Awareness Precedes Qualia

I wrote something for some reason and felt like sharing it.

A lot of my thoughts are influenced by Dzogchen Buddhism literature which I love to read. The fundamental notion of the nature of mind as distinct from discursive actions of mind underlay the words I use to outline my view.

The perspective I present here rejects the notion that Qualia can or must be explained only through scientific theories and models. Its not merely a sensory phenomenon.

Instead it is suggested that the notion of ‘Awareness preceding Qualia’ can be made to be consistent with line of thought based on deductive reasoning only with a more holistic picture of the world.

In the current received view of science there is a lot left desired as I think most people are surprisingly still stuck in a matter and motion world-view.

The scientific method is all that we’ve got when looking at how to do empirical and deductive reasoning about anything pertaining to phenomenon that is cyclic, but that doesn’t mean its methods can’t or won’t be augmented in the future.

Science currently answers questions of the ‘how’, but I see no reason why science won’t co-evolution with natural philosophy or philosophy of science and eventually be able to talk about the ‘what’.

Maybe simple questions such as “what is the color blue?” will have to be reframed, but we shouldn’t immeditely say it will forever be outside the scope of science.

We can think that as scientific knowledge becomes more self-consistent wiht observable phenomenon it will also correspond to helping human beings come up with the right sort of language to take about qualia and even broader notions such as awareness.

Problems in the philosophy of science, such as the problem of induction, will likely be simplified as well if we come up with a more constructive and inclusive view that naive mental phenomena, the artifacts of perception, come first and while scientific realism has a contextual scope and frame of reference that cannot be violated without reintegration, it must eventually, if at all possible, be structured and made consistent with any type of metaphysics that uses valid language.

I argue here that it is okay to reject the notion that Qualia is only a sensory experience due to signal input to the body. The idea of representational states, or the view that thoughts are only in your head, leave out what happens with the representations and how they relate to the entirety of the universe or, perhaps better framed, all other Qualia not immediately apprehended by the observer.

In a sense representative states seem like a closed system, whereas I do not think any part of phenomena exist in isolation. I subscribe to the view that when talking about phenomena that it makes more sense to consider interdependent causation more so than any other theory we try to create about causality. Basically, push pull causation is always in the context of a closed system, but the initial input to the system requires informational binding to external systems as well.

This view of ‘Awareness preceding Qualia’ also attempts to reject the idea that naive realism is merely naive, primordial in the idiotic sense, and forever stuck in mythopoetic modes of explanation and unsound non-scientific reasoning.

I propose that there is a feedback loop back to the rest of the universe from all views that are consistently constructible within the view presented here and the limits permitted in the language used to frame this view.

Note: I am overloading the word ‘view’ with the following meanings and contexts:

• the act of gazing out or the ability to gaze out; to see
• non-symbolic and non-dual apprehending;
• thought-free awareness
• all pervasive interdependence of phenomena; as in phenomena or ‘Qualia’ aspect of phenomena is something shared and non-conceptual.
• That the ‘view’ encompasses and refers to phenomena and qualia while admitting that it language and scientific models are just maps of the territory.
• Even though we are speaking of maps, so long as they are consistent, we can share meaning even if one meaning system is richer and the inferior or simpler system of meaning (think “language game”) is full of tautologies due to its inability to incorporate certain concepts.
• Though a simpler “language game” or metaphysical framing of phenomena cannot be consistent when integrating concepts that are not compatible, it still can bind its axioms to another language game.
• When speaking of the view, and science as both a human process and more easily understandable through operationalism, ideas such as time-binding, causality and memory are nearly taken to be something the brain does.

Hypothesis: The view that ‘Awareness precedes Qualia’ beckons a more consistent and constructive framework for how consciousness arises and may align better with modern scientific knowledge.

It is more consistent to have this view in the sense that sensory experience is bound by both a closed loop view of the universe and our models of neuro-cognitive processes in the nervous system are in no way made inconsistent or semantically undermined.

By closed loop view of the universe I mean to use word in this language that refers to ‘something’ non-dual (non-symbolic or not based on semiotics if you will) yet obvious and innate. In this sense its a bit like a pantheistic view where all divinity and the totality of experience is bound together.

I frame it slightly different than a pantheist does focusing on the notion of space as a focal point of reference. Basically, every point and every-perspective (ie every possible view that the universe can have of itself) is related to to every other point/view (through some type of super-symmetry or singular hologram).

John C. Lilly said, “in the province of the mind there are no limits,” and while that statement is not falsifiable and bold it aligns with the notion that any view is interdependent with all other views.

Such a view presents itself as more constructive because it allows ‘awareness’ to undermine all categories of knowledge whilst not denying the modeling power and practical strategy of scientific inquiry specifically towards the evolution of human consciousness. Its like saying take any symbol system, assume its framed around a non-dual reality which is not directly mappable to reality, and assume this non-dual reality has a fundamental type or category called awareness.

In this sense awareness can also be thought of not just as a direct experience that is available to you so long as you are alive, but also it can be modeled in language as a type in the mathematical sense of type theory. In this case the hard problem of consciousness should not be solved before the hard problem of awareness since in the conceptual aspect of this view all types are dependent on awareness. Albeit, framing it this way does give notion that there can be many theorems that are consistent in one theory about awareness, which are inconsistent in other theories.

Yet, taking awareness as the fundamental (a-priori both when looked at idealistically and empirically) category of the universe, it would follow that questions of “Why is there something instead of nothing?” can be reframed.

Since underneath it all there is only non-dual awareness it makes no sense to speak of non-awareness or nothingness. Doing so constitutes, a semantic misuse of language’s ontology. “Nothingness” cannot have a view that is dependent on it since its not dependent on any thing precisely because it is a non-thing. Nothing is like speaking of non-existential type that cannot be constructed. Nothing can be framed relative to it.

Therefore, a view cannot be dependent on “nothingness” since a view must be dependent on something, and all things are a view. Interestingly enough it may be the case that augmenting this view to include “nothingness” is the same as the worst mistake of computer science. Like including an arbitrary ‘null’ when its not needed, we don’t need to speak of nothingness since all aspects of phenomena are not relatable to non-phenomena.

The more interesting question to explore is that of identity using this view. Does awareness have a possessor that is both subject and object other than itself? Does it follow that since awareness is prior to everything that awareness also contains itself in all aspects. If awareness is taken as non-dual and observer and observed are taken as interdependent, then are our mythopoetic and narrative constructing tendencies merely a reflection of being more observer than observed? In that way it seems this is the result of awareness being embodied and the body self-identifying with the parts of sensory experience it can respond to.

When people speak of identity, they usually mean something deeper though. In terms of questions of the soul I would say in this view there is only an oversoul and conditioned experience, the body, genetics, and memory during this life dictate how you tend to resonate with the oversoul. If you yourself have any deep soul that is personal it is only insofar as you are a piece of ‘love’ or ‘life force’ that is fundamental and the universe needs in order to exist; in this sense you are a fabrication that is a mysterious reversal of entropy and that delights all views. Sounds corny, perhaps its due to limitations of how the body perceives, but I’m convinced its something like this.

Albeit, I admit, questions of Qualia may haunt the human race for all eternity. Even with all the endless metaphysics I fail to understand what the color blue is. Saying whether the color blue has a nature seems to yield only awareness (sort of the fundamental type of this view).

If anything we can hypothesize its some second order type of awareness. Then again there is no reason to not be optimistic. Perhaps something like science will be able to solve questions about Qualia if we make our brains a bit bigger.