Atla wrote: ↑June 9th, 2019, 12:46 pmIt's basically impossible to describe nondualism in a dualistic language like English (or more like any language), and use concepts from the totally dualistic Western philosophy. But I' can try:
Matter IS the qualia. You are conceiving two things or concepts or happenings, but they are one and the same. There is not-two, and there isn't a singular substance either as in monism.
In other words the experience of pain you feel probably indeed usually occurs in heads, but it may occur elsewhere in the universe too (where same or similar electromagnetic fields or whetever the material structure is, occur).
The entire material universe IS "experience". The "two" are one and the same.
So ultimately consciousness in the most fundamental sense isn't "yours", but more like you happen in consciousness. You are the infinite consciousness which is also the material world.
In other words, everyone since Plato and especially since Descartes is quite insane. I started out like that too.
There's a relevant distinction between
being experience(s) (being qualia) and
having experience(s) (having qualia). You explicitly write that "matter
is the qualia" and "the entire material universe
is 'experience'." [Why the brackets? Is "experience" different from experience?] So your "Eastern nondualism" seems to be an
idealistic/phenomenalistic monism, according to which
"apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness." (A. N. Whitehead)
Is this what you believe?
Anyway, what about the
subjects of experiences? According to the Buddhist
anatman (non-self) doctrine, there are no substantial subjects or selves. When you write that "…more like you happen in consciousness", it sounds as if you accept this doctrine—which happens to correspond to
Hume's bundle theory, according to which a subject/self/ego/person is
"nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement."
Antisubstantialist (pure-event/-process) ontology is typical of Eastern metaphysics: Subjects of experience aren't distinct substances or substrates of experience, because they are themselves nothing over and above complexes of (causally interdependent) experiential events/processes. And then we end up with a world consisting of nothing but mental/experiential "ideas" (and systems thereof), i.e. with Berkeley's idealistic world
minus substantial subjects.
Note that Berkeley rejected the ontological reduction of
mental/experiential subjects to nonsubstantial
mental/experiential items! He did not believe that a subject is
"only a system of floating ideas, without any substance to support them."
(Philonus:)
"How often must I repeat, that I know or am conscious of my own being; and that I myself am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas. I know that I, one and the same self, perceive both colours and sounds: that a colour cannot perceive a sound, nor a sound a colour: That I am therefore one individual principle, distinct from colour and sound; and, for the same reason, from all other sensible things and inert ideas."
(Berkeley, George.
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonus, Third Dialogue. 1713.)
I reject Berkeley's idealism/immaterialism, but I fully agree with him on this point: Where there is experience there must be a distinct subject of experience that is itself a
nonexperience, because experiences cannot experience themselves or any other experiences. The Buddhist non-self doctrine is false, because you cannot coherently have items of mentality without distinct subjects of mentality:
"To suppose that an item of mentality could occur without a subject of mentality would be as absurd as supposing that there could be an instance of motion without something that moves, or an instance of smiling without something that smiles."
(Foster, John. "Subjects of Mentality." In
After Physicalism, edited by Benedikt Paul Göcke, 72-103. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. p. 73) [Foster is a Berkeleyan idealist.]
This point can be generalized and directed at
pure-event/pure-process ontology as a whole: The very concept of a "pure", "free", or "absolute" event/process lacking a substantial substrate (object/subject) is not coherently comprehensible due to its postulation of e.g. "pure movings" without something moving/moved.
"[T]he Buddhist tradition introduces a new and unique way of talking about human experience by avoiding the metaphysical pitfalls of reification."
Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind ... -buddhism/
No, it doesn't really avoid "the metaphysical pitfalls of reification", since it reifies or "hypostatizes"
dynamic attributes (properties/qualities) expressed by dynamic verbs such as "to move", "to go", "to flow". Pure events/processes are nothing but occurrences of dynamic attributes, with these becoming the new
things or substances in pure-event/pure-process ontology. But its world is an impossible world, because there cannot "be an instance of motion without something that moves, or an instance of smiling without something that smiles." For movings and smilings, flowings and walkings cannot have an independent existence like substances. A world consisting of nothing but subjectless/objectless events/processes is ontologically unintelligible.
Atla wrote: ↑June 9th, 2019, 12:46 pmYou may ask well what is the experience of a rock then, it's probably just some random mess, maybe some chaotic flashef of light and dark or whatever, nothing humanly recognizeable.
But even to say that rocks experience "chaotic flashes of light and dark or whatever" is to say that they are capable of conscious vision, that they see things through undergoing or "enjoying" visual appearances/impressions of them. But how can an
eyeless&nerveless&brainless thing such as a rock possibly receive&process any optical signals and turn them into subjective color-impressions?