The fact that we can doubt the reality of our
selves, and the clear and unequivocal problem
that arises from that – if we can doubt our
selves then who is it that is doubting – raises
a concern that our view of reality is not yet
free from unexamined, and perhaps unfounded,
assumptions. To say that the apodictic
validity of our experiences is founded in awareness,
while clearly valid, still apparently leaves
intact the presumed form of the world – that
of separation and physical existence. The
definitions of the last chapter could be seen
as being merely a word game that is meant to
highlight the necessity of our being aware of
the world for it to exist, and the definition
of what is real meant merely to necessitate the
primacy of awareness over other mechanisms for
knowledge. Furthermore, our specification
of consciousness, awareness, and being could
be nothing more than a phenomenological analytic. In
order to validate our assertions about awareness,
it is now necessary to turn our attention to
our selves and see what is implied in the concept
of subjectivity. We have already seen how
objectivity incorporates an implicit requirement
for awareness that causes that concept to self-destruct
once it is looked at clearly. What about
subjectivity?
Subjectivity and objectivity describe the two
traditional views of our relationship with the
world. In the first way, all our perceptions
and knowledge of the world are colored by our
personal feelings, thoughts, and concerns, while
in the second, they are free of those encumbrances. At
least, that is what is supposed to be the case. Each
of us naturally experiences the world in a way
that we call subjective, with our perceptions being
continuously colored, or altered, by our emotions
as well as our thoughts and desires. Problems
with this condition arise in situations that
demand detachment from these purely personal
states. In such cases we find that our
normal way of experiencing and relating to the
world undermines our ability to accomplish particular
goals. For instance, where a judgment of
fact is to occur in a hearing of a complaint
between two parties, it is generally held to
be desirable that those doing the judging will
act dispassionately and fairly. The possibility
of the judges being guided by their subjective
feelings, desires, or concerns, calls into question
the fairness of the process. Science faces
a different, although related, problem. If
Science is to have a valid epistemological foundation then
it must have a consistent field of phenomena
free of subjective coloration, as well as a field
of phenomena that is common to everyone. The
former problem has to do with how we experience
and interpret phenomena, while the latter has
to do with the existence of the phenomena and
their origins. The solution to both of
these problems is generally held to be found
in objectivity.
Is objectivity something that actually exists? Or
is it a mental construction that we use
to balance the “equations” of our
thinking by allowing us to insert an adjusting
factor that seems to minimize the untoward results
that our subjective natures would otherwise introduce
into both of the main problem areas discussed
above? In the case of personal interpretations
of experiences objectivity is not a state; it
is only a goal. We attempt to be objective
and we more or less are, each according to our
ability to 'step-back' from our purely personal
reactions to the phenomenal world. In relation
to a shared field of phenomena, objectivity is
a premise that is necessary to allow Science
to break out of the solipsistic world of the
purely subjective; but one whose validity
is, we have argued, faulty. The cause of
both of these problems lies at the heart of what
we label as our subjective natures.
When we analyze subjectivity
in light of what we have discovered about the
structure of consciousness, we can see that the
assumption that consciousness is just another
attribute of our selves, and therefore what we
experience is always purely personal in nature,
should be looked at more closely because it is
now clear from our previous discussion that our
selves are phenomenal and ‘out
there’ in the world just as any other phenomena
is, when taken from the perspective of awareness
as it animadverts upon what we refer to as our
selves.
Consciousness has been presented
as arising from the animadversion of Awareness. Awareness,
the reality, is not something that we directly
perceive or can be conscious of, as it does not
have any attributes. Therefore, as an ineffable
nonexistent, it is incorrect to attempt to objectify
it and impose ownership upon it. Since
Awareness has no quality or characteristic upon
which I can found a property claim, nor which
I can use to bring Awareness directly into the
world as a distinct thing, the only way that
Awareness can be known is as an abstract intuitive
intellectual idea. But that is not
the same thing as being conscious of Awareness
directly. When we attempt to objectify
Awareness, we advert 'our' attention, which is
the animadversion of Awareness, onto an abstract
thought about awareness. Thus we are not
grasping Awareness, but only an intellectual
shadow or adumbrated idea of it. But once
we do so, our thoughts about consciousness revolve
around this structure consisting of this idea
of awareness and the content of the consciousness,
i.e. the phenomena, and we find that it all fits
neatly here, in our ‘selves’. It
is necessary to remember that this idea of awareness
is just an intellectual construction and that
the real Awareness, which is animadverting our
conscious experience – even at this very
moment – cannot be so neatly contained.
