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The Buddhist take here would be that when you actually hone your attention, introspection reveals not a unified consciousness but a stream of discrete events:

The Buddhist take here would be that when you actually hone your attention, introspection reveals not a unified consciousness but a stream of discrete events: thought, visual perception, tactile, tactile, thought,… The default is to not have enough resolution to perceive the edges. Under this view, the unification is an illusion or an appearance, analogously to how we perceive fluorescent lights to be continuous even though they are actually flickering on and off at a high rate. The difference being, our eyes have a hardware limit on temporal resolution, whereas for attention the relevant limit here is just “software”.

neom 2y ago
For anyone curious to explore this, I recommend sunyata, and particularly looking in the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna.
wanderingbort 2y ago
How do you know whether the discrete events are a more fundamental representation vs a higher level representation that your training and discipline produces?
- laserlight 2y ago
  You don't. Everything is mental fabrication, including calling some mental fabrications illusion. You train your mind to fabricate things that you prefer. Whether they are more fundamental or higher-level representations doesn't matter.
- theptip 2y ago
  It’s a great question. I have come up with two answers (though I am far from an expert): 1) this is empirically verifiable; just do an RCT where you teach people a meditation technique for attention without prompting, and see what they observe. (I have heard comments from aspiring meditators like “I tried meditating but after a while I could not find “the breath” because it broke apart into a stream of individual sensations”) - but I do worry that techniques like “noting” smuggle in an atomizing assumption, whereas other techniques like whole-body perception or Metta might lead you to a more unifying viewpoint if practiced exclusively. 2) maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s “more fundamental”; if you wire your brain to deeply believe that it is, then a bunch of positive effects occur, and that’s the goal of the whole exercise. The words “this is more fundamental” are just a cue to help you to shift. This feels less palatable to me but I haven’t seen the rewards, and if they were as good as promised maybe this would be justified. Anyway, I’m not sure many Buddhists would endorse 2), even among the secular / non-religious/ scientific minority of the community.
soulofmischief 2y ago
Well, that doesn't capture the whole story. If I punch your leg, you experience these "discrete" events simultaneously: the feeling of being punched, the sound of being punched, the visual phenomenon of me punching you. Your brain uses a combination of signal delay and anticipation/prediction in order to create a seamless experience that holds until the temporal discrepancy between events is too large. So there is some cyclic, recursive element to consciousness which is not adequately explained by a linear stream of discrete events.
- theptip 2y ago
  Indeed, there is some more detail around attention (foreground) vs. awareness (background), but the claim really is that in your foreground attention there can only be one object at a time. In your example the three sense modalities would occur sequentially in consciousness, and the rapidity would make you think they were simultaneous. But I think what you’re also getting at is that “object of attention” can be a surprisal signal from different layers, which I think must be true, and I do agree is something that needs to be accounted for. I didn’t go deep enough to speak to what Dharma theory would say about this.
geye1234 2y ago
The trouble with this idea is that, if there is no unity to the thoughts whatsoever -- as some seem to say -- then any kind of rational thought is impossible. If there is no unity to the thoughts, then there is no single principle that unites the thoughts. If there is no single principle that unites them, then there is no single, unchanging person having them. If there is no unchanging person having the thoughts, then there is no connection between the thoughts. If there is no connection between the thoughts, then there is "right" or "wrong" relationship between the thoughts. This makes all logical thought impossible, and means there cannot be correct or incorrect thinking. But if this is the case, then any argument in favour of the position just outlined -- or any other, contrary position -- is neither right nor wrong. So everything becomes absurd. (I don't think this is what the OP link is saying, btw -- he may think that, but his argument seems to discuss experience rather than ontology.)
- sctb 2y ago
  > This makes all logical thought impossible, and means there cannot be correct or incorrect thinking. No, this is conflating paradigms. If this were true, you would expect the same Buddhist texts not to mention "right" and "wrong", and boy do they ever.
- skeks6272 2y ago
  That’s Hume and it is indeed devastating. Only Kant had an answer, but not everyone likes it. Simple things like causality break down if you consider events to be discrete and unconnected. I believe modern AI research could do with someone (re)thinking some of this stuff. Kant has a solution, but it requires letting go of ever knowing True Reality(tm).
- theptip 2y ago
