YOU 6

     You are self luminous.

     Simply put, self luminous means not lit by another.

     But neither do you light anything else but your self.

     Further the light of self luminousness is not the light of mere
being, but the light of being plus knowing, knowing that you be and that
you know that you know and know that you be.

     Mere being means to simply exist without knowing one exists.

     All use of the term being hereunder means mere being.

     More deeply, self luminescence is when being and knowing are one
and the same event.

     A rock for example is a full instantiation of everything that
could ever be known about a rock, from the quarks it is made of to
the earth it rests upon.

     How much knowledge would you have to know to everything there
could be known about a rock?

     Yet the rock can be lit by the sun, and thus seeable, but still
neither the sun nor the rock KNOW anything about themselves or each
other.

     But a self which is self luminousness, knows about itself through
the facility of seeing that it sees and seeing that it knows that it
sees.
 
     The self knows that it exists with perfect certainty, and it knows
that it knows, and it can see itself knowing and seeing, and being perfectly
certain it knows, sees and bees.

     Take the rock for a moment, a real rock in a real physical universe
that exists whether or not anyone is there to see it.  There is no such
thing, as the world is a dream, physical things exist only in the seeing
of them, but let's pretend we don't know that.

     That rock is an instantiation, a complete and perfect embodiment,
of everything there is to know about that rock.

     The sheer amount of knowledge contained in that rock just being
there is staggering.

     To completely understand and know everything there is to know about
that rock, you would have to have mastered geology, chemistry, atomic
and quantum physics and probably all of space time mechanics including
special and general relativity.

     Even if you knew everything there was to know about that rock, you
probably still couldn't create one yourself, so the rock has you beat,
as it is sitting there already at the finish line of being created and
embodying every single thing you could ever hope to know about it.

     But does the rock know anything?

     No.  The rock is being an instantiation of knowledge, a reference
implementation of that knowledge, but the rock itself does not know
anything, about anything, let alone about being a rock.

     BEING (an instantiation of) knowledge and KNOWING knowledge are two
completely different facilities.

     Take a learning machine for example.  You know, a computer with a
couple of video cameras, and set it roaming about to learn things about
its environment through its eyes, its video cameras.

     It comes back with reams and reams of data about what is out there,
what their relationships are, what might cause what induced from what
followed what.

     Dependable followingness between events doesn't prove causation of
course, but it does open the door to the possibility of causation
between the two events that followed each other.

     This learning machine might even turn its cameras on itself and
learn something of its own make up and how it functions.

     THE FACT THAT IT FUNCTIONS DOES NOT MEAN IT KNOWS HOW IT FUNCTIONS.
It is able TO function, but that is being, not knowing.

     A car can drive like the wind, but does a car know anything about
being a car, can it build another car?

     So this machine is set out to study our rock, and it comes back
with lots of symbolic data representing knowledge about the rock.  

     What colors the rock reflects, what the rock's temperature and
weight are, it's density, its water content etc.

     That is knowledge.
 
     The machine is being a machine, but it is learning knowledge about
the rock.
 
     After a while the machine will know more about the rock than the
rock does, because the rock doesn't know anything about anything period.

     You see how it works then in the physical universe.  You have an
object that is being there, and a SECOND object comes along and is the
effect of the first object, and the second object changes state BECAUSE
of the first object, and that change in state acts as a causal imprint
on the second object that derives from the nature of the first object.

     The changes in state in the second object are a symbol for
knowledge about the first object, an encoding if you will of truths
found about the first object, namely how the first object causally,
effect the second object (the learning machine).

      The first object is called the referent, and the second learning
object is called the symbol, because the NEW states in the second object
that causally arose from interaction with the referent, are symbols
representing the causation between them.
 
     Thus the referent is being, and the symbol is knowing about the
referent.  Notice the symbol, being just another object, is BEING a
symbol and doesn't know anything about itself!

     Thus both the referent and the symbol are BEING, but some of the
being of the symbol is a result of a causal imprint from the referent,
and so the symbol KNOWS just that much about the referent and no more
but nothing of itself because the symbol hasn't been the effect of
itself.

     You can be without knowing, but you can't know without being.

     Knowing is always about being, and thus comes after and because of
being.  Thus knowing is a different event from the being that it knows
about.

     Notice we are talking about the phyiscal universe here, and
learning machines trying to learn about other machines etc.

     Now we are looking at a far away star with a video camera.

     The image on the video camera is transferred to a TV set.  The
image on the TV set is sent to our eyes and lands on our retina.

     The image on the retina is transmitted into the brain and the
visual cortex.  (There is no red, green or blue in the visual cortex.)

     There the image is rendered in a conscious image of color and
dimensionality.  (There is lots of red, green and blue in the conscious
rendering.)

     But then what?  What happens after it's rendered in consciousness?

     Then nothing, that's what.

     The end result has been achieved, consciousness is knowing that it
sees and knows without having to pass it on to something else later in
the chain to know it!

     The conscious image is the end of the line, because it doesn't need
yet another symbol down the line to see itself.

     We can't see the star directly.

     We can't see the image in the video camera directly.

     We can't see the image on the TV set directly.

     We can't see the image on our retina directly.

     We can't see the image in our visual cortex directly.

     But we CAN see the image in our consciousness directly!

     This is so amazing, words can not be placed on it.

     Each of the stages above act as a symbol knowing knowledge about
the referent before it via being an effect of that referent.

     The image on the video camera is a symbol that 'knows' about the
star via the light coming from the star.  The video camera is affected
by the light, and changes state because of the light, and thus comes to
represent knowledge about the specific nature of that light and the star
that emitted it.

