Rupert Spria's sweet blind spot

[findingblanks]

At 17.01 in the conversation linked to below Sam poses a good question and Spira's answer points to what I find the blind spot in so many teachers who think they are making good pointers when they go beyond their phenomenological descriptions.

Please note that I am not making a comment outside of the very specific frame of this post.

Here, all I want to point to is that we very often find great teachers who do such beautiful work pointing to phenomenology of experience but who then make jumps in logic that they honestly don't recognize as such. This tiny gap is where we find their justification for occasionally scoffing at how "obvious" it is....



p.s. For those who don't know, Sam Harris has made clear over the last several years that not only does he take the hard problem of consciousness seriously (in the sense that he thinks materialists and informationalists are fooling themselves who simply claim that consciousness must 'emerge'), he even is very interested in versions of monisitic idealism and some forms of panpsychicism. So his pushing against Spira can't be reduced to him being a materialist. Nor can it be reduced to him not knowing about non-dual experience since this has been the most important experience of Sam's life.

My interest isn't in the debate aspect of the question. It is simply to notice how comfortably Spira describes what would count as evidence against his core inference.

[Eugene I]

We had a lengthy discussion on the old forum about the "seemingly" unconscious states (anesthesia, fainting, deep sleep etc). The materialist's hypothesis is that the consciousness is truly absent in those states. The alternative idealist-sounding hypothesis mentioned by Rupert is a weak one and it's not the only possible one. We don't have to assume the "lapse" of reality between the falling into and waking from the anesthesia point. There can be other explanations, such as that the individuated consciousness is present in those "empty" states but the functioning of the mind and memory is absent or suspended. Each of these hypotheses are non-falsifiable in any experimental way.

[Simon Adams]

Yes there are definitely people who claim to remain aware during sleep, such as Ramana Maharshi. I don’t remember whether he claimed to be aware of things in the world around him, which would be the only way to verify that if there is anyone alive today who makes the same claim. I find Maharshi credible, but to add to that, we can sometimes wake up not remembering anything of the night, then later in the day something reminds us of a dream we had had. So in REM sleep state at the very least, there is a part of us that is aware but that awareness is not automatically available to our default waking state. We only remember the dream due to it’s contents standing out, so it’s not unreasonable to expect that a fuller state of awareness would include other “states of unconsciousness”.

In terms of the original point on Spira, I guess he was just stating a primacy to him of experience over abstractions. This is how he has chosen to prioritise things in his search for ‘truth’, which is something everyone does in one way or another from the same set of basic fact available to us. Depending on what you consider your epistemic solid ground, and the ontology into which you frame those epistemic weightings, you can build radically different conclusions from the same information.

I also think that Sam Harris is maybe going too far the other way in associating the scientific process with a kind of materialist assumption (although I appreciate that his views are a bit more nuanced than that). If he is going down that route, it’s easy to argue the fact that science is a process explicitly designed to study the material world, with “things of the soul” deliberately excluded from that investigation around 300/400 years ago. Science can’t explain consciousness, and at present can’t even really claim how the anaesthetic works.

Harris seems to be saying that ‘his way’ is better because of all that it has achieved, which is a fair argument to make - especially if utility is your aim in understanding anything. However that is surely also making an unwarranted assumption that a process which can only ever investigate the physical world (very effectively) is going to ever describe reality. Even if physicists came up with a TOE that unified the fields and from which all the behaviour of matter could be predicted, it would just be an abstracted description of how matter behaves. This may give us some clues about what nature is, but it’s not going to tell you anything about why nature is intelligible enough for us to be able to describe it with maths, why such a formula would produce beings curious enough and capable of abstracting their environment in such a way, why there is anything at all, let alone what consciousness is.

There is also an important aspect of the scientific process than inadvertently rubs off onto people who take scientism as their epistemological foundation. This is the idea that nothing is real unless it has an objectively evidenced basis, from a physical experiment/observation. The funny thing is that the more we understand things, the more the physical world seems to be relative. It’s simply not possible to have a consistent birds eye view of the material world that will be true for all observers. That hints at a problem because the laws themselves and the maths they rely on do seem to have an “objective” reality. They have built their foundations on sand that moves and changes in time, and all that remains firm in any way (regular Kuhnian revolutions excepted) are the abstractions that are ‘out there’, in the mind.

So everyone makes jumps in logic, it’s just that when the jumps are within the default materialist ontology they stand out to materialists.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Just with everyOne else, sooner or later the locus of Awareness mistaking itself for Sam is going to clue into the primacy of consciousness. It's pretty much inevitable, whether in corporeal life or in its passing. Why wait for some other version of now, I'm not sure.

