Avolith wrote: ↑Sun Jan 13, 2019 5:46 am
I wonder, what is the difference between consciousness and experience? Is it the same thing?
It depends on how we conceive and define these things. In my last post to you, I did use consciousness to mean the same as experience. The totality of your experiences and the totality of your consciousness is the same thing. At other times, it is more useful to define them differently - e.g. treat the world as though it were physical and objective and treat consciousness as though it were something that is confined inside a person’s head.
Avolith wrote: ↑Sun Jan 13, 2019 5:46 am
David Quinn wrote: ↑Fri Jan 11, 2019 10:32 am
Most of the time as we go about our lives, we never pay any attention to this issue, which means that most of the time we are experiencing our consciousness in an unconscious manner, as it were. It is only when we direct our attention to questions like “What is consciousness?” and “Am I really conscious?” that the comparison to non-consciousness kicks in. We establish that we are conscious by imagining what unconsciousness is like.
This is interesting, it seems important because I think it might be relating the logic of causality to direct experience in a way that's more easily understood from my particular perspective.
A good approach.
Trying again to imagine unconsciousness: I am here in this moment, and there are some memories in my brain that I can observe, so it's practical to assume that, in a practical sense, I, my body, my brain, has existed for a number of years. However, that doesn't tell me anything about the degree of consciousness that was present in each moment. My memories are not detailed enough to know whether there was consciousness in each moment.
Everything about the past is uncertain. Even if our memories were crystal clear and photographic in nature, we still couldn’t be sure that what we were remembering is 100% accurate, or even remotely accurate. Once a particular experience is experienced and disappears into the past, it is gone and can never be retrieved. The past cannot be grasped in any manner. The only way to assess the nature and quality of our consciousness in each moment is through the very experience of that moment. After that, it is gone.
Dreams are an extreme example. Is it so that, the degree to which I can remember the dream, depends on the degree of consciousness during the dream?
There is a strong correlation, yes. We tend to remember only the last few minutes of our nightly dreams, as that is the time when the brain is starting to wake up and already activating its short-term memory functions. Nightmares in the middle of the night can also be recalled vividly, due to the intensity of the fear invoked which causes the brain to activate the waking process.
Consciousness seems entirely tangled up with the brain's function of memory, is this correct?
Memory is integral to consciousness, yes. When a person goes on a drinking binge and passes out, he wakes up the next morning without being able to remember what he did the night before. His memory is a blank and it seems to him that he spent the night in total unconsciousness.
As a general rule, the more attention and intensity of consciousness that you apply to a given situation, the more intense and detailed the memory of it will be. If you are genuinely interested in a particular area of life, your memories associated with it are likely to be more vivid and recallable than normal.
It's probably not the whole story, but, does a higher degree of consciousness imply the creation of more detailed (short-term) memories?
To some extent, but it will not magically splice the missing genes for a photographic memory into your DNA.
And could attachments thereby be interpreted as processes in the brain that block the creation of memories?
Attachments distort one’s perspective in all matters, including the direct experience of each moment and the formation of memories of it.
I'm thinking this might be a reason why people doing (insight) meditation are reporting becoming enlightened through this process - insight meditation (paying extremely close attention to sense perceptions) could train the brain into creating more detailed short term memories, thereby 'brute forcing' the brain into understanding
Enlightenment has no direct correlation with the details of one’s short-term memory. Those with great memories are not necessarily any wiser than those with lesser memories. The key issue, rather, is the ability to grasp the fundamental principle of Nature, which is what the buddhas of old used to call “insight”.