the logical inconsistency, and if you move your attention to where the inconsistency relocated, it moves again.
Alternatively, the system can try to correct the inconsistency by flipping into a state that genuinely doesn’t have it, in a way that puts you into something of an altered state of consciousness. But if you stop looking for the inconsistency, it’s easy to flip back into one that does have it.
First, very important, what is “It”, the subject of this sentence, try to define “It” and you see the problem vanishes or the sentence no longer makes sense.
The ‘it’ was defined in the immediately preceding sentence so I’m a little confused by this suggestion, but I can define it in the sentence itself too: “The sensation of looking at the world from behind your eyes is a computational representation of your location, rather than being the location itself.”
Hmm… thinking about your comment about two different levels, it occurs to me that what you could interpret me to mean by such a sentence would be something like
“The sensation of looking at the world from behind your eyes is a computational representation of your location (appearance in consciousness), rather than being the location (external world) itself”
or some similar mixing of two perspectives. If so, I don’t think that I am mixing the levels; rather, this is intended to stay solely on the level of “everything in the external world is an appearance in my consciousness”. Here’s an attempted rewrite of the sentence to avoid the possibility for ambiguity:
“The sensation of looking at the world from behind your eyes is a computational representation of the location from which you are viewing that what you are seeing, but since the sensation is embedded in ‘that which you are seeing’, your actual perspective—to the extent that “perspective” is a meaningful term—must be external to the sensation of looking at the world.”
Grammarly seems to clear that paragraph as syntactically correct. :)
I can’t say something is right or wrong or probable unless I have a system of logic to judge those under.
Language is a good proxy for a system of logic, though sometimes (e.g. math and science) it’s not rigorous enough. But for most discussion it seems to do kind of fine.
If you are introducing new concepts that can’t be expressed using the grammar and syntax of the English language, I’m not sure there’s a point in discussing the idea.
Using new terms or even syntax to “reduce” a longer idea is fine, but you have to be able to define the next terms or syntax using the old one first.
Doesn’t that seem kind of obvious?
Just to be clear here, my stance is that you can actually describe the feeling of “being self” in a way that makes sense, but that way is bound to be somewhat unique to the individual and complicated.
Trying to reduce it to a 10 word sentence results in something nonsensical because the self is a more complex concept, but one’s momentary experience needn’t be invalid because it can’t be explained in a few quick words.
Nor am I denying introspection as powerful, but introspection in the typical Buddhist way that you prescribe seems to simplist to me, and empirically it just leads to people contempt with being couch potatoes.
If you tried solving the problem, instead of calling paradox based on a silly formulation, if you tried rescuing the self, you might get somewhere interesting...or maybe not, but the other way seems both nonsensical (impossible to explain in a logically consistent way) and empirically leads to meh ish result unless your wish in life is to be a meditation or yoga teacher.
If you tried solving the problem, instead of calling paradox based on a silly formulation, if you tried rescuing the self,
Why do you say that I’m not trying to solve the problem? Solving the problem is much of what this sequence is about; see this later post in particular.
Well, suppose you had never seen the color red, and I wanted us to have a discussion of what red looks like. You would tell me that in order to know what red looks like, I need to first define it in terms of the concepts you are already familiar with.
This makes sense, but if we had to do that with every concept, it wouldn’t work, because then we wouldn’t have any concepts to start out from. And if you’ve never seen anything reddish, I can’t give you an explanation that would let you derive red from the concepts you are already familiar with.
So instead I might tell you “see that color that my finger is pointing at? That’s red.” And then you could look, and hopefully say “oh, okay, I get it now.”
I’m trying to do the same thing here. Of course, the problem is, I’m trying to point at an aspect of internal experience, rather than anything in the external world.
But I’ve done the best I can to give you pointers towards the thing that I expect to be found within your experience if you just know where to look. To extend the color analogy, this is as if I knew there was a line of increasingly reddish objects arrayed somewhere, and I told you to go find the first object and follow along the line and watch them getting increasingly red, and then at the end, you would know what red looks like.
