Cathy Preston wrote:Eric Orwoll wrote:and that an underlying undifferentiated reality contains all being- but the validity of reason itself cannot be confirmed except self-referentially.
I guess I don't understand what you mean by "undifferentiated reality." because this relies on being differentiated in some way, and I am not. It appears as if I am a body/mind but I am not I am the environment, and all the things that appear to not be me, these things are all me too. There is absolutely nothing to be "undifferentiated."
Because all location is necessarily relative, without a specific reference point there is no location.
This means that if a reality exists outside of your consciousness then it cannot be differentiated in space.
If your consciousness is all that exists then the external world doesn't exist and all being is one mental thing.
If there is an external world then it exist undifferentiated. From this I conclude that all being is one informational thing and consciousness itself is an illusion.
Does our consciousness exist or doesn't it? This is the question of solipsism.
It's nice to know that neither implies dualism.
It seems that you believe in consciousness, and I don't believe in consciousness.
The me-ification of the universe doesn't do much in the way of explaining what reality is. Saying "all that exists is me" merely changes the definition of me to "all that exists". The question of what being is, regardless of whether you call it "me" or "undifferentiated reality" is unresolved.
Neither viewpoint can be confirmed, that is the one true epistemological limit- you can never know if your experience is all there is.
I prefer my conceptualization because it is useful in explaining reality. I don't get any use out of conceptualizing the seemingly multiplicitous mental objects I perceive as being begotten from a single mental source.
By conceiving of the multiplicity of being (the differentiation of being) as an effect of perception we can describe how the universe operates.
Being is differentiated by the inaccessibility of some element from another. The fundamental binary; 1 when being is there from reference point A and 0 when it is not there from reference point A.
This fundamental interaction of being and nothing exists only relative to points of reference. The linking together not there with there creates information. There are infinite points of reference, ergo there is infinite information.
That there are infinite points of reference can be drawn from my fundamental premise; something exists outside of yourself.
A reality external to your self could exist one of three ways:
1. As a reality without reference points.
2. As a reality with all reference points.
3. As a reality with some reference points.
1 and 2 produce the same result.
1. An external reality without reference points must exist undifferentiated. Undifferentiated reality when it interacts with reference frame/perception/nothing reacts everywhere equally because all being is equally distant to the non-observer.
In this case the existence of a perception, your own, implies that perception exists and must interact with being everywhere, creating infinite information.
2. A reality with all reference points essentially describes the state of the infinite interaction of perception with being. Again creating infinite information.
2 is a way of stating 1 without providing an explanatory mechanism for the multiplicity of reference points.
3. Is epistemologically tenable but requires an almost supernatural believe in reference points as a finite pantheon of Gods which produce reality.
I choose to use conceptualization 1 because it seems to me that 2 and 3 require a believe in a mysteriously generated multiplicity of reference points. I choose to attempt an explanation of the multiplicity.
Using conceptualization 1 (or 2) we surmise the existence of an infinity of information.
Within an infinity of information all math exists. And as Dennis pointed out, Math produces physics produces chemistry produces biology produces ecology. The phenomenological world is one syntax within an infinity of information.
Math also produces the phenomenology of mind directly. The informational constituents of every thought-moment exist outside of time. We perceive the forward arrow of time because of a syntactic combination of thought-moments.
Imagine that a thought is a circle. Reduce the radius of that circle and set it into another circle. Take the two circles, reduce them and circumscribe them, ad infinitum. This is the relationship of thought to memory. We remember our past thought because they are reduced (memory loss) and circumscribed in the present thought- moment. The reduced and circumscribed thought-moment bears a similarity to the original thought-moment which creates the illusion that they are one in the same. To mistake memory for reality is to mistake the symbol for the object.
In every moment we have the sense that we are connected to the past but the connection is not intrinsic; it can be conceived of as belonging to a logical pattern of similar thought-moments.
The concept of consciousness is a way of grouping together thought-moments. This kind of conceptualization amounts to a taxonomy of informational states. Of course, the application of a single name to multiplicitous phenomemon (thought-moments) does not itself unify them. All taxonomic classifications are useful only for convenience. There is no intrinsic distinction of type, categorization is a label applied to a class of objects that bear a similarity. Consciousness is a label and nothing more.
I constantly find that this conception of reality is consistent with my observation. Of course, so is a solipsistic conception, but I choose the one which provides me a fuller explanatory framework.