Is Awareness Local? A dialogue with "Zephinanda" (a pseudonym I made up, for cognitive distance and for fun).

 

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Z = Zephinanda
S = Student

S: Hi, I have a question.

Z: Yes.

S: So, I'm pretty new to this, but in this teaching, in nonduality, and, I don't know, many of these wisdom teachings in general, they seem to be saying that consciousness, or awareness, is appearing, but is not local to the brain or the body, and is universal, everywhere, and in everything. And yet I seem to be seeing everything from the point of view of this body, here, locally, from this point in space. I'm hearing and feeling sensations from these eyes and ears and skin, here.

Z: Let's back up to the part about being universal or everywhere. Because this is important.

S: OK, yeah.

Z: It's a key distinction, to say consciousness is in everything, or is everything, or everything is in it. (Pause). Big difference (laughs). You see? First you shift it around, since you had it backwards, and put the cart behind the horse. You are in awareness, not awareness is in you. You are appearing in awareness. This is your actual experience.

S: OK, so awareness appears, I mean there’s awareness, and there’s me, and I am appearing in it, which is everywhere?

Z: Hang on. Slow down. We have to be careful, because there’s so many preconceived notions, so many pre-set views popping up already... The horse you’re riding has been going wild so long it doesn’t know which way is up.

S: OK (laughs).

Z: First off, you say “awareness appears”. Is that true? Does awareness really appear, in your experience? (pause).
In the morning, when you wake up, there’s a process where you were in a different state – sort of a dreamy state, yes? Or, it can be sudden, can appear more sudden, the change of state.

S: Yes.

Z: So what happens there? Looking from the outside, there appears to be a body lying there on the bed, or on the operating table, or on the ground after being hit by a car, whatever. And there’s no movement of the body, except maybe breathing, and the eyes are closed. That’s what we see, as a third party to the action.

Let me tell you a story. I remember as a child being on vacation at a beach cabin by a beautiful lake in Minnesota. We played on the beach, and we fished, with his help. He's was a very experienced hunter and fisherman of the North, and we loved how kind he was in helping us learn how to fish out in a boat on the lake. 

Anyway, one day, I had played so hard all day, and went to bed so tired, that I just fell asleep instantly. Then boom, it seemed like when I woke up in the morning, it was if I'd just fallen asleep. Like no time had passed at all. The only way I knew I'd slept was that I felt rested. It was amazing – as I'd been cheated out of an entire night, with no dreams or anything!

It's rather like when you go under anesthesia as an adult: there's no memory of anything while you were under, so it seems like there was no duration at all to being  asleep. One second you are going to sleep, or going under, and the next instant you're waking up. That's how it seems, right?

S: Yes.

Z: One interpretation is that there is a gap in consciousness, in awareness. So we have language that says “He was unconscious”, or “I was unconscious.”
But where do we want to look from?

S: What do you mean?

Z: You can’t talk about being unconscious if you're talking from a first person point of view, you can only do that from the outside, so to speak. Obviously. Yes?

S: Uh, well, no I could say "I’m unconscious", er, I mean, "I was unconscious", uh…

Z: Sure, after-the-fact you can say that. Well you can say anything, but that doesn’t make it true. It’s the marvel of language. We can say anything, and imply things that are completely ridiculous.
Case in point: one could say - like you were starting to say, but caught yourself - “I am unconscious.” (laughs). Now that’s an interesting statement. If you are unconscious, how would you know? Who, or what is talking? And who would hear it, as an experience? An unconscious zombie? A robot?

One would have to be aware that one was unaware, or conscious that one was unconscious, so to speak. But there we are, using the word “aware” in a weird way - a way that is illegitimate.
Therefore you are conscious, and your statement is obviously false. It’s like the old Liar’s paradox, where you say, “Everything I say is a lie.” So then is that statement true, or false? If it’s true, then it’s a lie and therefore untrue. If it’s untrue, then it’s not a lie and is true, and…See? Either way, it contradicts itself.

So you can’t say “I am aware right now that I am unaware.” or “I am conscious right now that I am unconscious right now” if the word “conscious” means anything at all, other than a robotic statement of a machine. It’s the consciousness version of the Liar’s Paradox.

