I think that in the West we have it all wrong because thinking is so ever present that we ended up believing it can tell us something about being conscious. Also, we use thinking as a tool, so we tend to believe that this tool must be very important and can tell us something about the things we are trying to use the tool on. It’s quite clear to me that thinking has nothing to do with having and experience in first person (the way I like to call Consciousness, which to me is quite vague). Machines show us that thinking can do its own thing without requiring first person experience. Like you said, it’s computing. I think it’s hard for us to imagine that this computing can be un-conscious because we are always conscious so we equate the two things. At the end of the day most of our decision making (they say 80%) is un-conscious. With unconscious I mean literally what the word says. It’s not conscious, so it doesn’t mean that if consciously happen in some recesses of our deep mind (as some people interpret the psychoanalytic definition of unconscious), but that it’s more similar to our heart beating, it just happen. It’s mechanical. So most of our decision making is mechanical, even if driven by external inputs and emotional states (that, again, really are physical activations of our body, and need not to be conscious).
Anyway, I think that the fact that thinking doesn’t need to be conscious doesn’t tell us anything about consciousness. And that consciousness therefore can’t be thought about with thought. It can’t be explained. I think it can be experienced, but as a aconceptual one. And since concepts (thinking) give form/sense to what we normally call experiences (that are thinking instead), when concepts are not there we cannot really experience “anything” in the normal sense of term. It’s just pure experience, and even this definition is confusing since its mind meditated. How to get there? Working on it
I think that in the West we have it all wrong because thinking is so ever present that we ended up believing it can tell us something about being conscious. Also, we use thinking as a tool, so we tend to believe that this tool must be very important and can tell us something about the things we are trying to use the tool on. It’s quite clear to me that thinking has nothing to do with having and experience in first person (the way I like to call Consciousness, which to me is quite vague). Machines show us that thinking can do its own thing without requiring first person experience. Like you said, it’s computing. I think it’s hard for us to imagine that this computing can be un-conscious because we are always conscious so we equate the two things. At the end of the day most of our decision making (they say 80%) is un-conscious. With unconscious I mean literally what the word says. It’s not conscious, so it doesn’t mean that if consciously happen in some recesses of our deep mind (as some people interpret the psychoanalytic definition of unconscious), but that it’s more similar to our heart beating, it just happen. It’s mechanical. So most of our decision making is mechanical, even if driven by external inputs and emotional states (that, again, really are physical activations of our body, and need not to be conscious).
Anyway, I think that the fact that thinking doesn’t need to be conscious doesn’t tell us anything about consciousness. And that consciousness therefore can’t be thought about with thought. It can’t be explained. I think it can be experienced, but as a aconceptual one. And since concepts (thinking) give form/sense to what we normally call experiences (that are thinking instead), when concepts are not there we cannot really experience “anything” in the normal sense of term. It’s just pure experience, and even this definition is confusing since its mind meditated. How to get there? Working on it