What is so mysterious about human consciousness?

[Speck Tater]

76. Yes I did.

I do tend to come on strong when I'm trying to convince.

I was responding to the statement "anyone who has every raised a child..." followed by why the poster's views should be self-evident to a parent. Well, I raised three kids, and watched the growth and development of six grandchildren, and yet what the original poster thought was self-evident doesn't seem that self-evident to me at all. In fact, my experiences over the last 4+ decades of meditation have lead me to think that quite the opposite of his thesis is what is truly elf-evident.

There's experience, and there's interpretation of one's own experience, and there's interpretation of another's experience, and there's interpretation of another's interpretation of their own experience, ...

Suppose I claimed that my experience made what I claimed self-evident to me, and that I didn't have to interpret my experience? Of course you are free to doubt that, and interpret what I have said as being merely an interpretation of what I experienced. But that's not my experience, that's your interpretation of my experience, which is necessarily different from my experience.

In the final analysis we believe what we believe, and we think that if we show another person how self evident it is, they MUST also believe what we believe.

BUT, there's a problem with that. Other people don't see what we see so clearly, and that's a frightening prospect. Either it means that the other person is willfully ignorant, or stupid, or being contrary just to be mean, OR it means that the other person is rational, intelligent, and well educated and still doesn't see the self-evident nature of what we see to be self-evident.

And the reason that's a frightening prospect is that it opens the way to the possibility that what we consider self-evident isn't actually true at all! And that scares the shit out of us! So we go on the attack, either going all ad-hominem on the dude's ass to convince ourselves that he really is a moron, or piling on more "facts". Either way, we tell ourselves that a sharper attack will convince the opponent of what a fool he is and he will see the error of his ways, or that a sharper line of reasoning will carry the day by winning the argument based on pure logic.

But the fact is that Internet arguments are NEVER won because they cannot, in principle, be won. We have all lined up a full battery of justifications for believing what we believe, but to think that our a posteriori justifications could possibly constitute persuasive arguments against the other's a posteriori justifications truly is "just silly."

And so, the part of this whole thread that was truly "just silly" was my failure to remember that which I should have remembered before I made my first post. And that is simply that I am comfortable with my belief system, and I'm perfectly content to have other, intelligent, well educated people disagree with my point of view, because what I see as self-evident is not always self-evident to another. Not due to ignorance or stupidity or stubbornness, but simply due to the fact that we have had different lives and different experiences and what we see as self-evident is simply a product of those experiences.

And by way for full disclosure, my life experiences have included: raising three children, helping raise 6 grandchildren, working as an engineer for nearly 50 years, having graduate degrees in math and computer science, having taught programming and symbolic logic at the university level, having been a Catholic, a Mormon, a Lutheran, a Unitarian, a Hindu (in my hippie pot-smoking days), a TM meditator in the 70's, a Buddhist Atheist (for the last 30 years or so) having sat at the bedside with several people as they passed away including my wife, having had, since childhood, numerous "psychic" experiences that I have consistently tried to "explain away" (without a whole lot of success), having once lived for two years in a genuinely haunted house, having experienced (non-drug induced) transcendent states that quite literally change the way everything looks, ... (I could fill pages more, and some day maybe I'll get around to writing my memoirs, but that will do for now.) I'm betting that my life experience is at least a little bit different from most other people's, and so naturally, what I see as self-evident, they will not. And vice versa.

So I will try to remember in the future that I have no stake whatsoever in whether others believe what I believe or not. It really shouldn't matter to me, and I really do need to remind myself of that from time to time.