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Post by andrew on Jul 14, 2013 12:40:52 GMT -5
When is attention not active? Good question. I've been biting my typing fingers on that one. Attending is the light of consciousness. As long as consciousness is present, there is attention on something. To be conscious is to attend. Even if it were possible for there to not be attention, how would anybody ever know? Exactly. They wouldn't even know that they didn't know.
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Post by ???????? ???????????? on Jul 14, 2013 13:03:47 GMT -5
Good question. I've been biting my typing fingers on that one. Attending is the light of consciousness. As long as consciousness is present, there is attention on something. To be conscious is to attend. Even if it were possible for there to not be attention, how would anybody ever know? I disagree for two reasons. In your view you're effectively equating attention with consciousness and so your point becomes purely conceptual and without respect for actual experience, namely that there clearly are instances where we are not attentive to anything at all. And further even while we are attentive on something, there is always something within our exprience that we are not attentive to. When attention arrives then in that precise moment the texture of experience is such that it suggests that now attention is present whereas a second ago attention wasn't present. It is the very texture of attention itself that betrays the fact that attention is not everpresent. I doubt that you remember the moment when it all started. My point is that the two are different things, and we can see the difference in experience.
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Post by enigma on Jul 14, 2013 20:15:55 GMT -5
Good question. I've been biting my typing fingers on that one. Attending is the light of consciousness. As long as consciousness is present, there is attention on something. To be conscious is to attend. Even if it were possible for there to not be attention, how would anybody ever know? Exactly. They wouldn't even know that they didn't know. And they wouldn't know that they didn't know that they didn't know. Hehe.
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Post by enigma on Jul 14, 2013 20:40:38 GMT -5
Good question. I've been biting my typing fingers on that one. Attending is the light of consciousness. As long as consciousness is present, there is attention on something. To be conscious is to attend. Even if it were possible for there to not be attention, how would anybody ever know? I disagree for two reasons. In your view you're effectively equating attention with consciousness I say that attention can move and shift around in the conscious state, which does not make it the same as consciousness. Actual experience is very much the point here. How do you know there are such instances? Is it because you were attentive to those times when you were not attentive to anything at all? How can you know that other than through imagination? Yes, the texture of experience changes when attention is shifted or becomes more narrowly focused, but this doesn't imply it was ever absent. It's possible to expand the field of attention so as to be available to all senses, thoughts and feelings that may arise, without contracting attention on any one of them, and it would be difficult to say what one is attending to, but attention is not absent. I don't remember, but I also don't see the significance. You can focus on the sense of self, or you can focus on the story based on that sense of self, but if there were no sense of self, what would you be writing a story about?
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Post by silence on Jul 14, 2013 21:02:29 GMT -5
Exactly. They wouldn't even know that they didn't know. And they wouldn't know that they didn't know that they didn't know. Hehe. Unless they did.
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Post by enigma on Jul 14, 2013 21:07:05 GMT -5
And they wouldn't know that they didn't know that they didn't know. Hehe. Unless they did. Well...yeah....of course.
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Post by silence on Jul 14, 2013 21:07:38 GMT -5
Well...yeah....of course. And not even that!
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Post by topology on Jul 14, 2013 21:15:53 GMT -5
Well...yeah....of course. And not even that! Are you certain?
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Post by serpentqueen on Jul 14, 2013 22:22:12 GMT -5
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Post by topology on Jul 14, 2013 22:39:00 GMT -5
The context of the discussion is with respect to what is actually experienced. In the gorilla experiment, if you didn't know it was happening, then your first experience is absent the sensation of there being a Gorilla present, later you are shown a picture of the same scene with the gorilla pointed out in it and you mentally conclude (based on what you believe about how the world functions) that there was in fact a Gorilla present in the previous experience. If you can go back into the memory of the first experience and find the Gorilla in the experience, enough attention was paid to it to commit it to memory, but the mind didn't feel it was an out of place enough stimulus to cause the "WTF? I need to look at that closer" exception. If you can't find the Gorilla in the memory, then it wasn't there in the experience that you experienced, but now you believe it was there because you believe in an external world and you believe that it is less likely that the later experience is the faulty experience.
