1 & 2 - It is only Thinking which is without a doubt. You do not experience the meaning of any of the word-concepts written above without Thinking. There is no experience without meaning derived from Thinking. I am not going to give you a hard time about this misconception, because many mystical thinkers, some on this forum, also fail to notice that simple fact of experience and then come to deny the "ego" or "thinker" as you are. Even BK does that to a certain extent. I am now convinced that it is precisely because this fact is so simple and obvious that so many people fail to take notice of it. Thinking is so automatic today it has become like breathing or blood circulating - we simply don't notice it happening. Owen Barfield says, "the obvious is the most difficult thing of all to point out to someone who has genuinely lost sight of it."stratos wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 10:57 amFirstly, only conscious activity is without a doubt. Thinking is not. Thinking, as interpreted to be a sign of the activity of a supposed thinker behind the experience, of an ego that produces or manipulates thoughts, is always doubtful. The Cartesian "i think therefore i am" is not undeniable, as it presupposes something that it is not there: the entity of an ego that does the thinking. The actuality of experience and the undeniable statement therefore is "thinking, therefore thinking". Whenever you are lost in thoughts, you can always doubt. The certainty lies in the phenomenal character of experience, not in it's interpretation. And relaying on thinking will forever keep this fact of experience out of your reach. That's why meditation is not about thinking. But ok.
Secondly, and most important, why rocks or robots don't have consciousness and humans do? This is the hard problem, and i didn't see it addressing it in any way.
We have genuinely lost sight of this fact in the modern age because of thinkers like Descartes and Kant (not only them and not their individual personalities, but the forces living within their ideas). The former divided mind from matter and therefore made "mind" a strictly personal affair. The ancients would have said, "we think, therefore we are", or "the Spirit thinks, therefore it is". By "ancients", I mean nearly everyone prior to the 15th century. Kant then assumed Descartes' dualism and isolation of mind when deriving his divide between the noumenal and the phenomenal. I am assuming you know what these philosophical terms are referring to since you used them. The question, "why do rocks or robots not have consciousness?" is entirely a product of those unexamined assumptions.
You are assuming a non-existent perspective on the world, where you stand apart from the rocks, the robots, and yourself, and then judge which ones have consciousness and which ones do not. That is the non-existent perspective all of modern science (and much of philosophy) has used to derive its conclusions. We must distinguish between scientific data/results and conclusions here - the former is valid in so far as the observations and experiments were carried out carefully, the latter come from analyzing the results with all of those flawed assumptions. Science so far has not answered this question, because it does not access the inner life of anything other than humans to run experiments. Everything we know from modern science is from the human perspective, including what we presume to know about the experience-cognition of non-humans.
It is undeniable that you and I have qualitative experience and that we only know those qualities by Thinking. To exist is to be known and to be known is to be perceived-experienced. We must impose all sorts of assumptions and invent all sorts of hypothetical scenarios and non-existent perspectives to abstractly convince ourselves there is no substantial reality to that experience-knowing. It is the greatest magic trick of all time that we have blinded ourselves to that which is most immanently and ceaselessly present to our existence in every moment we are aware of that existence. Yet I doubt anyone is truly convinced beyond the level of abstract intellect... at least not yet, because we still go about in society acting as if everyone has substantial inner life behind their outer appearance. But that could change if we keep heading in the mechanistic direction we are heading in.