Awareness Monism - Only one awareness
[This blogpost is a part of the series Awareness Monism, originally my Master’s thesis. Go to the disambiguation page here.]
2. Monism: Only one awareness
It is conceivable that I, as my awareness (substitute your awareness), could be some (any) other human being, while remaining myself—even though I happen to actually be the human being thatI am, i.e. E (that you are).
If AM is true, there is only one awareness (my awareness, which is identical to your awareness)—which means that I (as awareness) actually “experience everybody”. That is, all experiences, from all points of view, of all body-minds, exist in and for me. There is just a single awareness, which realizes the experience of E, and of the human being that you are, and of all other conscious beings. It assumes all points of view. In other words, I (the awareness in which the experiences of E are realized, not E the human being) am identical to you (the awareness in which the experiences of the human being that you are are realized, not the human being that you are). There is only one I, “wearing” different points of view as “masks”[1]—my I and your I are the same I. If AM is true, underneath the particulars of content, that which manifests it is in all cases, in all experiences, the same.
The exact same immediacy of experience that was there for you when you scraped your knee as a child—the painfulness of pain that was yours, immediately given—is the same immediacy that your current experience has. The past experience is no longer here for you—but when it was, it was yours. If AM is true, then all experiences, when they exist, exist in the same way, revealed to and for the only awareness there is, which is the awareness realizing the experiences of the human being that you currently are, i.e. which is you (as it is me—your and my awareness are the same awareness; I am you).
So AM amounts to this: that all experiences exist in the same way, as now, here, and immediately given. Note that the claim is not simply that “all experiences are experienced” or “all experiences exist in the same way, i.e. now and here”. The claim is more specific and substantial[2]—that the now-here, the way they are experienced, is identical to the now-here of your experiences, including of this particular experience. It’s not simply stating that “all pain hurts” (someone, somewhere), but that all pain hurts in the same awareness (it hurts here-now; it hurts you). All experience exists in the same way the current experience of the human being reading this sentence exists. So it’s not only that all pain hurts, but that all pain hurts in the same way the pain of the human being that you now are hurts—all pain is yours, regardless of whom it belongs to, regardless of which creature or body is being hurt. There is no distinction between experiences in the way they exist, in their being.
The experience of the human being now reading this sentence, of reading this, i.e. THIS experience, exists in the same way the experience of the human being now reading this sentence waking up this morning, and eating their lunch yesterday, and entering their classroom on their first day of school back when they were a child, and all the other past and future experiences of this human being exist. And if AM is true, then actually all experiences, of all people and other conscious beings, at all times, of past and present and future, exist (when they exist) in that very same way. The same awareness that manifests the experience of the reader of this sentence waking up this morning also manifested the experience of the writer of this sentence waking up this morning. These experiences differ in their content—the former is that of one human being, the latter that of another—but they share the same subject, i.e. the same awareness. All past, co-present, and future (relative to this moment) experiences, of all conscious beings, relate to the awareness that manifests this current experience, of the human being that you are, of this sentence being read, in the same way—they manifest in and for it, they are realized by it. Experiences only differ in their content, but not in what their being consists of. It is your being, it is you.
So if you are worried about the future pains of the human being that you are because you anticipate undergoing that distress, i.e. of that distress being immediately manifest, you should be equally worried about all future pains, to whomever they happen. All future pains will be manifested in the same awareness in which are present the pains of the human being that you currently are.
If you conceptualize yourself not as awareness, but rather as something more defined, more contentful, i.e. if you identify with a particular content or a particular creature (a particular human being), then this is obviously not the case—the experiences of one creature are not and cannot conceivably be the experiences of a different creature!
But phenomenologically, in the experience, the owner or subject of an experience in the sense of the creature that undergoes the experience (for example E, in the case of E’s experiences) is just a part of the content of experience—its experiential center. E is not awareness; she is not that which grounds experience, but just a certain kind of experience, or reducible to it.
The experience of this sentence being written is said to be E’s experience, because it is centered “around” E—it is an experience from the point of view of E, where E (her body-mind) features prominently. For example, it is centered visually around her head, and the stimuli from her particular body are experienced “from inside” (as opposed to the stimuli of some other body). For me as awareness, E is an object of my own experience, even though usually a peculiarly prominent one.
