> extremely confused and can't separate philosophy/mysticism from empiricism/science. That's rather bold generalization form a single term.) Nevertheless I wou

> extremely confused and can't separate philosophy/mysticism from empiricism/science. That's rather bold generalization form a single term.) Nevertheless I would argue that I could easily hold a discussion on various branches of Eastern philosophy and modern sciences. My friend, awareness does not act, it exist. Other parts of the brain are responsible for actions. That is the point. Awareness is a process (processing of a sensory input, if you wish), one of many, not the whole. Awareness cannot be objective (or subjective) - this notion is inapplicable. Are camera and microphone in your phone objective? Observer is a metaphor used to give an oversimplified but familiar example. In philosophy of the mind an observer emerges as an abstract entity when awareness augmented with a language is directed toward itself in the process of verbalized introspection. A human language is a prerequisite for having such a notion. That is why modern science has no evidence that animals posses self-awareness. That "mind" or "I" or "myself" with which the verbalized introspection has been labeled what it think it sees is mere a linguistic construct. A label. A name for a reflection in the water of consciousness. The notion of Brahman is applicable to the nature of the universe and has nothing to do with awareness. The different notion - Atman - is used to convey fundamental idea, that what the nature of a Man is no different from the nature of the Universe - Man is mere a "product" of the Universe. This is the meaning of famous upanishadic "Atman is Brahman" and "I am that". There, perhaps, no subject other than what we call the philosophy of mind, on which the best minds of the humanity has been working since the beginning of time, and the ideas and notions they have developed, principles they have formulated still stands, even if they were realized as mere insights and intuitions. As for feedback loops and emergent properties - these are everywhere in biology. No one argues against systems biology or development. A brain has been emerged dues to accumulation of feedback and selection on "useful" patterns (I am oversimplifying for the sake of the argument). There is nothing to talk about. Actually, what is really ridiculous is trying to put in a few sentences the findings of evolutionary psychology, the notions of social and cultural conditioning, that a language is conditioned by a sensory experience (and hence by physical shared environment - this is how we got these apriori notions of time and space, described by Kant). What we call the mind is mere conditioning and memories of experiences, encoded using the very same conditioned linguistic forms and emotions (should I explain in what sense emotions are conditioned by the shared environment?). I think you should take the Robert Wright's course and read a book or two on the subject before trying to piss on a wrong tree.