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Thursday, 26 December 2019


Theories of consciousness, in the line of the 'hard-problem' come to resemble a complex heap of functioning with the uncanny guest, qualia, somehow necessarily attached. This can't be right, it is as if qualia are the immensely contracted residue of the soul in our materialist age. Actually, any worthwhile theory of consciousness would have to include a whole family of uncanny guests, these are the phenomena of life which irreducibly point inwards to the deepest ontological mysteries of being, in other words phenomena which are or seem to be directly tied to the nature of conscious existence as identified by their almost universal prevalence. There are distinct classes of these. One of them is the ethical, and embraces something like the seven deadly sins, or say in particular the root sins of pride and envy. Another is the psycho-social, the fundamental elements of what we might call mental health in so far as these involve the 'correct' embodiment of consciousness. A third is the phenomenological, which would embrace the phenomena or states arising from meditation and various altered states of consciousness. There may be more examples, especially in the are of religious experience, but even these three are enough to suggest yet another problem, namely that while these have considerable areas of overlap, they are for the most part independent. What is being suggested here is that there are realities as fundamental as 'qualia', having in a sense their own particular 'hard-problems', that belong in each of these regions of being and that are quasi-independent. As if the space of these generalised qualia is multidimensional and so impossible to suggest from any single 'direction'.

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