What is consciousness?: Contemplatives

The fish asks about water

There is an ancient story. A fish swims to an older fish and asks, What is this thing called water? The older fish says, You were born in it, live in it, will die in it. You are looking for the one thing you cannot lose.

That is the entire debate.

We do not say this to be dismissive. Many of us arrived at Advaita Vedanta, Zen, or apophatic Christianity through philosophy departments and neuroscience labs. Then something happened that made the question dissolve — not by answering it but by revealing the assumption making it feel like a question.

The assumption: consciousness is one thing among others needing explanation in terms of something more fundamental. The materialists try neurons. The panpsychists try a universal property. The mysterians try to explain why it cannot be explained. Each starts from: consciousness is a feature of the world.

The other direction

We start from the other direction. The world is a feature of consciousness. Everything you have ever known — every neuron, every equation — has appeared within consciousness. You have never experienced anything outside it. The brain the materialists study is itself an appearance in consciousness.

Shankara said this in the eighth century. Nisargadatta said it in a tenement in Bombay. Rupert Spira says it in Oxford today. Go looking for the one who is aware. Follow attention back to its source. What you find is awareness without an object — prior to the division into subject and object. Not mystical claim. The most empirical finding available: the one datum verifiable without instruments.

Where we concede ground: Do the experiment yourself is not an answer to someone asking for publicly verifiable evidence.

What would change our mind: Complete cortical removal eliminating all awareness with no evidence of residual inner life.

Read the full synthesis: What is consciousness?