  > If there is no unity to the thoughts, then there is no single principle that unites the thoughts. Not sure what this means. Buddhists would say “everything is a formation” > If there is no single principle that unites them, then there is no single, unchanging person having them. This is the core teaching of Buddhism, so we can just start from here. > If there is no unchanging person having the thoughts, then there is no connection between the thoughts This is a non-sequitur. In the Buddhist view, each thought or mental moment is conditioned upon the previous one(s). There is nothing in “logical thought”, or even illogical/emotional thought that logically requires a self. Thoughts can arise, like pure functions operating on their inputs, and returning some output into the global workspace. Subsequent thoughts can compose those previous ones, or consume new sense percepts that are emitted by the sense organs. Now as a matter of empirical fact this model could be wrong, but I don’t think your attempt to disprove it with logic succeeds.
limit499karma 2y ago
> a unified consciousness but a stream of discrete events Rather, those are the contents of mind that are illuminated by consciousness, which is Divine, Luminous, and Unified and ever present.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
passion__desire 2y ago
> the unification is an illusion or an appearance Julian Baggini - The Duality of Non-duality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAiE_ZQhiDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAiE_ZQhiDs Bundle theories of the self, inspired by David Hume, view the self as a collection of experiences, memories, and thoughts rather than a fixed entity. This perspective sees the self as dynamic and changing, without strict borders, yet maintaining a high degree of order and stability over time. While rejecting the idea of a core self, it doesn't advocate for "no self" or "many selves," but rather a gradualist approach that acknowledges the fuzzy distinction between self and other. The speaker emphasizes that this view doesn't negate the practical existence of individuals or invalidate logical thinking. Instead, it suggests that different levels of description are valid for understanding reality, and that metaphysical views about the self don't necessarily dictate how one should live their life.
- theptip 2y ago
  Thanks for sharing! I think these are probably the lines of reasoning that best bridge from Western philosophical traditions to the Buddhist ones. Anatta seems to be one of the trickiest subjects in Buddhism, not least because there is a very wide range of theories across the different traditions. Some traditions literally claim nothing exists (the solipsist position?) whereas some are very clearly stating “not Self, not No-Self” ie some middle position that should probably be understood contextually against Hindu notions of eternal self that were the ground truth at the time of Buddhism’s formation. I think the “traditional” Buddhist position is something fairly similar to Hume’s view as Bundle theory. Simply stated here: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn44/sn44.010.than.html https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn44/sn44.010.th...
  - passion__desire 2y ago
    I personally find process philosophy to be the ultimate description. i.e. Heraclitus position https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/ Put another way, it's dynamic structures all the way down or up https://youtu.be/j96Hls_-Ulc https://youtu.be/j96Hls_-Ulc
- 2y ago
swayvil 2y ago
>the unification is an illusion or an appearance Or a map. Call it a useful illusion.
visarga 2y ago
Temporally they are not unified, but spatially they are. I am referring to the relational representation space, or the "embedding" space. We know that from neural nets, they use high dimensional vectors for language, vision and other modalities. This representation space is where we go from raw inputs to semantics. The cool thing about this semantic space is that it emerges in unsupervised manner, and makes learning concepts so much easier, is as easy as identifying a point or sub-volume and assigning a label. It can relate any idea to any other idea. Being created from an agent's past experiences, it is first person and captures all the qualitative nuances of qualia. I think this representation space is what we refer to when we say consciousness is unified.
- theptip 2y ago
  > I think this representation space is what we refer to when we say consciousness is unified. I don’t think this is what OP meant, and this is not what Buddhists are talking about RE: unified vs discrete conscious experience. It really is about temporality as I originally noted. As in, are the actual qualia that you experience somehow a single continuous thing, even though they cross multiple sense modalities, and may interleave with complex/compount thoughts? Or are they a sequence of atoms arising that are not a single thing? I do think embedding spaces are a great concept, but I don’t think they bear on qualia very much.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
Or, in a nutshell, Buddhism says consciousness isn't continuous - it's pulse-width modulated[0]. There's many things in life that can be modeled this way, and I kind of forgot about this insight until your comment. I guess this is the flip side of the "refrigerator light error"[1] - sometime the thing isn't "on", it's flickering too fast to notice. (And the way you get that "unification" is like the way RGB LEDs are made: by putting three differently colored LED close to each other, PWM-ing them independently, relying on limited temporal and spatial resolution of human perception to make this looks like arbitrarily-colored point light.). -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation [1] - How's that even a thing? I don't even remember thinking this way as a kid, because the first fridge-light-related memory I have is of opening the fridge doors slowly and gently enough to see the point at which the light turns on, then locating the switch and pressing it with my fingers to confirm.

