The source of the 'Hard Problem of Consciousness'

[LukeJTM]

I think another question we can ask to penetrate a bit deeper into the cause is, why is it so difficult for people to notice (and remember) the role of their own first-person conceptual activity when observing the world? After all, Steiner is simply bringing our attention to something very intimate and verifiable to our experience. Perhaps your experience of reading PoF was similar to mine - I wondered, 'how did I miss this reality for so long?' So there is clearly something within our soul-life which actively works towards keeping us in the dark about this integral spiritual activity which should otherwise be obvious to anyone paying close attention to how they make sense of the world.

Thanks for moving my post into a better room.

Yes, I must admit that reading PoF was a bit confusing at first because I didn't realize, initially, that a lot of what Steiner wrote in the book was based on his first person observations of his inner life, even though it literally hints that in the book's subtitle! I think it is just the mode of thinking I came to expect from philosophy and science that caused my confusion. I do like the approach he took, which is certainly a refreshing change from the orthodox ways.

I definitely think one factor keeping us in the dark about the depths of inner life is the way Western tends to function now. There is a lot of sources of entertainment and things causing sensory overload, such as screens, video games, or nonsense like celebrity gossip, invasive advertisements, etc. Of course there is nothing wrong with simply watching a film, or playing a computer game, my point is that it is often too easy to spend too much time on these activities, leaving no time spent on inner life. Workaholic lifestyles is another factor I think, because people can be so focused on surviving that there isn't always the right space for focusing on their inner life and some kind of spiritual practice that works for them.

But you seem to be saying that there are even deeper forces underneath all those complicated factors, I think you are trying to say that there are spirits that influence human evolution on a bigger scale. But I don't have much more to comment on that because I am not too knowledgeable on it.

It seems to be the case that the abstract mode of thinking/seeking knowledge is simply laying a groundwork for the next stage of human evolution. What do you think of that?

[Stranger]

I think everyone here grasps that much. I intended the post to look more deeply into this, and/or other connected factors that give rise to these "hard problems".

There is an undeniable experimental fact: the presence of our conscious phenomenal experience here and now. Any conceptual model of reality that assumes the existence of some other more fundamental level of reality that gives rise to the conscious experience immediately faces the "hard problem" of needing to explain how such "brute emergence" occurs and how it can be explained (how conscious experience can arise from something that is not of the nature of conscious experience?). The only ontology free form such "hard problem" is the one where the conscious experience itself is the most fundamental reality.

Regarding the mystical reductionism. Perhaps it is more useful to focus on HOW everything is one? And, trying to cultivate oneness in practice (for ex. meditation) could be useful? Do you have any thoughts on that?

If the conscious experience itself is the most fundamental reality, then consciousness is all there ever is, where the word "consciousness" is a linguistic pointer to the fact of our inner first-person experience of the presence of this very ability to create and be aware of conscious phenomena. All our thoughts, ideas, percepts, feelings, will gestures are only movements and forms of the same consciousness (the same fundamental ability to have conscious experiences), and we all share this same ability, and so there is oneness in all reality sharing the same consciousness. We all can directly experientially recognize and know this consciousness because we can self-reflect and experientially and directly know ourselves as consciousness, thereby we can experientially recognize the fundamental unity of all reality sharing the same consciousness.

The best way to do it is in meditation or other concentrated practices, because during our busy daytime activities it is hard to concentrate on this realization. The difficulty is that we habitually identify ourselves with our human person with our body and personality (what we call "me"). Realizing ourselves as one consciousness requires transcending this identification with the sense of "me".

[Federica]

Hi Luke! I haven't read your post yet - I'm writing to say: Welcome, and that you are undoubtedly in the right room (well, yes, I have read your P.S.)

Thanks, Federica. I originally posted it in a different room, but AshvinP said he moved it to general.

Hi Luke - Yes, I think the idea is that both rooms are appropriate, but in this one we are free to digress in any possible ways from the initial topic, and recently we have only been discussing in this way. So I guess it's good that you are here with us rather than isolated in another room that has little to no activity these days.


