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Who Am I?
What's the Point of Philosophy Without This First?

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Who Am I?
longfun
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Posted 10/27/09 - 05:03 AM:
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#61
unenlightened wrote:

sometimes what I am, is not known to me.

Comparable to an ongoing math-calculation, it does not know what it is, sometimes not even when or until it ends.
But such ongoing calculation can emerge an ever changing image by understanding of properties..."you only need something to project it on"
You are an ongoing calculation part of an bigger calculation.
What I want to know is how does a calculation generate visible usable form?
I'm Long and I'm playing the greatest game of all.
throng
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Posted 10/27/09 - 07:57 AM:
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#62
I's guess is - everything is there to define 'me'.

neutral
I know that I don't know, so I don't know if I do.
peter rabbit
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Posted 10/27/09 - 10:38 AM:
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#63
unenlightened wrote:
You can call it what you like of course

I realise that. I find it preferable though to agree on meanings with people I talk with.

unenlightened wrote:
but there is no evidence of thought or distraction.

Yes, you could be in the mong-zone, but this is very similar to thinking and being distracted. Quite a way from being fruit to root to finger tip here and now like a child, calm, full awareness. In that state you don't forget much.

unenlightened wrote:
Clearly, if I am driving, there is attention to the moment, and what is unfortunate about it?.

There are different qualities of attention. The "attention to the moment" of driving is pretty much like the "attention to the moment' of watching teevee. Body unmoving, tactile senses unengaged, necessity to creatively focus diminished; very much like hypnotism, a state which I would call unfortunate for what has to be obvious reasons.

unenlightened wrote:
But my intention in bringing it up, is to point out that 'what I am' - and that is sometimes what I am, is not known to me.

Just as watching teevee, in which consciousness is dimmed.

unenlightened wrote:
No, they do not. That is what I am pointing out with my example; there is no sense of self that is not memory or imagination.

That is quite a claim. Does this mean that someone without imagination or memory has no "sense of self"? What about in deep dreamless sleep - do I literally cease to exist? Or does my "sense of self" cease to exist - in which case, what remains?

unenlightened wrote:
When you point out that my flies are undone, I become aware of your image in contradiction to my self image

You may well. But not necessarily. You could just immediately look down, see them, and do them up without all these images getting in the way. "Images getting in the way", as I pointed out in my last post, are the cause of a great deal of human suffering.

unenlightened wrote:
if you pointed out that I have a nose on my face, it would not have much significance.

If I asked you to look at your nose, or your hands (a little more accessible to the eye) then perhaps, without this "much significance" you would see something new?

unenlightened wrote:
Yes, quite a few assumptions. I wonder if you could free us both of the cruelty of these assumptions?

Certainly! Could you then tell me if you would like to free yourself of being subject to the cruelties of the robotic emotional mind?

unenlightened wrote:
It is almost as if my name offends your religious sensibilities, and perhaps that is why I chose it - to point out to those who pay attention to it, that their flies are undone.

Did you choose your name to prompt such as I to become aware of your image of unenlightenedness in contradiction to my self image? How unpleasant. I do not have religious sensibilities, and find many people who claim to be enlightened to be pretenders. I find many socialists to be morons, but I wouldn't call myself "unsocialist" in order to upset them.
unenlightened
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Posted 10/27/09 - 11:04 AM:
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#64
peter rabbit wrote:
How unpleasant.


Then let us dwell on it no longer. I hope you enjoy your nothingness.
...most of our actions are the result of the past, or according to a future ideal. That's not action, that is just conformity. J Krishnamurti

"Philosophy, to the Philistine, is an evolutionary process, watched over by some sort of brisk dynamic Providence, and culminating in the supreme insight of modern thought." John Cowper Powys
peter rabbit
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Posted 10/27/09 - 11:23 AM:
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#65
parameter wrote:
Then let us dwell on it no longer.


I take it then that you did choose your name to prompt such as I to become aware of your image of unenlightenedness in contradiction to my self image?! I find this extraordinary, and indeed unpleasant; no different to calling yourself "uncreative" in order to chastise those who consider themselves artists. Let us, indeed, dwell on it no longer.
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Posted 10/27/09 - 11:47 AM:
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#66
Don't worry, only the image has been hurt. wink
...most of our actions are the result of the past, or according to a future ideal. That's not action, that is just conformity. J Krishnamurti

"Philosophy, to the Philistine, is an evolutionary process, watched over by some sort of brisk dynamic Providence, and culminating in the supreme insight of modern thought." John Cowper Powys
peter rabbit
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Posted 10/27/09 - 12:03 PM:
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Glad that the enlightened part is unaffected
hanuma
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Posted 10/27/09 - 12:41 PM:
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#68
peter rabbit wrote:
If it is, as you say "a totally different voice" (emphasis mine) that is asking the question then it does not behave like the normal voice of question asking which cannot posit two things that are simultaneously one thing or "unified."
Yes, and you claimed such a voice existed in the statement you made, which is precisely why I thought it needed correcting. And by "existed" I don't mean to say you aren't hearing or experiencing this voice, this question, just that it is at best a contrivance, a reflection of something that has already flashed through your neurons. It isn't autonomous in any sense. And your example is an interesting one to demonstrate this:

Are you sure? When you put your hands in your pocket and find your keys missing do you think "let me think where I put my keys?" or do you physically experience their lack and then go on, immediately (without the intermediary "I will now think about..." thought) to think about where they might be? In other words; who is this "you" which cannot ask "yourself"? Is it really thinking, or does it have a more direct experience of what is?
The question would already have been asked before you put your hands in your pocket, because the expectation of finding keys is built on the vacuum of the possibility of them not actually being there. Anything else would require complete certainty, complete omniscience.