You said that the Kaj/Harris/Kelly/etc. thing is a rather bad philosophy. It is if you evaluate it in terms of a philosophy that is supposed to have a self-contained argument! But that’s not its purpose—or at least not the starting point. The purpose is to give you a set of instructions that are hopefully good enough to point out the thing it’s talking about, and then when you’ve looked at your experience and found it, you’ll get what the rest is trying to say.
Your metaphor doesn’t quite work, because you are trying really hard to show me the color red, only to then argue I’m a fool for thinking there is such a thing as red.
As in, it might be that no person on Earth has such a naive concept of subjective experience, but they are not used to expressing it in language, then when you try to make them express subjective experience in language and/or explain it to them, they say
Oh, that makes no sense, you’re right
Instead of saying:
Oh yeah, I guess I can’t define this concept central to everything about being human after 10 seconds of thinking in more than 1 catchphrase.
But again, what I’m saying above is subjective, please go back and consider my statement regarding language, if we disagree there, then there’s not much to discuss (or the discussion is rather much longer and moves into other areas), because at the end of the day, I literally can not know what your talking about. Maybe I have a vague impression from years of meditation as to what you are referring to...or maybe not, maybe whatever you had in your experience is much more different and we are discussing two completely different things, but since we are very vague when referring to them, we think we have a disagreement in what we see, when instead we’re just looking in completely different places.
Your metaphor doesn’t quite work, because you are trying really hard to show me the color red, only to then argue I’m a fool for thinking there is such a thing as red.
No? I am trying to point you to something in your subjective experience, exactly because it is something that exists in your experience, and which seems like an integral part of how minds are organized. I’m definitely not going to argue that you are a fool for having it, because by default everyone has it.
As in, it might be that no person on Earth has such a naive concept of subjective experience, but they are not used to expressing it in language, then when you try to make them express subjective experience in language and/or explain it to them, they say
Oh, that makes no sense, you’re right
Instead of saying:
Oh yeah, I guess I can’t define this concept central to everything about being human after 10 seconds of thinking in more than 1 catchphrase.
But my claim is not “there’s a concept in your experience that you can’t define in words”… I defined it in words in my article! I even explained it in third-person terms, in the sense of “if a computer program made the same mistake, what would be the objectively-verifiable mistake in that.”
I am just saying that while the mistake is perfectly easy to define in third-person terms, I cannot give you a definition that would directly link it up to your first-person experience. Because while words can be used to point at the experience, they cannot define the experience in a way that would create it.
We can see where a computer program that committed this mistake would go wrong, but we do not see ourselves from a third-person perspective, so I cannot give you a third-person explanation that would cause the third-person explanation and the first-person experience to link up directly. But I can suggest ways in which you can examine your first-person experience, and then when you have the third-person explanation, the two can link up.
(Note that I am explicitly deviating from the Buddhist writers who say that it’s intrinsically impossible to understand what’s going on. I get why they are saying that: the Buddhists of old didn’t know about computers or simulations, so they didn’t have a third-person framework in which the thing can be explained. But we do, and that’s why I’ve explicitly given you the third-person framework, or at least tried to.)
A person who is shown red for the first time could also say “oh, right, that’s red; you’re right that I couldn’t have defined it in words”, but unlike your comment suggests, the “I couldn’t have defined it in words” isn’t the important part of the “oh”. The important part is “oh, now I can assign a meaning to your sentence in a way that causes its odd syntax to make sense, and now I can think more clearly about what something like ‘seeing red’ means”.
But again, what I’m saying above is subjective, please go back and consider my statement regarding language, if we disagree there, then there’s not much to discuss (or the discussion is rather much longer and moves into other areas), because at the end of the day, I literally can not know what your talking about.
If I may ask, how much time did you spend actually following the suggestions in the post and trying to find what the thing that I’m pointing at?
It’s certainly not “literally impossible”. Some are lucky enough to find it the moment they are pointed towards it. Others may have difficulty, and of course, given the fact that human minds vary and some people lack universal experiences, I cannot disprove the possibility that there could some people who naturally lack this experience at all.
But I do expect that most people can find it—maybe it takes a minute, maybe ten, maybe a year, I have no idea of what the average and the median here might be. But you have to actually try looking for it.
I appreciate the extended reply!
