Don … welcome to ILP 
Thanks to Mags I just read a quote from George Santayana that seems relevant:
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Are the terms Consciousness, Brahman and Spirit pointing to the same ineffable reality?
Meno wrote:
"It takes consciousness to create this chimera, the ideal of of which is the idea of the ground, the point-reason for IT, without which IT would, could not be.
“This consciousness is not no thing either, nor is IT a thing, but without IT at the very least, awareness would stymie at the very minimal level of pre reflexive automatically instinctual level where even an inorganic/organic conflation would, could not manifest.”
This is in perfect accordance with Eastern metaphysics. Zen, in particular, positions ultimate reality (sometimes referred to as “Mind” or “the Void”) as nothing, i.e., "No thing.” From my understanding of their philosophy, it is both nothing yet everything as infinite potential. The root of the word “Brahman” means “to grow.” That is its nature and why the universe we perceive exists as “Lila,” the play of God.
There is a Zen anecdote in which a Zen abbot encounters two students debating about a flag blowing in the wind. One student argues that the flag is in reality moving while the other maintains it is the wind. The master ends the discussion by stating definitively: “Mind moves.”
If one contemplates this, one will discover that the answer nicely resolves Zeno’s paradoxes. Purported mathematical answers to them employing calculus merely manipulates the unit and ignore the underlying existential issue.
Pilgrim, thank you so much for your kind welcome.
My mental image of ultimate reality: Consciousness; Spirit; Brahman, is like a Rubik’s cube, constantly rotating its faces, exhibiting changing patterns, while all the while maintaining its structural integrity as one. So my answer to your question is yes.
It changes in accordance with the metaphorical algorithm termed “karma” (work): “So as you sow so will you reap.”
Human manifestations of Consciousnes came to believe that the material existence was real and forgot their true nature as eternal spirit after “eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” Thus dualism (“Maya”, the illusion of separateness) was born and with it the existential anxiety that virtually defines our very existences. "Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked.” (They came to fear death.)
I appreciate your quotation from Santayana, “the philosopher who denies there is a God and believes that Mary is His mother.” 
Dan … your comment concerning Santayana is even more interesting … it strikes a personal chord.
Apparently Santayana was a respectable intellectual … I certainly respect his decision to abandon the academic community … turning down a job offer at Harvard speaks volumes. Apparently he felt life in the academic community required the adornment of a '“straight jacket.”
Seems logical that Santayana was trying to tell us something … reflected in your comment.
While speculation is most often futile … sharing how he struck a chord with me may help.
My “watershed” moment involved Jesus … yet about two-three years after my Jesus experience I believe He sent me to His mother Mary for guidance … protection and so on.
Perhaps Santayana’s attitude towards “God” was a commentary on the “God” of the Western psyche??
Don Schneider wrote, …“This is in perfect accordance o Eastern Metaphysics”…
The final Zen posture can be best desrived as no calculus between the Eastern and the Western t
raditions, shown by koans such as:
If, it is claimed that one is enlightened, is proof of the
falsity of that claim.
There is no need to seek out context or a holy shrine to seek it, anyplace will do.
These very loosely phrased koans illustrate the hidden ontology of the East, against the overt epistemology of the West. The hiddenness pre-empts the coming of Occidental doubt.
It, as it were, an intentional covering, as illustrated in the incident between a novice and the master, of a rice-bowl. As I do not remember it, I will try to find it and get back.
Here is one koan:
Joshua was a master who started to study Zen when he was sixty.
When he was eighty he found enlightenment.
They say that he thought for forty years thereafter.
Once a student asked old Joshu: “You teach that you must empty our minds. I have nothing in my mind now what shall I do?”
“Throw it out said Joshu.”
“But I have nothing,how could I throw it out.”
"If you can’t throw it out, drive it out,
but don’t stand there in front of me with nothing
On your mind."
Why is consciousness is a vague and unusual question.
If you are asking why there is consciousness or what purpose does it serve, I can only reply by asking; Can life exist without consciousness?
If you are asking what is consciousness, you need to be more specific because there are many types of consciousness and many levels within each type.
If your query is neither, you need to precisely state it.
Wouldn`t it be great to be able to nail everything down ?
Dear Don
allow me to quote your wonderful interpretations in Ontic-philosophy.com - a new forum for lovers of as above so below games
waechter418: wrote:
"Dear Don
“allow me to quote your wonderful interpretations in Ontic-philosophy.com - a new forum for lovers of as above so below games”
waechter418:
Thank you. Of course, if you think anyone will be interested
Best regards,
Don
It’s easier to judge and criticize something instead of taking it upon yourself to EXPERIENCE the validity or falsehood of it.
