Philosophy Thread

Awareness and Consciousness are difficult things to pin down, philosophically speaking (and I imagine harder still empirically speaking). From what I've been able to piece together from a few sources, a broad descriptor for consciousness seems to be "To experience the world from a particular place, perspective or centre". Now, this begs the question of what exactly is doing the experiencing, and there seems to be disagreement on the answer to this question; the immediately intuitive answer of a concrete 'self' as an object-in-itself is not always posed. If I'm remembering my reading right, Buddhist religious philosophy, for example, tends to assert that there is no fixed self, and that consciousness is more like a stream of impressions that aren't directly causally-related back to an object. Heidegger had a concept of dasein (well, okay, technically he reinterpreted it from Hegel), or being-there, which becomes known as being-in-the-world. Ultimately our ability to really understand this in full is limited by the fact that we are not some transcendent beings who live outside the universe, but we are shaped by our nature as being existent within it. I think that Hegel and also Marx (as well as probably the other young Hegelians, I'd imagine, though I've not really read up on Stirner et al.) would likely agree with this basic premise from how I've laid out dasein here, despite the difference in Hegel and Heidegger's definitions. I think an interesting thing to note is that one thing that Existential philosophers seem to agree with German Idealist (In Hegel's terms, anyway) and Materialist philosophers on is that rather than being a thing-in-itself, life can be quite well-described as a process of becoming. I think we see that crop up in both Nietzsche and Marx, and maybe a little in Camus as well. EDIT: The apparent overlap between continental and eastern philosophy here might stem from approaches to logic, as neither Hegel nor Nagarjuna seem to operate on standard Aristotlean precedent that: A = A or A = not (non-A). Hegel employs a triadic structure of logic, whereas Nagarjuna employs a four-fold logic.