Reflexivity
Self-illumination/reflexivity
- Every conscious experience is directly revealed to itself.
- ”In seeing blue, you experience seeing”
- Problems: Reflexivity as a concept is weird though
- ”A knife cannot cut itself, an acrobat can’t stand on their own shoulders."
- "How can one and the same awareness be both of an object/content and of itself?”
Reflectivity
Other-illumination/reflectivity
- For a state to be a conscious state is for it to be the object of a higher-order mental state (an inner perception or inner thought).
- ”I see blue, I’m aware that I see blue”
- Problems: how could two states that are nonconscious in themselves come together and make one of them conscious?
- Curious how this applies to emergent behaviour
- By having a higher layer that enables the reference of a lower layer, this is essentially a two-way recursive relation that opens the door to much more composable and perhaps complex behaviour
Nagarjana’s Argument
- Infinite regress, you cannot use a fact to establish itself
- Summarized in terms of reflectivity Opponents Argument
- Can use recursive definition, a fact can have a ‘base case’