cousinbasil: It consists of A and B. ONLY A and B, nothing else. NOT US. Therefore, if neither one is conscious (or consciousness itself), NOTHING is distinguished.
jupviv: If neither A or B is conscious, then nothing is distinguished? Then where are the non-conscious A and B coming from, or for that matter, the hypothetical universe itself?
As soon as I noticed that we were repeating ourselves, I suspected we weren't really on the same page.
Did you notice I said "NOT US" in the quote above? Jupviv, this is a hypothetical universe. You cannot just bring us into it whenever you want! Are you actually arguing it is impossible to conceive of a [hypothetical] universe that does not contain the person(s) doing the hypothesizing? If that's your reasoning, the discussion is over. It's moot at that point.
... A is already distinguished from B, simply by being A. I originally said that A and B exist at the same time, so how can A distinguish B after it comes into being? - which is necessarily what must happen if we follow your line of thinking.
Well now I can see why you cannot grasp this.
I am not saying that anything is "coming into being"!!!!! I am
hypothesizing their existence!
I am IMAGINING a universe with just A in it. Then I am saying A is conscious. My argument is a thought experiment. I am saying that LOGICALLY if A is conscious it REQUIRES a B so it has something to be aware of that is not itself.
I have never said that in the hypothetical universe we have A and then B appears.
I am saying it is possible to have a universe with just a nonconscious A. It is also possible to have one with a nonconscious A and B (and C and so forth). But it is not possible to have a universe with just A if A is conscious. That is what I mean when I said conscious A requires B. So I now imagine a DIFFERENT universe that contains conscious A and non conscious B.
One more time, my entire point is this: Is this universe I have just imagined LOGICALLY possible? Or is it not logically possible, the same way a universe consisting of just conscious A and nothing else is not logically possible? Remember, I was forced to discard that universe and postulate that if A was conscious (or consciousness itself) it required B so then I hypothesized an ENTIRELY NEW universe.
A is already differentiated from B, just by the very fact that we are positing A and B. It doesn't make sense to say that A differentiates B from itself, when we have just posited A and B as existing.
Of course it makes sense. We have said A is conscious (or consciousness itself). That's what consciousness
does. For you to be aware of a thing, you must first be able to differentiate that thing from what it is not.
This is the entire meaning of A=A! It is the foundation of rational thought.
Jupviv, I am doing nothing but applying logic to hypothetical scenarios and asking are these scenarios logically consistent. Then I reject the ones that are not.
I am rejecting a scenario in which we have a universe with just two things A and B
if one or both of them is conscious.
My reasoning is simple - do not read into it more than is there. All I am saying is that in such a universe of two things with one of the things being conscious (or consciousness itself), there also necessarily exists at least a third thing, which is A's concept of B.
Maybe I should be using the term
perception instead of
concept here. As in A's perception of B is not B and cannot be A either, even if A were consciousness itself.
I say this because if A is aware of B, it MUST ALSO BE SELF AWARE.
You have argued with this last point, but logically it must be so. Because for A to be aware of B, it must be able to rationalize B=B. That means "B is B
and nothing else." For A to grasp this fundamental truth, it must first be aware that there is a
something else which it then sees that B is not. Since the only other thing in this universe is A itself, A must be aware of itself if it is going to be aware of B.
A cannot be aware of B in relation to nothing. If it could, then it could be aware of itself in relation to nothing and would not require a B to be aware of, that is, to be conscious (or consciousness itself.) We have already logically rejected this particular hypothetical universe as logically impossible.
Now since A must be aware of B and also be aware of itself, it has at minimum two concepts, one of which it identifies with each thing, respectively. But since the concepts (or perceptions, if that helps you see this) are not the things-in-themselves, we have more than just A and B.
Is your argument that a perception does not exist the same way the thing doing the perceiving exists?
BTW, we are not going in circles. It's more like spirals. Round and round, but hopefully we are getting somewhere.