When one reflects upon what it
is that arises in consciousness as the content
of that consciousness when we think about awareness,
it should be doubly clear that it is not Awareness
itself that we are conscious of, but only an
intuitive idea. In
the first instance because we are thinking about
it. We are not in a ‘natural’ mode
of experiencing consciousness ‘first-hand’,
but rather, we are in a state of reflection. That
should be enough to convince us that we do not
have our ‘hands’ around the ‘real
thing’. Second, because we can never
get past the feeling of being aware when we focus
our attention upon this idea of awareness. But ‘feeling’ is
not awareness itself, rather it is what Awareness
provides to conscious experience (as opposed
to just registrations of sensory data such as
would occur in an artificial ‘intelligence’). Can
we then lay claim to this feeling other than
by force of habit? Is it some thing that
we can locate and place a deed of ownership upon? We
need to be extremely careful here as this is
the crucial point upon which our understanding
of reality is based. It is here, at this
crucial juncture that our understanding becomes
either “true knowledge” or merely “opinion”. If
we can see that we have no evidence for attaching
a claim of ownership on awareness we can overcome
the forceful opinion that obfuscates our true
understanding of the apodictic validity of our
experiences.
We assume that since we are conscious
of our selves that we are therefore "conscious
beings". When I say that I am a conscious
being, I mean that I am first and foremost conscious
of me – my attributes, my thoughts, my
feelings and my actions. Awareness, however,
except as an intuitive thought about it, is not
one of the things that I can be conscious of. I
feel the consciousness of various phenomena,
but what would it mean to feel the awareness
of that consciousness? If awareness and
the feelings that are imparted upon our conscious
experiences are ours, here in this body, then
to feel the awareness of that consciousness means
that we would have to be ‘outside’ of
our own selves. We would have to be a presence
looking upon our ‘selves’ in a most
intimate way to be sure, but as an onlooker nonetheless. Does
this logical necessity solve our problem for
us? Does it prove that the awareness is ‘contained’ within
us? Or have we only arrived at that special
state that we referred to in the second chapter
of this essay as “contemplative awareness”? Has
our Awareness been adverted upon itself? Or
has it instead ‘taken a step backward’ so
that our normal state of being immersed in our
experience of the world has now ‘flipped’ so
that our experiential moment is now contained ‘within’ Awareness?
The realization that these questions
lead to raises some disturbing questions: Have
I jumped to a conclusion about the consciousness
of my self being mine? Which of its attributes
make it mine? What characteristics does
it have that I can recognize as clearly being
a part of me? Is it because I am conscious
of myself; that I have access to my 'inner' world
and no one has access to that but me? Yet
am I only conscious of myself? Am I not
also conscious of a world that is filled with
other individuals? Do those individuals
experience the exact same world as I do? We
are in the habit of assuming that we all experience
the same world, but this is patently false as
we each have individuated perspectives upon
the world, or what does subjectivity refer to? Is
the fact that only I am conscious of my ‘inner’ world
the result of an individuated perspective on
the world, or is it the result of an individuated
awareness?
The first alternative fits the
phenomena well, if we can give up our hegemonic
demand for ownership of the phenomena of consciousness
for the moment, while the second creates a number
of difficulties. Clearly
an individuated perspective means that the thoughts
that I am conscious of will be ‘mine’. If,
instead of my own individuated perspective, I
shared yours, then obviously the thoughts that ‘I’ would
be conscious of would be ‘ours’ and
not ‘mine’. But if Awareness
is individuated, rather than the perspective
from which it animadverts, could I ever be conscious
of anything from your perspective? I am
conscious of your mood when I see you. In
order to explain how I am conscious of your mood,
since, given a Physicalist view of reality, we
can only be conscious of our own selves and our
subjective experience of the world, it is necessary
to introduce the idea of “subliminal perceptions” of “signals” that
I somehow “pick-up”. You and
I both view something, but from our individual
perspectives and with our presumed individuated
awareness, so how is that we can understand what
we each experienced? In order to explain
this we introduce the idea of an “imagination” that
allows us to fantasize about what the other experienced,
and we place this imagination within the limits
of an “objective reality of matter”. We
then either leave it to metaphysicians to
explain, and poets to comment upon, why it is
that this “fantasy” so closely fits
the other’s experience, or we introduce
an “Unconscious mind” filled
with “race memories”; or as a last
resort, we put it all down to “predispositions” somehow
encoded in our genetic material. And
what of those wondrous moments shared by lovers
and close friends who know each other’s
feelings? Are they merely an illusion also
or are they the result of those subliminal “signals” that
we “pick-up” again? Or are
they the result of random historical occurrences
that have resulted in the ‘programming’ of
such sublimity, as that which Shakespeare and
all the other poets of human history found themselves
in awe of? Are my intuitions about the world
and the other beings in it also illusory? And
how is it that I can empathize with others? Is
it because I only “imagine” how they
feel? The more we analyze our conscious
experiences, the more it becomes apparent that
the assumption that Awareness is individuated
requires us to greatly multiply the number of
entities at work in our conscious experiences,
quietly violating our scientific preference for
parsimony, such as that expressed by Occam’s
Razor.
