March 21st, 2023
- posts by John Michael Greer summarizing, critiquing, and building on Schopenhauer
- > What, after all, does it mean to be conscious of something? Some simple examples will help clarify this. Move your hand until it bumps into something; it’s when something stops the movement that you feel it. Look at anything; you can see it if and only if you can’t see through it. You are conscious of something when, and only when, it resists your will.
That suggested to Schopenhauer that consciousness derives from will, not the other way around.- This is kinda compelling but it seems like it might be contradicted by the Pure Consciousness Event
- like I could reason about it, but also insofar as I had this experience a couple weeks ago... from my own experience, what was consciousness in that moment? what was my will? it felt like I let go of all will and it was by letting go of all will that I was able to perceive consciousness itself without anything else
- > There were other lines of reasoning that point in the same direction, and all of them derive from common human experiences. For example, each of us stops being conscious for some hours out of every day, whenever we go to sleep. During part of the time we’re sleeping, we experience nothing at all; during another part, we experience the weirdly disconnected representations we call “dreams.” Even in dreamless sleep, though, it’s common for a sleeper to shift a limb away from an unpleasant stimulus. Thus the will is active even when consciousness is absent.
- Hmm, may well be. But this is confusing two kinds of will perhaps????
- like we have unconscious reference levels that take care of things without us "noticing" (and this includes eg digestion)
- some of these we can notice if we pay attention, some not
- maybe most of them with enough
- although in general in SOME sense when something does resist our will here we then notice it
- but like, passive pressure and light don't per se involve any willing? that's a bit of a stretch tho it's a fun metaphor
- there's a difference between perception & error
- the whole thing here is missing the insights from Interface Theory of Perception a bit
- tho maybe a precursor in some ways
- > Schopenhauer proposed that there are different forms or, as he put it, grades of the will. Consciousness, which we can define for present purposes as the ability to experience representations, is one grade of the will—one way that the will can adapt to existence in a world that often resists it. Life is another, more basic grade.
- ohhh, okay, he's figuring this out maybe
- > the will that acts isn’t a representation.
- but also in a sense it is, like it's all in terms of one's understanding of things
- > the only things we can experience are our own representations.
- although maybe he's basically saying "will is not actually experienced"? it merely happens, and we experience its effects? that feels odd
- > You don’t experience the will, you encounter its effects,
- [okay, that is what he's saying!]
- > but everything you experience is given its framing and context by the will. Is it “your” will? The thing you call “yourself” is a representation like any other; explore it using any of at least three toolkits—sustained introspection, logical analysis, and scientific experimentation—and you’ll find that what’s underneath the representation of a single self that chooses and wills is a bundle of blind forces, divergent and usually poorly coordinated, that get in each other’s way, interfere with each other’s actions, and produce the jumbled and self-defeating mess that by and large passes for ordinary human behavior.
- waaaahhhh trippy:
- > What we call mind, from his perspective, is simply one of the more complex and less robust grades of will—it’s what happens when the will gets sufficiently tangled and bashed about that it picks up the habit of representing a world to itself, so that it can use that as a map to avoid the more obvious sources of pain. Matter is a phantom—an arbitrarily defined “stuff” we use to pretend that our representations really do exist out there in reality.
- > Notice that this implies that the more general a statement is, the further removed it is from that thin trickle of sensory data on which the whole world of representations is based, and the more strictly subjective it is. That means, in turn, that any value judgment applied to existence as a whole must be utterly subjective, an expression of the point of view of the person making that judgment, rather than any kind of objective statement about existence itself.
- initial resistance to this, but yeah I guess it's sorta right?
- > A range of contrasts separate the prophetic religions from the older polytheist folk religions that they supplanted over most of the world, but one of the crucial points of difference is in value judgments concerning human behavior—or, as we tend to call them these days, moral judgments. The gods and goddesses of folk religions are by and large no more moral, or interested in morality, than the forces of nature they command and represent; some expect human beings to maintain certain specific customs—Zeus, for example, was held by the ancient Greeks to punish those who violated traditional rules of hospitality—but that was about it. The deities central to most prophetic religions, by contrast, are all about moral judgment.
- > The scale of the shift can be measured easily enough from the words “morals” and “ethics” themselves. It’s become popular of late to try to make each of these mean something different, but the only actual difference between them is that “morals” comes from Latin and “ethics” comes from Greek. Back in classical times, though, they had a shared meaning that isn’t the one given to them today. The Latin word moralia derives from mores, the Greek word ethike derives from ethoi, and mores and ethoi both mean “customs” or “habits,” without the language of judgment associated with the modern words.
- > For those who believe in a single, omniscient divine lawgiver, it makes perfect sense to talk about morals in the way that most people in his time and ours do in fact talk about them—that is to say, as though there’s some set of moral rules that are clearly set out and incontrovertibly correct, and the task of the moral philosopher is to badger and bully his readers into doing what they know they ought to do anyway.
- I don't even quite agree with this, frankly, for there's still the problem of interpretation and of relevantly applying the old rules, which is necessarily subject to representation
- like it makes sense from the inside but only because you're denying something pretty obvious
- and this is independent from how inspired the original prophet was