Not all E’s experiences are necessarily centered in this way—for example, when she is dreaming, sometimes there is a different body that constitutes the center of the dream-experiences, and sometimes there are even experiences where there are no traces of E or an objective world at all, e.g. hypnagogia. These experiences are not considered E’s by virtue of their content, but by virtue of their being generated by E’s brain (the brain that usually generates experiences which are centered around E’s body, where the brain is placed)—E’s brain is the “subject” (or “owner”) of these experiences, in yet another possible sense of “subject”.
Usually, the experiences are E’s both in the sense of
1) being phenomenally centered around E (an internal property of its content) and
2) being “generated” by[3] E’s brain (an external property between the (purely private) experience and an (intersubjective, external, objective[4]) object, i.e. a brain).
But there are (or could be) certain kinds of experiences where the correspondence is broken[5]—e.g. the aforementioned hypnagogic or dream states, which are generated by the E-brain, but not centered around E; or the hypothetical scenarios of E-centered experiences being generated by a different object, like a memory of E’s life transferred to and replayed by a different brain or a computer, or even arising randomly in a Boltzmann brain. So we can apply the term “subject of experience” to very different things, based on very different kinds of relations proper to an experience. In a sense, E is the subject of E-experiences (as that which the experience is centered around); in another sense, the E-brain is the subject (because it “generates” them, and in that sense undergoes them); in yet another sense, awareness is the subject (because it manifests them). For the purposes of this work, it is the relation between experience and awareness that is the most salient—I am interested in the “subject of experience” in the sense of the ground of experience, and that is how I use the term.
[1] Their identity is concealed by their momentary content—whereas the identity of my I today and my I yesterday is revealed in the content, in memory. More elaboration on this metaphor in chapter 1 of part 2—Daniel Kolak’s Open Individualism. However—I remember (in this experience, now), i.e. it appears to me, it was me who experienced this body-mind’s yesterday, but this is not a proof of the remembered past experience actually being mine. A memory is a kind of content which is believed to be a representation, an image, a replaying of some past “actual” content. For example, when I experience a memory of tasting a new kind of food the day before, I imagine the gustatory experience “in my mind”, i.e. I have a gustatory experience in the imaginational mode—or, alternatively, the memory is just in a kind of descriptive mode, a thought, i.e. I am aware that “I tasted a new food yesterday”, but without recalling the taste, without “simulating” it. And I believe that this experience (imaginational or descriptive) corresponds to an actual gustatory experience that existed yesterday, and that this experience existed for me, in the same way the current gustatory experience in the imaginational mode or the thought “I tasted a new food yesterday” exist for me. The current experience is considered a “replaying” of the past experience. However, we sometimes have what we believe to be memories of past experiences that did not actually happen, and so these (pseudo-)memories are not actual replayings. My having an experience which I believe is a memory of something I actually experienced previously is not a proof of my actually having experienced it. And vice-versa, my not remembering an experience doesn’t constitute proof of that experience not being mine. So even though memories can serve as clues about who we are and which experiences were ours, they do not constitute a proof of our actually being someone or not, or having experienced something or not.
[2] And more disturbing.
[3] Or: being E’s brain from the inside.
[4] I.e. something that figures represented in other experiences as an object, too. Whereas E’s experience cannot figure as an object in some other experience, that which is represented in E’s experience as an object (e.g. a tree she is looking at) can be represented in some other experience as an object, too—i.e. it is intersubjective; it is an object in the world. Note also that brains, apart from being objects in the world‒‒i.e. things we can see, touch, study empirically‒‒are peculiar in that they are also “experienced from inside”. I could theoretically touch my brain, and thus experience it as an object in the world, representing it in my experience, as certain tactile feelings. But my experience, in some sense, is “my brain from the inside”. Awareness, in some sense, experiences the brain from inside. (The same is expressed by the claim that “the brain experiences itself”; i.e. the brain is, in some sense, a subject of experience.) Awareness experiencing something as an object and experiencing something from inside (i.e. being “generated” by it) are different kinds of relation.
[5] Which amounts to them not representing the (objective/intersubjective) world, and so not being veridical. If such experiences depict a world (e.g. dreams, virtual reality), they are simulations of a world. There is no “outside world” they correspond to, available to be represented in other experiences. (That is, unless the simulated world is inhabited by other experiencing creatures, too.)