(Un)consciousness of breathing?

[mincale]

Hi all,

Hope you can help me understand something.

In Bernardo's Analytic Idealism Course he mentions situations in which we don't experience our breathing because we're focused on something else. He uses this example to draw a distinction between consciousness and meta-consciousness. He says that in those situations we are conscious of our breathing but we're not meta-conscious of it. Or in simple terms, we're experiencing breathing but we don't know that we are doing it (which is like 99% of our daily life, unless we force ourselves).

Therefore I'm wondering: can I ever truly say that I was conscious of my breathing if I wasn't meta-conscious of it? For all I know, unless I direct my attention to my breathing, breathing isn't an experience. It is probably happening, but because my attention isn't there, then nobody's conscious of it. So my unconscious breathing might as well have not even been there, because it couldn't be reported (just like with the tree falling in the forest). So if it wasn't anyone's experience (not mine at least), it seems I am not entitled to say there was consciousness of breathing, because nobody truly experienced that. The only way for me to admit my "un-conscious" breathing is through inference, or by referring to the past, which is already referring to thought instead of consciousness.

So I'm wondering: is it possible that with analytic idealism we exchange one "hard problem" for another? Instead of "how does matter create subjective experience", are we now faced with the impossibility of proving the existence of consciousness without meta-consciousness? Can we demonstrate pure consciousness (without the "meta" aspect) without referring to the possible experience of plants or dogs? Does one need a mystical experience for that? Is this the place where logic becomes circular?

I guess Bernardo meant that the one who's actually conscious of "unconscious" breathing is the Mind At Large? But then again, if it cannot be reported to self or others, can we truly state that any consciousness was there? Isn't this in itself an inference?

Thanks in advance for all your responses.
 
 

[AshvinP]

Hi all,

Hope you can help me understand something.

In Bernardo's Analytic Idealism Course he mentions situations in which we don't experience our breathing because we're focused on something else. He uses this example to draw a distinction between consciousness and meta-consciousness. He says that in those situations we are conscious of our breathing but we're not meta-conscious of it. Or in simple terms, we're experiencing breathing but we don't know that we are doing it (which is like 99% of our daily life, unless we force ourselves).

Therefore I'm wondering: can I ever truly say that I was conscious of my breathing if I wasn't meta-conscious of it? For all I know, unless I direct my attention to my breathing, breathing isn't an experience. It is probably happening, but because my attention isn't there, then nobody's conscious of it. So my unconscious breathing might as well have not even been there, because it couldn't be reported (just like with the tree falling in the forest). So if it wasn't anyone's experience (not mine at least), it seems I am not entitled to say there was consciousness of breathing, because nobody truly experienced that. The only way for me to admit my "un-conscious" breathing is through inference, or by referring to the past, which is already referring to thought instead of consciousness.

So I'm wondering: is it possible that with analytic idealism we exchange one "hard problem" for another? Instead of "how does matter create subjective experience", are we now faced with the impossibility of proving the existence of consciousness without meta-consciousness? Can we demonstrate pure consciousness (without the "meta" aspect) without referring to the possible experience of plants or dogs? Does one need a mystical experience for that? Is this the place where logic becomes circular?

I guess Bernardo meant that the one who's actually conscious of "unconscious" breathing is the Mind At Large? But then again, if it cannot be reported to self or others, can we truly state that any consciousness was there? Isn't this in itself an inference?

Thanks in advance for all your responses.
 
 

I think you have a great point here and, unfortunately, I do not think BK's idealist framework actually addresses it in any satisfactory manner. His response would likely be, "we are assuming there is only consciousness i.e. experience because it satisfies various philosophical criteria the most effectively, and therefore all occurrences you are not aware of must still be experienced." It the sort of response that is just barely coherent and specific enough to be trivially true and convince most people not to dwell on the question any longer. That is a huge mistake IMO. We should continue dwelling with these and similar questions because there is much more about essential relations we can learn from that process.

By dwelling on it more we find an essential role of our highest Thinking activities (imaginative, inspired, intuitive) - allowing us to discover experiential meaning that is always present yet rarely noticed. We then realize that it does not matter whether we can say with certainty that your breathing (or anything else) was occurring before you became aware of it, because, to the best of your knowledge (now and forever), it is as if your breathing was occurring before you became aware of it. That is the only possibility which makes sense of your experience of ideal relations in general. I refer to Cleric's illustration below so often because it was very helpful for me. It is important to remember that only in our Thinking do we find this harmony between phenomenal and reflective consciousness. Unfortunately, BK (like Schopenhauer) leaves this activity in his blind spot.

