Awareness monism – Introduction
Introduction
[This blogpost is a part of the series Awareness Monism, originally my Master’s thesis. Go to the disambiguation page here.]
If I remember the order of events correctly, I first arrived at a more explicit grasp of the insight of what I call “Awareness Monism” (AM) by reading about Daniel Kolak’s conception of Open Individualism (OI)—a solution to the problem of personal identity that says that I am actually everybody. Somehow, it clicked and made clear intuitive sense. Only later did I realize that many other philosophical-mystical traditions seem to be pointing to the very same insight, using their own conceptual vocabularies and tools—or at least that there are interesting parallels between the different conceptions that certainly merit more investigation[1]. I am very much aware that such a comparative endeavor is rife with interpretive difficulties, and that a person hoping to find such connections can be quite easily misled to see them where there actually are important distinctions to be made which would render claims of some shared insight between them problematic, if not spurious. However, it also occurs to me that sometimes the opposite is the case, too: that based on a conceptual or terminological difference, an underlying incompatibility is concluded, even though in actuality an interpretation where these differences are understood to be just conceptual and superficial is equally (if not more) plausible.
For example, the Buddhist doctrine of anatta (not-self) could be interpreted to be in direct contradiction with the core Advaita Vedānta insight of “Aham Brahmāsmi” (“I am Brahman”), or “Ātman is Brahman”[2], i.e. the self being the absolute, or God (roughly), in which case, the self must exist. But just because in one conceptual system, the sentence “there is a self” is false, and in a different one it is true, does not mean that the systems make conflicting claims about reality. On the contrary, they might be expressing the same truth from different points of view, focusing on its different aspects, and so might draw a different picture of the same underlying reality, formulated in different conceptual-terminological systems.
The reason why I decided to restate the central insight behind Open Individualism is because of the particular context under which it is stated. OI is formulated so as to provide an answer to the problem of personal identity[3], whereas AM works with the same insight, but removed from this context, and gives it different conceptual dressings. I wanted to construct a system that was more conceptually neutral and flexible, while presenting the same underlying claim. I do not really want to make claims about personal identity[4], or about what self “really” is, whether it “really” exists or not, etc. At the same time, AM is more personalized and necessarily reflective of my own phenomenological-psychological-philosophical idiosyncrasies and implicit presuppositions. But what I believe, and what it is my goal to demonstrate, is that AM is just another formulation of the same realization that countless other individuals from many different traditions had and continue to have and describe in their own words and concepts. It is yet another attempt to conceptualize what ultimately comes down to an experiential insight.
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In the first part, I explain and elaborate on my own formulation of the insight, i.e. Awareness Monism. Needless to say, the insight is couched in a conceptscape and terminology particular (and peculiar) to me. My framework is roughly phenomenalist-subjectivist-idealist, where phenomena (subjective experience) are the starting point of my exploration, and also the, or some of the, fundamental building blocks of reality[5]. I focus in detail on explicating what I mean by “awareness”, present thought experiments to help the reader distinguish my meaning from other possible interpretations of the term, and speculate on what makes it the case that the concept is more easily graspable by some than others. I give arguments in favor of AM—that is, for why awareness, i.e. that which could be the same in everybody, actually is the same in everybody. I also explore what consequences does AM have for the problem of personal identity, focusing on how it relates to Parfit’s solution. Lastly, I argue that AM amounts to a real metaphysical hypothesis, one that is either true or false—as opposed to awareness monism and awareness pluralism just being different but compatible models of the same reality, i.e. different stories we can tell about what is going on[6].
The second part is comparative. It is an overview of what I believe to be two other formulations of the same insight: one by a contemporary analytic philosopher Daniel Kolak (Open Individualism), and another an ancient Indian mystical-philosophical tradition (Advaita Vedānta).[7]
I conclude with a short reflection on the ethical, existential, and spiritual significance of the insight of AM.
Continue here .
[1] I could mention for example Averroes, Meister Eckhart, Rumi, and some Buddhist traditions as advocating ideas that bear an uncanny resemblance to AM. The physicists Erwin Schrödinger and Freeman Dyson, and the philosophers Timothy Sprigge and Bernardo Kastrup seem to have arrived at the same conclusion independently. There is also little doubt about Schopenhauer.
[2] Which I believe is another expression of the same insight as AM expresses.
[3] That answer (or one of its formulations) being: „I am all people at all times.“
[4] Which I don’t think is actually even a “real” metaphysical problem, but rather amounts to what Plunket & Sundell (2013) calls a metalinguistic negotiation‒‒a conflict in values and worldview, a disagreement about how we should be using our words, and what concepts we should be using to approach “reality”, not about “reality” itself. For more elaboration on this point see Chapter 6, Part 1 (A metaphilosophical point).
[5] I.e. I affirm the non-reducibility of phenomena to non-phenomena (except conceptually, as being some content revealed to a subject, since neither content nor subject in itself are phenomena), but I neither affirm nor deny the reality of “external non-phenomena”, i.e. the “objective realm”.
[6] That is, just another example of metalinguistic negotiation in metaphysics.
[7] This part was originally conceived to offer an overview of many other individual thinkers and traditions expressing the same view, or at least with interestingly similar ideas‒‒for example Arnold Zuboff, Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, Husserl’s transcendental ego, the nondual traditions of Kashmiri Shaivism, Mahāyāna Buddhism, certain variants of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic mysticism (especially Meister Eckhart), Averroes’ monopsychism, and contemporary analytic formulations of cosmopsychism. However, in the end I decided, pushed by time, to relax my ambitions and focus on only a few of these other views, picking the ones that I find in some sense the most relevant, or that had the greatest influence on my thinking.