[findingblanks]

It strikes me that Rupert's comment about what would be evidence was so sloppy. Like I say, as a phenomenologist, he is incredible. I love his pointers and descriptions. They are thick and rich. I am a monistic idealist but I simply do not think Rupert's jump in logic from phenomenology to ontology is well founded. He does not always make that move. He often is careful to point out that his claims are based on good inferences based on experience. This just happens to be one move I hear him make quite often. I'm only pointing to this one specific kind of argument. It only sounds like nitpicking if you don't realize how interesting the details of such conversations can be for some of us

[Martin_]

@findingblanks

So, are you saying that you have problem with the following exchange (paraphrasing):

Sam: "what would disprove the theory that everything is consciousness?"
Rupert: "Evidence that there are things that are not counsciousness."

In that case a totally agree; but i wouldn't classify it as a jump in logic but instead as a meaningless tautology. My response to Rupert would be "Well 'duh!" (which, thinking aobut it is pretty much how Sam replies, but somewhat more civill.)

[Eugene I]

@findingblanks

So, are you saying that you have problem with the following exchange (paraphrasing):

Sam: "what would disprove the theory that everything is consciousness?"
Rupert: "Evidence that there are things that are not counsciousness."

In that case a totally agree; but i wouldn't classify it as a jump in logic but instead as a meaningless tautology. My response to Rupert would be "Well 'duh!" (which, thinking aobut it is pretty much how Sam replies, but somewhat more civill.)

I think it was Rupert's answer that was a civil variant of a "well duh" answer to the Sam's question, because a meaningless tautology is the only possible answer to it. It's like:
- I'm asking you a question with the meaningless tautology being the only possible answer to it
- (Well duh!) my answer then is a meaningless tautology
- (Well, duh!) thank you so much for such a profound answer!

[Martin_]

@ Eugene. Nah. i disagree.
Either your theory is testable or its not.
To me, Sam is just asking for the test that should come with the hypothesis.

Meaningful responses to Sam's question could be:
1. Admit it's not a testable theory. (Which is fine; after all this is metaphysics; right?)
2. Present the test.
.3 ...

Either response would send the discussion in different directions which shows that the question was not meaningless.

Ruperts response brings us nowhere new

[lorenzop]

Watched this interview a few times, very enjoyable. I think it odd that Sam questions the wisdon of extending claims about human consciousness to reality, yet has no difficulty extending such re scientific observations, scientific observation which also occur in consciousness.
The difference being that scientific observations, and also viewing a sunset etc. - the experience cooresponds to an event that exists independent of any finite mind.
The question for Rupert and non dualists in general is: Can the experience of pure awareness be extended to reality? Is Pure Consciousness reality?
I'm not sure how Bernardo would answer because I don't fully understand Mind at Large, and how it varies from pure awareness.

[SanteriSatama]

Yes there are definitely people who claim to remain aware during sleep, such as Ramana Maharshi. I don’t remember whether he claimed to be aware of things in the world around him, which would be the only way to verify that if there is anyone alive today who makes the same claim.

Is he talking about the well known and relatively common phenomenon of lucid dreaming, with metacognitive function turned on during REM, or basic sentient awareness also during deepest sleep? Or something else?

If he is going down that route, it’s easy to argue the fact that science is a process explicitly designed to study the material world, with “things of the soul” deliberately excluded from that investigation around 300/400 years ago.

Amputation of introspection is indeed anti-empirical and anti-scientific, and especially anti-philosophical, as it goes directly against the Socratic motto 'know thyself'.

Harris seems to be saying that ‘his way’ is better because of all that it has achieved, which is a fair argument to make - especially if utility is your aim in understanding anything. However that is surely also making an unwarranted assumption that a process which can only ever investigate the physical world (very effectively) is going to ever describe reality.

There is a deep contradiction between teleological utility arguments and the theoretical ideal of purely descriptive function. Teleological utility of techno magic methodologically already requires deterministic repeatability and causal predictability and excludes unique phenomena even as a possibility. The old criticism of the descriptive function is Plato's criticism of mimesis, and when the assumption is that describing is about "objective reality", subject-object division has been already done and the frame becomes very hard to escape. In the worst case, the subjective pole of S-O relaltion becomes blind spot and/or is outright denied as in eliminative materialism. Either case, the asubjective ground gets covered under a linguistic artifact. And what remains is bad philosophy, as you say:

There is also an important aspect of the scientific process than inadvertently rubs off onto people who take scientism as their epistemological foundation. This is the idea that nothing is real unless it has an objectively evidenced basis, from a physical experiment/observation. The funny thing is that the more we understand things, the more the physical world seems to be relative. It’s simply not possible to have a consistent birds eye view of the material world that will be true for all observers. That hints at a problem because the laws themselves and the maths they rely on do seem to have an “objective” reality. They have built their foundations on sand that moves and changes in time, and all that remains firm in any way (regular Kuhnian revolutions excepted) are the abstractions that are ‘out there’, in the mind.