"The key to understanding selves and consciousness is the “strange loop”—a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain is the one called “I.” The “I” is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse. How can a mysterious abstraction be real—or is our “I” merely a convenient fiction? Does an “I” exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the laws of physics?" Douglas R. Hofstadter
Sorry, I thought this had the potential to be a serious discussion on consciousness. Welcome to sciforums. jan.
It's really very simple. Each person has a different perspective due to the separation of their physical bodies, however they perceive only one reality due to having but one consciousness.
Maybe another way of putting it is that we perceive one reality insofar as we live on a small planet and try to see things realistically and honestly. The reality exists whether we perceive it or not, and there are a lot of people like religious fanatics who apparently aren't seeing it.
I believe it is possible to have a meaningful conversation with anyone. If ''consciousness is one'', can it emerge by itself, ''zero''? jan.
What is that ''one reality''? How can we speak of it, through it, and come to no conclusions as to what ''it '' is? jan.
We do? I don't think so. How would you argue for your idea that my consciousness is somehow the same as your (and everyone else's) consciousness? We don't share thoughts. Why did you capitalize the word 'One'? Even if we just consider one individual, I'm not convinced that the individual's consciousness is single and unitary. People experience a constantly changing flow of ideas, perceptions and feelings. My consciousness now is very different than it was a moment ago. It's even broken up by periods of unconsciousness and by altered states like dreams. So are we really justified in saying that there's a single unchanging substratum that ties it all together? Or is it just a flow of causation, with the present-me merely assuming its continuity with the minute-ago-me because it possesses privileged access to memories of "my" past?
Both consciousness and cosmos might be subsumed under the same hypernym or higher-level concept, which could tentatively be called a "nomological system". Which would include those variable instantiations of consciousness as multiple, experiencing, thinking agents being integrated under its governance. As an historic proto-example: Immanuel Kant introduced the breakthrough of a "mind" essentially being as much a principle or rule-driven system of organization as a natural world (the very ordering of received influences into such an exhibited phenomenal domain, no less). Experience resulted from the mingling of regulating faculties (sensibility and understanding), and lawfully conformed to them as its inferred "observer" progressed anywhere through the presentation of universe, maintaining the coherence and inter-consistency of objects and their changes. Since the objectivity of Kant's "empirical realism" (which accompanined critical idealism) was grounded in the interpersonal availability of these extrospective events and circumstances, the regulating a priori forms of consciousness were necessarily universal and coordinated with all humans (or similar conscious entities). This overarching controlling "logic" that pervaded all anthropic minds actually seems to compromise Kant's attempt to establish freedom or autonomy in his practical philosophy, but it is perhaps only applicable to the mutual agreement or consensus of reality encountered in the awareness of nature (that half of the twofold view of "phenomenal / noumenal"). Although Kant certainly believed there was an independent, yet experientially unknown "source" for phenomena "outside" of experience and cognitive faculties, he devised a standard for "real" and "objective" which did not solely rely upon a metaphysical counterpart for this "shown realm". (One might consider individual "things" as being represented rather than the world which their relations constituted, the latter not being even a deceptive copy, and thus appeasing both the commonsense realists and indirect realists). Kant, on the lawful system which experience conforms to: "The objects of experience are therefore never given by themselves, but in our experience only, and do not exist outside it. That there may be inhabitants in the moon, though no man has ever seen them, must be admitted; but it means no more than that, in the possible progress of our experience, we may meet with them; for everything is real that hangs together with a perception, according to the laws of empirical progress. They are therefore real, if they are empirically connected with any real consciousness, although they are not therefore real by themselves, that is, apart from that progress of experience. "... Phenomena, however, are given accordingly, not by themselves, but in experience only, because they are mere representations which as perceptions only, signify a real object, provided that the perception is connected with all others, according to the rules of unity in experience. Thus we may say that the real things of time past are given in the transcendental object of experience, but they only are objects to me, and real in time past, on the supposition that I conceive that a regressive series of possible perceptions (whether by the light of history, or by the vestiges of causes and effects), in one word, the course of the world, leads, according to empirical laws, to a past series of time, as a condition of the present time. It is therefore represented as real, not by itself, but in connection with a possible experience, so that all past events from time immemorial and before my own existence mean after all nothing but the possibility of an extension of the chain of experience, beginning with present perception and leading upwards to the conditions which determine it in time. "If, therefore, I represent to myself all existing objects of the senses, at all times and in all spaces, I do not place them before experience into space and time, but the whole representation is nothing but the idea of a possible experience, in its absolute completeness. In that alone those objects (which are nothing but mere representations) are given; and if we say that they exist before my whole experience, this only means that they exist in that part of experience to which, starting from perception, I have first to advance. The cause of empirical conditions of that progress, and consequently with what members, or how far I may meet with certain members in that regressus, is transcendental, and therefore entirely unknown to me. But that cause does not concern us, but only the rule of the progress of experience, in which objects, namely phenomena, are given to me. In the end it is just the same whether I say, that in the empirical progress in space I may meet with stars a hundred times more distant than the most distant which I see, or whether I say that such stars are perhaps to be met with in space, though no human being did ever or will ever see them. For though, as things by themselves, they might be given without any relation to possible experience, they are nothing to me, and therefore no objects, unless they can be comprehended in the series of the empirical regressus. Only in another relation, when namely these phenomena are meant to be used for the cosmological idea of an absolute whole, and when we have to deal with a question that goes beyond the limits of possible experience, the distinction of the mode in which the reality of those objects of the senses is taken becomes of importance, in order to guard against a deceptive error that would inevitably arise from a misinterpretation of our own empirical concepts."
I'm not a monist, so I don't defend the sort of things you question here. You go and have a meaningful conversation with a monist!
It seems to me that Genius is (unconsciously?) working out of the analogy that consciousness is like the air that we breathe: there is one air, but at any given time, every living human has their own share of air in them/their lungs.
I agree with previous poster to look into works by Carl Jung. Imagine a consciousness formed somehow in the Universe. If we are all one, then this consciousness would logically exist in the Ether. Now imagine you got bored of simply existing and began manifesting matter and planets and people who all carry a portion of your consciousness to experience. This is a vision presented by Edgar Cayce, but I am not advocating it. It is merely a thought. Every conscious would be unique to the individual but you would also be part of the whole.
Maybe it hasn't occurred to you that the thread title ''Consciousness is ONE'' has a particular monistic flavour to it? jan.
errr ... communication I guess .... Its one thing to say we have a common language and its entirely something else to say we have one consciousness