To say that we are only conscious
of ourselves and we are the only ones who can
access our 'inner' world is to place ourselves
on a very slippery slope that leads to solipsism,
even if we deny solipsism itself by introducing “objectivity”. To
say that Awareness is individually contained
and that no one but ourselves can pierce into
the inner world of our being is misanthropic,
as it results in most, if not all, of our most
fulfilling experiences as humans being segregated
into a wasteland of fantasy and appearances.
Consciousness is not a personal
attribute. It
does not belong to someone; rather it is of someone
or of something. Whenever there is consciousness
of an experience, we habitually impose ownership
upon it due to the animadversion toward
that which is experienced from this perspective
here while focusing on the content of that consciousness. That
is, we equate the venue with the content. This "turning
to" or adverting of the attention of Awareness
is personalized by our ratiocinative thought so
that the circumlocutory, but exact, description
of the experience as a “consciousness of
something arising from the animadverting of Awareness
upon it from this viewpoint” is figuratively
expressed as “my consciousness of
something"; where the "my" in
that familiar form of expression is being used
as shorthand for the point of view, and everything
local to it. As in the case with most figurative
speaking, we err when we then make the leap from
using a personalized “consciousness of” expression
because of its simplicity in speech and thought,
to imputing that the consciousness of the experience
must therefore be a component of our selves since
it is 'my' consciousness of something. We
also err when we forget that a “consciousness
of” something arises from a particular
point of view and instead try to hold that the
consciousness can be nonspecific or even absent,
as we do when we introduce “objectivity”. In
the first error we are seduced by a reflection
and forget that the mirror is not what it reflects. In
the second, we believe there can be a reflection
without a mirror!
It is in our attempt to correct
the deficiencies that we see arising from the
first problem of subjectivity – of being immersed within ‘ourselves’ – that
leads to the inadvertent introduction of the
second mistake inherent in the objective point
of view. Not remaining cognizant of the
fact that there is always a reference point,
or point of view, inherent in any consciousness,
we attempt to be “objective”, and
deal with things ‘themselves’ without
the complications of subjectivity. We make
believe that the phenomena that we experience
are not reflections at all, but are real
things, permanently disconnecting Awareness from
what it is conscious of, as if the latter can
stand alone ‘outside’ of our awareness
of it. It then becomes evident to us, as
we follow the implications of this line of thought,
that it is consciousness that is contingent upon
'objective reality’ and not the reverse,
since consciousness is just an empty 'container'
into which are put experiences of 'real' things. We
then scramble to explain how it is that consciousness
arises, either as a function of the operation
of distinct brain components in some kind of
feedback loop, or as a phenomenon that supervenes upon
it, or as a feature of the physical construction
or configuration of the brain itself. That,
or we fall into metaphysical ruminations in which
we attempt to correct this difficulty in seeing
how it can be that consciousness can arise out
of matter by seeking a metaphysical solution
that is compliant with our having marginalized
consciousness while still being forced to
deal with Awareness and all that it imparts to
experience. Some even go so far as to throw
up their hands and declare that this is too hard
a problem to solve with our human intellectual
faculties.
The Objective point of view causes this
error because it entails a failure to realize
that a view from nowhere in particular is
still a view, if it postulates the existence
of anything. It attempts to forget this
by making the “consciousness of something” contingent
on the “thing itself”, minimizing
or completely vacating the power of Awareness
in deference to the presumed unassailable reality
of "external" things. Along with
this we see the relevancy of feelings eviscerated. The
fundamental error to be found in this position
is the belief that there is a place outside of
Awareness. Having marginalized consciousness
and co-opted the content upon which Awareness
animadverts, we necessarily find such a container
as consciousness to be too small to hold the
world. As our faith in objectivity
strengthens, our belief in an external,
ever-present world becomes solidly set in our
minds, and our "internal" experiences
get more and more degraded until they are as
nearly eviscerated of any validity as they can
be without our becoming completely dysfunctional
beings. We turn our “insides" into
a kind of Frankenstein construction of componentry,
subject to all the deterministic rules that
we deem to govern the rest of reality. We
treat our bodies’ symptoms allopathically with
drugs. We come to see ourselves as nothing
more than data processing units, and find the
goal of creating a conscious artificial intelligence to
be coherent.
