Philosophical Speculations

I’ll stop here. Let’s see if we’re on the same page so far. Was I able to explain well the nature of these two modes of thinking? Has the “can’t do both” question been clarified? If it’s still unclear consider than in one mode we’re doing something with our spiritual activity, yet we’re not interes...

But note one point: regardless of how thinking manipulates ideas or imagination images, all these are ultimately forms, and forms are by necessity self-reference. So even if some extra theory of free will might be required, that theory must be in direct relation to self-reference. Say you are imagin...

That’s all fine but my goal with the example was to approach more intimately the experience of thinking. This didn’t happen and you didn’t address the questions, so I’ll try again. I really struggle to find a way to ask these questions because you keep finding ways to circumvent their essence :) Ev...

Clearly, the self-referencing "I" is not a thing among other things. We're not naming it. We're not trying to formalize it. Let's put it this way. We want to capture the fact we are seeing a unicorn, so we say "I am seeing a unicorn". There is a gap - (1) the "I" that ...

The thing is that self-reference is not a thing. So strictly speaking, it cannot be spoken of. You cannot even name it. You cannot even call it "self-reference", because calling it in any way gives the false impression that it is a thing. As I also wrote in the paper, the word "self-r...

Well... we are self-reference. Every moment of our life is experiencing self-reference.

I hesitate to recommend a book I have not read, but you might look into the book "Laws of Form" by George Spencer-Brown - he uses math\logic to construct reality and does so with fundamentals more 'primitive' than your model. If interested, you might begin with a set of videos: Thanks, I ...

Great, this makes it much clearer. In a proper phenomenological approach this is all that we can safely say: We exercise our spiritual activity and we recognize that certain phenomena/qualia manifest or disappear from our field of consciousness. As you can see, in both your and my model one can’t g...

OK, the problem really seems to stem from the fact that it is not clear what you imply by words like ‘leads to’, ‘creates’, ‘arises’, ‘explains’ and so on. Let’s first start with the fact that in your view, qualia arise as a result of the spiritual activity of the “I am”. In the primordial case the...

There is no such thing as "alien visual apparatus". There is only alien consciousness. And that consciousness put in similar contexts will bring into existence similar qualia.

I repeat: there is no apple, there is just the quale of apple.