RJG wrote: ↑July 27th, 2021, 1:50 pm
3017Metaphysician wrote:I would agree that 'experience' itself ranks high in the hierarchy of perceiving one's own truth (one's ability or capacity to perceive truth through their senses). However, I would question whether memory itself holds this same preeminence.
Without memory, we could not "know" that we experience anything.
3017Metaphysician wrote:Consider a new born baby who has a blank slate of conscious experience. Their own need to live (their will) acts as an instinct to survive.
Agreed. Though it does not matter if the body is a newborn or an adult. We all auto-react accordingly (all the time!). Only those of us that can experience recognition (made possible by memory) can "know" that we experience some of these auto-reactions.
3017Metaphysician wrote:Self-awareness, and the Will (Schop-as mentioned earlier by other's), more than likely precedes memory.
True "self-awareness" is a myth; a logical impossibility [X<X].
1. We can only consciously experience experiences (physical bodily reactions), not "selfs", or things themselves.
2. We cannot be in two places at once. We cannot be both the observer and the observed simultaneously.
RJG!
I think you can have both memory and Will that in-turn break the rules of P and not P. In phenomenology and reality, of course, logical impossibility exists in many forms, whether it’s the paradox of time itself (the act of thinking/cognition itself and the paradox of past, present & future time) and/or the explanation of consciousness. And in discussing the nature of reality (metaphysics), formal logic does not really help us.
The conscious mind and subconsciousness mind working together breaks the rules of non-contradiction/bivalence, and metaphorically becomes a kind of ‘mottled color of red’ description or phenomenon.
For example, consider daydreaming while driving through a red light, then killing yourself in that car accident. Which mind was driving, the conscious or subconscious mind? The answer is a little of both (which is not allowed in formal logic). In that descriptive case, the logically impossible proposition/judgement/explanation would be: I was driving and not driving my car. Though that proposition on its face is objectively logically impossible/not sound, it remains subjectively true for the individual and their experience of driving. And that’s because he didn’t know if he was on the beach or consciously/physically driving the car at the same time. He was confused, it was a little of both. His body was somewhere else at the same time his mind was somewhere else.
To your point, using a similar sense of logic here, one could say being an “observer” is our own subjective truth that we advance in time by Being, thinking, acting, and so forth (the Will). And the “observed” becomes an independent objective truth that we require to make sense of ‘things’ in an objective world (world of matter/objects). Both truths happen simultaneously to apperceive a some-thing, an experience. We need both truths. And the phenomenon is dynamic; not static, linear or sequential. This is another reason why you cannot use the static rules of a priori logic to explain the nature of (conscious) existence and/or reality (metaphysics). One’s own ‘memory’ then, becomes subordinated into or part of a ‘mottled color’ of consciousness, subconsciousness, and unconscious cognition.
In short, embrace logical impossibility and logically impossible explanations for things. Our minds, in and of themselves, is a some-thing that exists that is essentially ‘beyond pure reason’. Its logical explanations become transcendent. A priori logic does not provide for accurate descriptions or explanations for the nature of those existing things. This is a common mistake I see philosophers make, (especially for atheists who rely exclusively on logic or want to somehow deny mystery and so on). The irony rears its head (no pun intended) when one cannot even explain their own existence/reality yet suppose they can ‘objectively’ explain ‘all of’ the nature of same.
Anyway, with respect to the myth of self-awareness, could you be taking issue with “I think therefore I am”, which of course is another discussion altogether, yes? In that case, I might argue that the ‘I’ which is part of self-awareness becomes a synthetic judgement because it’s a given or assumed that I exist, to think that “I am”. Is that part of the self-awareness ‘myth’?
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” "Spooky Action at a Distance"
― Albert Einstein
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