Not sure if I’m understanding you correctly, but that sounds like it might be part of the exact issue I’m pointing at? That the concept of a sensation is something that one experiences (“being aware of”), but that in the phenomenological experience something happens to make the experience into one of something that we don’t have a word for (“experiencing from”) - and which doesn’t even really make sense when you think about it.
I acknowledge that “being aware from a sensation” isn’t an expression that exists, in standard English—exactly because the concept is incongruent. But if I am trying to suggest that the mind tends to create an experience that is logically impossible when you think about it, I’m not sure how to do that without using an expression that doesn’t exist in standard English exactly because we don’t usually talk about logically impossible things?
When you say that I am making mistakes that usually go unnoticed because they don’t usually matter so we don’t pay close attention—that’s kind of similar to what I’m saying is happening in the mind. That the mind usually makes some mistaken assumptions which generally go unnoticed because one doesn’t stop to closely examine them, but once one does start closely examining their own experience, one may start noticing something odd.
Often what happens is that the confusion kind of shifts around—since the mistaken assumption implies a logical impossibility, an attempt to look at it shifts the assumption to a slightly different location, that you are not currently looking at… but you can at least become aware of the fact that your experience was just modified on-the-fly to hide the logical inconsistency, and if you move your attention to where the inconsistency relocated, it moves again.
Alternatively, the system can try to correct the inconsistency by flipping into a state that genuinely doesn’t have it, in a way that puts you into something of an altered state of consciousness. But if you stop looking for the inconsistency, it’s easy to flip back into one that does have it.
The ‘it’ was defined in the immediately preceding sentence so I’m a little confused by this suggestion, but I can define it in the sentence itself too: “The sensation of looking at the world from behind your eyes is a computational representation of your location, rather than being the location itself.”
Hmm… thinking about your comment about two different levels, it occurs to me that what you could interpret me to mean by such a sentence would be something like
“The sensation of looking at the world from behind your eyes is a computational representation of your location (appearance in consciousness), rather than being the location (external world) itself”
or some similar mixing of two perspectives. If so, I don’t think that I am mixing the levels; rather, this is intended to stay solely on the level of “everything in the external world is an appearance in my consciousness”. Here’s an attempted rewrite of the sentence to avoid the possibility for ambiguity:
“The sensation of looking at the world from behind your eyes is a computational representation of the location from which you are viewing that what you are seeing, but since the sensation is embedded in ‘that which you are seeing’, your actual perspective—to the extent that “perspective” is a meaningful term—must be external to the sensation of looking at the world.”
Grammarly seems to clear that paragraph as syntactically correct. :)
I can’t say something is right or wrong or probable unless I have a system of logic to judge those under.
Language is a good proxy for a system of logic, though sometimes (e.g. math and science) it’s not rigorous enough. But for most discussion it seems to do kind of fine.
If you are introducing new concepts that can’t be expressed using the grammar and syntax of the English language, I’m not sure there’s a point in discussing the idea.
Using new terms or even syntax to “reduce” a longer idea is fine, but you have to be able to define the next terms or syntax using the old one first.
Doesn’t that seem kind of obvious?
Just to be clear here, my stance is that you can actually describe the feeling of “being self” in a way that makes sense, but that way is bound to be somewhat unique to the individual and complicated.
Trying to reduce it to a 10 word sentence results in something nonsensical because the self is a more complex concept, but one’s momentary experience needn’t be invalid because it can’t be explained in a few quick words.
Nor am I denying introspection as powerful, but introspection in the typical Buddhist way that you prescribe seems to simplist to me, and empirically it just leads to people contempt with being couch potatoes.
If you tried solving the problem, instead of calling paradox based on a silly formulation, if you tried rescuing the self, you might get somewhere interesting...or maybe not, but the other way seems both nonsensical (impossible to explain in a logically consistent way) and empirically leads to meh ish result unless your wish in life is to be a meditation or yoga teacher.
Why do you say that I’m not trying to solve the problem? Solving the problem is much of what this sequence is about; see this later post in particular.
Well, suppose you had never seen the color red, and I wanted us to have a discussion of what red looks like. You would tell me that in order to know what red looks like, I need to first define it in terms of the concepts you are already familiar with.
This makes sense, but if we had to do that with every concept, it wouldn’t work, because then we wouldn’t have any concepts to start out from. And if you’ve never seen anything reddish, I can’t give you an explanation that would let you derive red from the concepts you are already familiar with.
