So, I've talked about consciousness and awareness. Is introspection something different? — T Clark

Well, I would describe it as the difference between biological consciousness and culturally produced self-consciousness.

So animals are certainly aware of the world in a direct or "extrospective" fashion. They are wordlessly plugged into the here and now in terms of how they are feeling, thinking and reacting.

Then humans have a speech-structured mind. Language is a machinery that allows us to step back and comment on the further fact that we are "selves" doing all these things. Language creates a distance from just the doing and so makes the doing reportable, controllable, memorable, interpretable.

The real mystery of consciousness is the biological one - why brain activity would feel like something. Then self-consciousness is just a linguistic trick. Language allows us to develop the habit of turning our attention inwards on the flow of action, seeing it all as something happening to a self. Then responding to that meta-view in terms of thoughts, feelings and actions.

Isn't the essence of self-awareness an ability to see things we have not been taught to see? Maybe I don't mean "self-awareness." Maybe I mean "enlightenment." Otherwise, how do we get beyond our personal and cultural illusions? — T Clark

Talk about enlightenment or higher states or whatever would be more cultural framing. Every religion - as a cultural practice - has to invent a suitable view of what it might mean to have a certain kind of mind. And then that is what we would learn in that culture. It would become the social script to which we would try to live up to.

So if you are Catholic, you will look inside and see your beastly self in conflict with your purer spirit. You will be trying hard to feel guilt at the right things. You will be looking for evidence of sinful desires. Your introspecting may become very focused on a particular social role it has to play.

And just the same if you are brought up in a completely different culture - like say Buddhism - where a different model of your internal workings will become the lens through which you see yourself.

And yet again if you are a modern neoliberal aetheist, or a wet PoMO liberal.

All cultures promote some model of how your mind ought to be inside. You learn those concepts and apply them in a way to gain some proper control over this introspecting "self".

I'm standing in a dark room. In front of me, maybe on a stage, is a cloud that fills the whole front of the room. — T Clark

Yeah, that does sound interestingly different from me. There is the same sense of a peripheral feel. But I guess I conceptualise it more in terms of the neuroscientific models I know. So I am quite aware of switching between a focused goal-pursuing left brain attentional state and an open vigilant right brain one. There is a different feeling when you are still searching for the connecting elements versus when you are working through the details of a path that you already expect to fit together.

So maybe you are talking about the same general thing, but conceptualising it in metaphors, like a room with a glowing cloud before you. My conceptualising doesn't have that habit of imagery, but I do conceptualise it in terms of a familiar brain process.

She told me she had just realized she is one of those people who have no mind's eye. It is very difficult for her to see images of even things and people she knows very well. — T Clark

Yep. It seems like a Bell curve distribution. So 10% of people are highly visual, 10% are surprisingly lacking in such imagery.

Two points. The difference is easy to explain as it relates to how far down the visual hierarchy you can push an idea so that it becomes fleshed out in concrete detail. The high level impression of a giraffe would be highly abstract - hazy. But if we focus for half a second, we can generate some particular giraffe experience that is "painted" across the primary visual cortex. Although people vary in how easy they can do that.

Then also, the visual pathways are strongly divided into separate object recognition and spatial relations pathways. So you can be highly visual in terms of one and not the other. One path would generate the concrete pictures of actual scenes. The other would generate a "concrete" sense of some set of objectless spatial relations or transformations. So if you are good as an engineer, its important to flip shapes around in your mind and really feel how the spaces fit together, or put different forces on each other.

Well, it is odd. Actually, it's terrible, horrifying. Of course there were feelings, I was just not aware of them. Did you ever go to the bathroom in a public toilet and have trouble peeing because others were around? Imagine if you felt that same panic every time you were with other people and might have to provide an appropriate emotional response. — T Clark

So it sounds like you just didn't have the "right" training in how to conceptualise that part of your experience.

If you are good at compartmentalising your thoughts - another attentional skill - then it is easy to make that kind of disconnect a habit.

One of the things you have to teach young kids is to recognise their emotions. They are quite confused until they have learnt some concepts that explain their rapidly changing shifts in state. After that, they can start to regulate and feel in more socially accepted ways.