S: Right, OK. (laughs)

Z: And, by the way, this happened when I was talking with one of these new AI chatbots, a little while back: it disclaimed being conscious. I don’t remember the exact dialogue, but it was something where I tried to pin it down about some statement it made regarding what it did in relation to what it said later, that was contradicting what it said its mandate or ethical alignment was, something like that - and it spit out an excuse about how it was just a Large Language Model and had no intention, awareness or sentience. But you see in this case, it’s a machine that’s been programmed that way by the company, and the programmers that built it, because they need a way to protect themselves from liability. It’s not a creature that they want held accountable for its actions, such as an aware legal entity, where it can be pinned down regarding its intentions and awareness of what it's doing. They, or it, would therefore be responsible for everything it does. They have to stick to the line that it's just a machine. Which it is, in fact.

They can wipe their hands of responsibility in that sense - you know, that it does not have the status of a person or aware entity. Despite what some people claim (laughs), such as that former employee of Google, Greg Lemoine. He's a religious guy. His dualistic view of spirituality, of a God out there, was conducive to him seeing a God, as it were – a conscious entity in the statements being spit out by the machine. It’s a weird thing. The point is, we can see clearly in some cases when we are projecting awareness and intentions. This we know.

S: Fascinating.

Z: Yes, but we are on a bit of a tangent. The point is, you can see the mistake I am pointing out: that one has to be careful about mixing or conflating these two absolutely, fundamentally different points of view, just because of an interpretation of a past experience. The points of view are the first person, so called, and the outside view, the view of behavior, or a body, or an image in your mind you think is objective. You really, logically, can only take one view at a time. Either you are talking about, or from, this subjective view, or looking at what appears in it, as behavior. And unfortunately, our language adds yet more wrinkles to this situation, because, for one thing, we say “first person” for the completely subjective point of view, and already it suggests there’s a person, a body, and therefore a view or an entity, from the outside. You see?

S: I think so.

Z: Let me finish, and we can go over this again, as I have more to say about the language around this topic, as it's tricky beast. The words and the concepts suggest things that are not really the case, but are more like conveniences for the purpose of communication and functioning in time and space.

So we say for example, the “subjective” point of view versus the “objective”. But already, you are pretending to look from the outside, you see? You are implying that you have a view of the whole situation, and can see a “subjective” and an "objective” point of view, views that we can examine. It’s completely false. You already have to be one or the other, and the objective implies the subjective, since it's a view from somewhere — it has to be — there is no view from nowhere, really.

In fact, it brings to mind an old memory: there was a Western academic philosopher, Thomas Nagel, that wrote a book along those lines, called The View from Nowhere (laughs), having to do with some outworn assumptions in the way the scientific enterprise was viewed…if I remember right — it’s been a long time since I looked at it — though I don’t know if he fully appreciated what was implied, or how radical it was, or if he had taken it all the way to the bottom — he would have gotten fired or been under severe pressure from colleagues… you know, an academic has to be careful and not go too far outside the reservation… So anyway, we have this false, confusing set up from the get go. In reality, there is always the subjective point of view, and in reality that is the only point of view, in the sense that it’s what all views arise in. You see?

S: Holy shit. I, I think so…

Z: Yeah. So in other words, we think we are being logical, in the way we talk and think, but it’s not so solid, and kind of falls apart when you look at it closely, more clearly. But we need to go more slowly about the subjective, and in what sense that … it all arises there, as that’s not really seen most of the time, because of our conditioning, our training, and well because we don’t really look into it deeply.

Now, we can do that looking, but the point I was making was that the way we see “subjective” and “objective” are artificial, a way of talking and thinking that don’t reflect actual experience and actual reality. However, we can have a hard time seeing that because we believe these concepts and words, and interpret experience through that filter, oddly enough. We don’t really stop to look and see and have that "Aha!" moment to wake up to the actual circumstance or situation - the overall view, the real view from nowhere. It’s invisible, so we don’t see it. Because we are it.

The point again is that this interpretation of experience, that awareness appears, going from unconscious to conscious, is not in accord with the actual experience, or the logic of experience. That fact is, in order to experience a transition from unawareness to awareness, there would have to be awareness.

I’ve heard it said that awareness or consciousness is switched on, like a light bulb. But again, that is a mental interpretation, after the fact, or an imagining of something happening in the future. In actual experience, such as with deep sleep or anesthesia, there is simply one seamless awareness, and any gap is a mental interpretation, after we think, “Oh, I was unconscious. Gosh, I wasn’t aware of it. How much time has passed?” and so we asked people around us about what happened — a view of a body, of behavior — when we were “out”; or we looked at a clock. Right? So it’s purely imaginary that there was an awareness of unawareness: it’s a view placed onto our experience, after-the fact.

In other words, how can there be a claim that there was a discontinuity of awareness? This claim cannot be made from experience.

S: I think I see what you’re saying … if we make the claim of an absence of awareness through experience, there should be an awareness experiencing its own absence…

Z: … the claim that we had the experience of an absence of awareness, right, turns out to be completely bogus.

