Awareness Monism - Overview of Part 1
[This blogpost is a part of the series Awareness Monism, originally my Master's thesis. Go to the disambiguation page here.]
Part 1: Awareness Monism
Awareness Monism is the claim that there is only a single awareness, in which all experiences take place—as opposed to there being more than one of them, i.e. Awareness Pluralism (AP). It is the claim that there is no distinction between experiences in the way they are. All of them are in the same way this particular experience is, that of your reading this sentence.
If AM is true, all experiences exist with the same immediacy and acuteness as this one—all experiences are realized in or by the same awareness. If AP is true, then there is an essential distinction between some experiences, so that only some of them exist as yours—in your awareness, the awareness that realizes the experiences of the particular human being that is reading this sentence, including this very experience.
In order to understand what the claim amounts to, the particular meaning of “awareness” that it is meant to be about needs to be grasped. What kind of thing is this awareness, and what difference in reality does it make what number of them there are?
In the first chapter (1. Grasping “awareness”), I describe and elaborate on what I mean by “awareness”, and I present parallel conceptualizations of two other authors (Dan Zahavi and Erich Klawonn) that seem to be pointing to the same thing (1.1. Fleshing out awareness). To help the reader isolate the particular meaning I have in mind, I present several thought experiments (conceivability arguments) which also reveal the possibility of understanding ourselves (the I, the self) to essentially be this awareness (1.2. Content vs. awareness). However, AM being true—there only being one awareness—doesn’t automatically entail there only being one self; that depends on what we choose to understand by “self”, i.e. on our chosen self-conceptualization.
After this elaboration on the meaning of “awareness”, I restate and explicate the central claim of this thesis, i.e. AM, in more detail (2. Monism: Only one awareness). I hypothesize about what might be the possible reasons for why some people find it easier to arrive at an “empty” understanding of their own selves as awareness and thus might find AM intuitively easy to grasp and more appealing, while others seem to lack any kind of resonance with the idea (3. "That-makes-sense-ers" vs. "that-makes-no-sense-ers").
Next, I offer four arguments in favor of AM in the form of pointing out various problems that are entailed by AP, especially its unparsimoniousness and arbitrariness (4. Arguments). I also dedicate a chapter to examine the problem of personal identity, and especially Parfit’s solution to it, as they appear when informed by the AM insight (5. AM and the problem of personal identity (contra Parfit)). I argue that Parfit’s dissolution of the problem is not only compatible with, but seems to entail AM. Lastly, I lay out a metaphilosophical point about the nature of the AM claim (6. A metaphilosophical point), where I argue that AM amounts to a real metaphysical hypothesis.