Rock Garden, Ryoan-ji: japan-guide.com
2022-1-7
My Awareness
My Subjective Interpretation of State
Our awareness or consciousness is dependent on how we establish
or define our view of the world. To build a model representing
systems in the virtual world of computer systems can be done, for
instance, like using a primitive knowledge representation tool
called KL-ONE. Artificial knowledge representation depends alot
on how you define the limits of knowledge in your representation.
The boundaries of your knowledge determine how you build your
artificial model.
Our awareness arises out of the relationship we give the concepts of
our world we've formed over the history of our development since
childhood. Each concept or idea of our world we form are interrelated
to each other, and cannot exist independently in itself in "a-prior" sense.
You can sense this truth in the following statement
[1].
It cannot be the case that state is an attribute possessed by
an object independent of its observer.
We as a individual human being is the observer as well as the object
of the observation [2]. By this, I mean, that we cannot completely separate
the meaning of any element of a system from each other. Each element
gives meaning to another element in the system. Hence, the observer
and the observed are interrelated.
You can see how objects are necessarily interrelated by sort of going to
the extreme in thinking about opposites. For example, in mathematics, does
the question, "Is zero related to infinity?", make sense. Can you to
define infinity as one divided by zero? This is abstract, but still
a relationship exists never-the-less.
In my philosophical meanderings, this is the same way I feel about unity
and duality. I need both to understand the world. In some mystical
sense, unity and duality eventually gets enfolded in a close loop like
a circle. Unity and duality is like a subjective interpretation of zero
and infinity, and hense in a subjective sense are intricately related
in my world view. In the Hindu philosophy, the awareness of monks were
sometimes classified into the Vendanta and Samkhya schools of consciousness.
Advaita Vedanta is a non-dual interpretation of reality. Samkhya is
a pure spiritual interpretation also which is consistent with how the
observer views the world. But Samkhya is dualistic.
I'm now beginning to realized how deeply imbued feelings of unity and order
had in my interpretation of the world. It's been central in forming
my awareness of the world ... an awareness with reinforcing intentions
that I do not desire to stop. It's become, in some sense, my spiritual
place and path.
[1] Alan Bawden, Analyzing the State Behavior of Programs, August 1988,
MIT AI Lab working paper 311.
AIM-WP-311
[2] Ramana Maharshi and the Adviata Vendanta view of the world.