Alas there is no clear definition of what phenomenology is (which should not to be confused with the specific philosophical work of Edmund Husserl) or even what phenomenism, empiricism, positivism and the theory of knowledge exactly are. There is no clear definition of what the philosophy of consciousness is or how it could differ from the philosophy of mind. And there is no clear idea of what a spiritual science could be or a science of consciousness. We are in possession however of the bodies of knowledge encompassed by the various branches of psychology and cognitive science - and there is surely much of value there.
In our writings we have emphasize a few important points relevant to the entire interwoven enterprise of all these subjects. The centrality of first-person experience and both its descriptive insight and analysis as well as its self-action and self-cultivation: there can be no genuine progress without a radical and thorough form of personal self-cultivation and self-transformation of consciousness itself becoming self-transparent and self-transcendent. Another point we made concerned the great importance of the first-person experience of the body and the various feedback mechanisms involve, specially those related to sensory systems and the peripheral nervous system.
We can ask again: is there any relevance or legitimacy in the idea of mathematical (or formal) models of consciousness?
This question, which we will not attempt to give any definite answer for now, seems related to the circumstance that to us there seems to be two distinct (but not necessarily non-complementary or non-convergent) roads passing through all the subjects mentioned above, whose ultimate aim is not only spiritual science but attaining the ultimate spiritual knowledge. We might characterize these two as respectively the Buddhist and the (neo)Platonic philosophical and spiritual sciences - it being understood that these terms should be read in a very universal sense encompassing in particular a huge range of philosophical literature from antiquity to the present, both from the east and the west. Both their differences and a deep common core (we have written on the connection between the Platonic-Socraticc dialogues, Pyrrhonism, Damaskios and the Pseudo-Dionysian literature) they share are important.
As regards to the differences it is interesting to point out that such seems to manifest in particular in the kind of mathematical or formal model of consciousness we could associated with each one of them. The (neo)Platonic path would seem to point to geometric and topological models of consciousness (and synthetic, global, anagogic methods) while the Buddhist path (analytic and actively illuminating through insight) would prefer event and process-oriented computational models as well as dialectics. Its remarkable western embodiment has great luminaries such as Sextus Empiricus, Hume, Kant and Brentano.
About the geometric-topological model of consciousness. This resolves around the ancient notion of topos (cf. Aristotle's Physics Book IV), the modern concepts of stratified space, and the granting legitimacy to traditional cartographical, architectural, horticultural and other metaphorical language regarding consciousness and the diverse faculties and regions of the soul (cf. the ars memoriae).
No comments:
Post a Comment