In message <v02140b07b306f7cff093@[128.103.96.185]>, Reed Konsler
<konsler@ascat.harvard.edu> writes
>>...experience, in itself, is always serial, but in
>>L3 (or thereabouts) you can get past the belief that there's
>>really only one thing going on, and allow for parallelism.
>>- --
>>Robin
>
>Well, I can't speak for other people's experience. To be honest
>I'm not sure exactly what Richard meant when he wrote about
>"Level 3"...I can only tell you what I understand it to mean.
>
>I don't experience life serially. Every event, every word, every
>action in my life resonantes on multiple levels of meaning. I
>perceive things from a rationalist, a Christian, and a Zen/karmatic
>mystical level instantaneously simultaneously. Those are the
>meta-narrative metaphors which I usually operate with, but at
>times I've experienced "The Force" a la Star Wars.
But I'm not talking about metaphor or meaning. I could not agree more strongly that meanings run in parallel, that one event can have any number of them. But we were talking about "experience", weren't we? For me, there's experience, and then there's the interpretation of it. There can be multiple interpretations, but there can be only one stream of consciousness. To me that seems very fundamental, part of the definition of consciousness. Two or more different streams of consciousness would have to belong to that number of different people. It is often speculated that in the "split brain" condition, each hemisphere may have its own stream, but that's generally viewed as a very strange situation, like two people inhabiting one skull.
>It's not easy to balance the streams of consciousness, expecially
>where they are dissonant.
You seem to view "metaphor/meaning" and "stream of consciousness" as practically synonymous, which I really don't understand. Can you explain?
(I'm not responding to the rest of your message, not because I think it's not worthy of it, but just because I'm really short of time just now, and I think I've isolated the main problem, for myself, here. But I must just say this: I'm rather surprised that a seemingly sophisticated thinker like yourself believes in "evil".)
-- Robin