Consciousness
: I’m doing a lot of noting practices right now, where you try to precisely label the state that you are currently in (for example, which sensory event is currently most salient, for these purposes treating thought as a sixth sense). 1/10
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One thing you quickly realize, especially if you are verbalizing you’re notes, is that the state you are in has changed by the time you apply the label. What you are saying is not what you are experiencing, even if it was when you started to say it 2/10
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You can try to speed up if you want to, but you will find is that every attempt to label or even to orient is always a step behind what you are actually experiencing. And the reason for that is that experience is impermanent and constantly in flux 3/10
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Why is that relevant? When we say things like “everyone knows what it’s like to see red”, we ignore the continuous unfolding dynamics of experience. Visual experiences feel like they are wicked stable, because our visual system is constantly sampling and refreshing 4/10
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But unless you have done a lot of training, my guess is that you aren’t able to hold on to a single experience long enough to pull apart the complex interactions that are unfolding between distinct sensory events, which will shape the way the experience of “red” in a 5/10
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specific context feels. I am not claiming that there’s nothing there, but I am claiming that the decision to lump a bunch of experiences together & call them the “red” experiences is a simplifying and clustering decision. It’s useful for languaging creatures, and useful for 6/10
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things like remembering and imagining. But it’s not giving you insight into what you are experiencing at any particular moment. Last claim, I tend to think that when you get to the basic constituents of sensory experience, they end up being far less mysterious 7/10
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changes in temprature and pressure, the urge to drink or consume sodium, flows of air across the hair in your nose, all feel like exactly what they are in the body. Visual processing is likely to be harder, as you need to understand how colors, shadows, blur, etc are 8/10
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being produced through interactions with distal objects, and there will be some aspects of smell and taste that are just as complicated. But my guess is that careful tracking of experience only leaves us with so-called “easy problems” 9/10
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But even when experiences are separated and analyzed conceptually, I don’t think it’s their intrinsic nature to be seperate. And the categorization scheme we choose will always determine what we find. Hence my quasi-illusionism 10/10
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Re: "every attempt to label or even to orient is always a step behind what you are actually experiencing"—exactly the meaning of "sati" in satipaṭṭhāna—"to remember," from Sanskrit smṛti, root smara. As soon as a note is made, one is merely remembering a past impression.
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Replying to @NoaidiX
Yes! And it’s unfortunate that “memory” has fallen out of so many contemporary discussions of mindfulness. Weirdly as someone noted up thread, this was also something William James also recognized: introspection is always retrospection!
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