Why We Continue To Be Confused About Consciousness
My Earnest Suggestion Is That This State Of Affairs Is Wholly Caused By Our Limiting Cognitive Frame Of Mechanical Materialism
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That we don’t know what consciousness is, nor how it arises, if it arises, rather than being a fundamental aspect of reality, is now a trite, often repeated, banality. The fatigue that has set in has even led some who try to deal with the subject to suggest that there is actually no such thing as consciousness — which begs the question of how they can come to that conclusion, since it requires that one is conscious of the problem, if that was their meaning.
There are those, like myself, who say that consciousness is not a thing at all, but we don’t mean that you are not conscious of your feelings, perceptions, thoughts and ideas, and the meaning of these words as you read them. What I mean by that, is that consciousness is a completely incoherent conceptual abstraction for the irrefutable truth that we are conscious. My earnest suggestion is that this state of affairs is wholly caused by our limiting modern paradigm of Mechanical Materialism. It is not a cognitive limitation of the human being per se.
I base this assertion on the fact that over millennia, profound meditators and contemplative scientists have been discovering and describing how it is that we are conscious, and how to train one’s attention and concentration, while emptying one’s mind of preconceived notions, in order to discover this via our own meditative practice. It is our modern limited scientistic view of what matters, that demands that scientists ignore the accumulated wisdom of our forebears — for the most part.
Fortunately, not all scientists comply with that demand, and this brings hope for a renaissance of enlightened thought and knowledge — that which the word “science” actually points to, rather than the co-opted version rebranded to be the practice of modern scientists, rather than knowledge. Co-opting language is a first strategy of those who wish to deny some quality or character of others. For example, when the Catholic Church wished to banish the culture of native peoples in the Americas, their agents began the process by labeling the native peoples as “sub-humans,” so that they were no longer human beings. Language matters as much as mathematics, and for most humans, it matters more.