Awareness Perspective
In the "Awareness Perspective" (of Nah), we take The Awareness to be the basic ingredient in Information Processing.
However, the nature and mechanism of awareness isn't yet well known and the awareness isn't taken for granted to exist (in permanent and/or universal sense), to be good (for us, for something else, or in any way), to be reliable.
I simply use awareness as hypothetical and temporary base when I think about certain things because it seems to provide explanations for what I'm interested in.
As awareness itself seems to have the positive/absolute bias already built in, I think it's better to be very cautious about having or building blind faith/trust/dependency/etc. Otherwise, like any positively tainted perspective, this can turn any one of our idea into a sort of "religious" belief.
Basic nature of Awareness
The basic nature of awareness I've noticed and we can observe, so far:
- The density/degree of awareness seems to fluctuate, from no awareness to "average" waking awareness of many of us, as well as into dream and other less common states.
- Awareness may or may not have the focus (Focus Of Awareness) on Field Of Awareness, with asscociated side effects, such as separation/division, virtualization, sticky tendency, generation of subconscious (and negative) zone, and so on.
- Awareness requires pattern matching (or at least signal detection), which may imply some sort of memory (or at least delaying mechanism and comparator), and probably multistage feed back loops.
- Awareness is awareness when it is aware that it is aware instead of void/emptiness.
- Awareness requires continuity of certain duration (possibly different for different species and/or different moment).
- Awareness seems to have the basic tendency to presume this momentarily continuity as persistence or even permanence. This is possibly due to the lack of finer pattern matching at the basic level of awareness, and we may be able to correct by providing information concerning inpermanence into the lower feed back loop(s).
- Similarly, the tendency of virtualization and stickiness creating the impression of absoluteness associated with the focused part might be reduced or reset by injecting the information concerning limited and conditional nature of any focus and also the very vague nature of The Boundary.
- Without these correction measures, awareness will continue to influence any information processing with very strong bias for positivity and absoluteness, creating the kind of Thinking And Reasoning pattern so common among us.
- The tendency of The Awareness to see focused part as The Absolute/whole would cause the presumption of permanence/absoluteness/universality/etc and this will in turn propel us for the quest of The Truth, as well as The Certainty about what we assume as The Reality (a.k.a. knowledge).
Related threads
- Separated reality = virtual world http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=168136
Because of the focusing on the positive matching area and its stickiness (which is required to produce positive match of above minimum continuity), awareness generates the sense of certainty.
If we are aware of something, we are certain about it (in varying degree, depending on the density, sharpness, etc of the focus and awareness).
To maintain the awareness, it's necessary to avoid the sense of uncertainty (and remain/keep the state in which the sense of certainty is generated).
This cause the awareness to have the bias for positivity and persistence/universality, as fluctuation breaks the sense of certainty and wider spot is difficult to miss.
Since our mental activity is directly based on how we focus our awareness on different matter and compare/evaluate them, our thought is highly and tightly biased towards positivity, certainty, and permanence/universality, which is nothing other than our (often subconscious) image of the absolute.
In addition to the bias, we desire the positive/certainty/permanence/universality/absolute while fear the negative/uncertainty/impermanence/limit/restriction.
Thus, it's normal to see such tendency in most of our mental activity and its products such as logic, philosophy, religion, and so on. In short, most of our mental activities are the quest for the positive/certainty/absolute (in slightly different forms depending on the nature of each person).
The awareness-certainty link is most probably responsible for the prevailing occurrence of "hinge-proposition", in the sense Sam26 presents in this thread (in another forum).
And I would say that lots of our theories/systems are built/founded upon hinge-propositions, and also restricted by them.
In the case of formal logic, I think it's evident that the motivation for having such system is to preserve the sense of certainty (represented by Truth/Fact/Reality/etc) and even boost it, as I've written in this thread:
Personally, I see logic as something a bit different:
Awareness as the positive certainty generator
Implications of awareness-certainty link
Related Threads
Potential Remedies