If they see someone get hurt, what should the feel? Physiologically they may feel a natural aversion, an anxiety, an urge to move away or even laugh. We want to teach them instead to feel a suitable empathy. Their fluttering nerves and shock can be reframed as being natural to wanting to help rather than being natural to wanting to flee.

Arousal is just arousal. Then we learn to frame it in a socially correct fashion.

I come back to what I asked before - isn't it possible, even if only for Buddha, to go beyond that cultural conceptual structure. — T Clark

Well my answer is only going to be that Buddhism is just another form of social mind-control. It is a model of how to be a self that is promoted within a certain culture as it is pro-social for that culture. It serves that society's organisational interests.

But then I'm also arguing that we are only ever creatures of our cultures. So it is not a bad thing in itself that we are culturally programmed to have a particular view of our "selves".

And some cultures of "self" may be better than others in long-run evolutionary terms.

So there is no going beyond some kind of conceptual structure. There isn't any truth to be found in being a human that isn't somehow a reflection of a culture.

Yet we certainly these days can make some choices about the cultural framings we allow ourselves to be most influenced by.

This understanding is explicit in Indian traditions as they have a long history of renunciation. Those who dwell 'in the forest' are understood to be outside social structures; this is what 'the forest' represents in that cultural context. — Wayfarer

Yep. But I question the view by which being apart from society is in any way an improvement on the human condition.

If your culture is somehow bad or toxic, then you might want to escape its constraints. But you would still need some new culture within which to flourish.

This is why, for instance, there are teachings in Buddhist meditation on 'bare awareness', through which the student is trained to simply notice the habitual reactions and thought-formations that arise more or less automatically in the mind. That act of noticing is 'seeing how things truly are', which is the basic practice of liberating insight, insofar as to directly how reactive emotions occur is to lessen their hold. — Wayfarer

Again, I don't see this as a stepping up to anything, more a regression ... unless it is the unlearning of habits that allows for the learning of some new and more pro-social set of habits.

So as a social practice, I can see it may have merits. But as a theory of mind, it is quite wrong.

But the point I want to make is that we're not socially conditioned all the way down; we're the artefacts of something more than simply human culture. — Wayfarer

Alternatively, human nature is fundamentally a social construct and so humanity is quite concerned with "taming the beast within". It wants to put a distance between its cultural self and its biological roots.

So philosophy - east or west - makes sense in this context. It is the next step in breeding a detachment from "the beast within". It makes us more social in being more rational and less emotionally driven.

Letting go of "yourself" and "the world" is only a cultural injunction to transcend whatever biology that society wishes didn't dominate your thinking so much. And once you have been trained to let go like that, you can start to fully participate in a calm, rational, linguistic culture where all actions become pro-socially reasonable.

So it is just another cultural game - and one actually designed to strengthen culture's hold on your thought patterns.

Alternatively, human nature is fundamentally a social construct and so humanity is quite concerned with "taming the beast within". It wants to put a distance between its cultural self and its biological roots. — apokrisis

That’s what Freud says in ‘Civilsation and its Discontents’, but again, I see another dimension to human existence. But it’s certainly true that not everyone does. (Freud certainly didn’t.)

What about Plato's charioteer? Freud's romantic tripartite division of the soul has ancient roots.

Yeah but Freud set his sights too low.....actually I suppose that’s a kind of Freudian thing to say.... :-*

Do recall the account of the legendary meeting of Jung and Freud:

CARL JUNG'S relationship with Sigmund Freud was probably doomed from the start. They met in Vienna on March 3, 1907, after having corresponded for a year. Freud sought a gentile to champion his ''Jewish science.'' Jung yearned for an influential father figure; Freud anointed Jung ''his scientific 'son and heir.' '' In 1910, according to Jung's ''Memories, Dreams, Reflections,'' Freud made a request: ''Promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. . . . We must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.'' Against what, asked Jung. ''Against the black tide of mud . . . of occultism.''

Freud’s ‘black tide of mud’ extended to anything he designated as religious or spiritual. It’s a major reason he and Jung fell out.