Regarding your initial post, it's refreshing and interesting to see how a new member of the forum expresses the ideas contained in The Philosophy of Freedom (PoF)! We have all our specific levels of understanding of those ideas, our preferred vocabulary to word them, and our individual perspectives, and all contribute in unique ways to develop or refine understanding, not only of each other's views, but also (at least for me) of the reality itself, that we are discussing and experiencing. So it's great that you come in bringing your personal viewpoint on Steiner's epistemology.


In this respect, it might be a matter of simply synchronizing vocabulary, but I was having the following reflections:

The way to inner freedom is using introspection or meditation, becoming conscious of what is unconscious within ourselves (which is basically depth psychology).

I also understand PoF's way to freedom in terms of introspection and meditation (various types of thinking activity) however I think this is different from depth psychology, in that freedom according to Steiner is gained through the act and practice of self-exertion and self-development of our thinking (spiritual) 'muscles' rather than through an attempt to explore and verify a theory about how our psychological buildup happens, from birth, through childhood, to adulthood, as in Freud's conception, for instance. What do you think?

Steiner tried to demonstrate that knowledge is gained in two core ways: perception (e.g. sensory observation) and concept (e.g. the ideas we have about objects in the sense-world)

Here I would comment that sensory observations (we could discuss further what we exactly mean by that ) and concepts are, rather than two ways to gain knowledge, two moments of a unitary cognitive process. Personally I found this short essay (largely discussed in the thread linked below) very useful in expanding understanding of this process. If you ever have the opportunity, I would be interested in your comments on it:


viewtopic.php?t=899

[AshvinP]

I think another question we can ask to penetrate a bit deeper into the cause is, why is it so difficult for people to notice (and remember) the role of their own first-person conceptual activity when observing the world? After all, Steiner is simply bringing our attention to something very intimate and verifiable to our experience. Perhaps your experience of reading PoF was similar to mine - I wondered, 'how did I miss this reality for so long?' So there is clearly something within our soul-life which actively works towards keeping us in the dark about this integral spiritual activity which should otherwise be obvious to anyone paying close attention to how they make sense of the world.

Thanks for moving my post into a better room.

Yes, I must admit that reading PoF was a bit confusing at first because I didn't realize, initially, that a lot of what Steiner wrote in the book was based on his first person observations of his inner life, even though it literally hints that in the book's subtitle! I think it is just the mode of thinking I came to expect from philosophy and science that caused my confusion. I do like the approach he took, which is certainly a refreshing change from the orthodox ways.

I definitely think one factor keeping us in the dark about the depths of inner life is the way Western tends to function now. There is a lot of sources of entertainment and things causing sensory overload, such as screens, video games, or nonsense like celebrity gossip, invasive advertisements, etc. Of course there is nothing wrong with simply watching a film, or playing a computer game, my point is that it is often too easy to spend too much time on these activities, leaving no time spent on inner life. Workaholic lifestyles is another factor I think, because people can be so focused on surviving that there isn't always the right space for focusing on their inner life and some kind of spiritual practice that works for them.

But you seem to be saying that there are even deeper forces underneath all those complicated factors, I think you are trying to say that there are spirits that influence human evolution on a bigger scale. But I don't have much more to comment on that because I am not too knowledgeable on it.

It seems to be the case that the abstract mode of thinking/seeking knowledge is simply laying a groundwork for the next stage of human evolution. What do you think of that?

Luke,

Indeed there are spirits tied to everything. We could say every morsel of food we eat is connected with the activity of spiritual beings. Some of these are referred to as 'spirits of darkness', to the extent they distract us from high Cosmic ideals and entrench us further in personalized Earthly interests. It's interesting that alcohol is commonly referred to as 'spirits', which is a remant of more ancient knowledge which was well aware of the spiritual forces in nature. Obviously alcohol weakens our will and ego-consciousness, driving us into a more animalistic state. So we can point to many interwoven developments of body-soul-spirit over the last 2,500 years or so which has brought us to the point of extreme separation from consciousness of the spritual worlds and activity which live in our inner life of thinking, feeling, and will. Hence we saw the rise of nominalism, rationalism/dualism, Kantian idealism, materialism, modern mysticism. These all come from the underlying spiritual root, in which we blot out consciousnses of our ongoing activity of perception-cognition by focusing only on the finished content of that activity.

