The Elephant and the Blind -- a provocative book about pure consciousness

Proving my dedication to the study of consciousness (or maybe my addiction to books), a few days ago my $80 copy of Thomas Metzinger's 600 page book, The Elephant and the Blind, arrived. 

I had to buy the paperback version because I can't read a nonfiction book without a pen and highlighter in hand. But the book can be read for free via a download from the publisher, the MIT press. Just click on the Open Access tab.

Metzinger is a philosopher who wrote a book about the mind, The Ego Tunnel, that I enjoyed. Here's some of the blog posts I wrote about the book (the last one has links to all the posts).

Stuck in "The Ego Tunnel" without a self 
Laying bare how the ego tunnel is dug
My review of "The Ego Tunnel" -- 5 stars

I've just started reading The Elephant and the Blind. It looks really interesting. This is the Amazon description of the book.

An engaging and insightful journey into human consciousness.

What if our goal had not been to land on Mars, but in pure consciousness? The experience of pure consciousness—what does it look like? What is the essence of human consciousness? In The Elephant and the Blind, influential philosopher Thomas Metzinger, one of the world's leading researchers on consciousness, brings together more than 500 experiential reports to offer the world's first comprehensive account of states of pure consciousness. Drawing on a large psychometric study of meditators in 57 countries, Metzinger focuses on “pure awareness” in meditation—the simplest form of experience there is—to illuminate the most fundamental aspects of how consciousness, the brain, and illusions of self all interact.

Starting with an exploration of existential ease and ending on Bewusstseinskultur, a culture of consciousness, Metzinger explores the increasingly non-egoic experiences of silence, wakefulness, and clarity, of bodiless body-experience, ego-dissolution, and nondual awareness. From there, he assembles a big picture—the elephant in the parable, from which the book’s title comes—of what it would take to arrive at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience and create a genuine culture of consciousness. Freeing pure awareness from new-age gurus and old religions, The Elephant and the Blind combines personal reports of pure consciousness with incisive analysis to address the whole consciousness community, from neuroscientists to artists, and its accessibility echoes the author’s career-long commitment to widening access to philosophy itself.

After reading the initial chapters, I decided to head to the final chapter, "The Elephant: What is Pure Awareness?" It turns out that it isn't exactly pure, so it'd be more accurate to say Purer Awareness. Here's five possible answers Metzinger gives. I've shortened some of the answers.

P1 Contentlessness MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience] can occur in full-absorption episodes as the only kind of phenomenal character that can later be reported; in these cases, pure awareness appears as a stand-alone, singular feature.

P2 No-thought The second less radical, but equally canonical reading of "purity" refers to the absence of all mental conflict, noise, and perturbation. In a simplified reading, it is the absence of all discursive thought, memory, planning, and "spontaneous-task unrelated thought" like daydreaming or mind-wandering.

P3 Clarity In this answer, pure awareness is the experience of a clear and unobstructed space of knowing... The clarity feature has been described for centuries and is simply the nonconceptual experience of one's own epistemic capacity per se, of an inner space that is pure in the sense of being wide open and lucid at the same time.

P4 Suchness This interpretation refers to the phenomenology of "pure perception"... Here, the conscious experience is of perceptual content spontaneously arising, but with a complete lack of conceptual overlay, including time experience and implicit judgments as to the "existence" or "nonexistence" of what is perceived. It is this lack that makes perceptual awareness pure.

P5 Nonduality In chapters 27 and 29, we saw that one way of defining "purity" is as conscious experience lacking subject/object structure. In this sense, pure awareness is a nondual mode of experience that lacks an epistemic agent model and any sort of egoic first-person perspective.

Comments

[Appreciative Reader]

Fascinating book. And it's great that it's available for a free read, thanks for the link.

Glanced through your other posts on it, and bookmarked them for a read later when I'm free. Funny that I don't seem to remember having seen this before, given how extensively you've covered this, and how interesting and relevant the content.

[Appreciative Reader]

Enjoyed reading those three posts of yours. And the comment conversations from back then, as well.

Haven't had time to read this book, but I did browse briefly through some chapters that caught my eye, following those chapter-links you'd provided. Looks fascinating.

If you find anything interesting in there, then do write about it here, Brian. I do think bona fide research on this subject broadly, is a great idea. Of course, what you've covered so far isn't objective neuroscience, its more like a sociological/anthropological survey of people's subjective recall/claims; but absolutely, that also does qualify as bona fide science, if a softer science.