5 ms·

I also practiced meditation (Vipassana) for several years, and, like you, realised that positing the non-existence of consciousness is a dead-end. Buddhism see

• EGreg 10y ago
  What EXACTLY did you discover during meditation? What steps did you take and what was the resulting experience? Can you be specific? Same w Ayn Rand. What ideas did you read, can you summarize?
  • IsaacL 10y ago
    Reading your other comment: "I am finding that everything we say about consciousness is just an artifact of our language. If we are careful to always include the subject of the sentence as well as the unspoken assumptions then I have not come across any questions that don't have a straightforward answer. Same with morality." It sounds like you're influenced by Wittgenstein, or at least his ideas. If you assume all these issues are artefacts of language then there's no way I can give you an adequate summary in any amount of writing, and especially not one comment. Human minds can only communicate by exchanging strings of words, after all. To give you a straight answer, though: in vipasanna meditation you focus on one thing (typically the breath, though I often used ambient sounds) and attempt to break down your experience of that thing into constituent sensations. One thing you learn from this is how frequently your attention wanders, and by really training yourself to focus you learn how your attention is directed from moment to moment. The main thing you are trying to gain, though, is a first-hand experience of the Buddhist view of reality: that solid objects do not exist, and that existence consists only of flickering sensations, with no permanence or independent existence. I really can't summarise Ayn Rand, since her writing is already extremely well summarised and essentialised. Click around that website if you want to learn her views on any particular topic. The relevant ideas here, though, are her views on concepts. There's been a long-running divide in philosophy between people who thought concepts reflected something intrinsic to the universe (e.g., that all horses contain an essence of horse-ness, or reflect Plato's ideal horse) -- and the people who thought this was nonsense and that language was therefore an arbitrary human construct (this latter view is currently dominant). Rand found a third position: concepts are human constructs, but they serve an objective purpose, and there are objective rules which determine their formation. ITOE is the only place where you will find her full argument. To compare the two: Buddha takes sensory experience as the gold standard for reality, and concludes that reality exists, but is ultimately transient and lacks identity. Rand takes perceptual experience as the gold standard and concludes that reality exists, that the everyday objects we perceive really exist, and that therefore reality is logical and consistent. (As for Wittgenstein, he says human language is just an arbitrary game which can never describe true reality, and ends up in a kind of quasi-mysticism (man helpless in the face of an ineffable, incomprehensible universe)). I predict you will not be satisfied with this answer, because you are following a very misleading philosophical framework, but I wrote it up for the interest of lurkers.
    • EGreg 10y ago
      It's kind of interesting, you are the second person recently to tell me that I am espousing Wittgenstein's ideas. I never read the man's works or know much of his philosophy, though I know others. I would say what we have are beliefs. And we use language to express them and can only legitimately convince each other, ie change someone': beliefs, through exposing a double standard in beliefs. All other methods eg. appeal to emotion could achieve this but are not logically legitimate without the double standard reason for changing beliefs. Knowledge is another word for bias. From your perspective, do you dispute this?
      • IsaacL 10y ago
        It's kind of interesting, you are the second person recently to tell me that I am espousing Wittgenstein's ideas. I never read the man's works or know much of his philosophy, though I know others. Interesting. It's probably that most people who consider the question "what do words really mean?" hit on a very small set of possible answers. There's also the fact that his ideas have influenced many other intellectuals in many fields, and you many have absorbed his way of thinking by osmosis. can only legitimately convince each other, ie change someone': beliefs, through exposing a double standard in beliefs The primary legitimate way to convince another person is to point to reality -- the simplest way to do so is to point to something observable. If I want to convince you that eggs break when dropped, I drop a bunch of eggs in front of you. Knowledge is another word for bias. I can't really make sense of this statement, but it seems you're implying that all of our knowledge is untrustworthy. I definitely dispute this -- we have to have some certain knowledge or we don't have any knowledge at all. Put it this way -- do you know that "knowledge is another word for bias"? Are you certain? How? "Also I say that the word 'exists' is meaningless unless it is relative to a conscious observer." But does the conscious observer then exist? Do they have to exist relative to another conscious observer? Existence has to be absolute or you end up in such paradoxes. Otherwise, I agree that asserting the existence of parallel universes is arbitrary. "I also think morality is relative to someone with a "sense of morality". Absolute morality is like absolute humor. Humor requires a human with a "sense of humor"." Rand's view is that morality is objective, which she distinguishes from intrinsic. Intrinsic morality would be what you call absolute morality -- things are inherently good or evil, regardless of their relation to other things. In contrast, Rand says things are good or evil in relation some agent. However, this relationship is an objective fact of reality. (E.g., "sunlight is good for lizards", or "friendships are good for human beings").