Breaking the "Literal Reality" addiction.

Is it not patently obvious that experience can and does cease to exists when people lose consciousness? What other type of experience do you have in mind besides "as that person"? Perhaps you could clarify your use of "experience" in the context we're discussing.

Funnily enough, no I don't think it is "patently obvious." The fact of losing consciousness, as experienced from the first person, is of an instant discontinuous break in context. Thus, when I am put to sleep on the operating table I awaken in what seems to me the next instant. if I didn't "know" (intellectually) that I'd been put under, and if there wasn't this discontinuous break in surrounding context, then I would have in fact no reference to tell me that I was ever allegedly "not experiencing." In other words, as lived through, it's moot whether there is really a break in experience, and I can make a case that the same might apply to death, on a larger scale.
 
Funnily enough, no I don't think it is "patently obvious." The fact of losing consciousness, as experienced from the first person, is of an instant discontinuous break in context. Thus, when I am put to sleep on the operating table I awaken in what seems to me the next instant. if I didn't "know" (intellectually) that I'd been put under, and if there wasn't this discontinuous break in surrounding context, then I would have in fact no reference to tell me that I was ever allegedly "not experiencing." In other words, as lived through, it's moot whether there is really a break in experience, and I can make a case that the same might apply to death, on a larger scale.

Do you operate under the assumption that other people are conscious?
 
Do you operate under the assumption that other people are conscious?
Yes, I tend to assume that other people and animals are conscious. While I can't prove it, I'm aware that I didn't consciously produce the theory of relativity or compose Beethoven's Fifth.

So yes, I tend to assume consciousness in other beings.
 
Yes, I tend to assume that other people and animals are conscious. While I can't prove it, I'm aware that I didn't consciously produce the theory of relativity or compose Beethoven's Fifth.

So yes, I tend to assume consciousness in other beings.

Ok, I agree. But if we operate under this assumption, then the illusion of continued consciousness as you described in the surgery example doesn't really shake out as a true continuation. The experience "lost" for the individual in surgery (but which seems fluid) can be verified against the conscious experience of any other individual.
 
Ok, I agree. But if we operate under this assumption, then the illusion of continued consciousness as you described in the surgery example doesn't really shake out as a true continuation. The experience "lost" for the individual in surgery (but which seems fluid) can be verified against the conscious experience of any other individual.

But you are witnessing a series of events that takes place within your own experiential flow, not the experiential flow of the person you are observing. It's exactly the same problem with "observing death"...you observe it, third person, from the outside...you haven't died "from the inside." So if existence is experientially rooted, then this changes the meaning of what we see. We infer that a person is "unconscious" for a period of time, but that is not how it is known to them in their own experiential flow. You cannot access someone's experiential flow directly, so watching a death from the outside is not necessarily the same "reality event" as death experienced from the inside.
 
But you are witnessing a series of events that takes place within your own experiential flow, not the experiential flow of the person you are observing. It's exactly the same problem with "observing death"...you observe it, third person, from the outside...you haven't died "from the inside." So if existence is experientially rooted, then this changes the meaning of what we see. We infer that a person is "unconscious" for a period of time, but that is not how it is known to them in their own experiential flow. You cannot access someone's experiential flow directly, so watching a death from the outside is not necessarily the same "reality event" as death experienced from the inside.

I agree with all this. I guess my point was that the world does indeed exist to the one person while the consciousness of the second person is temporarily "off". So essentially we have a situation in which the world exists without experience (of the one person, at any rate). But does this not go far enough? Is the real question, then, would the world exist if there were nothing there to experience it?
 
I agree with all this. I guess my point was that the world does indeed exist to the one person while the consciousness of the second person is temporarily "off". So essentially we have a situation in which the world exists without experience (of the one person, at any rate). But does this not go far enough? Is the real question, then, would the world exist if there were nothing there to experience it?

I don't think it would exist, for of course, I am arguing that what we call "the world" is really a kind of tissue of experience at a ladder of levels.
 
That's a bold claim. Back it up.

Pretty sure that 2012 article Steve001 posted is talking about a math proof, and thus an argument from reason rather than a conclusion based on empirical evidence.

In any case, board physicists can correct me but I don't think that the wave function being extant, as opposed to an artifact of math, says anything one way or another about the role of the conscious observer.

Part of my reasoning is that the January 2013 New Scientist article "Quantum Shadows" discussed three experiments that corroborated the idea that the observer influences reality. (Summary of article here + here)
 
Pretty sure that 2012 article Steve001 posted is talking about a math proof, and thus an argument from reason rather than a conclusion based on empirical evidence.

In any case, board physicists can correct me but I don't think that the wave function being extant, as opposed to an artifact of math, says anything one way or another about the role of the conscious observer.

Part of my reasoning is that the January 2013 New Scientist article "Quantum Shadows" discussed three experiments that corroborated the idea that the observer influences reality. (Summary of article here + here)
Note. NS is a commercial magazine whose primary interest is making money.
Go reread the article from Phys.org.
 
This thread only exposes evident ideas that philosophers have been saying for centuries: we can not prove that an independent world of experience exists, everything changes, so the world is a relationship between process and not a thing, nothing new under the Sun.
 
The core of most issues like this have indeed been known for centuries, but the other side of that is that they are unlikely to go away.

If there is not a world independent of experience, there is still the question of whether there is experience independent of this world, and if there is "who" is having that experience? There is a slight pre-requisite in dreams, however, there isn't much sign that the dreamstate is an *independent* realm of experience. Then again, am I the "same person" when I am dreaming as when I am awake, so once more "who" is having that experience? If some kind of collective participation in a dreamstate occurs at some level, this might be a fashion in which experience rolls over into another material state or life. There doesn't seem much evidence that nature strongly conserves particular individuated forms, 'selves' or memories though.
 
Yes, in that thread the suggestion was made to me that I create another thread for this issue in particular, which seemed like a useful suggestion :)
 
I appreciate this thread's existence. I think this whole way of looking at the Phenomenal/Numinous is an interesting one and Kai's presentation synthesizes a few ideas that I wonder about.

A lot of this isn't new, but then many of our conversations here bear the scent of the Ouroboros.

;-)
 
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