AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Nov 29, 2021 2:45 am
This is the problem I keep trying to point to - you have gone from "I have no memories of dreamless sleep" to "
it is in principle not possible experimentally prove from the 1-st person experiential perspective that such state ever exists". You, BK, and JW are all making the exact
same leap from what is true of your current state of localized cognition, to declarations about the structure of
Reality itself. And, according to basic human psychology, the person who has set up this dualism never has any reason to keep asking questions and seeking answers about what can be known in the deep dreamless sleep, because they have declared it "not possible in principle". BK does the exact same thing and so is JW with his "energy which impedes the senses" abstraction. Ironically, JW's appropriate consistency when it comes to avoiding metaphysical assumptions leads him directly into modern materialistic science's abyss of "emptiness of emptiness"... everything in objective Reality is grey on grey without color. Why? Because he is still beholden to the same metaphysical assumption as BK and yourself - Kantian dualism.
"Unaware Idea" or "unaware Being" are as much abstraction and Kantian divide as "energy which impedes the senses" abstraction. By stating that the structure of reality is something that cannot be experienced in our 1-st person perspective experience (which means that it is experientially unknowable) is the same Kantian divide. The only way to avoid Kantian divide is to infer that reality fundamentally structured in exactly the same way we experience it from our 1-st person perspective. This does not mean that there may not be more deeper/higher level structures and beings, it only means that all of them are of the same essence - of the essence of conscious (aware) 1-st person experience, and therefore in principle (or in the future) knowable to us in our 1-st person experience (which closes the Kantian divide). But in such case there would be no such thing or state as "the absence of awareness", because such state is in principle impossible to experience form the 1-st person perspective.
But if you claim that it is possible to know a state of the absence of awareness (i.e. experiencing a state of the absence of experiencing), please explain how would that be in principle possible (without resorting to abstractions). That statement (a possibility of experiencing a state of the absence of experiencing) would be incompatible with Reason.
Eugene wrote:You said above that it is impossible to separate any meaning and its awareness (including the meaning of awareness itself), and that is true and can be verified by introspective meditation. But that simply means that they are experientially inseparable and we have no ground to assume that awareness can exist without meanings, as well as to assume that any meanings can exist without awareness.
The real question is, are they only inseperable or also identical? If we were referring to willing and feeling activities, then I think there is logical warrant to make
distinctions between those and thinking. But I see no such warrant for "awareness" and thinking.
Sure, but the same applies to the identity of meanings and experiences - they are inseparable, but that does not mean that they are identical. Their identity can only be an inference.
Basically, in our 1-st person experience meanings and awareness are inseparable, that's the experiential fact, but it does not tell us anything more than that. From here we can take a few (metaphysical) inferences:
1. They are inseparable because they are identical and are simply aspects of the same "entity"
2. They are only experienced simultaneously, but fundamentally separate and different essences. This would be a substance dualism ontology which is subject to interaction problem.
3. They are always experienced simultaneously, but one of them is emergent from the other. We now have two options:
3.1. Awareness is emergent from Meaning/Idea
3.1. Meaning/Idea is emergent from Awareness.
In 2.1 case we would be running into the "hard problem of consciousness", so not acceptable. Which means that we are left with only two options:
1. Awareness=Idea, or self-aware Idea
3.1Idea is emergent from Awareness.
Pick your favorite.