Thursday 16 March 2017

The Hard Problem of Consciousness and Ananda


The hard problem of consciousness is supposed to be about our own personal feeling of the world. This is as far as I, or anybody, understands it, that peculiar cast that the generic experience of red for example has. Yes but isn’t that problem a subsection of the main problem of how the cerebral events translate into an experience of red as such? Talking about neural correlates has embedded in it the assumption that we know that this neuronal traffic ‘is’ red. This is what Stephen Earle Robbins calls the coding problem.
cf:coding
Three dots represents S in Morse code. This is the convention. How do we know ‘red’ before we know it. It’s an unknowable convention so to speak.

Are Plato’s forms and the substantial forms of Aristotle an attempted solution to the problem of conscious experience? The upadhis (limiting adjuncts) are proposed by Advaita. If we knew what consciousness was such that experience is possible would that bring an alteration to experience as such? Shankara says no and insists that it is a matter of insight. Would, however, the cast of general experience alter and the hard problem now be the source of ananda (bliss)?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjeVJiEqZoE

ombhurbhuva said...

Thanks for that link. I’ve looked at some of the video and will probably post on it later when I’ve seen it all. Agehananda Bharathi is a persuasive speaker but I can disagree with what I would consider a false opposition between Western philosophy and Darshana. He defines the former too narrowly in an analytic manner which would reflect the dominance of logical positivism and ordinary language theory in his early philosophical education.