But as you point out, all these developments serve critical purposes in the spiritual evolution of humanity. Generally that relates to developing our inner thinking freedom so we can voluntarily reattune ourselves as individuals and collectives with the progressive Cosmic rhythms. As Steiner puts it in PoF, the World Content can freely become our Thought-Content and we can thereby develop moral imagination. So that is another reason to be wary of mystical reductionism, which generally loses sight of this overarching evolutionary process and thereby reduces the Earthly/physical plane and our intellectual capacity to mere illusion and something to be shunned or compartmentalized into an orthogonal domain of life which has little to do with spiritual enlightenment. That is not the case at all on the path of modern initiation. Instead, we seek to work through the ego-conscious intellect and the Earthly plane to earn our spiritual degrees of freedom and bring back the fruits to others (in which the intellect clearly plays a critical bridging role), thereby spiritualizing the World in progressive stages.

I think it's clear that this propsect is subconsciously pushed away by the reductionists, material and mystical, because, after all, who really wants to also become responsible for the World along with their spiritual enlightenment? It's very interesting how people generally jump from one reductionism to another to another, at various stages of life. Usually, if we are interested in thinking about these things at all, it starts with the default material-perceptual reductionism. But then we jump into a mystical, religious, or philosophically idealistic reductionism, depending on our circumstances. All the while, we point out how the camp we just jumped from is silly, stupid, deluded, etc. The places we haven't yet jumped to are superstitious or unknowable or something similar. We want Reality to reduce to our current perceptions and thoughts, whatever those happen to be at any given stage of our development, because that means we are exactly where we need to be for a comprehensive understanding and little further effort is required.

It's interesting because, as you are aware, and referred to in your comment to Cleric, there are subtle bodies which weave us more into the Cosmic life of ideational activity than the dense atomized body we normally perceive, which appears to connect us only to a limited aperture of Earthly happenings. Through esoteric science, we know there is only One being in the entire Cosmos who possesses all the vehicles which connect the dense body right through to the 'right hand' of the Father (Absolute Spirit), thereby building the true gradient between Earth and Cosmos (Heaven). That is the Christ being after his incarnation. So, if we really let such things sink into our minds and hearts, we begin to discern that the path forward for human evolution becomes imitatio Christi - we can participate in the concrete realization of this Earthly to Cosmic gradient which has been established through his sacrifice. That discernment is really what the next step of our spiritual evolution entails.

[Stranger]

Instead, we seek to work through the ego-conscious intellect and the Earthly plane to earn our spiritual degrees of freedom and bring back the fruits to others (in which the intellect clearly plays a critical bridging role), thereby spiritualizing the World in progressive stages.

The problem with trying to overcome reductionism through the ego-conscious intellect is that the ego-conscious intellect can only perceive and cognize the World dualistically and unable to grasp and experience it wholistically as Oneness, which means that it is destined to remain in its own version of reductionism by reducing the wholeness of Reality only to either its perceptual World Content or, at best, the Thought-Content, and disregarding the Oneness that is responsible for creating and experiencing this content. The ultimate transcendence of reductionism consists in embracing the World Thought-Content together with and inseparable from the Oneness that creates and experiences this content. However, such transcendence is not achievable as long as we approach it through the ego-conscious intellect (exactly for the reason stated in the first sentence above).

We still have to approach it through evolutionary process, and one of the inevitable stages of this evolution is the ego-conscious intellect which we cannot just skip over. For the vast majority of humanity, the evolution through the ego-conscious intellect and Earthly plane will remain the main path for a long time ahead, and so, we indeed need to learn how to "earn our spiritual degrees of freedom and bring back the fruits to others (in which the intellect clearly plays a critical bridging role), thereby spiritualizing the World in progressive stages". But we should not fool ourselves with the hope that we can become fully free of reductionism while remaining within the limits of the ego-conscious intellect, because our perception of reality will inevitably remain to some degree reductionistic until at some point we become able to transcend the ego-conscious intellect.

