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The Emergence of Universal Consciousness (TED talks)

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#2
Magical Realist Offline
I ask myself what I believe in. What undeniable fact of my life experience can I put absolute trust in? And the answer is consciousness. I believe in consciousness, both as a phenomenon and as a spiritual principle. It is the reason I get up in the morning. It is the reason for the evolution of mankind. We are here to pass the torch of consciousness to succeeding generations with the hope that it will burn brighter in this dark universe. No other phenomenon better captures the sense of mystery and wonder of existence than consciousness itself. It is here. We are here. It is gone. We are gone. Infinitely creative and self-transcending, I celebrate the magic and power of evolving consciousness in a world that would only be going on in silent intangible darkness without it. And consciousness, I affirm, is eternal.


[Image: expansionofconsciousness-672x372.jpg]
[Image: expansionofconsciousness-672x372.jpg]

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#3
C C Offline
(May 28, 2018 02:29 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: I ask myself what I believe in. What undeniable fact of my life experience can I put absolute trust in? And the answer is consciousness. I believe in consciousness, both as a phenomenon and as a spiritual principle. It is the reason I get up in the morning. It is the reason for the evolution of mankind. We are here to pass the torch of consciousness to succeeding generations with the hope that it will burn brighter in this dark universe. No other phenomenon better captures the sense of mystery and wonder of existence than consciousness itself. It is here. We are here. It is gone. We are gone. Infinitely creative and self-transcending, I celebrate the magic and power of evolving consciousness in a world that would only be going on in silent intangible darkness without it. And consciousness, I affirm, is eternal.


When you get right down to it, the manifested phenomena of consciousness are the given or original example of existence. (When dead there is no evidence of one's body or the cosmos -- either of the empirical kind or arguments / proofs outputted by reasoning.)

The primary / secondary qualities distinction -- via it seeming to degrade the immediate manner of "be-ing" to a secondary status -- perversely reverses that order with its labeling. An analogy would be our climbing up to a roof from the ground (experiential existence) and then kicking the ladder away so as to pretend that we had always been on the roof (the intellectual version of existence). IOW, our replacing the presented properties of sensation with the generalities abstracted from such by reflective thought slash inferential activity.

Setting aside the commonsense, naive, or empirical realism of the public... Scholarly institutions have been treating "theory" or "metaphysical hypothesis" as the "legit" manner of existence since the time of the ancient rationalists. The latter's approach of stripping away the character of "phenomenal be-ing" to leave only abstract description (number, principles, forms, etc), which is then valued as the "real world" or ultimate level of being.

Hume went against the grain of that tradition with his so-called pan-phenomenalism. And Kant challenged it by continuing the rational process to even stripping away the primary properties or demoting them to just more speculation themselves rather than fact or verified knowledge about a transcendent stratum. (In the context of the intellectual world proper, anyway; not banished from the a priori apparatus of conscious agents or the regulating concepts and spatiotemporal intuitions for making experience possible.)

David Hume (1711-1776) formulated the theory of Panphenomenalism [didn't call it that himself, though]. He denied the existence of all ultimate reality (metaphysical reality), accepting as valid data only those things experienced as sense impressions; in other words, he asserted that existence is limited to phenomena, which are objects, not of reason, but of experience. By rejecting the idea of cause and soul as substances, he eliminated the entire problem of interaction. Hume concluded that events depend upon merely repetitious or sequential activities; that nothing in the universe is ever created, or caused to act, by anything else; and that reality consists only of a series of phenomena appearing in a temporal order. --Ideas of the Great Philosophers ... p. 107 - 108; by William S. Sahakian, Mabel Lewis Sahakian (1966)

Needless to say, Hume's version of "phenomena" were prior in rank to minds or brains (which were constituted of qualitative impressions themselves). Just as on the flip-side the rival, rationalist approach has reason outrunning mind or being prior in rank to psychology on those occasions when it declares its intellectual version of metempirical existence to not be dependent upon an objective intellect or "god's eye view" type of overarching mind. Arguably instantiated most of the time by doctrines of the materialism family (not to be confused with any mechanistic relationship or "causal structure" variety which is purely explanatory / practical rather than making metaphysical claims).

~
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#4
Ostronomos Offline
Hume's rationalist view seems strongly in favor of empirical realism and is thus a socially conforming opinion. It goes against conformity to explain and support metaphysics with a god's eye view twist of an overarching benevolence. pan-phenomenalism is a very basic Philosophical outlook and thus superficially explains reality by removing ultimate reality from its perspective.
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