Eugene I wrote: ↑Fri Nov 19, 2021 6:19 pm
I'm going back to the same questions that I posted above, specifically:
How exactly, form the bare facts of your 1-st person phenomenal experience and without making any assumptions, you arrived at the statement that we all experience a shared ideal content?
My claim is that you can not arrive at such statement without any assumptions. In fact, as Hume showed long ago, if we only consider the base phenomenal single-person 1-st person experience and do not make any assumptions at all, we will get stuck at the extreme agnosticism/skepticism and single-person solipsism. We necessarily need to make certain unprovable assumptions to move from that dead end point. But the point is - we need to clearly and explicitly state which assumptions exactly we make. If you want to make an assumption of the shared ideal content - that's fine, I may even agree with you, but you need to explicitly admit that you are making such assumption.
There's no need to make an assumption. We are not forced by anything to make that assumption except by our worldly desire to have an opinion on a given topic. The question is not whether every one experiences individual conscious perspectives of reality. We can easily conclude that this is the case.
So we should understand what shared content really means. My feeling is that confusion arises because it is not well understood what is meant by this.
Let's consider RS's words:
One must distinguish between experiencing one's own world of sensation, and looking at that of another person. Every man of course can look into his own world of sensation; only the seer with the opened “spiritual eye” can see another person's world of sensation. Unless a man be a seer, he knows the world of sensation only as an “inner” one, only as the peculiar hidden experiences of his own soul; with the opened “spiritual eye” there shines out before the outward-turned spiritual gaze what otherwise lives only in the inner being of another person.
In order to prevent misunderstanding, it may be expressly stated here that the seer does not simply experience in himself what the other being has within him as content of his world of sensation. That being experiences the sensations in question from the point of view of his own inner being; the seer becomes aware of a manifestation of the world of sensation.
https://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA009/En ... c01_4.html
The second paragraph says it directly. The seer doesn't see the unique perspective of the person, he sees the
manifestation of the sensations of that person. So we should be clear that all perspectives are unique but this doesn't mean that thoughts, feelings, sensations can't be perceived by another being (obviously from another perspective).
So the question shifts to: are the thoughts that the seer perceives the same as the ones that the person thinks. It depends on what we mean by 'the same'. If we ask if the experiences of the thoughts are the same in absolute sense, the above quote already answers - no, they are not. They are the same in the same sense as when we look at the same table and realize that it is in fact
the same table - it's just that we experience it from different perspectives. Everything will be much more easier to understand if we realize that each one of us has clairvoyant consciousness but ordinarily only in a small domain that we designate as physical body. The key that unlocks this mystery is to understand that our thoughts and feelings exist as real processes within a shared world, in the same way we agree that our will operates within a shared physical world. So let's be clear: shared contents means something that we can have relative perspective of. This completely fits Rovelli's view. We're not speaking of objective world-in-itself out there but of reality which justifies us to speak, for example, about the
same table.
The only reason we don't normally speak of same thoughts, feelings, sensations, is because our ordinary consciousness seems to be finely tuned to perceive only those within the physical, etheric and astral bodies that the "I" recognizes as its current metamorphic view. Obviously no one can prove this formally but we should be at least open to the possibility that when the "I" learns to loosen the links between the bodies, it is capable of experiencing thoughts and feelings that are to be found in the etheric and astral environment in the same way we can encounter the effects of the will of others in the sensory spectrum. We should understand that we're always seeing in the astral and etheric world but we're doing so in a quite limited aperture within a physical body. From the etheric world we perceive only those sensations and thoughts that resonate with the processes in the body. So it is for the astral (soul) world from which we feel only those desires that are sucked in by the body, similarly to the way a sponge absorbs water. If we understand this, many mysteries will be lifted.
When the "I" learns to extend its etheric and astral perimeter it can experience thoughts and feelings that lie in the general etheric and astral world in the same way it feels those that are in the vicinity of the physical body. If another "I" extends over the same parts of the etheric and astral world as our "I", this doesn't mean that it will have the same perspective as ours. So you see, the real challenge here is to overcome the uneasy feeling that makes us imagine our thoughts and feelings to be something that has existence only in our completely personal world and that only the senses and the will live in a shared environment. Even physical science shows that our thoughts and feelings have objective extension in the shared physical world where our brain and blood are to be found. From this point on, it is really only a prejudice of our times that what we experience as thoughts and feelings from our "I" perspective, doesn't have existence in shared layers of reality which can be known also from other relative perspectives.
So it all boils down to our ability to see our thoughts and desires as lawful part of the world, just like we see our will and sensations as belonging to that world. The only reason that people are reluctant to see things in this way is because through the influence of materialism they have learned to feel carefree about what they think and feel, because they assume it doesn't matter. As long as a person feels shame or something similar about his thoughts and desires, he'll feel obliged to imagine them as existing in a completely opaque world inaccessible by any other being. This is why all genuine spiritual traditions have always turned attention to purity. This is today laughed at by modern people. They see it as just another arbitrary rule that the elders have placed upon people in order to make their life more difficult. Well, purity has nothing to do with arbitrary rules. It is really something which everyone can feel for themselves. It's enough to imagine that the dead can see in the souls of the living. How does this makes us feel? Is there anything we want to hide, that we're afraid can be seen? It's not the point to be afraid that the dead will judge us. They won't, they have other tasks on their hands. The question is that as long as we feel that we need to imagine the boundaries of consciousness to be sealed, we can't really make any progress in higher development. The reason is simple: even the most rudimentary glimpses in the higher realms reveal that thoughts and feelings exist in shared realms, just like sensations and will exist in relation to the shared physical world. These are really like spectrum bands of the same one reality. It's only a materialistic belief, which imagines that we have common ground in the world of will but thoughts and feelings are only personal protrusions on top of that shared world.