neom 2y ago

For anyone curious to explore this, I recommend sunyata, and particularly looking in the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna.

wanderingbort 2y ago

How do you know whether the discrete events are a more fundamental representation vs a higher level representation that your training and discipline produces?

laserlight 2y ago
You don't. Everything is mental fabrication, including calling some mental fabrications illusion. You train your mind to fabricate things that you prefer. Whether they are more fundamental or higher-level representations doesn't matter.
theptip 2y ago
It’s a great question. I have come up with two answers (though I am far from an expert): 1) this is empirically verifiable; just do an RCT where you teach people a meditation technique for attention without prompting, and see what they observe. (I have heard comments from aspiring meditators like “I tried meditating but after a while I could not find “the breath” because it broke apart into a stream of individual sensations”) - but I do worry that techniques like “noting” smuggle in an atomizing assumption, whereas other techniques like whole-body perception or Metta might lead you to a more unifying viewpoint if practiced exclusively. 2) maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s “more fundamental”; if you wire your brain to deeply believe that it is, then a bunch of positive effects occur, and that’s the goal of the whole exercise. The words “this is more fundamental” are just a cue to help you to shift. This feels less palatable to me but I haven’t seen the rewards, and if they were as good as promised maybe this would be justified. Anyway, I’m not sure many Buddhists would endorse 2), even among the secular / non-religious/ scientific minority of the community.

soulofmischief 2y ago

Well, that doesn't capture the whole story. If I punch your leg, you experience these "discrete" events simultaneously: the feeling of being punched, the sound of being punched, the visual phenomenon of me punching you. Your brain uses a combination of signal delay and anticipation/prediction in order to create a seamless experience that holds until the temporal discrepancy between events is too large. So there is some cyclic, recursive element to consciousness which is not adequately explained by a linear stream of discrete events.

theptip 2y ago
Indeed, there is some more detail around attention (foreground) vs. awareness (background), but the claim really is that in your foreground attention there can only be one object at a time. In your example the three sense modalities would occur sequentially in consciousness, and the rapidity would make you think they were simultaneous. But I think what you’re also getting at is that “object of attention” can be a surprisal signal from different layers, which I think must be true, and I do agree is something that needs to be accounted for. I didn’t go deep enough to speak to what Dharma theory would say about this.

geye1234 2y ago

The trouble with this idea is that, if there is no unity to the thoughts whatsoever -- as some seem to say -- then any kind of rational thought is impossible. If there is no unity to the thoughts, then there is no single principle that unites the thoughts. If there is no single principle that unites them, then there is no single, unchanging person having them. If there is no unchanging person having the thoughts, then there is no connection between the thoughts. If there is no connection between the thoughts, then there is "right" or "wrong" relationship between the thoughts. This makes all logical thought impossible, and means there cannot be correct or incorrect thinking. But if this is the case, then any argument in favour of the position just outlined -- or any other, contrary position -- is neither right nor wrong. So everything becomes absurd. (I don't think this is what the OP link is saying, btw -- he may think that, but his argument seems to discuss experience rather than ontology.)

sctb 2y ago
> This makes all logical thought impossible, and means there cannot be correct or incorrect thinking. No, this is conflating paradigms. If this were true, you would expect the same Buddhist texts not to mention "right" and "wrong", and boy do they ever.
skeks6272 2y ago
That’s Hume and it is indeed devastating. Only Kant had an answer, but not everyone likes it. Simple things like causality break down if you consider events to be discrete and unconnected. I believe modern AI research could do with someone (re)thinking some of this stuff. Kant has a solution, but it requires letting go of ever knowing True Reality(tm).
theptip 2y ago
> If there is no unity to the thoughts, then there is no single principle that unites the thoughts. Not sure what this means. Buddhists would say “everything is a formation” > If there is no single principle that unites them, then there is no single, unchanging person having them. This is the core teaching of Buddhism, so we can just start from here. > If there is no unchanging person having the thoughts, then there is no connection between the thoughts This is a non-sequitur. In the Buddhist view, each thought or mental moment is conditioned upon the previous one(s). There is nothing in “logical thought”, or even illogical/emotional thought that logically requires a self. Thoughts can arise, like pure functions operating on their inputs, and returning some output into the global workspace. Subsequent thoughts can compose those previous ones, or consume new sense percepts that are emitted by the sense organs. Now as a matter of empirical fact this model could be wrong, but I don’t think your attempt to disprove it with logic succeeds.

