This is a YouTube video titled "On Consciousness: A Dialogue With Peter Russell" containing a philosophical dialogue from October 2012 discussing the nature of consciousness, language, and science's approach to subjectivity. The conversation features Peter Russell and an unidentified second speaker exploring the limitations of nouns in describing consciousness and the need for introspection in scientific inquiry.
I think it's even wrong to use the word consciousness, because we make it a thing, we make it a noun. As soon as we add ness to anything, we turn a quality or an attribute into something which we can talk about. It's useful for language.
Yes. It becomes an object again, a mental object. Yes, but so can one talk about it all? Is there a better word that doesn't have that? The dao.
Well, I think we should not use nouns for it, because as soon as you use a noun, whether it's Tao, consciousness, awareness, whatever, as soon as we use a noun, we're making it a thing, which implies we're beginning to look for another object, another form, another of perception. And so even the question, what is consciousness? Which they're asking to me is the wrong question, because it's like we are knowing, we are conscious. Then we're asking, what is it? We're looking for something other than what we are.
The question immediately makes it into an object again.
So I prefer to use verbs for it.
So let's see what that sounds like.
Well, I am aware and there is awearing. What I know is there is. We could call it awearing. There is experiencing. Consciousing doesn't work quite.
But well aware. So you have to create a new word to get rid of the inherent error in nouns and so on.
Yes. Or even knowing. I mean, knowing is a word we do have. There is that knowing. I know my experience. There is this experience now, being here, talking to you. And there is the knowing of that experience. And that to me is. That's what we're referring to as consciousness. And that is, as you've pointed out many times, that's what is always there, that is unchanging, just that knowing or the knowingness now. So I think science is actually misleading itself by looking for something, not realizing. It's the act of looking.
Yes. So in a way, science can never find the answer to consciousness until or unless the scientist becomes introspective, directs attention away from there, redirects attention back to the source within himself. In other words, the scientist has to become a meditator or a mystic. And then, of course, whether the mystic would still want to be a scientist, I don't know.
I actually think the mystic can be a scientist. I think we have to again draw a distinction between science as its practice now and the belief systems of science, which. Which are. It's a very materialistic belief system, and it excludes awareness or consciousness, and deliberately has done so because you can't measure it, you can't put a rule up against it, and it hasn't seemed important. I mean, science's explanation of how the universe works seems to work perfectly well without ever getting into this funny thing called subjectivity or knowing. We don't need to bother about that. It.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