Everything needs a mirror or something other than itself to see itself. So, what is able to see and observe thought? How is it different from thought?
If you compare thought against what observes it, you will see that thought is fragmented and incomplete.
What you discover DOING this is NOT based on belief or disbelief, it is based upon personal EXPERIENCE. The latter is vastly different from the former.
Criticize something you have never experienced is like the child looking at something new on his dinner plate that his mother fixed and saying, “I don’t like this.”
Consciousness exists because even the simplest life needed some way of interacting actively with its environment, in order to achieve the ability to successfully differentiate between one thing and another. Consciousness can be boiled down to the process of sensation plus response. Throw in a huge memory bank that we are also sensing and responding to, and make human brains sensitive and complex enough to actually sense not just physical sensations but also things like ideas, facts, meaning, complex relationships and abstractions, and you arrive at human consciousness. Our consciousness is simply the sensing and responding to of this vast field of possible stimuli, possible for us humans because we have a far better and more acute sense organs than other life (because we not only use our five senses but we also use our thoughts and reason, and from the interplay of these comes also what we call emotions, another ‘sense’ that we use – reason, thought, and emotions being things which we are taught and that we acquire over time, rather than being entirely or mostly inborn genetically. We are born with a genetic capacity to learn these things, but not these things themselves; we must still be taught them as children, and really we keep learning and teaching them to ourselves throughout our entire life).
Think of any moment of your own consciousness – of what does it consist? It consists of stimuli which you are sensing, and your reactions to those stimuli. That’s all it is. Now, pick a moment of consciousness, maybe this one as you read this, and do it for yourself. Analyze this moment for yourself and see what are you sensing, and how, and why, and what are your reactions to what you are sensing? How is the processing occurring, and why? Do this deep introspection enough times and you will see that consciousness is just a process of sense and response. And this is why it is a “mystery” because it is just a process that sits between two real or tangible, easy to discern things, namely that which is sensed and your response to it.
What you sense, the object, and how you are responding to it, your self, seem to be the tangible, concrete real objects, while consciousness as the mediating process in-between those objects seems to be intangible or unreal/mysterious by comparison. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Consciousness is very easy to understand, once you grasp that it is just a process mediating sensed objects and your responses to them. None of this mumbo jumbo nonsense about mysticism and universal consciousness and “ooh it is so mysterious how the ancients knew so much!” and blah blah whatever else, none of that is needed.
I take it that, without naming me, this is your rebuttal to my stated views here. Therefore, here is my rejoinder.
The problem with what you suggest is that the processes you indicate could be had without consciousness. If we manage not to annihilate ourselves first, then I have little doubt that our technological geniuses will eventually manage to achieve a level of sophistication with artificial intelligence comparable to that of the android Data on Star Trek, the Next Generation. If Data accidentally placed one of his fingers into a candle flame, his sensors would immediately indicate to his CPU a rapid increase in the topical temperature of his artificial skin. In reaction, he would immediately recoil, the same as you. However, the experience would be most decidedly different.
With every process you named, the effect could be achieved without consciousness. An android could be programmed to “love” or “hate“ based on sensory input emanating from humans and react accordingly. “If this person does that, then I love or hate him or her and shall respond accordingly towards that person.”
As for lost or unrealized today knowledge of ancient sages, you react to such a proposition as nonsense (“mumbo jumbo”), exactly as I said people like you would. If one receives a blow on one’s head of sufficient force, one will lose consciousness. The same blow to one’s stomach would not have that result. Therefore, the common sense view is that consciousness emanates from the human/animal brain. Therefore, I merely ask, why would it even have occurred to the ancient sages who wrote the Upanishads to assert that the opposite is true, that the brain, like all matter, is a manifestation of universal, undifferentiated consciousness, let alone be able to convince countless others from time immemorial to adopt such a seemingly bizarre, counterintuitive perspective? I think it’s a valid consideration. No civilization ever developed the concept of a square wheel, after all.
BTW, how exactly do you resolve Zeno’s paradoxes within your paradigm of material realism? If you’re interested, I’ll be glad tell you how they are easily solved within my paradigm of idealism which was exactly their point per Zeno’s mentor Parmenides (who antedated Socrates as do the Upanishads), the denial that motion and change are possible in a material universe.
Also, BTW, what would you guess I do for a living? You’d probably be wrong. I’m an accountant. Can you envision a more conventional, mundane and prosaic occupation than that? Accountants are not noted for having profound philosophical interests. After I got out of the Navy (a, er, wee spell ago), it dawned on me that one has to do something in life. My father before me had been an accountant, and I found the idea less objectionable than, for example, loading and driving trucks as I did one summer while in college. However, I never had any great affinity for the field. It simply pays the bills.
