One sentence on Thought

[benkahuna]

I don't believe you're using the term awareness as it's commonly used. Your awareness sounds very idealized, perfect and pretty much unattainable by mere mortals. A perspective doesn't just invite bias, it creates a bias. One could even say that it IS a bias.

At least for humans, our range of awareness is so limited that we select a small range of things to observe and that act alone prevents observation of some ultimate truth because we focus on a microcosm at best.

All that said, what you seem to be speaking of, transcendental meditation strikes me as a very positive activity. By freeing yourself from the main trappings and attachments of society, you can be cleansed of your main stressors and avoid what seems to be for humans, an unnatural and uncomfortable existence. We were not meant to be sitting on our asses working at a desk and driving or sitting in cars with such great access to delicious fatty and sweet food, indoors, with stifled sex lives. It's a very peaceful and useful activity and seems to make people happier as well as healthier as shown in a few studies.

I have a number of problems with your post, not the least of which is the fact that usmot's contribution has been entirely consistent with what makes philosophical sense to me as well as modern neuroscience's take on consciousness, sense data, sensory transduction, and thalamic gatewaying.

What I see you attempting to do is go below consciousness to a level where sense data has entered the brain and is a pure and accurate representation of the exterior world. I'm afraid I'm going to have to burst your bubble here because what happens isn't remotely like that.

The first problem as far as accurately perceiving reality is that humans are aware of such a limited range of the available, ambient data. Our temperature awareness is imprecise and only gives some rough approximation of the energy density of systems in which we're in contact. We are aware of only a small range of electromagnetic radiation, sound frequencies, chemical stimuli and tactile stimulation. Even on our own bodies, sensory discrimination in some areas is so poor we can't tell a pinprick as being in two different places despite a difference of a centimeter. Let's push all those concerns aside and just say "so what, so our range of sensory information is limited to certain ranges of certain external events and not perfectly consistent on our own bodies." I agree, so what. It's something, but it can be let go.

If we go just below consciousness and try to reach an area of pure external awareness, we have a problem. You're in the thalamus and the cortex modifies incoming data (tuning and gating it) based on cortical activity. You decide what to experience or not experience to some extent. The information reaching the thalamus is already modified and structured and is not an accurate representation of the external world. It's not our subconscious either because the thalamus is not really a part of the brain where cogitation occurs (and the subconscious needs to be consciously accessible at some point). That's pretty much the cortex and to some extent the cerebellum.

Even if you go to the primary sensory neurons themselves that interact with the outside world, there's a problem. The nervous system is arranged such that one pays attention to changes in the environment. This occurs in both a temporal sense (adaptation--and now how most would use the term, refers to a molecular mechanism by which the identical stimulus over time causes less activity) and in the sense that contrasts are enhanced. The nervous system is structured so that something called lateral inhibition occurs. It's why watermelon tastes sweeter with some salt on it and it's why those edges you see are overshaded on one side and undershaded on the other side compared to how the light actually hits the object.

There's even a blind spot in your vision. The brain just fills in the visual field you perceive to make up for the fact that retinoganglion cell axons (your optic nerve at this point) are placed so that no photoreceptor cells are present in a small degree range of your receptive field. It's a lie to create a complete visual picture of the world.

Unless you have some means of knowing how your nervous system is constantly lying to you about reality and can directly access this sense data, your whole world is a lie. It's an evolutionarily useful lie based on paying attention to contract and temporally dynamic events, but a lie just the same. And if you're not aware of something like sense data itself as your perfect awareness, I don't see how you can be aware of anything without it being distorted compared to the outside world. Once you've axed out sense data, the rest of our experience is conceptual and suffers the trappings of bias that you've already pointed out.

There's a bumper sticker that you see in my part of the world, "Question Reality." Question reality indeed. And not even considering drug states, idealistic philosophy, and the journalistic presentation of reality.