Nondual awareness could be closest to the scientific worldview

In my previous post, We're all having an "out of brain experience," I said there was more to say about a lengthy chapter in Thomas Metzinger's book about pure awareness, The Elephant and the Blind. 

Here's that saying. More accurately, here's what Metzinger says, because his ideas are so subtle and often expressed in philosophical language, I figure that it's best if I use his own words here, rather than trying to restate them in my own language.

Don't be surprised if some, or much, of what Metzinger says in these excerpts isn't crystal clear. It isn't always clear to me, either, and I've finished his entire 500 page page book.

Our inner model of the space of pure awareness is a medium, like a window. You can look at a window, or through a window. And as we all know, sometimes you can somehow do both at the same time.

...Just like a window, our inner model of the space of pure awareness, and epistemic openness (which may be what MPE [minimal phenomenal experience] is) can be more or less transparent. If it is fully transparent, we typically do not notice it.

We see through it, but it reappears as the experiential realness of what we take to be the external world. It reappears as the all-pervading subjective confidence that things are there and we know about them. It reappears as the certainty that something has been known, the nonconceptual knowledge that knowledge exists. It reappears as the background experience of openness to the world. 

Only through meditation practice do we sometimes become aware of the window itself, quite often while still looking through it at the same time. Then we begin to notice something that has been there all along. 

...Let me first explain what "phenomenal transparency" means. This philosophical concept has a lot to do with what, in meditation research, is often called "reification." Phenomenology is described as transparent when certain contents of experience (e.g. perceptual objects, the body, and sometimes even the content of thought) are experienced as thinglike, mind-independent, ultimately real, and immediately given.

We don't see that they are processes anymore because, phenomenologically, they have become frozen or "solidified" into something objective and real. You experience the tree in front of you not as a holographic construct, but simply as a tree, out in front of you, irrevocably real and as if immediately given.

This is because normally your introspective attention does not penetrate the earlier processing stages in your brain that construct the visual scene, bind different visual features into a gestalt, resolve ambiguities, and separate the tree from the background.

...In my book Being No One, I said that transparency is a special form of darkness. There is something that you cannot see -- namely, the fact that most of the content of your experience are constructs, the brain's best guesses, representations not experienced as representations. They are probability distributions, predictions, mere possibilities -- but represented as realities.

...Some aspects of experience "seem to vanish" as a result of exercising attentional agency, actively trying to "fix our attention" onto them. Nondual awareness is highly evasive because any sense of exerting mental effort to attend to it or any attempt to meditate on it immediately destroys it by creating an epistemic agent model and contracting the phenomenal signature of knowing into this model.

...One of my main claims in this book has been that pure awareness is not literally contentless, but that it actually represents something. It is of something, but in a way that makes it completely natural to describe it as devoid of content, as entirely empty, as not like anything, or even as a kind of nothingness.

...In some sense it is an embodied image occurring in a biological organism. You can see an image in two different ways: You can recognize it as an image, or you can look right through it, as it were, and mistake it for a direct experience of reality itself. Drawing on Moore, we can now say that in the first case the image would be called "opaque," and in the second case, it would be "transparent." 

This is merely a visual metaphor. But if it's pointing in the right direction, then pure awareness itself also could be sometimes opaque and sometimes transparent. Sometimes we might be able to look at it, and sometimes we might be looking through it. And sometimes we are it. 

...The transparent VR [virtual reality] in our heads has been highly parsimonious and computationally efficient in helping us survive and copy our genes to every next generation. However, meditation practice can make the medium "opaque," so we sometimes become aware of the medium while still perceiving the world. 

And in a full-absorption episode, we have nothing but the autonomous recurrent activity of the medium itself, creating an internal model of mere epistemic capacity, of the abstract space of awareness as such. Epistemic openness is all there is. 

...I think that conscious beings are precisely those who have a model of their own space of knowledge -- they are systems that (in an entirely nonlinguistic and nonconceptual way) know that they currently have the capacity to know something. 

...The space itself can be almost empty, containing only a clear, abstract image of the mere capacity for knowledge and experience. Or it can contain images of actually ongoing actions, perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. In this account, MPE [minimal phenomenal experience] itself is a model of the entirely unobstructed empty space in which all these different processes of knowing something can occur. 

...Nondual awareness, on the other hand, is a state in which the model is there and has become salient, and in which something actually is known -- but the structural feature of subject/object duality (by means of which the embodied brain normally explains what is happening to itself) has been attenuated. Now the experience of knowing is no longer contracted into an ego, into an epistemic agent model -- now "everything knows," but selflessly. 