The objective point of view is
a laudable idea because it provides for a ‘shared nature’ of
reality, such as a table that similarly exists
for all beings in a room, that is so important
to Science and which would be otherwise
absent; and by the implications of the Physicalist view
it is the only option that gives us the ability
to have such absolute knowledge of the world. Without
objectivity we can have no Science, or so it
is thought, because without a shared objective
reality there is nothing to ground it upon. But
this view gives us this ability to have absolute
knowledge of the world by eviscerating our ‘subjective’ experiences
of relevancy. Furthermore, this need for
a ‘shared nature’ of reality only
arises because of the first mistake that we make
that gives rise to our opinions of the subjective
point of view: that we think consciousness is
an attribute of our individual selves. Thus
if consciousness is an individual attribute how
is it that there is sure knowledge of a world
'outside' of us? But if consciousness is
not derived from individuated awareness, which
by the very nature of Awareness that gives rise
to it, it cannot be, as we are beginning to see,
then the shared nature of reality that we seek
arises because Awareness has only an ‘inside’. It
is without any ‘outside’.
This alternative view of a reality
of non-individuated Awareness with individuated perspectives
corrects the errors inherent in the subjective
point of view without either needing the fantasy
of, or introducing the deficiencies of, an objective
point of view. As well, it reflects an
understanding that a point of view always entails
awareness. There is no current name for
this third way of viewing the world, so we will
borrow a word from mathematics and set theory. A
Surjection or surjective function is known
as an “upon function”, and is the
word most congruent in intended sense to that
for which we search. It incorporates this
sense of upon as directionality from outside
of a set. This sense can be extended metaphorically
to the animadversion of Awareness upon that which
it gives rise to: consciousness of. Therefore
I will refer to this third way of viewing the
world as Surjectivity.
The Surjective point of view
maintains the distinction between a “consciousness of” and
the intentional source of that consciousness.
Thus, while there is a consciousness of my self,
that consciousness is not an attribute of my
self. It is not self-consciousness, a reflexive
act of ‘mine’, but consciousness
of myself, a surjective act of Awareness. While
there is consciousness of my perceptions, that
does not mean that the power of Awareness that
gives rise to the consciousness of those perceptions
somehow arises from any body or substance, including
my own body; nor does it require the reality
of any substances or bodies, as we will see later. Yet
Science will still be epistemologically well-grounded,
as will be explained. Surjectivity then
is the stance of contemplative Awareness.
It is not an easy thing to shake
off the habits that we have acquired. Thus, when it is
said that there is no need for substances or
bodies, we view this statement from the viewpoint
of Materialism and find that since this
new view does not require substance, then it
must demand ideas, or Idealism, as these are
the only two traditional ontological positions. But
this is wrong, as will be shown. Also,
so ingrained is our belief that consciousness
is always an attribute of someone, that to say
that the consciousness of myself is not an attribute
of my self immediately gives rise to the question: “Well
then, whose consciousness is it?” and the
idea of a unary consciousness necessarily
arises. The problem with this concept is
again that we have trouble changing our way of
perceiving and thinking about the world. Thus
if consciousness is not multiple, it must be
singular. There must be a shared, universal
consciousness at work 'in' each of us. This
also will be shown to be defective. These
either-or possibilities are symptomatic of a
failure to shake off the error inherent in the
subjective point of view. A “consciousness
of” is simply that. It is not “someone’s
consciousness of”. That is just figurative
speech. Nor is it "One" consciousness,
as we will see later.
Surjectivity means that it is
possible to doubt one’s reality; that such an exercise is
not empty of content simply because the statement
itself is trivially false. When we undertake
this exercise we find that we are left with a
presence that has no other attributes whatsoever. In
the absence of everything there is still this
presence that is undeniable. This then,
finally, is the absolute ground upon which
everything arises – our selves, the world,
even time and space. It is this presence
that is the source of the apodictic validity
of all experience.
Yet, it is possible to imagine
that there is still a need for something other
than this ground of Awareness. What is it that is experienced
after all? Intellectually, one sees a need for
some type of substance behind the phenomena
giving rise to that phenomena that Awareness
gives rise to a conscious of. Whereof this
intellectuality? Where do these ideas come
from? How do they arise? Is the Intellect something
apart from Awareness? Is it perhaps something
greater than Awareness? Until we settle
this matter, the form of the world is still
open to debate.
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