There are seven "yous" here. I am confused. I realise there are millions of "Is" in my head, but how many I's experience them? For me, its just the one.
This single, centred consciousness is very much made up after the event of thought. You might find this program particularly interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X09TgwcfQyA
peter rabbit
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Posted 10/27/09 - 01:08 PM:
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#69
hanuma wrote:
...you claimed such a voice existed in the statement you made...


That is correct, and I claim it still.

hanuma wrote:
...which is precisely why I thought it needed correcting.


By saying that...

hanuma wrote:
...there is an irreducibility to the whole process..


Which surely is the same thing? Something that is irreducible does not behave like the "normal voice of question asking" which... reduces.

hanuma wrote:
And by "existed" I don't mean to say you aren't hearing or experiencing this voice, this question, just that it is at best a contrivance, a reflection of something that has already flashed through your neurons. It isn't autonomous in any sense.


Autonomous to me means being able to act and decide. That which precedes thought (the consciousness of thinking) also precedes time and space (which only exist in thought) and so cannot be said to act or decide. I agree with you, therefore, that it is not autonomous, but not that it is a contrivance. In my experience (and the experience of those whose time and space making thought-selves are not as rigid as modern westerners - namely primitive people, children, artists and lovers) it is reality itself.

hanuma wrote:
The question would already have been asked before you put your hands in your pocket, because the expectation of finding keys is built on the vacuum of the possibility of them not actually being there. Anything else would require complete certainty, complete omniscience..


I wasn't referring to the experience of not finding the keys, which, as you say, is made significant by expectation, but what happens after this; what lies between not finding them and thinking (asking) where they might be. You suggest there is some kind of intermediary thinker that says something to the effect of "I will now think about where my keys are" before then going on to do it. I am saying that "thinking-where" happens straight after "not-finding" without such a thinking self to mediate. Perhaps a less complex example would be to ask where is the thinking self that lies between the followed tennis ball and the perfect drop shot. In my experience, in the experience, there is no such self and if there were, I would fluff the shot.

hanuma wrote:
This single, centred consciousness is very much made up after the event of thought. You might find this program particularly interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X09TgwcfQyA


Sorry I do not see the connection. Here is a man who is fooled into feeling and then thinking that his time-space perception is in a different time and space. What it is that feels and thinks does not come into this video.

"The single, centred consciousness" is seen as "made up after the event of thought" by thought. It is thought that thinks that consciousness follows from it, because thought cannot think of that which is unthinkable; i.e. the thinker.
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Posted 10/27/09 - 02:21 PM:
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peter rabbit wrote:
Sorry I do not see the connection. Here is a man who is fooled into feeling and then thinking that his time-space perception is in a different time and space. What it is that feels and thinks does not come into this video.
I said the program, not just the video.

Which surely is the same thing? Something that is irreducible does not behave like the "normal voice of question asking" which... reduces.
Must be something I'm not getting, one irreducible, the other reduces... "surely the same thing"...?

Autonomous to me means being able to act and decide. That which precedes thought (the consciousness of thinking) also precedes time and space (which only exist in thought) and so cannot be said to act or decide. I agree with you, therefore, that it is not autonomous, but not that it is a contrivance. In my experience (and the experience of those whose time and space making thought-selves are not as rigid as modern westerners - namely primitive people, children, artists and lovers) it is reality itself.
'It' being the questioning voice? That really is a part of the way your brain functions (as covered in the afore-linked program). The brain has patterns to the way it functions, based in the actual physical make-up of it, and barring some form of brain damage or autism the 'production' of conscious thought, of this self-identity happens as a way of presenting and ordering the millions of smaller processes required to process your immediate surrounding, and the gigantic database of your experiences that is constantly "open-source". So it seems we can agree that "thought" is significantly more than whatever is presented to you inside your own head, in voices/pictures etc., it is also that which does the presenting, that which cannot be entirely expressed due to its own complexity; and so back to your example:

I wasn't referring to the experience of not finding the keys, which, as you say, is made significant by expectation, but what happens after this; what lies between not finding them and thinking (asking) where they might be. You suggest there is some kind of intermediary thinker that says something to the effect of "I will now think about where my keys are" before then going on to do it. I am saying that "thinking-where" happens straight after "not-finding" without such a thinking self to mediate. Perhaps a less complex example would be to ask where is the thinking self that lies between the followed tennis ball and the perfect drop shot. In my experience, in the experience, there is no such self and if there were, I would fluff the shot.
The "intermediary thinker" as the brains production of that self, its presentation of what it had already counted on well before putting hand to pocket. The question "where are my keys?" did not need to be produced in order for you to access the memory of where the keys could be, just as actually repeating the question isn't part of the search for an answer, it's more like a status update of what you're currently doing, which isn't unimportant, because from this produced voice (like when we write or speak) acknowledgement is returned, you focus you become distracted by the question, which allows for the brain to make its calculations. But I do not wish to degrade consciousness all together, as below ;

"The single, centred consciousness" is seen as "made up after the event of thought" by thought.
I do believe it is consciousness that allows me to make these observations and not some extra dimension of thought, but only in so far as it services unconscious processes. Certainly a lot to think about there though.
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