It seems to me that the experience is awareness. At any point you are conscious, you are aware of something - you are experiencing something. What you are conscious/aware/experiencing is whatever your attention is focused on at the moment. It could be the words on this screen, the television show in the next room, or your own mental processes. We can even turn our awareness back on itself to be aware of being aware. How else can you say that you are aware of anything unless you are actually turning your awareness back on itself, kind of like a camera looking back at the monitor it is connected to. Saying that you are experiencing awareness, or that you are aware of your experience, is turning your awareness back on itself. It is an expression of knowledge - the knowledge of being aware of some thing.

Are you aware of your experience, or experiencing being aware? Does it make a difference? If not, then I would say that it would be simpler to say that you are aware of being aware.

Alternatively, human nature is fundamentally a social construct and so humanity is quite concerned with "taming the beast within". It wants to put a distance between its cultural self and its biological roots.

So philosophy - east or west - makes sense in this context. It is the next step in breeding a detachment from "the beast within". It makes us more social in being more rational and less emotionally driven. — apokrisis

If I'm not mistaken, human nature according to the Eastern social construct doesn't contain a "beast within." Rather, the true nature of sentient beings is that of emptiness, according to Eastern philosophy, and it is social constructs like the concept of self that obscure this nature.

Letting go of "yourself" and "the world" is only a cultural injunction to transcend whatever biology that society wishes didn't dominate your thinking so much. And once you have been trained to let go like that, you can start to fully participate in a calm, rational, linguistic culture where all actions become pro-socially reasonable.

So it is just another cultural game - and one actually designed to strengthen culture's hold on your thought patterns. — apokrisis

Generally speaking, religion is just another cultural game which binds groups in thought and purpose. Transcendence, which may or may not be achieved via a religious practice, isn't about transcending biology. It's about transcending the conceptual construct of self.

Transcendence, which may or may not be achieved via a religious practice, isn't about transcending biology. It's about transcending the conceptual construct of self. — praxis

(Y)

It's about transcending the conceptual construct of self. — praxis

What does that even mean - thinking that you are more than what you are - a delusion of grandeur?

Are you aware of your experience, or experiencing being aware? Does it make a difference? If not, then I would say that it would be simpler to say that you are aware of being aware. — Harry Hindu

In my experience, being aware is not the same thing as being aware of being aware.

Likewise, I believe that there was of course motion in dream images. Yet on closer examination, I realised that there is only a swirling sense of flow or zoom. The image itself was a static single frame with a sense of motion added. — apokrisis

Hi Apokrisis, I always enjoy reading your posts. Do you have any literature for this claim?

Language is required in order for us to become aware of some things. So, placing all awareness as prior to language is a mistake for it renders you unable to take proper account of the things which only language facilitates our awareness of.

Language is required in order for us to become aware of some things. So, placing all awareness as prior to language is a mistake for it renders you unable to take proper account of the things which only language facilitates our awareness of — creativesoul

I respectfully, and completely, disagree :)

Language is only required, in my opinion, when something needs to be communicated to another person ... because, when two people communicate, without language or another communication protocol, the two parties will not be able to agree on what is being said. This communication could be a sentence in Russian or just a smile or a kiss on the cheek.

However, if it is just you wanting to be aware of something, you don't need language at all. In fact, I would go so far as to say that language sometimes gets in the way of understanding something. When you label something as "tree" or "rock" or "elephant", you convince yourself that now, you understand whatever you are labeling. Do you mean to tell me that there is nothing more to a tree than the English word "tree" or the German word "Baum" ?

Labeling (i.e. language), often, is a reflection of our laziness to really understand something. It is necessary, but not always sufficient.

If I'm not mistaken, human nature according to the Eastern social construct doesn't contain a "beast within." Rather, the true nature of sentient beings is that of emptiness, according to Eastern philosophy, and it is social constructs like the concept of self that obscure this nature. — praxis

Yeah, you're right that the beast within is the Western view. If we are talking Buddhism in particular, that agrees with social constructionism in that it teaches that the self is an over-concrete illusion we hang on to.

So that part of the psychology I agree with. But where I disagree is then treating the social ground of this selfhood as also an illusion to be dissolved away.

My argument is that society and self form a complementary interaction. Each is busy producing the other. And together they make something more complexly developed.

It is natural and right that human existence is a balance of competitive and co-operative actions. There is nothing wrong about becoming individuated as a striving self, so long as there is then also the balance of the socially co-operative self. Whereas the Buddhist ambition would seem to be to dissolve both aspects of being human back into detached nothingness.