I’ve been a voracious reader since childhood and always had a philosophical bent. In young adulthood, I started reading the great philosophers of Western civilization, from Plato (and before) to Sartre and many in-between. When I moved on out of curiosity to reading about the Eastern metaphysical philosophies, knowledge of which I was then virtually totally bereft, I first encountered the term “Brahman.” One day, I thought to myself: “Could ‘Brahman’ be a name for consciousness?” as I was always intrigued by the concept of consciousness. I was astonished to learn that that is exactly correct as formulated within the Upanishads. The fact that I had independently deduced this from those who formulated the idea greatly impressed me; i.e., I hadn’t been influenced as I had been as a child being indoctrinated into Catholicism.
But many if not most people believe that their beliefs are already reality, things set in stone.
Why is it, do you think, that people like to believe ~~ have a need to believe?
Is it just lazy thinking? Are they afraid to take that leap or the dive into what could become the unknown to them, shattering their stronghold, their mental edifice?
What do you mean by ~~~~
…as it doesn`t exist anymore either?
Heraclitus’ thought?
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.
Nothing endures but change.
But it is still true - Rome wasn’t built in a day. 
or what was Rome back then.
eaglerising
Does the experience itself necessarily speak of its validity or falsehood? Meaning does that no? And isn’t meaning different for all of us?
What is observing it? Consciousness? Can’t consciousness also be fragmented and incomplete?
Aren’t our beliefs and lack of beliefs capable of affecting/influencing our experience and how they are interpreted and sensed?
Will reply when I can.
Don, the problem with your “Data” idea is that Data is conscious. The stuff that a “conscious” being does, that stuff cannot be separated out as if consciousness were separate from it— what consciousness means is simply all of that stuff, that action and movement and sense and response. That’s literally all that consciousness is.
Data is conscious, but doesn’t have emotions. Why? Because he has no nervous system, he has computer chips. He didn’t evolve with the need for there being a pleasure/pain mechanism within his sense and response machinery. Why not? Because he was designed not to damage himself and to register and avoid damage as needed, namely he was actually made by something intelligent and with a plan. Nature isn’t like that, so the organisms that spawn from nature need an immediate way of registering damage to themselves, namely they evolved a subjective sensation we call pleasure or pain. Pleasure and pain are just very motivating responses to certain stimuli, that’s all they are, they have no mysterious “qualia” or anything like that; just as color vision is nothing more than our subjective interpretation of variations in electromagnetic wavelengths, and color itself means nothing except that it is LITERALLY this interpretation as such, so too with pleasure and pain. Data had no evolution, he was designed, and so pleasure and pain didn’t apply to him. But try to imagine an organism spawned from natural selection and without a pleasure and pain sensation, how would it seek food and sex and avoid harm? It has no conscious ability to understand these things, all it can do it… feel them.
The idea that we could somehow be exactly as we are except without consciousness, which is an idea pushed in philosophy departments today, is about the stupidest load of shit I’ve ever heard. That someone would actually believe this only shows they have no real understanding what consciousness actually is. You know that the body has a “sixth” sense called proprioception, right? Well this same mechanism also applies to mental sensations as well. Here is how you figure it: any given moment of consciousness for you consists of a total number of mental (neurologically located) sensations that are impressions and responses to stimuli; the brain is such that it produces derivations of derivations of derivations… every mental event cascades tree-like producing waves that influence still more things, until the whole causality structure is so immense and complex and self-responsive that it becomes truly chaotic, and impossible to predict beyond a certain point; becomes, in a word, auto-generating. The sheer magnitude and complexity of its contents and the inter-relarionality within those contents is enough to produce “spontaneous” results from that total mass of “mental” stuff. This is what our neurology is for: building a mental universe based on our senses and responses in reality.
Every single thing you think or feel is just the tip of an iceberg, really the tip of thousands and thousands of icebergs, one for every significant object and aspect of an object within your mentality. That larger content is in there, you’re just aware of only a small bit of it. And as for “consciousness itself”, there is no such thing, consciousness means to be conscious of something. Every moment of consciousness has its objects, without exception, and the asymptotic curve approaching but never reaching total inclusion of all relevant contents of consciousness in the sum peak moment of that consciousness, is simply the proprioception I just mentioned, the fact that it seems like there is a “consciousness as such” independent of its objects and contents, but there is no more any such thing than is there a priorioception of your body “as such” and independent of that body and its individual sensations.
