Ok, awareness is not a concept. But how we think of it, what it is and how it works is a lot of concept. Trying to understand awareness form the human experience of awareness is like trying to understand fundamental particles from the apperance of a human being. And there is no combination problem of awareness as there is no difference between mind and and matter but merely two different perspectives. It is obvious that it can combine into all sorts of micro, meso and makro systems like atoms, human beings, ecosystems and galaxies.Eugene I wrote: ↑Sat Apr 10, 2021 10:27 pm The awareness is not a concept, it's the very experiential and existential fact of you having conscious experience right here and now. The problem with your approach is the same as Dennet's: you are ignoring the fundamental fact of the reality of the direct conscious experience. How relations and interactions can give rise to conscious experience if the ability of having such experience is not fundamental (i.e. if it is an epiphenomenon emerging from interactions)? If you deny a non-relational and non-emergent nature of the ability to have conscious experience (not the content of it, but the very ability and existence of it), you immediately run into the "hard problem of consciousness". If you accept a non-relational and non-emergent nature of such ability, then this is idealism which is to pose that the monistic prime is conscious by nature. In the latter case of course the content of conscious experience is always relational, but not the very "existence" of such experience.
I do realize of course the fundamental fact of conscious experience in existence. Its all there is, seen from within existence. But i belive existence is merely an aspect of an unrelational "awareness of awareness" that is not aware of anything and thus it just is itself. If you loop awareness on awareness it is no-thing. It is not finite, its not of this world, it is infinity and gives rise to the world.
As soon as being loops in on itself awareness becomes an awareness of something and thats the experience of beeing human. Being forgets a part of itself, only to know another part of itself. We only know what we experience but not what is experiencing. If one manages to loop the experience to experiencing one just is. At that moment there is total selfknowlage, noticing that there is nothing to know...
Relations and interactions do not give rise to conscious experience. Interaction is experiencing. Relations are experiencial states. There is no epiphenomenon emerging. There are relations evolving and thus creating all kinds of experiencial states and states of consciousness. So there is no hard problem.