...Astonishingly, very few people seem to have realized that we have continual access to the richest, most robust, and closest-to-perfect VR [virtual reality] experience currently imaginable: our very own ordinary biologically evolved form of waking consciousness. 

...Have you ever imagined that you were a visionary who could see into the future? Well, your ordinary conscious experience is an (often reasonably successful) attempt to do just that, because what you see is the most likely future state of the world. 

Scientifically, phenomenal content (the brain-based content of conscious experience) is the content of an ongoing simulation; it is a prediction trying to model the probable causes of a sensory signal. It is not a veridical representation of the actual environment, and it is useful for precisely this reason, because it helps the organism reduce the uncertainty about what will happen next.

This is what conscious experience and VR [virtual reality] have in common: They provide us with a counterfactual image of the world. Waking consciousness is a complex hallucination constrained by the senses, and -- as sketched out earlier in our discussion -- it makes something possible become real.

As opposed to today's VR, biological consciousness is about successfully anticipating the future. This is the reason why we could even say that ordinary consciousness is an action-oriented kind of visionary experience. 

...This raises the interesting question of whether some global modes of conscious experience are closer to the emerging scientific image than others -- whether their underlying ontology maps more closely onto the scientific worldview than does ordinary waking consciousness, which is strongly shaped by biological imperatives. 

I think that nondual awareness could be a high-convergence mode in exactly this sense: a form of conscious experience that is suboptimal from a biological perspective but is closer to our best scientific understanding of what the conscious brain really does and what the deeper causal structure of the world actually is.

Comments

[Ron E.]

Although some of what Metzinger is saying is understandable such as; “the fact that most of the content of your experience are constructs, the brain's best guesses”, and that the self is a construct, he (quite naturally for an academic philosopher) couches his ideas and findings in a language that (for me as a layman) is quite difficult to follow.

It is laudable that his work attempts to demystify meditation, non-dual consciousness, self, awareness etc. by putting it within a naturalistic interpretation. In many of the writings of Mahayana Buddhism there are numerous commentaries; personally, I would need a set of commentaries to get a clearer understanding of Metzinger’s terms and phrases.

[juan]

It seems a new master has taken the charge
https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/chandigarh-news/jasdeep-singh-gill-is-new-head-of-radha-soami-satsang-beas-101725267018861.html

[Baba Land Grab]

Dera Beas gets new Guru Jasdeep Singh Gill (cousin of Gurinder Singh Dhillon

[Appreciative Reader]

He seems to be making two points here. The first is, again, the brain-model business. As far as that, sure. ...And the second point he makes is, the capacity-to-experience thing he'd discussed before. As far as that, I'm not sure I agree. Because, that epistemic route thingy he'd introduced in an earlier chapter, which idea I liked, very much.

He's saying, meditators experience at first hand something that can be described as capacity-to-experience. Sure, not contesting that. Most long-term Vipassana meditators have experienced that, to more or less degree. Including yours truly. Usually it's fleeting; but to those who undertake longer retreats spanning many months, including monks --- whom I've spoken with at first hand --- that experience can be more lasting than the more fleeting experiences of it that other vanilla long-term meditators normally experience.

But, my point is, that experience of capacity-to-experience, is just that, it's just an experience. There's no epistemic route linking that experience to anything real. For that, we have no other recourse but to rely on science.

You see what I'm saying? ...Maybe an analogy might make this clearer:

Our experience is that the sun goes around the earth. But science tells us that the earth goes around the sun. ...So, say we devise practices, including fasting and meditation, and/or drugs as well, the net result of which is that you sit cross-legged under the sun, and look up, and experience that it is you that is going around the sun. That's a cool experience, sure; but there's no epistemic route linking that experience to what's actually happening. Therefore it does not make sense to say that that experience, of the earth going around the sun, is closer to a truly scientific worldview. For all we know it could just be the head spinning from the malnutrition and sleeplessness and the meditation, and/or the drugs.

Likewise this. I agree with the experience itself. But, I'm saying, absent a clear epistemic route linking that experience to how the brain-model actually operates, I don't see why we should treat it as anything other than just a cool experience. I don't see why we're now describing it as an accurate mapping of a scientific worldview. More like happenstance, it seems to me.

(Or so it appears to me. Happy to change my opinion, if I'm mistaken about this, and if you would show me where my mistake lies.)