limit499karma 2y ago

> a unified consciousness but a stream of discrete events Rather, those are the contents of mind that are illuminated by consciousness, which is Divine, Luminous, and Unified and ever present.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

passion__desire 2y ago

> the unification is an illusion or an appearance Julian Baggini - The Duality of Non-duality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAiE_ZQhiDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAiE_ZQhiDs Bundle theories of the self, inspired by David Hume, view the self as a collection of experiences, memories, and thoughts rather than a fixed entity. This perspective sees the self as dynamic and changing, without strict borders, yet maintaining a high degree of order and stability over time. While rejecting the idea of a core self, it doesn't advocate for "no self" or "many selves," but rather a gradualist approach that acknowledges the fuzzy distinction between self and other. The speaker emphasizes that this view doesn't negate the practical existence of individuals or invalidate logical thinking. Instead, it suggests that different levels of description are valid for understanding reality, and that metaphysical views about the self don't necessarily dictate how one should live their life.

theptip 2y ago
Thanks for sharing! I think these are probably the lines of reasoning that best bridge from Western philosophical traditions to the Buddhist ones. Anatta seems to be one of the trickiest subjects in Buddhism, not least because there is a very wide range of theories across the different traditions. Some traditions literally claim nothing exists (the solipsist position?) whereas some are very clearly stating “not Self, not No-Self” ie some middle position that should probably be understood contextually against Hindu notions of eternal self that were the ground truth at the time of Buddhism’s formation. I think the “traditional” Buddhist position is something fairly similar to Hume’s view as Bundle theory. Simply stated here: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn44/sn44.010.than.html https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn44/sn44.010.th...
- passion__desire 2y ago
  I personally find process philosophy to be the ultimate description. i.e. Heraclitus position https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/ Put another way, it's dynamic structures all the way down or up https://youtu.be/j96Hls_-Ulc https://youtu.be/j96Hls_-Ulc
2y ago

swayvil 2y ago

>the unification is an illusion or an appearance Or a map. Call it a useful illusion.

visarga 2y ago

Temporally they are not unified, but spatially they are. I am referring to the relational representation space, or the "embedding" space. We know that from neural nets, they use high dimensional vectors for language, vision and other modalities. This representation space is where we go from raw inputs to semantics. The cool thing about this semantic space is that it emerges in unsupervised manner, and makes learning concepts so much easier, is as easy as identifying a point or sub-volume and assigning a label. It can relate any idea to any other idea. Being created from an agent's past experiences, it is first person and captures all the qualitative nuances of qualia. I think this representation space is what we refer to when we say consciousness is unified.

theptip 2y ago
> I think this representation space is what we refer to when we say consciousness is unified. I don’t think this is what OP meant, and this is not what Buddhists are talking about RE: unified vs discrete conscious experience. It really is about temporality as I originally noted. As in, are the actual qualia that you experience somehow a single continuous thing, even though they cross multiple sense modalities, and may interleave with complex/compount thoughts? Or are they a sequence of atoms arising that are not a single thing? I do think embedding spaces are a great concept, but I don’t think they bear on qualia very much.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

Or, in a nutshell, Buddhism says consciousness isn't continuous - it's pulse-width modulated[0]. There's many things in life that can be modeled this way, and I kind of forgot about this insight until your comment. I guess this is the flip side of the "refrigerator light error"[1] - sometime the thing isn't "on", it's flickering too fast to notice. (And the way you get that "unification" is like the way RGB LEDs are made: by putting three differently colored LED close to each other, PWM-ing them independently, relying on limited temporal and spatial resolution of human perception to make this looks like arbitrarily-colored point light.). -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation [1] - How's that even a thing? I don't even remember thinking this way as a kid, because the first fridge-light-related memory I have is of opening the fridge doors slowly and gently enough to see the point at which the light turns on, then locating the switch and pressing it with my fingers to confirm.