As for how ancient People came up with their crazy mystical nonsense, I have no idea. Maybe one of them took some shrooms and recorded his hallucinations. But there is no wisdom in eastern thought, not when it comes to answering the question of what is consciousness. How or why did they think that consciousness is “universal” or somehow beyond the human body and brain? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter anyway because that idea isn’t even correct. So who cares?
Don,
To add onto this, and prove there is no such thing as “consciousness itself”, just think about how your consciousness feels to you… it feels like whatever the contents of your consciousness feel like. If you are in pain, then your consciousness feels a lot different to you than if you are not in pain, or if you are in pleasure. If something great happens then your consciousness feels one way, if something terrible happens to you then it feels another way. For every combination of contents of consciousness there is a different corresponding ‘proprioceptive’ feeling that consciousness feels like to itself. This is the same as with any of your five senses too: whatever fills your senses with content at any given moment (including what remembered senses you are recalling in that moment) is going to be what fills your consciousness in terms of sensation.
If you were to remove all senses and all proprioception then consciousness would simply vanish, because it would have nothing of which to be conscious. No objects in the ‘mental universe’.
The easterns, mystics, etc. often want to attain a state of pure consciousness, and in order to do this they meditate in order to clear contents from their consciousness… this doesn’t get you closer to some sort of “consciousness itself”, but it does clear some of the clutter out, therefore making whatever contents remain more overdetermining of how your consciousness feels in that moment.
If you could hypothetically achieve perfect meditation and clear all contents out of your consciousness, which would not be possible anyway, all that would happen is that you would simply lose consciousness. There would be no contents, no objects, no experiences left for you. How is that any sort of ideal or goal to aspire to? It is a very stupid idea, based on a misunderstanding of what consciousness is and how it works.
Now to look at color again, because that is a good example, do you know why we see colors? It is because the organism that was spawned by evolution (natural genetic selection) needed a way to perceive objects in its visual field, and one way to do that was to find a way to visually represent different objects based on how light reflects off of those objects, since when light reflects off of an object that light takes on a frequency based on the material against which it reflected… because of this, evolution selected organisms that were able to differentiate more objects visually, because such organisms were naturally more able to interact with their environment in a successful way (they had more information about their surroundings). This ability to differentiate objects visually based on the way light reflects from those objects, is what we call color. Color has no mysterious quality or qualia or nature unto itself, it is not some kind of pure consciousness or objectivity or anything like that, it is simply and quite literally the way that our sort of organism developed to differentiate objects visually based on light reflection. Color is this differentiation, and nothing besides.
This same logic applies to all of the senses, including the body’s and mind’s proprioceptions. But in terms of the proprioceptions, these are slightly different because they are summative of a lot of other senses and feelings; for example, your body has probably hundreds of different feelings at any given moment, such as blood flowing here or there, muscles contracting, bones moving, hormones being excreted from glands, etc… all of those feelings taken together constitute “what your body feels like to itself”. If you are suddenly stabbed with a knife then “what your body feels like to itself” is going to suddenly change. Why? Because what your body feels like to itself is nothing more than the sum of all individual feelings that constitute your body at any given moment.
Now, this same logic of the body proprioception also applies to the mind, to mental senses and feelings. If you look only at one kind of mental senses/feelings you arrive at what images are in your mind, the “mind’s eye”; if you take other kinds of mental senses/feelings you arrive at your mood, how you feel to yourself at an emotional baseline level.
…And one more example, just think about what your consciousness would be like or feel like to itself if you suddenly lost all of your memories. Can you imagine what it would be like to have no memories at all? Would you be the same, would your consciousness be the same as it is right now? No, it would be radically different. Why? Because there is no such thing as “consciousness itself”. This is why the whole p-zombines, Data, etc. sort of thought experiments are so fucking idiotic. They assume that something exists which does not in fact exist, namely “consciousness itself” or some sort of baseline consciousness independent of the actual contents and experiences of that consciousness itself in any given moment.
Arcturus Descending –
Here are two examples. A child is looking at something new on his plate that he has never eaten before and says: “I don’t like that!”
Someone criticizing a book that they never read,
Arcturus Descending –
If you examine it you will be able to answer that question yourself.
Arcturus Descending –
Yes, but what is experienced in the absence of belief is vastly different from what is experienced with belief.
Arcturus Descending –
You are trapped. This is why It’s wise to approach and examine things freshly as if you had no prior knowledge of them. Also viewing them as a possibility rather than a forgone conclusion.
Arcturus Descending –
Instead of believing or disbelieving Thomas Nagel, take it upon yourself to examine it and determinate it yourself.