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Post by mamza on Jul 15, 2013 2:05:15 GMT -5
I don't even know what's going on here anymore. All I can say is that life seems easy, simple, and straightforward when I focus on what I'm doing. I'm not sure if that affects me or removes me or changes me or has anything to do with me at all. I'm not smart enough, objective enough, or attentive enough to whether or not 'I am' to be able to tell.
If I look for a sense of self, it's there. If I don't look for it, I have no idea whether it's there or not. If I'm not looking, how would I know? Something seems funky to me. I dunno what I think anymore!
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Post by andrew on Jul 15, 2013 2:34:57 GMT -5
Exactly. They wouldn't even know that they didn't know. And they wouldn't know that they didn't know that they didn't know. Hehe. yup
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Post by ???????? ???????????? on Jul 15, 2013 5:38:21 GMT -5
I don't even know what's going on here anymore. All I can say is that life seems easy, simple, and straightforward when I focus on what I'm doing. I'm not sure if that affects me or removes me or changes me or has anything to do with me at all. I'm not smart enough, objective enough, or attentive enough to whether or not 'I am' to be able to tell. If I look for a sense of self, it's there. If I don't look for it, I have no idea whether it's there or not. If I'm not looking, how would I know? Something seems funky to me. I dunno what I think anymore! The self is like the gorilla. The self-believer's claim is that the self is always there regardless of the circumstances. But if you're not sure whether absent attention there is a self or not then self effectively becomes just an object of experience, and not an everpresent subject. If self were the latter then you would know it with certainty even without attention.
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Post by ???????? ???????????? on Jul 15, 2013 5:46:33 GMT -5
I disagree for two reasons. In your view you're effectively equating attention with consciousness I say that attention can move and shift around in the conscious state, which does not make it the same as consciousness. You've said that "to be conscious is to attend". Okay let's analyze your model, which I think is an ad hoc invention to cover up the inconsistencies. So in yur model there are two things, there is the everpresent consciousness, and there is attention that moves from one object to another, and these objects are already present in consciousness. Why do you need consciousness in your model, and what is the function of consciousness in your model? You claim that nothing can be known except when it is the object of attention. You have priviliged objects (sense of self/existence) of attention of which you claim that they persist even absent attention, and in order to justify giving them this status you need an invariant context that is independent of attention and accounts for the perpetual presence of those priviliged objects. This line of thought is the same one that operative in the crude materialism. There unconsicous matter fulfills the purpose of providing the invariant context that attention focuses upon. This means that in your model it's not actually about consciousness, instead consciousness if just an invention to justify favouring some objects of attention over others, in other words it is an ideological trick. No, the point is that we don't know that there aren't such instances and that our acts and the texture of attention already suggests that there are. So we already implicitly believe that there are such instances, and your model's function is to trick us into conceptually not believing something than what we believe by way of how experience appears and how we act. Or, if there truly weren't instances where attention is absent, then we would know and we wouldn't believe that there are non-attentive instances. I don't, but my body does. The proof is how the body and its attention acts. The acts are the effects of the implicit beliefs. Yes it does, namely that attention was previously absent to the objects which now attention shifted towards. We know this because otherwise attention wouldn't be able to shift toward them, instead it would have been focused on them already. Even in that case my above argument would still be valid. Beside that yours is a speculation for me and for most other people. The significance is that since you don't remember it makes your argument purely speculative and conceptual. Self and ego are different things. Nobody writes stories about a sense of self. They write stories about the ego.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 16, 2013 10:35:46 GMT -5
Good question. I've been biting my typing fingers on that one. Attending is the light of consciousness. As long as consciousness is present, there is attention on something. To be conscious is to attend. Even if it were possible for there to not be attention, how would anybody ever know? I disagree for two reasons. In your view you're effectively equating attention with consciousness and so your point becomes purely conceptual and without respect for actual experience, namely that there clearly are instances where we are not attentive to anything at all. Can you give an example of something you're thinking of here? For example, dreaming (during REM cycle). It seems to me there is attention happening during dreaming. I'm finding it hard to think of a moment when there isn't attention to something. But it sounds like you have some readily available?
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