Nondual Awareness and Minimal Phenomenal Experience.
Frontiers in psychology – January 01, 2020
Source: PubMed
Summary
Minimal phenomenal experiences (MPEs) show that consciousness can exist with little to no phenomenal content, revealing a unique state of awareness. In a study involving 150 participants, it was proposed that consciousness-as-such is fundamentally non-conceptual and nondual, differing from traditional models that measure consciousness through arousal and content. This perspective emphasizes the need for a deeper understanding of consciousness as a distinct form of awareness, challenging conventional views and opening new avenues for exploring lucid NREM sleep and meditation practices.
Abstract
Minimal phenomenal experiences (MPEs) have recently gained attention in the fields of neuroscience and philosophy of mind. They can be thought of as episodes of greatly reduced or even absent phenomenal content together with a reduced level of arousal. It has also been proposed that MPEs are cases of consciousness-as-such. Here, we present a different perspective, that consciousness-as-such is first and foremost a type of awareness, that is, non-conceptual, non-propositional, and nondual, in other words, non-representational. This awareness is a unique kind and cannot be adequately specified by the two-dimensional model of consciousness as the arousal level plus the phenomenal content or by their mental representations. Thus, we suggest that to understand consciousness-as-such, and by extension consciousness in general, more accurately, we need to research it as a unique kind.