E9MBD

Pain may involve brain activity, memory, language and behaviour. But none of those descriptions explains “why pain hurts.” So the issue is not whether consciousness is exactly as we imagine it. The issue is whether explaining its functions also explains the “felt experience.”pain hurts..red looks red .. something is being experienced. Calling it an illusion doesn’t explain them..

@e9mbd @Philip_Goff It's closer to the latter. Daniel Dennett, one of the proponents, never said it *doesn't* exist, he does not deny that consciousness exists, but instead denies that it is anything like what we think it is. He didn't think qualia exists.

I don't think this objection works, and I explain why in the video.

@DearS_o_n Take your job seriously, not yourself. Taking yourself too seriously is the root of much of the suffering you are trying to escape by hiding inside your job.

BIG FACT: Taking a job too seriously is a sign of low intelligence.

@CuriosityonX A sufficiently advanced intelligence may enter through consciousness itself, using subtle bodies, altered states, possession, dreams, or temporary identification with a human nervous system. They may never arrive in metallic ships or step out wearing biological bodies.

If aliens exist, why haven’t they visited Earth?

@Philip_Goff If consciousness is an illusion, where is the illusion appearing, and what is aware of it?

Is Consciousness an Illusion??? I have the answer! You can find it at my channel Philip Goff Philosophy. Link below & in my bio.

Death does not destroy illusions…..only destroys the body.…beware of turning the cremation ground into another place of worship. A cremation ground can teach you nothing if you enter it with the same unconscious mind with which you enter a shopping mall. You may watch a hundred bodies burn and still return home to fight over property, status, religion and wounded pride.

Spend an hour in a cremation ground. It will teach you more about life than any guru, motivational speaker, book, place of worship, scripture can teach you. It teaches biggest lesson- Everything you are fighting for…one day you will leave behind. Death destroys all illusions.

@Entity3Self @tao_lin Future life progression! Yes

@tao_lin 🤔 Are there any cases of people remembering future lives ?

I recommend reading about near-death experiences and children who remember previous lives.

Blind belief in science is still blind belief. The real problem is the army of superstitious “science experts” around us who do not practise scientific inquiry. They merely replace religion with science and continue believing blindly. Parapsychology may be the first serious step toward spirituality. In this domain, exceptions are not noise. They are often the rule. They are the first hints that our current scientific map may be too small for the territory. Science does not yet know what to do with these anomalies.

These data points are too common to ignore, and the sooner one opens one’s mind to them, the more beautiful life becomes

My point wasn’t about the literary structure of Nirvana Shatakam. It was about the human being reading it. I can point to a rose and say, “It’s not a mango.” Have I actually conveyed the rose? Negation is still language. Whether language points, describes or negates, it remains within the domain of the psyche. That is precisely why Vedanta insists on preparedness before Sravana . Otherwise the teaching is merely understood conceptually. My suggestion is simply that depth psychology can help cultivate part of that preparedness for many modern seekers. It is neither a substitute for Vedanta nor its final destination. Jung and Shankara are addressing different layers of being. Jung asks, “Who is unconsciously running your life?” Shankara asks, “Who is the one you take yourself to be?”

@e9mbd Nirvana Shatakam isn't describing the unsayable, it's negating everything sayable until nothing's left to negate. That's not language pointing at content, it's language dismantling itself. Diff move than Jungian symbol work, which stays in the psyche & works its material.

Adi Shankara cooked Carl Jung's whole worldview 1200 years before he was even born and Jung still lost the debate posthumously 😭😭😭

The real divide is between closed metaphysics, which decides beforehand what reality must be, an open inquiry, which allows evidence to reshape belief.Science is a method,spirituality is experience.both become reliable only when they remain open to correction.“Good science” should say current evidence is insufficient.

Much of the supposed Science vs Spirituality dichotomy is very silly. There’s some bizarre unfounded orthodoxy amongst the I Heckin’ Love Science crowd that the scientific method is somehow intrinsically tied to an unimaginative, limited, dry, reductive worldview. But that’s just not true. Science is constantly evolving and so too is the type of world it reveals us to be living in. In the 19th century, the scientific consensus was pretty dogmatic that Laplacean mechanistic determinism was definitely true. Any view that exact present conditions don’t uniquely determine exact future outcomes was seen as unscientific and woo. “God doesn’t play dice” Einstein would say as late as 1926 in praise of this orthodoxy. But then quantum mechanics came long, demonstrated phenomena that worked probabilistically rather than via Laplacean mechanistic determinism and that whole dogma went up in smoke. Similarly, in the 19th century, the idea that two observers could experience different amounts of elapsed time would have seemed woo and metaphysically obscurantist. But general relativity blew that up in smoke too. The idea of multiple universes or non-local action at a distance would have sat in the woo category too, but now populates all manner of mainstream scientific theories. The lesson here is that the line between woo and scientific dogma is always shifting. Today’s woo is tomorrow’s scientific dogma. And you can be quite sure that this trend will continue with the sacred cows of today’s faith-based scientism. Already the dogma of reductionism is being challenged by experimental findings. Check out the recent work of Nobel Prize winners Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger on the irreducibility of entangled quantum systems to the independent local properties of their component particles. Check out the work of Nobel laureates Philip Anderson and Robert Laughlin on emergence. Check out the work of Denis Noble on downward causation. Check out the work of Michael Levin on bioelectric intelligence. I could go on and on. Scientific orthodoxy used to mean mechanistic, objective, reductionist, local, single universe, 4 dimensional billiard ball like explanations of all phenomena. Woo meant anything that required non-mechanistic, subjective, non-reductionist, non-local, multi-universe, multi-dimensional explanations. Now all of the latter is becoming part of scientific orthodoxy. If all this woo has become science in just the last 100 years or so, do you really think it’s so inconceivable that all the phonemana dismissed as woo today can’t find a home in the evolving world of what science could reveal. Things like spirits or reincarnation or non-physical components of mind or any of the other phenomena that faith based adherents of unscientific scientism rule out a priori. Not to mention the limits beyond which it cannot access. Science, actually is no friend to people who rule out any possible way the world could be a priori. It’s no friend to those who lack imagination about what a final map of the reality might look like. It’s no friend to people who deny their own first hand experience in favour of presumed dogmas stitched together from the arbitrary metaphysical fashions of the day. There is no science vs woo dichotomy. There is an epistemic humility vs metaphysical dogmatism dichotomy. There is an open-minded inquiry vs premature certainty dichotomy. There is an imagination vs lack of imagination dichotomy. And the I Heckin’ Love Science, scientism-as-religion types are not on the flattering side of those dichotomies as often as they think.