To give a simplified example, if I think about 1 and 2, then 4 and 5, does this mean that 3 doesn't exist until it is experienced? From experiential perspective every idea exists for me only when I experience it. But still, the relation between 2 and 4 is such that they can only be what they are if there's 3 in between. That's why I've always said (when you bring the Platonism argument) that it's irrelevant to me to fantasize some abstract container for ideas, which I can never experience in its purity. The important thing is that when I discover 3, nothing really changes for 1,2,4,5 - they are only complemented, the ideal picture becomes more complete. Even if 3 was never discovered, the relation between the above numbers would be as if 3 exists. This would be different if after the discovery of 3 all other numbers change relations. Then we would really have justification to speak of ideas being created. The act of creation of the idea has measurable effect and displaces all other ideas in some way. But as long as I discover ideas and beings, which only complement my own experiential ideal landscape, all talks about if these ideas and beings exist in 'pure form' before I experience them, is pointless.

[Ben Iscatus]

Hello mincale, yours is a thoughtful question. I'd answer it by saying that if you regard animals as conscious, because they experience, then you can regard non-metacognitive experience -instinctive life- in humans as conscious too.

[AshvinP]

Hello mincale, yours is a thoughtful question. I'd answer it by saying that if you regard animals as conscious, because they experience, then you can regard non-metacognitive experience -instinctive life- in humans as conscious too.

But that's the problem - we don't know whether we can regard animals as conscious without meta-consciousness. I suspect that is why mincale said, "without referring to the possible experience of plants or dogs?" Ultimately these things can only be satisfactorily addressed from the human perspective and from the accessible experience of any given individual human. And if we don't realize that Thinking is itself a mode of experiencing-perceiving, a means of penetrating into the objective reality of psychic processes and their relations, the dynamic relations of conscious activity at all levels - sub-conscious, conscious, supra-conscious - then these things will never be satisfactorily answered. BK and some analytic idealism has made it much farther past the arbitrary boundaries and almost non-existent imagination of modern academia in philosophy and science, but eventually we must also realize that's a low bar to pass and start setting higher ones for ourselves.

[stratos]

Hi all,

Hope you can help me understand something...

Hi mincale. There is no meta-consiousnerss. You cannot be meta about consiousness. And either there is feeling or not. There is no experience in the present that it is missing but nonetheless felt without knowing it.You can forget the existanse of some past experiences, and you can recall the existanse of others, but experiencing unfelt experiencies... this is nonsense.

Plus, dogs have consioussness too.

[stratos]

Thinking is itself a mode of experiencing-perceiving, a means of penetrating into the objective reality of psychic processes and their relations, the dynamic relations of conscious activity at all levels - sub-conscious, conscious, supra-conscious - then these things will never be satisfactorily answered.

Two things, firstly, thinking cannot penetrate to the reality of psychic processes, for example cannot penetrate to thinking itself, as you cannot investigate the glasses you are wearing by already wearing them, and you have resort to consiounsess to do this. And secondly, there are no levels to consiousenss: it is either on or off.

[Ben Iscatus]

But that's the problem - we don't know whether we can regard animals as conscious without meta-consciousness. I suspect that is why mincale said, "without referring to the possible experience of plants or dogs?" Ultimately these things can only be satisfactorily addressed from the human perspective and from the accessible experience of any given individual human.

It's not a problem as I see it. Just as I believe other people have conscious inner life because they behave in a manner that suggests this is so (I'm not a solipsist), then I believe that a lot of animal behaviour demonstrates that they have conscious experience. Animals display many similarities with (and interactions with) conscious humans. But I do acknowledge it's possible that people lost in their own mental abstractions would not readily intuit that animals have consciousness.

[AshvinP]

Thinking is itself a mode of experiencing-perceiving, a means of penetrating into the objective reality of psychic processes and their relations, the dynamic relations of conscious activity at all levels - sub-conscious, conscious, supra-conscious - then these things will never be satisfactorily answered.

Two things, firstly, thinking cannot penetrate to the reality of psychic processes, for example cannot penetrate to thinking itself, as you cannot investigate the glasses you are wearing by already wearing them, and you have resort to consiounsess to do this. And secondly, there are no levels to consiousenss: it is either on or off.