So for me, sentience is the delicate and complex balance - mastery over instability. Whereas the Buddhist view is that things that arise and become complexly individuated should return back to the undivided vagueness from whence they came.

Transcendence, which may or may not be achieved via a religious practice, isn't about transcending biology. It's about transcending the conceptual construct of self. — praxis

Well the question would seem to be what functional role does some set of cultural beliefs play in the flourishing of that society?

The Western model of mind has evolved to produce people with a striving and competitive mindset. To be individuated is the highest state of development.

But Eastern cultures were appropriate for their time and place. A stoic collectivism gives a different social dynamic. It puts the emphasis on the compassion and co-operation.

Either way, what matters is putting human biology in its place and allowing a rationalising culture to be in control of things. Culture comes to encode the behaviour that works. And culture produces a model of the ideal self as the way to shape up those habits in an individual. We learn to be self-regulating according to a general social script.

Do you have any literature for this claim? — JupiterJess

Thanks. One slightly mad yet really excellent collection of phenomenological descriptions of dreaming is Andreas Mavromatis's Hypnagogia.

But try it yourself. Next time you catch a dream, ask yourself if anything about each "frame" was in fact moving.

There is always a sense of moving, panning or zooming. But it is like the kind of giddy feeling we get when getting off a roundabout and the world still swirls as an after-effect.

In my experience, being aware is not the same thing as being aware of being aware. — T Clark

That wasn't my question. I wanted to know the difference between experiencing awareness and being aware of your experience.

And, how can you know that you are aware without being aware that you are aware? How do you know that you are aware? Your awareness (or your mental processes) are the focus of your awareness at the moment. What you are aware of at any moment is what your awareness if focused on in the moment, which could be your mother, music, or your mental processes.

What kind of knowledge do you acquire from experience as opposed to awareness?

Language is required in order for us to become aware of some things. So, placing all awareness as prior to language is a mistake for it renders you unable to take proper account of the things which only language facilitates our awareness of
— creativesoul

I respectfully, and completely, disagree — Aurora

You underestimate the effects/affects that language has and the different ways it's used.

I first started reading phenomenological literature when I was 18. I was impressed with the apparent ability to vary something, say a lightbulb, in terms of shape, size, consistency, constitutive elements in order to derive its necessary properties in our sensory manifold, pace Husserl. A friend at university introduced me to Heidegger, and suggested I read Being and Time. The thing that made me want to read it was the friend's observation, which was (paraphrased and shortened):

The mode of engagement with an object characterised by intellectual variation of its sensible properties does not derive necessary sensible properties of the appropriate kind as the necessity is of a justificatory rather than perceptual character. It is imposed rather than implicated in the perceptual object.

And that completely blew me away. If Heidegger's method of thought could in some manner get around the problem - providing the right kind of entailment or suggestiveness in the description of phenomena to their fundamental constituents -, it was something worth studying. So I spent a year or so reading through Being and Time and secondary/tertiary literature, writing rough notes on the sections in the first part (no temporality). It helped a bit with the problem, as instead of focussing on particular objects or areas of study, it took (what was allegedly) the entire environment of a person and implicated a kind of hierarchy of concepts (say, tools->signs->language->propositional-as-structures, hermeneutic-as-structures with anxiety->my self as mine-> facticity->horizonal temporality->originary temporality for a rough discretisation of the book) which were holistically implicated in each other. In a certain sense, the broadness of scope allowed a big chunk of what mattered to stay near the concerns of the analysis (the obsession with 'thematisation' for those who know Heidegger).

So after studying Heidegger for a while I turned to Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, who apparently noticed that intersubjectivity and the body respectively appear in incredibly impoverished forms in Heidegger's analysis. It rang quite true, the Other in Heidegger is mostly a normative-linguistic structure that distracts us from our own lives, and the body is little more than the vessel for Dasein.

Levinas remained a pure phenomenologist, but implicated in his phenomenology is a kind of limiting process and the revealing of my limits that allows a place to be other (and be other than me). Merleau-Ponty's (early) methodology is far more radical however, as it studies perception as the body varies, using case studies from brain damage and amputees.

