This talk really challenged my understanding of consciousness. Since I have listened a lot to Osho, my understanding of Spirituality was that you keep elevating your consciousness since that's what is fundamental.

But there is a tendency to objectify even consciousness. And it's quite shocking. When I say my consciousness, it brings the ego (I-ness) into the picture meaning that the ego is fundamental.

Consciousness is defined here as a duality in which the ego stands on one end and the world that we perceive on the other.

And since the ego (me) is just a bundle of narratives and conditioning (reminds me of Jiddu Krishnamurthi), it just projects them on the world and 'distorts' it. And that's why the suffering.

Keen on reading your views and understanding.

Say you suddenly realized that you left your phone outside. A feeling of anxiety and fear arises in you. Your stomach tightens and you perspire.

Is the feeling due to the thought or the feedback from the body? Don't say both - I want to know the time sequence in the causal chain of thought, feeling, bodily reaction.

Sometimes I read that feelings are a readout of the state of the body. If the muscles were temporarily anaesthetized, would there be no feeling even if the negative thought is there?

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Many accounts of the mind say it only develops through interaction with others. But that raises a question for me: can you be your own "other"?

If I talk to myself, or recall who I was ten years ago, there seems to be a difference I can respond to, even without a second person. So maybe what a mind needs is not another individual, but difference itself.

But where would that internal difference come from? Time? Memory? Or is it ultimately something we first received from other people?

Is another mind necessary, or is difference within a single self enough?

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Imagine that neuroscience could explain every relevant neural process, every perceptual discrimination, every behavioural response, every report about experience, and every cognitive function associated with consciousness.

Would this complete account explain why those processes are accompanied by subjective experience—why seeing red feels a certain way, for example—or would a further explanatory question remain?

The difficulty is determining what would count as a genuinely missing explanation. A physicalist might argue that the apparent gap reflects limitations in our concepts, intuitions, or explanatory methods, rather than an ontological gap in nature. A defender of the hard problem might argue that explaining functions and mechanisms does not, by itself, explain why experience exists at all.

There is also a danger in moving too quickly from the fact that we cannot currently explain consciousness to the conclusion that it cannot be physically explained.

My question is therefore not simply why consciousness exists, but what would justify the claim that a complete physical and functional explanation either does or does not account for subjective experience.

Tuesday question.

At precisely what point does chemistry become consciousness?