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Are we products?

We and our awareness are products of ......


  • Total voters
    19

Nakosis

Non-Binary Physicalist
Premium Member
I agree mostly.

By ‘consciousness’, I mean the ability to discern. Our conscious waking or dreaming states are the manifest results. Most however mistake the effect of consciousness to be the consciousness.

The reality that runs through and discerns the waking, dreaming, and sleeping, is the Me. It cannot be known through mind or words.

A computer system can discern and I'm not trying to be argumentative. Just I'm hard press to accurately describe what is unique about consciousness. "I think therefore I am?" :shrug:
 

Thief

Rogue Theologian
What do you believe and why?
the angelic will ask this same question
followed by.....WHO told you that....????

yeah.....we are here to sort out this thing called....real
and then we go back to God

if what we become can walk with grace.....more shall be given
if not.....then we end up somewhere else

gotta go where you belong

how else to be happy?
how else to be fair?

truth?....and is mine the same as yours?

not likely
but THAT is what makes heaven interesting

finding you there will be a surprise...!!!!

heheheheh
(sorry.....please don't take my humor seriously)
 

atanu

Member
Premium Member
A computer system can discern and I'm not trying to be argumentative. Just I'm hard press to accurately describe what is unique about consciousness. "I think therefore I am?" :shrug:

Does a computer system know that it discerns?
 

atanu

Member
Premium Member
the angelic will ask this same question
followed by.....WHO told you that....????

yeah.....we are here to sort out this thing called....real
and then we go back to God

if what we become can walk with grace.....more shall be given
if not.....then we end up somewhere else

gotta go where you belong

how else to be happy?
how else to be fair?

truth?....and is mine the same as yours?

not likely
but THAT is what makes heaven interesting

finding you there will be a surprise...!!!!

heheheheh
(sorry.....please don't take my humor seriously)

Sorry. I don’t know what to make of this scripture. :)
 

Nakosis

Non-Binary Physicalist
Premium Member
Does a computer system know that it discerns?

A computer system is not self aware.
As far as I know, no one knows how to go about making a computer system self aware.

Some have an idea that if you make a computer/AI aware of its environment and I suppose provide the right feedback, it will develop self awareness.
 

Thief

Rogue Theologian
Sorry. I don’t know what to make of this scripture. :)
oh....?
did it seem I was quoting scripture?

well.....there is that one line....
to those who have …..more shall be given

that much came from a parable of the Carpenter
 

atanu

Member
Premium Member
It is not attained.
It is the nature of mind. No explanation is required.

That it is not 'attained' is a realization, which is an attainment. What you are telling requires an explanation -- for most people.

Some instruction in shamatha and an indication of the process of vipassana is helpful.
But I have observed that concern with ‘getting it nailed down’ mostly just gets in the way of meditation.

Right knowledge is a requirement.
 

atanu

Member
Premium Member
Imagine someone wearing a virtual reality gear trying to live his live with a complete mismatch between what he sees and what is happening in the real world. It would be extremely difficult to do so and much easier surviving if our perceptions match the real world. Natural selection therefore benefits the latter.

While we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. We do not remove a desktop icon to the trash bin, although the icon is not the real file. Mind-senses feed us a representational picture only. Reality is what we are.
 

Willamena

Just me
Premium Member
While we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. We do not remove a desktop icon to the trash bin, although the icon is not the real file. Mind-senses feed us a representational picture only. Reality is what we are.
That only says that we shouldn't take fictions literally. But we all knew that (hopefully).
 

Howard Is

Lucky Mud
That it is not 'attained' is a realization, which is an attainment. What you are telling requires an explanation -- for most people.
Right knowledge is a requirement.

Yes, I agree.
But I don't think that taking a position on acinteyya - the imponderables - is helpful.
That is why I said "Some instruction in shamatha and an indication of the process of vipassana is helpful".

'What we are products of' makes no difference. We are what we are. To progress through simple mindfulness to absorption in samadhi requires no cosmological or theological position. To the contrary, those conceptual attachments can prevent resting in unfabricated mind,.

Buddha said that hunger cannot be satisfied with a picture of a cake.

Any meditator who correctly practices shamatha and vipassana will experience the innate wisdom. There is no need to pre-empt that.
 

atanu

Member
Premium Member
Yes, I agree.
But I don't think that taking a position on acinteyya - the imponderables - is helpful.
That is why I said "Some instruction in shamatha and an indication of the process of vipassana is helpful".

'What we are products of' makes no difference. We are what we are. To progress through simple mindfulness to absorption in samadhi requires no cosmological or theological position. To the contrary, those conceptual attachments can prevent resting in unfabricated mind,.

Buddha said that hunger cannot be satisfied with a picture of a cake.

Any meditator who correctly practices shamatha and vipassana will experience the innate wisdom. There is no need to pre-empt that.

Hunger cannot be satisfied by picture of a pizza. True. Yet I need to know that pizza is true.

Else, there would have been no need to speak of Nibbana.
...

Do you have a position on the poll?
 
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Thief

Rogue Theologian
Are not your posts scripture? He he.
if ever I find a way to download my postwork
in a lump
I will sort through the mess I've made and publish my work

but there seems a trick to doing so and I haven't figured it out ….yet
 

Koldo

Outstanding Member
While we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. We do not remove a desktop icon to the trash bin, although the icon is not the real file. Mind-senses feed us a representational picture only. Reality is what we are.

Even our conceptions of what we are is related to perception.
 

atanu

Member
Premium Member
That only says that we shouldn't take fictions literally. But we all knew that (hopefully).

Hopefully. In my understanding, If we assume that there is an objective universe out there and that we know about that universe through some mechanism in our brain, then we do not really know anything.Is the universe in the brain? Do we really see the brain as it is? So, we have built a nice fiction that governs us.

OTOH, if awareness is the ontological primitive wherein space-time-objects appear, then the universe is true since consciousness is true.

...
 

Willamena

Just me
Premium Member
Hopefully. In my understanding, If we assume that there is an objective universe out there and that we know about that universe through some mechanism in our brain, then we do not really know anything.Is the universe in the brain? Do we really see the brain as it is? So, we have built a nice fiction that governs us.

OTOH, if awareness is the ontological primitive wherein space-time-objects appear, then the universe is true since consciousness is true.

...

Fiction is not some part of the world if it is the whole world. In a sense, the world is true because fiction is true.

The term "knowing" I take like so: all the world is believed (implying observed, ordered, and grasped), so shiny. Some of its (the world's) bits shine brighter, and so are attractive. The attractive quality "true" is attached to them, by means debatable, so they are what is "known." As "known" literally doesn't mean anything grander than shiny attractive bits, then yes, we do know things. We know the attractive fiction. We know the bits that are true, the bits that shine the brightest. Of these, some bits are given to be not of our making (objective), hence outside of our control (they are poofed off to become part of nature).

The brain is part of the very world for which it is given to be the instrument of observation. As a best-case scenario, a solid working theory, and a comfortable narrative, it is an attractive fiction. But the whole world is like that: there is no part that is not the attractive fiction. So using the attractive fiction to separate some parts of the world from the whole and declare them alone to be the fiction is the attractive fiction. That any parts of the grand picture are more or less the grand picture is the attractive fiction.

All the world is one bright pearl, consisting of the same attractive fiction, its bits riding on the surface of the same pearl that it proposes itself to be.
 
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