I listened to a lecture on conscious awareness by Professor Li Shanyou at Chaos University in the evening. He logically demonstrated the existence of a higher level of consciousness behind thinking, called "conscious awareness," which is unified with the world of ideas.
1. Understanding#
In the evening, Professor Li Shanyou gave a lecture on conscious awareness, mentioning that consciousness is a higher level of conscious state than thinking. Consciousness is the cognitive subject that can know and is on the spiritual level, possessing unity; thinking is the cognitive object that is known and is on the material level, possessing duality. The duality of our thinking determines that our cognitive world is divided into good and evil, beauty and ugliness. However, pointing directly to the source, under the unity of conscious awareness, which is one and exists in infinite space and eternal time, the world of ideas is unified, without good and evil, without beauty and ugliness.
After listening to the above sharing, I personally associated it with simple systems and complex systems, entropy increase and entropy decrease, and the relationship between disorder and order. Each individual's thinking can be seen as a simple system, which follows a certain pattern and can be considered orderly in a sense.
Complex systems can be seen as a collection of countless thinking objects. The evolution from simple systems to complex systems is a collision process between independent thinking objects. This process is an increase in entropy, and the orderly pattern of operation is impacted, giving rise to an unordered pattern of operation. Creativity is born in this disorder and chaos.
In connection with the course, my personal understanding of conscious awareness is like the unordered pattern of operation in a complex system, while thinking is more like the orderly pattern of operation of independent objects.
2. Misconception#
During the course, I had a question that I didn't think too clearly about. I am sharing it here, hoping that someone can provide their understanding and give some insights.
How to understand "its smallness has no interior"?
When demonstrating the unity of conscious awareness and the world of ideas, Professor Li Shanyou made the following inference:
- Two things are independent of each other and do not meet the self-referentiality, so the viewpoint is not valid.
- Two things have a belonging relationship, which does not meet the characteristic of unity and smallness without interior, so it is also not valid.
- There is only one possibility, that the two things are actually the same thing.
Regarding "its smallness has no interior," I have two interpretations myself and I don't know which one Professor Li Shanyou was referring to:
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Conscious awareness or the world of ideas, the system itself is infinite in space and eternal in time, infinitely large and infinitely small, so the system itself cannot find a smaller system than itself.
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Conscious awareness or the world of ideas, the smallest part within this system cannot find anything smaller than itself. The smallest part is like the Peano remainder in mathematics, an existence of higher-order infinitesimal. Infinity and infinitesimal are similar to limits, they are limit values or approximate values. Between the two systems, there exists a higher-order infinitesimal, and because nothing smaller than it can be found, it can be approximated as the two systems having equal values, or understood as unity.