Nondual Awareness and Minimal Phenomenal Experience

Zoran Josipovic,Vladimir Miskovic

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02087

Zoran Josipovic, Vladimir Miskovic

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02087

Copy DOI

Abstract

Minimal phenomenal experiences (MPEs) have recently gained attention in the fields of neuroscience and philosophy of mind. They can be thought of as episodes of greatly reduced or even absent phenomenal content together with a reduced level of arousal. It has also been proposed that MPEs are cases of consciousness-as-such. Here, we present a different perspective, that consciousness-as-such is first and foremost a type of awareness, that is, non-conceptual, non-propositional, and nondual, in other words, non-representational. This awareness is a unique kind and cannot be adequately specified by the two-dimensional model of consciousness as the arousal level plus the phenomenal content or by their mental representations. Thus, we suggest that to understand consciousness-as-such, and by extension consciousness in general, more accurately, we need to research it as a unique kind.

Highlights

We have previously proposed that the impasse in today’s scientific understanding of consciousness would be helped by understanding consciousness itself or nondual awareness (NDA), a basic aspect of consciousness that is different from all other phenomenal contents and functions of consciousness and from global states of arousal (Josipovic, 2014, 2019; Josipovic and Baars, 2015)
We show that NDA and minimal phenomenal experiences (MPEs) should be treated as distinct and not be conflated and that only NDA can truly be considered to be consciousness-as-such
Presently we will stay with the original meaning of the term as stated above, so that MPE here refers to experiences of greatly reduced or minimal phenomenal content that are accompanied with lowered levels of arousal, such as those occurring during initial stages of lucidity in deep sleep or during the full absorption in meditation

Summary

INTRODUCTION

We have previously proposed that the impasse in today’s scientific understanding of consciousness would be helped by understanding consciousness itself or nondual awareness (NDA), a basic aspect of consciousness that is different from all other phenomenal contents and functions of consciousness and from global states of arousal (Josipovic, 2014, 2019; Josipovic and Baars, 2015). Presently we will stay with the original meaning of the term as stated above, so that MPE here refers to experiences of greatly reduced or minimal phenomenal content that are accompanied with lowered levels of arousal, such as those occurring during initial stages of lucidity in deep sleep or during the full absorption in meditation. As previous argued in more detail (Josipovic, 2019), this inherent self-knowing or reflexivity makes NDA a unique kind, in the sense that it differentiates NDA from all other phenomenal contents, as well as from the functions of consciousness like attention, memory, and so on, and from the various states of consciousness caused by the global levels of arousal in the brain This intrinsic capacity for unmediated self-knowing qualifies this awareness as the consciousness itself or the consciousness-as-such. This is not accurate because NDA can co-occur with any content, whether perceptual, affective, or cognitive, which appears in it, so to speak, like an image in a mirror

Findings

DISCUSSION

CONCLUSION