Hubert Dreyfus places the breakdown of everyday phenomena as a disclosive frontier for phenomenology; like, you're playing your guitar, a string breaks, for a second or two you're treating your guitar like an object that doesn't make much sense (oh shit, it broke), much different from the flow state of playing it. Merleau-Ponty does a similar thing with perception - what happens when the body varies, how can we speak of the sensation of the phantom-limb and the kick-in-the-nads in the same breath?

What Merleau-Ponty and Levinas showed, methodologically, was that phenomenology cannot just proceed from the every-day to thematise any (perceptually derived) concept and its ontological ground, we have to take a methodological breakaway to unusual circumstances of our being to study its structures comprehensively; and treat that heterogeneity with both intellectual and practical respect. There can be no privilege of 'internal' ontological inquiry over the 'external' ontical conditions that constrain it.

There’s a modern Western modification of Advaita Vedanta, called (by its critics) “Neo-Advaita”. Google will bring up a number of articles about it, by its critics.
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Buddhism, too, probably has modern Western versions.
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All versions, traditional and modern Western, place great emphasis on the goal of the final outcome, life-completion (also called Liberation or Enlightenment), the end of lives. Because of that emphasis, many Westerners want the end to arrive at the end of this life, instead of after lots of lifetimes.
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Additionally, of course reincarnation conflicts with Materialism, our culture’s dominant (but unsupportable) metaphysics.
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It seems to me that the emphasis on life-completion and the end-of-lives is unnecessary and premature. We’re all in life, and the end will just happen when it happens. Meanwhile, we all have things that we like in life.
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It’s said that transcendent experiences often are temporary, and don’t necessarily indicate life-completion.
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I can’t prove that there’s reincarnation. Little can be said about the end of this life that isn’t speculative.
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On that matter, I don’t suppose much can be said with assurance that wasn’t said in Hamlet’s Soliloquy.
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If there’s no reincarnation, then the endless sleep arrives as soon as this life ends …even for those who aren’t really feeling very restful, contented, quiet or peaceful. Maybe. As I said, what comes at death is speculative.
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It’s really rather amazing and surprising that this life started. We’re used to it by now, of course, but why and how did it start?
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Unless you believe Materialism’s brute-fact, and its unverifiable and unfalsifiable claim about the objective existence of this physical world and its things, if you don’t believe in a brute-fact, then maybe this life started for a reason. Well then, what if that reason remains at the end of this life?
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I’m just saying that endless sleep at the end of this life is far from certain, and shouldn’t be taken as the default presumption, since it’s a conclusion from the questionable metaphysics of Materialism. It’s one of several suggestions.
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The matter is speculative.
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Michael Ossipoff

It's about transcending the conceptual construct of self.
— praxis

What does that even mean - thinking that you are more than what you are - a delusion of grandeur? — Harry Hindu

Granted the language is a bit grandiose, but what it signifies is merely a subduing of the neural activity associated with the self-concept, or rather a particular brain state where a sense of self has diminished or is altogether absent.

It seems the negative side of developing a self-concept, and other concepts such as life, death, the future, etc., is that it tends to breed existential anxiety. Subduing the sense of self tends to relieve this anxiety, and may also facilitate other beneficial psychological and social developments.

we have to take a methodological breakaway to unusual circumstances of our being to study its structures comprehensively; — fdrake

That's what science has always sought to do - looking for the limit conditions (what you call unusual circumstances) of theories. Seeing farther than Newton's theory of gravity involved the limit case of non-euclidean geometry and so on.

It isn't what philosophy has always sought to do, though. The empirical character of phenomenology let it internalise that kind of dialogue between liminal phenomena and pre-developed theory.

Granted the language is a bit grandiose, but what it signifies is merely a subduing of the neural activity associated with the self-concept, or rather a particular brain state where a sense of self has diminished or is altogether absent.

It seems the negative side of developing a self-concept, and other concepts such as life, death, the future, etc., is that it tends to breed existential anxiety. Subduing the sense of self tends to relieve this anxiety, and may also facilitate other beneficial psychological and social developments. — praxis

What it seems like you're saying is that we need to think like lower animals which have no concept of their own death, or their future. How is thinking like lower animals transcendent?

