2024-04-03, 09:56 PM
(2021-11-04, 11:27 AM)David001 Wrote: [ -> ]Isn't that just plain obfuscation?
You start with a world that contains no consciousness.
Then somehow this non-conscious world creates an idea (like teacups or radios or clocks have ideas perhaps) that it must be conscious (a lot more details about this step might help).
This idea is then received by another part of the non-conscious world, and voila - we have illusory consciousness!
The existence of an individual discrete consciousness (like we all experience) doesn't necessitate the existence of a self as western people think of the self.
This is the Buddhist perspective.
We are conscious distinct individuals. That consciousness exists in this life and continues through rebirth and karma (the consequences of one's actions) follows it through rebirth.
However that individual consciousness is just an impersonal process of cause and effect. You can see this operating in your own mind if you observe how one thought, emotion, impulse, or sensory experience, leads to another by association, or memory recall, or analysis, until something comes and changes the line of thinking. Different unconscious processes produce thoughts emotions impulses, sometimes they contradict each other, sometimes they work at cross purposes. You don't choose your emotions, you don't see how each individual thought is constructed - there would be infinite recursion if you could observe yourself constructing your thoughts. The feeling of being, the sense of being an observer, the feeling of having free will, the self image, etc also come from these unconscious processes they are not different from any other thought or feeling.
And if there were nothing to see there would be no consciousness of sight. Same for sound, taste, touch, bodily sensations, thoughts etc. Consciousness depends on the environment for its existence. You can't have consciousness without something to be conscious of.
It is like a wave in water. It is distinct, it has individuality, but you can't separate it from the water.
Consciousness exists as we experience it, it continues after the death of the body, but the self is not what we think it is. There isn't a thing that is a personal self, there are only impersonal phenomena that act like pixels to produce an image of a self.
And this does not change how we experience existence - whether we understand it or not we are having the experience we are having. You don't disappear or go unconscious if you change your opinion of what self is. You still experience consciousness as an individual in the world you are in. You still love and appreciate beauty. Does it matter that an individual brain cell functions according to impersonal natural law? Does it invalidate love and beauty?
https://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2023/12/do-b...-soul.html