So instead I might tell you “see that color that my finger is pointing at? That’s red.” And then you could look, and hopefully say “oh, okay, I get it now.”
I’m trying to do the same thing here. Of course, the problem is, I’m trying to point at an aspect of internal experience, rather than anything in the external world.
But I’ve done the best I can to give you pointers towards the thing that I expect to be found within your experience if you just know where to look. To extend the color analogy, this is as if I knew there was a line of increasingly reddish objects arrayed somewhere, and I told you to go find the first object and follow along the line and watch them getting increasingly red, and then at the end, you would know what red looks like.
You said that the Kaj/Harris/Kelly/etc. thing is a rather bad philosophy. It is if you evaluate it in terms of a philosophy that is supposed to have a self-contained argument! But that’s not its purpose—or at least not the starting point. The purpose is to give you a set of instructions that are hopefully good enough to point out the thing it’s talking about, and then when you’ve looked at your experience and found it, you’ll get what the rest is trying to say.
Your metaphor doesn’t quite work, because you are trying really hard to show me the color red, only to then argue I’m a fool for thinking there is such a thing as red.
As in, it might be that no person on Earth has such a naive concept of subjective experience, but they are not used to expressing it in language, then when you try to make them express subjective experience in language and/or explain it to them, they say
Oh, that makes no sense, you’re right
Instead of saying:
Oh yeah, I guess I can’t define this concept central to everything about being human after 10 seconds of thinking in more than 1 catchphrase.
But again, what I’m saying above is subjective, please go back and consider my statement regarding language, if we disagree there, then there’s not much to discuss (or the discussion is rather much longer and moves into other areas), because at the end of the day, I literally can not know what your talking about. Maybe I have a vague impression from years of meditation as to what you are referring to...or maybe not, maybe whatever you had in your experience is much more different and we are discussing two completely different things, but since we are very vague when referring to them, we think we have a disagreement in what we see, when instead we’re just looking in completely different places.
No? I am trying to point you to something in your subjective experience, exactly because it is something that exists in your experience, and which seems like an integral part of how minds are organized. I’m definitely not going to argue that you are a fool for having it, because by default everyone has it.
But my claim is not “there’s a concept in your experience that you can’t define in words”… I defined it in words in my article! I even explained it in third-person terms, in the sense of “if a computer program made the same mistake, what would be the objectively-verifiable mistake in that.”
I am just saying that while the mistake is perfectly easy to define in third-person terms, I cannot give you a definition that would directly link it up to your first-person experience. Because while words can be used to point at the experience, they cannot define the experience in a way that would create it.
We can see where a computer program that committed this mistake would go wrong, but we do not see ourselves from a third-person perspective, so I cannot give you a third-person explanation that would cause the third-person explanation and the first-person experience to link up directly. But I can suggest ways in which you can examine your first-person experience, and then when you have the third-person explanation, the two can link up.
(Note that I am explicitly deviating from the Buddhist writers who say that it’s intrinsically impossible to understand what’s going on. I get why they are saying that: the Buddhists of old didn’t know about computers or simulations, so they didn’t have a third-person framework in which the thing can be explained. But we do, and that’s why I’ve explicitly given you the third-person framework, or at least tried to.)
A person who is shown red for the first time could also say “oh, right, that’s red; you’re right that I couldn’t have defined it in words”, but unlike your comment suggests, the “I couldn’t have defined it in words” isn’t the important part of the “oh”. The important part is “oh, now I can assign a meaning to your sentence in a way that causes its odd syntax to make sense, and now I can think more clearly about what something like ‘seeing red’ means”.
If I may ask, how much time did you spend actually following the suggestions in the post and trying to find what the thing that I’m pointing at?
It’s certainly not “literally impossible”. Some are lucky enough to find it the moment they are pointed towards it. Others may have difficulty, and of course, given the fact that human minds vary and some people lack universal experiences, I cannot disprove the possibility that there could some people who naturally lack this experience at all.
But I do expect that most people can find it—maybe it takes a minute, maybe ten, maybe a year, I have no idea of what the average and the median here might be. But you have to actually try looking for it.