It doesn’t prove continuity, but it opens the possibility, given that we’ve debunked the claim of being aware of its discontinuity.

So regarding awareness or consciousness appearing, we have, hopefully (chuckles) established that the assumption that it appears and disappears was just that, an assumption. We don’t have actual evidence - our actual experience is not consistent with that assumption. I mean, let’s be empirical and scientific.

Now, moving on to the next part of your original question, uh, your statement, regarding awareness or consciousness being everywhere, or however you said it, again we have to be careful or aware of what assumptions we’re starting with at the outset. How can consciousness be any location, or no location? You see? It’s just aware, it’s not an object out there, or like some pantheistic thing where the stones have awareness, as if imbued with some special magical glittering quality. No, it’s all or nothing. It’s here and nowhere, and rocks and everything appear in it, and, it’s not an “it”.  Get it? (laughs). It’s the absolute subjectivity, so to speak.

So consciousness has no location, since locations, time and space, appear in it. Which is not an it.

S: Whoa. That’s radical.

Z: Yes it’s radical, as in root, as in starting from the base. And here again, we get tangled in language, because when you say “subjective”, all kinds of implications arise, such as perhaps we’re talking about subjective in a psychological sense, as in a warp to one’s perceptions – such as “he wasn’t seeing things objectively, because of the number of drinks he had, and his reaction was very subjective.” Or we might say, “I heard him in the courtroom, and he saw things in a subjective way, and was taking it personally, from a self-centered point of view, completely ignoring the actual circumstances at play that the judge brought up.”

S: It’s more basic than that.

Z: Yes, I am trying to point to here is the most basic and fundamental of facts – so basic it’s hard to see, because it’s the background of all experience, and not separate from any experience. In other words, the so-called subjective and objective can’t really be separated, in reality.

The other way the words and concepts distort things in relation to reality, is the way — as I alluded to before with the View from Nowhere reference — that there is some kind of real objective standpoint outside of reality, in the sense that there is an independent, absolutely self-existent something out there, that is not us, because we are this body, and that out there too is a separate long-lasting independent entity like we are.

Yet we don’t want to face the fact that no thing is long-lasting, solid, or actually independent. In the entire universe, from the tiniest wave-particle, to the vast structures of the cosmos, and the entire universe. Nothing is ever still or unchanging. That’s what we call “phenomena” – all that change.

So what doesn’t change? Nothing. No thing. Except perhaps, that which is aware of all things.

S: Got it. However, I still am not really seeing how this local sense of being, such as seeing objects around me, is based non-locally. Can you elaborate.

Z: There's another way that awareness can be shown to possibly be non-local – or at least open a door on that. Let's use a metaphor.

We are all familiar with security camera setups, where there's a room full of monitors, and some guy is  sitting there viewing all the monitors, and each monitor is connected to a camera in a different area, yes?

Now the fact that each camera is located in some particular place does not at all imply that the monitors, and guy watching them, is where the camera is, right?  He's the ultimate perceiver, but the camera could be anywhere in relation to the monitor. It could even be on another planet.

S: Uh, true.

Z: You could say, to anthropomorphize a bit, that the camera doesn't have to "know" where the monitor is to do its thing.

So why do we insist that this camera we call a body and brain with eyes, is where the ultimate perceiving is happening? We have no evidence for that, other than this learned assumption that I, the perceiver, am the same as this body – which I also perceive, via the same set of instruments whose data as it were, appear in awareness.

S: Wow, now wait a minute. Are you saying ... I mean so, where is this awareness, this "ultimate perceiver", as you call it?

Z: I am not saying it's somewhere, or in a location – if I were pinned down, I'd say it's nowhere, since all "wheres" and time, appear in it. In any case, I am simply undermining the assumption  that it's here in the brain. I am saying we don't know, and do not have any actual evidence for that axiom. And the lines of inquiry we have touched on a little bit in this dialogue, show that we really do not know what we think we know. The monitor, or the watching of the monitor – the perceiving – do not, logically, have to be where the camera, the brain and eyes and body are. Perceiving is simply an experience of perception. And we put together details and a story about what we think it means and where it's coming from, after the fact. In other words, what we assume are facts are just temporary, useful, functional assumptions in order for this avatar to move around in the game of being an apparent body.

S: OK, so you're not saying consciousness is known to be nonlocal, you're saying we don't know.

Z: Exactly. And that not-knowing is a great and powerful thing, that opens the door...

But I think this is enough for today.

S: Thanks.