     You see if the light is 5000 Angstroms, the video camera will
change one way, if the light is 4000 Angstroms, the video camera will
change another way.  So there is a differentiation in the final state of
the video camera according to the nature of the cause that impinged upon
it, and in any case the end state of the video camera will be different
than its beginning state before light from the star hit it at all.

     So that differentiation IS knoweldge.

     "Light hit me, and it was 4000 Angstroms and not 5000 Anstromgs."

     In its end state the video camera is one way and not another way
BECAUSE the star is one way and not another way.  That's called
tracking.  And that is what knowledge is about and how it is encoded in
symbols of final authority.

     A symbol of final authority is a symbol that we use to tell us
what's what in the world around us according to the state of the symbol
at the time.

     So the video camera at the moment it receives light from the star
becomes the symbol of final authority (for the moment) about the nature
and state of the star.

     But does the video camera know that it knows?  No, the video camera
is just an object BEING a symbol for knowledge about the star.

     In the same way, the TV set displays the image on the video camera,
and thus is itself another later symbol being knowledge about the video
camera, but the TV set does not know that it knows.

     Notice the TV set has no idea if the image it gets from the video
camera came from a star or not!  So the video camera knows about the
star, but the TV set knows only about the video camera.

     The TV set displays the image but can not SEE the image it is
displaying.  The TV set can only be, not know.

     Remember seeing means more than just being in the light, it means
KNOWING in the light.  A flashlight can't see the rock even if it is on
and pointed right at it.

     Consciousness is knowing living light, that is more than just a
flashlight throwing a few photons around.  Photons just be, they don't
know anything either.

     A conscious unit may USE photons to help itself know by
illuminating a physical object which then illuminates the retina etc,
but the photons don't illuminate the consciousness, and in the end it is
consciousness self luminescing that is doing the knowing.

     So only when we come to the conscious rendition at the end of the
data chain does something very different happen.

     Again the image is displayed in consciousness, just like on the TV
set, but there is no *FURTHER* symbol needed, for consciousness to know
that it sees, to become later knowledge about what is displayed in the
consciousness.

     With the TV set, the image on the screen is the referent, and the
image on the retina is the symbol.

     With the final conscious rendition, the conscious color forms that
we see are both referent and symbol at the same time with no time between them.

     In otherwords the knowledge the retina has about the TV set is always
LATER than the image on the TV set because causes travels at a limited
velocity.

     But the knowledge the consciousness has of its own seeing is
instantaneous, no time between seeing and knowing that one sees, and
thus we can conclude that conscious perception of itself is a timeless
'process'.

     The colors of consciousness are a form of BEING, but the seeing and
knowing that we see those colors are a form of KNOWING.

     Thus being and knowing are one and the same event, with no space or
time between them, or we couldn't see anything.

     Separation between knowing and being makes for absolute blindness.
That's why the video camera may know about the star, but the video
camera will never ever SEE a star.  It can only ever BE a symbol for a
star even if the image in the video camera 'looks' like we fancy the
star to look.

     So try to get this now.

     Pick any two events that are causally related, like a cow and a
picture of that cow on film in a camera.

     The picture comes AFTER the cow, the picture is a picture of the
cow as it WAS a few nanoseconds before, namely 1 nanosecond per foot of
distance between the film and the cow.

     The referent is the cow and it is merely being.

     The symbol which is the picture on the film can not SEE the
referent directly, but can KNOW about the referent by being the effect
of it indirectly through alleged photons bouncing off the cow and
hitting the film plane a few nanos later.

      The symbol can neither SEE nor KNOW about itself because
it is not the effect of itself.

      Now take conscious color form, namely all the stuff
you see around you with your eyes open.  Notice you are seeing
your conscious rendition of the room, not the room itself, you
see reds, greens, blues etc, these are not physical qualities of
the alleged objects in the room, these are the directly qualities
of your conscious experiences of the room.

     Take some acid, the conscoius experience of the room changes, but
the alleged room does not, therefore the room, and your conscious
experiences of it are two different objects.

     With conscious experiences like red color form, the referent is
also being just as above with the cow.

     But the referent IS its own symbol.

     Conscious referents are self symbolizing.

     Thus the symbol CAN see the referent and CAN know about the
referent and CAN see itself and CAN know about itself, because the
symbol and referent are one and the same event.

     And that is self luminousness.

     Nothing other lights consciousness, and conciousness lights nothing
but itself.

     And that light is not just more light of being, like the sun
shining on the rock, but the light of knowing.

     Consciousness is self liminousness being lit up and knowing you are
lit!

     That's conscious seeing.

     A machine can't do that, because a machine can't operate self
symbolizingness.  All knowledge in a machine is distant in space and
time from the object which is being that the knowledge is about, and
even that knowledge is just more being in the machine without self
knowing.

     This is because a machine is always trying to learn across a
distance, like the video camera is trying to learn about the star.

     There can't be any distance, space or time, between referent and
symbol in a self symbolizing event, a self luminous event.

     Something very big has been said here.

     Can you be that big?

     This is about you.

     Your consciousness is not a space time machine, nor a process in
one.

      Homer

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Homer Wilson Smith     The Paths of Lovers    Art Matrix - Lightlink
(607) 277-0959 KC2ITF        Cross            Internet Access, Ithaca NY
homer@lightlink.com    In the Line of Duty    http://www.lightlink.com
Mon Jun 30 00:19:11 EDT 2008