From: platootje@netscape.net
Date: Sun Sep 04 2005 - 15:44:24 BST
Ham,
I've found out I agree with you on a lot of issues, this post however not being one of them.
You wrote:
>Can there be any doubt that there's something very different about pain?
Yes
>The stove and the body sitting on it are universally definable objects whose
>existence can be empirically established. Pain is a proprietary sensation,
>the awareness of which can only be experienced by the person feeling it.
You talk about the stove, not the mental picture of the stove as seen by person A
You talk about a person, not the mental picture of this person as seen by person B
Yet you talk about the pain, and not about the heat of the stove...
It's a subjective "feeling"; it's what the individual knows is real
>because he is directly in touch with it. You can't feel my pain, no matter
>how empathetic you are, but you can't deny its reality to me.
You can't see 'my' stove either. But just because one is a picture and the other a feeling, doesn't make them that much different as you say.
Is pain due
>to trauma that irritates the nerve endings, sending messages of distress to
>the brain? In materialistic terms, yes; but that's the circuit "schematic",
>the routing and processing of information as electrical pulses. You can
>dissect this neuronic tissue cell by cell but you won't find the pain.
Same goes for the mental picture, it's not heat damaging nerve-ends, but fotons doing something in the eye, that causes a signal down the nerve, etc.
>Everything in the universe, including the universe as a whole, is an "other"
>to me. Yet, my awareness, my feelings, my thoughts, my concepts, my values
>are all identified with my conscious self and no one else's. Without them I
>am nothing. Because consciousness is uniquely proprietary to every
>individual, the experience of reality is likewise proprietary. Moreover, if
>the individual's experience is what creates or structures this reality,
>essentially we're dealing with a "subjective" world.
Yes, your body provide you all the right circumstances for developing an ego.
If it weren't for the
>"universality" (i.e., commonality) of empirical knowledge, we would have
>concluded long ago that physical reality is a solipsism.
This empirical knowledge is just as illusionairy as a 'self', albeit on a different level maybe...
>
>The fact that the intellect, awareness or consciousness has a biological
>contingency -- that we couldn't experience without a brain and nervous
>system that evolved from Nature, that we can measure nerve energy in
>microvolts, or make consciousness dysfunctional by chemical injection, or
>that we can compile the thoughts and ideas of individuals into a cultural
>database called "Intellect" -- all this is beside the point. Because
>conscious awareness is subjective it is unlike anything else in the realm of
>scientific or philosophical investigation. We can't create it, localize it,
>measure it, universalize it, predict it, or even prove it. But, if the
>truth be told, it's the most "genuine" reality we have.
It's probably the very last thing that seperates us from the source/Essence/unity....
>Have I sparked any new ideas, or do you all fail to see the relevancy of
>this rambling discourse?
I'll wait a little longer before drawing too many conclusions.
Kind regards,
Reinier.
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