The age of 35 is not what matters. I would treat it as a metaphor.The real turning point comes when your unconscious material begins to suffocate you. For one person, that happens at 22 through trauma.For another, at 47 after the loss of a spouse.age is incidental. Crisis will reveal your borrowed/inherited identity is insufficient for the life you are actually leading.

Do you agree that Carl Jung was right when he wrote that if a man does not face his shadow by age 35 he will not improve?

The funny part is that even when someone claims to know what remains after the ego becomes quiet, they finally say it is unsayable. Then comes Nirvana Shatakam, another language pointing toward what supposedly cannot be put into language. So do not become trapped by nomenclature. And perhaps you have reduced Jung to casual self-study or “therapy in an armchair.” Jungian analysis is not merely reading about the shadow and calming the ego. It is a disciplined process conducted with a trained analyst, involving complexes, projections, dreams, resistance, transference and unconscious patterns. A person (scholars)can possess perfect Vedantic vocabulary ..can appear as a ‘guru’-and still remain governed by fear, projection and unconscious compensation. Knowing the word viveka is not discrimination. The person most desperate for a guru may be least capable of recognising one. Perhaps a “ideal” guru cannot simply be found. Perhaps the guru finds you!

Only if you assume Jung was trying to reach Advaita’s final conclusion. Jung is highly useful before the final recognition . For Vedanta, the classic preparation is Sadhna-catustaya.. Without this work, a person may read Shankara and say: “I am not the body. I am pure consciousness.” But practically it fails for almost all Advaita followers. Everyone in pop-spirituality knows this but will not help navigating life.” There is no doer” becomes their coping mechanism not their personal truth.they have missed the major step in between.repeating self affirmations (I am Brahman)is not non-duality…it doesn’t dissolve one who is repeating. Jung helps prepare the person.

It appears like a paradox: Looking forward, life appears chaotic. Looking backward, events may appear connected. “Everything is already predetermined, so there is no point doing anything” is passive fatalism. You are also part of whatever produces the future. Your resistance, intelligence, stupidity, courage and surrender all belong to fate. Everything is not pre-written. Everything is conditioned. Your birth, body, family, wounds and encounters form the field delivered to you. But every delivered moment becomes another junction. Most people do not consciously choose at that junction. Their fear chooses. Their conditioning chooses. Their momentum from the unfinished past chooses. A chance meeting may be the intersection of two independent lives. Yet the intensity it awakens may reveal a pattern waiting to be completed. Retrospectively, we demand that the wound should never have happened. But the event happened once. Anyhow, resentment makes it happen every day. In hundreds of PLR cases, I have repeatedly seen the same pattern: people continue reacting to an event long after the event itself has ended. In one’s final moments, if one exclaims life was all predetermined... imagine the guilt and hopelessness! Escaping fate is not freedom. Freedom is a state of realisation when one no longer experiences oneself as the victim of “pre-destined” events.

Everything is pre-determined.

@CuriosityonX Which worldview best prepares someone for death and the continuity of consciousness, (if/since)consciousness survives bodily death? That’s the better question….

Which religion, in your opinion, makes the most sense?

@RaminNasibov “He/she” stopped calling

write a sad story using only 3 words

the past is “unpredictable” because its meaning keeps changing. The past should be fixed. But in human life, it isn’t. A childhood event at 10 feels different at 20, 40, and 70. Same event but Different interpretations A breakup once felt like betrayal. Later it feels like rescue. In eastern philosophy .. Liberation is when the past loses the authority to impersonate the present.

A Russian saying on nostalgia: "The past is more unpredictable than the future."

@waldenpod You know it because every doubt, every question, every denial appears inside it.

How do you know that you’re conscious?

Numbers do not have consciousness. Consciousness gives numbers meaning. Like birthdays, for example. A birthday is just numbers on a calendar: 9 July, 12 March, 9 minutes, 49 days. The numbers themselves feel nothing. But consciousness attaches memory, identity, love, fear, ritual, loss, and expectation to them.

@Philip_Goff @mary_leng are numbers conscious?

Are Numbers Real??? I loved this chat with the awesome @mary_leng! You can find it at my channel Philip Goff Philosophy. Link below and in my bio.

A little story that I use to explain kids to understand Ontology .. it goes like this … Ama smiled. “Bring me the apple,” she said. Tara picked up the apple. “Does the apple exist?” Ama asked. “Yes.” “How do you know?” “I can see it. I can hold it. I can eat it.” Ama nodded. “Good. Now bring me the number 7.” Tara picked up the paper. “This is not the number 7,” she said. “This is only ink.” Ama laughed. “Then how many apples would we have if I gave you seven apples?” “Seven.” “So the number works?” “Yes.” “Then do not ask whether number 7 exists like an apple exists. Ask how number 7 exists in our counting game.” Tara became quiet. Ama said, “Not everything exists in the same way.”