RE: Qualia - Everyone Sees The World Differently
wow... first of all, thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed comment and also for trying to answer some of my questions according to your point of view.
Well, your answers have made me wonder how you feel about the whole thing and I respect that you view a person's consciousness as a sequence and product of experience, of the brain. I know many who think that way. But personally I see it differently.
And yes, I know the attempts to measure human brainwaves and to reproduce them both visually and audioally. But what the program shows at the end is how the programmer sees things. My brainwaves will show the red what the programmer has programmed into the program as red. And so it is with many other things.
Which red is the truth now? Yours or mine? Does there even exist a red with a truth? It's the same with views and opinions. Which one of us is right? You with your opinion or I with mine? You see a 9 and think it's right and maybe the truth for you and I see a 6 and I think it's right for me and maybe its my truth.
You try to convince me of your opinion (your view = your truth = your reality) and I try to convince you of mine. (my view = my reality = my truth)
But I think that there is no ultimate truth. There are only views and everything is built on them ;)
In ref to both @oendertuerk and @hartnell, before venturing towards an ultimate truth, it needs to be precisely worded - reminds me of the computer in Hitchhiker's Guide. So, if all we experience is our mind, is there any state of mind that is universal, something we can all agree upon? This is not dissimilar to Descartes' meditation, although the answer is different.
There is a state of pure awareness (or consciousness) devoid of any other experience. It is the ground state of consciousness. We don't usually notice it as our attention tends to focus on the phenomena generated by the mind, be they deemed external or internal (the mind doesn't seem to care). It has various names, depending on the language of the texts, but the definitions show such words to be synonyms, and hence the experiences to be the same.
How can one experience a kind of stateless state? What is interesting is that the state has no phenomena that one can point to, and yet the memory of the state remains - it is not a memory-less sleep, it is a conscious state. Indeed, if I was more skillful, and diligent, I should be able to extend such periods of consciousness - so-called sleep yoga claims to have techniques to achieve this.
When one comes out of the pure state, there is an admixture of our standard conscious mental activity with the ground state still present. Mental activities appear with a certain detachment. Without practice, the ground state fades back into the background, yet can be accessed - and it will always be the same state.
And yet all are in a different state, in which each one moves his reality.
is the highest state the truth? who determines the truth?
To give an analogy, a computer can run many programs, yet its kernel, the heart of the OS, is the same. It can even be thought of as the interface between machine and experience, between biology and experience, for us.
Truth? That depends on the question. The answers to many questions do not come in words but in experiences. Hence the fascination with things such as Zen koans, which make no sense unless you are inside having the experience.
I wanted to make it clear why I upvoted and make a comment on what appears to be a habit of yours that runs counter to it.
Brilliant! That's probably the most succinct, accurate and rational thing that any one of us have said on this post.
Why try to sound smart when what you've just said is actually really smart?
Boggles the mind.