[Federica]

The problem with trying to overcome reductionism through the ego-conscious intellect is...

But we should not fool ourselves with the hope that we can become fully free of reductionism while remaining within the limits of the ego-conscious intellect, because our perception of reality will inevitably remain to some degree reductionistic until at some point we become able to transcend the ego-conscious intellect.

"Through" only means "through". It doesn't mean "remaining within the limits of". Of course "through" leads to "transcend".

So I don't see any problems here.

[Cleric K]

The problem with trying to overcome reductionism through the ego-conscious intellect is that the ego-conscious intellect can only perceive and cognize the World dualistically and unable to grasp and experience it wholistically as Oneness, which means that it is destined to remain in its own version of reductionism, reducing the wholeness of Reality only to its perceptual World Content or, at best, the Thought-Content, and disregarding the Oneness that is responsible for creating and experiencing this content. The ultimate transcendence of reductionism consists in embracing the World Thought-Content together with and inseparable from the Oneness that creates and experiences this content. However, such transcendence is not achievable as long as we approach it through ego-conscious intellect (exactly for the reason stated in the first sentence above).

We still have to approach it through evolutionary process, and one of the inevitable stages of this evolution is the ego-conscious intellect which we cannot just skip over. For the vast majority of humanity, the evolution through the ego-conscious intellect and Earthly plane will remain the main path for a long time ahead, and so, we indeed need to learn how to "earn our spiritual degrees of freedom and bring back the fruits to others (in which the intellect clearly plays a critical bridging role), thereby spiritualizing the World in progressive stages". But we should not fool ourselves with the hope that we can become fully free of reductionism while remaining within the limits of the ego-conscious intellect, because our perception of reality will inevitably remain to some degree reductionistic until at some point we become able to transcend the ego-conscious intellect.

Eugene, I believe there's misunderstanding of the word 'through' here. In your reading it is as if the intellectual ego through its arrangements of thoughts will solve the Cosmic puzzle. But this is not what is meant with that word. 'Through' means that there are forces concealed within the activity of the intellectual ego, which are experienced only in a quite rigid manner within the discrete intellectual trains of thought.

An analogy has been used many times: magnetic field and iron filings. Our ordinary thoughts feel like the latter. In our age, where the intellectual soul is still dominant, people still think instinctively, dimly steering through meaning and feeling like they arrange patterns of iron thought-particles. Now we're at a place where the development of the spiritual soul is already in progress. One of the characteristics of this higher level of cognitive being is that we become more and more self aware as a spiritual being that bends the configuration spaces of intellectual thinking. In certain sense the spiritual force concealed in ordinary thinking is liberated from its discrete forms and fills our whole inner world. Now we begin to feel ourselves as the meaningful will that acts as 'lines of force' along which ordinary thoughts are usually arranged.

'Through' means that we can find this spiritual force only by more intimate experience of our intellectual thinking since it is already what animates it, even if we're not yet self-conscious at that level. That's why the appropriate method of meditation for our age goes through concentration of thinking. This concentration doesn't aim to lock us forever in some thought-form but only to stabilize a thought-form which gradually allows us to become more sensitive of the spiritual force that supports it. It's like our intellectual thoughts are the rough tree bark. As long as we simply move along the patterns of the bark, we don't yet grasp the underlying forces. It's also crucially important that simply accepting that we're inseparable and One with the phenomena of consciousness (bark patterns) doesn't lead us too far either. Through concentration of our intellectual activity, we gradually begin to sense the unsuspected currents of our higher being that energize it, they are like the sap that moves through the tree and accrete the hard materials. These are the currents of our soul body, our deeper drives, sympathies, antipathies and so on, but now not simply as feelings but as creative cognitive currents. We can never reach that deeper spiritual activity by simply trying to feel that we're already one with it, simply because this kind of activity is nowhere to be found in our normal cognition. Normally we can imagine to be One only with things that are at least marginally present in our consciousness (various conscious phenomena, no matter how elusive). But in the case of higher spiritual activity we have something that is hidden, concealed within our intellectual thought, as electricity is concealed in the electric wires and elements. Thus we don't even know what we should imagine to be One with.