Well, you are wrong on both counts. Thinking is precisely the activity which can penetrate into its own activity, but it requires a lot of patience and discipline - we will not study a set of philosophical propositions by abstract intellect and suddenly arrive at the essence of Thinking. It must be experienced by each individual for themselves. Although we can consider a basic fact and how it hints in the direction of this higher knowing - when you produce a thought-form of "triangle" from within, it is immediately united with its entire meaning. Unlike perception of all other forms, it does not refer you to anything outside its perception-meaning and your own ideating activity for the explanation of its existence - the noumenon and phenomenon are truly united. Your second point is also wrong by observation of simple fact - there are at least two 'levels' of consciousness nearly everyone experiences: waking consciousness and dreaming consciousness. There is third of non-dreaming sleeping consciousness, but we do not remember any of its content except for some sense of duration. If we fall asleep and have no dreams, we still sense that time has passed when we wake up. In reality, there are many more 'levels' of consciousness we can all experience, but the modern age has convinced most people to accept they don't exist, which is why they never discover them.

[AshvinP]

But that's the problem - we don't know whether we can regard animals as conscious without meta-consciousness. I suspect that is why mincale said, "without referring to the possible experience of plants or dogs?" Ultimately these things can only be satisfactorily addressed from the human perspective and from the accessible experience of any given individual human.

It's not a problem as I see it. Just as I believe other people have conscious inner life because they behave in a manner that suggests this is so (I'm not a solipsist), then I believe that a lot of animal behaviour demonstrates that they have conscious experience. Animals display many similarities with (and interactions with) conscious humans. But I do acknowledge it's possible that people lost in their own mental abstractions would not readily intuit that animals have consciousness.

There are several confusions here. We all agree that everyone, including animals, has conscious experience - the question is whether they can reflect on that conscious experience (meta-consciousness). There are many arguments which can be made for higher non-human animals, such as birds and monkeys and dolphins, which suggest that they do reflect, but then there are also arguments for why that is simply our biased assumption - a projection of our own reflecting activity onto them. It is theoretically possible we can merge into the perspective of non-human, but until then all of these things remain abstract speculations and those will never be satisfactory to a human asking questions. With human experience, however, we have a reference point shared by all in normal waking consciousness. What you are referring to with the word "intuit" above is a mode of human Thinking which allows us to actually share in another person's interior perspective. We are literally perceiving the world from these shared perspectives. But if we do not follow our intuition further and seek higher resolution, it will just consist of brief low resolution glimpses of those other perspectives and we will write most of them off as tangential to any "real" knowledge. We certainly will not develop it further to see what level of knowledge and meaning can actually be gained from going beyond mere abstract intellect.

[stratos]

Well, you are wrong on both counts. Thinking is precisely the activity which can penetrate into its own activity, but it requires a lot of patience and discipline - we will not study a set of philosophical propositions by abstract intellect and suddenly arrive at the essence of Thinking. It must be experienced by each individual for themselves. Although we can consider a basic fact and how it hints in the direction of this higher knowing - when you produce a thought-form of "triangle" from within, it is immediately united with its entire meaning. Unlike perception of all other forms, it does not refer you to anything outside its perception-meaning and your own ideating activity for the explanation of its existence - the noumenon and phenomenon are truly united. Your second point is also wrong by observation of simple fact - there are at least two 'levels' of consciousness nearly everyone experiences: waking consciousness and dreaming consciousness. There is third of non-dreaming sleeping consciousness, but we do not remember any of its content except for some sense of duration. If we fall asleep and have no dreams, we still sense that time has passed when we wake up. In reality, there are many more 'levels' of consciousness we can all experience, but the modern age has convinced most people to accept they don't exist, which is why they never discover them.

I didn't quite undersrtand your first point. What does it mean "from within" and what does it mean "you produce". Lets say, as you say, that an image of triangle arrises. How do we proceed from here and what is your conclusion? These exact illusions of "you" "producing" something "within", all these are illusions that cannot be investigated with thinking and are totaly hidden from it.

To the second point. What do you mean? Waking consiousness is EXACTLY as much of a consiousness as dreaming consiounsess, and there is ZERO degree of consiounsess difference between them...
As for the dreamless sleep, we don't know if there was consiousness or unconsiousness, and the after dreaming feel of duration might have nothing to do with actual experience. (for example unconscious processes in the body might keep tracking the time, and after sleep give rise to the feeling you mention).

The various experiencies have differences in content but they are all consiousness, be it dream, waking life or tripping.