Idealism and the Booting Problem

When I "boot" up my computer it has to load a program into memory to get things going. The word "boot" itself comes from the phrase "to lift ones self by their boot straps". The idea being that the computer has to lift itself up in order to get started in the first place.

A recent post on Michael Prescott's Blog about "idealism" is actually about this very problem. He explains that idealism is the concept that consciousness creates the world we live in. He goes on to point out a problem with this:

"This means, of course, that our brains are created by consciousness. After all, brains are part of the physical world, and idealism ascribes all of the physical world to consciousness. But here's the rub. Clearly our own particular consciousness is tied to our own particular brain in very obvious ways. We see only through our own eyes, smell only through our own noses. We cannot see what someone in China is seeing, and he can't see what we see."

And he finishes with . . .

"Essentially, it's circular reasoning (or begging the question). There doesn't seem to be any place to start, which means there is no solid ground to stand on. Or at least that's how it's always seemed to me."

This is where things get fuzzy. If we believe that the brain itself is the point of origin for consciousness, then none of it makes any sense. But what I have experienced is that consciousness originates outside the brain. Back to our computer example. The computer consists of hardware and software. The hardware is fixed. Nothing much we can do about that, or so it seems (more about this in the next post). The software would seem to be more under our control. The problem is that most of it is already written by the time we are six years old. Everything after that is mostly data.

And that "pre-existing" program that the computer loads into memory in order to boot itself up? Well, it is called by a lot names, but the one that comes to mind is "Karma". Now, our understanding of "Karma" is extremely simplistic. We think of it only in terms of retribution, when in fact it is so much more. Karma is the program that we came into this world with. It is the idea's and concepts that were already existing and was loaded into the ram memory of the computer (our body), and was booted up, born.

So it would seem that we are the result of hardware that is fixed, and software that is already written and running. So how does the computer change itself? It doesn't. The computer, already running cannot reprogram itself. The programmer has to do that. So who, or what, is the programmer?

Introduction

"Opening to Awareness" will be a place to store my thoughts concerning human consciousness and awareness in general. It will be an experiential blog. Theory is fine too, but I am mostly interested in the practical day to day experiences that come up in life.

Now when I say "practical" I do not exclude the mystical, but rather my meaning encompasses it. But mostly by "practical" I mean the experiences that have had an effect on me.

I am also concerned with survival. Survival occurs at not only the physical level, but the emotional and mental as well. I seek to record my experiences and experiments with the correlation between these two.