So there it is. 'Through' means not by arranging more spiritual and beautiful patterns of iron filings alone but through the forces that animate the intellect, even though we're not in the least conscious of them today without the necessary development. We should take a thought and see it like a rough nut. Through concentration we strive to gain consciousness of its living nucleus. Here we should be vigilant about a common pitfall. When we concentrate on a thought we might be tempted to imagine that, just as a nut, we already encompass its entirety. That our consciousness already contains whatever is inside it and we just need to crack open it. As said so many times, this simply makes us feel that we already encompass all reality from its outer periphery and it is a matter of working out the details in the interior volume. Yet we need quite polar attitude in our meditation. When we concentrate on the thought-image we shouldn't expect that our higher spiritual being will pop out of it. That force is not there. We should rather conceive that everything in our consciousness is a kind of outer bark. The inner essence actually is nowhere to be found within our consciousness. It is the force that supports our concentration and it enters consciousness from a direction that is, so to speak, orthogonal to anything we can normally imagine. That's why we need this disposition of openness, that the higher spiritual being must impregnate our consciousness from without, from directions unimaginable. That's why we need this trust and prayer to the Divine. Only in this way we can accommodate something completely new, something that we can't presently find as something within consciousness with which we can decide to feel One.

7 Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. 8 The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

[Stranger]

'Through' means that we can find this spiritual force only by more intimate experience of our intellectual thinking since it is already what animates it, even if we're not yet self-conscious at that level. That's why the appropriate method of meditation for our age goes through concentration of thinking. This concentration doesn't aim to lock us forever in some thought-form but only to stabilize a thought-form which gradually allows us to become more sensitive of the spiritual force that supports it.

Yes, as a transitional process, we have to do it "through" the ego-consciousness by more intimately introspecting into it until we eventually transcend it, as Federica said, "Of course "through" leads to "transcend". But, as long as we remain within the framework of the ego-consciousness, we will inevitably also experience the world "through" the filtering of the ego-consciousness which will inevitably remain reductionistic.

[Federica]

But, as long as we remain within the framework of the ego-consciousness, we will inevitably also experience the world "through" the filtering of the ego-consciousness which will inevitably remain reductionistic.

I believe you are tending to reinstate a hard threshold that yourself have already worked through, and made souple, in the progression of your recent exchanges with Cleric, which could be described as Cleric did in the recent "bycicle wheel" post:

I'm really happy the image made sense (even though it can never be the full picture). Maybe it elucidates from another angle the milestone we reached with Eugene - that complete Oneness is at the perimeter at infinity, yet as soon as we have manifested stream of existence through time, a being's perspective already finds itself in certain 'phase relations' with other beings. These relations are much more symphonic in the higher strata but can become dissonant when the relations go out of phase in the more differentiated strata. It's important to keep in mind that instead of the perimeter we can think also of a center (like the Deep MAL picture). In both cases we deal with symbols so we can't expect that it is either one or the other. This however speaks to our deep intuition that the Divine One is both the Center and the Periphery (even if in purely geometric sense it seems contradictory). We have the Great Poles once again, in between which all exploration of differentiated potential manifests. Through all ages this mystery has been encoded with the simple occult symbol of a circle with a dot in the center.

[Federica]

Since this forum also is about Bernardo Kastrup, his idealism does seem guilty of using the idealist reductionism you are speaking of. I've noticed that his model, generally, doesn't seem much different from materialism in terms of how it functions. Because, he basically posits some blind Will force that creates the physical world, as well as experiences (it seems to function the same as blind matter honestly), and that our minds are something 'dissociated' from the cosmic mind until we die...not much different from how materialists consider minds to be something totally private or isolated from everything else, except that it's reduced to some 'dissociative boundary' rather than brain chemistry. And so on.

I wish I had this sort of clarity about BK's model when I arrived here! (through my interest in BK's philosophy)
So well expressed.