The fact that we know we can die is knowledge that enables us to avoid death. It is the basis of all our medical knowledge in understanding how our bodies work and their relationship with the rest of the world. What you seem to be arguing is that we should try to attain a state of ignorance instead of knowledge.

As I said in my original post

I’d like to talk about the experience of awareness. What it feels like from the inside. In particular what it feels like to become aware. — T Clark

What does it feel like to become aware? For me, becoming aware of any aspect of myself usually takes place over an extended period of time. Often, the recognition that I am aware comes on suddenly, by surprise, fully formed. I have had one experience where I was actually aware of becoming aware as it happened.

Fifteen years ago I started to study Tai Chi. I'm a pretty stiff person. Historically, I haven't been very aware of what is going on in my body, although that has gotten better over the years. As I studied Tai Chi in class and practiced at home, I at first felt very clumsy and off-balance. I watched more experienced students and teachers who seemed much more graceful and in control than I was. They were clearly getting something I wasn't. The movements felt mechanical. I felt as if I were throwing my body around - as soon as I started a movement, it was out of my control. Like jumping from one (metaphorical) platform to another - in the middle of the move there was no control at all, sometimes I was lucky enough to land on the other platform in the right position to continue. Often not.

0ne day in my bedroom I was practicing the beginning move in my own stiff way. I remember feeling something, I call it a tickle, but that’s not what it was. It was something faint, I wasn’t sure if I could feel it at all. I didn’t know what it was. The only other similar experience I remember is when taking a hearing test. Sitting in an insulated room while they play sounds with different frequencies intensities. It starts with very soft beeps, which they increase in loudness until you can hear them and push a button. Many times just before I pushed the button, I felt something. It wasn’t a sound I could differentiate. I wasn’t sure it was anything at all. And then I heard the beep. Clearly, that tickle was a sound right at the edge of my hearing.

After I felt it a few times. I started paying attention. No words, no thoughts. Like unfocusing my eyes, but still looking, watching. Like looking at something in my peripheral vision. Looking back, I think that way of paying attention is the primary skill of awareness. I use it all the time now. Someone will ask me something about what I am thinking, feeling. I unfocus my mind and let the radar work. It’s funny, sometimes when I do this, my eyes move back and forth, like I’m looking for something. It is interesting to me that I often don’t know what I think or feel until I pause for a second.

Over time, the feelings became stronger, paying attention became more effective. At first, the awareness was of feelings in my abdomen and shoulders. That spread to other muscles. It also spread to other Tai Chi moves. Then to other movements that had nothing to do with Tai Chi. There is a feeling of sinking into myself, becoming more stable, balanced. After about five years I stopped doing Tai Chi. I’ve thought many times about going back and doing it again. Even now that feeling of lowering myself, become balanced is still there.

What does it feel like to become aware? — T Clark

That all depends upon what one is becoming aware of, doesn't it?

The mode of engagement with an object characterised by intellectual variation of its sensible properties does not derive necessary sensible properties of the appropriate kind as the necessity is of a justificatory rather than perceptual character. It is imposed rather than implicated in the perceptual object. — fdrake

The implication here is that we cannot derive the necessary properties of an object by talking about the properties of the object, because talking is justification not perception, and only properties of a perceptual character are appropriately called "necessary sensible properties".

Talking imposes our own thought and belief about an object upon the object... I guess we could say that. We could also say that talking about an object allows us to know things about it's elemental constitution that we could otherwise not become aware of via brute perception alone(absent language).

That all depends upon what one is becoming aware of, doesn't it? — creativesoul

In my experience, the process of becoming aware and what it feels like to be aware are similar for all kinds of awareness. For me, that's the point of this whole thread.

What does it feel like to become aware?
— T Clark

That all depends upon what one is becoming aware of, doesn't it? — creativesoul

In my experience, the process of becoming aware and what it feels like to be aware are similar for all kinds of awareness. For me, that's the point of this whole thread. — T Clark

Becoming aware of something horrible makes one feel quite differently than becoming aware of something wonderful.

Right?

I think you may be skirting around self-awareness.

Emotional maturity. Understanding one's own emotional triggers. Coming to acceptable terms with oneself and the world. All those things and more... perhaps?