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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 4

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I wish I knew more about the relationship between Freud and Jung. There must be books and even films concerning the history of their increasingly distinct ideas, perhaps a historical 'biography' of their work together and then apart, far apart, when Jung developed a whole other way of thinking about the subconscious mind. I do remember reading somewhere that Freud stated toward the end of his life that he wished he had followed Jung's approach and explorations.

"I wish I knew more about the relationship between Freud and Jung. There must be books and even films concerning the history of their increasingly distinct ideas,"

A Dangerous Method - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2011 by David Cornenburg - I haven't seen the film.
 
Sex on the brain: Orgasms unlock altered consciousness - life - 11 May 2011 - New Scientist

Georgiadis argues that the OFC may be the basis of sexual control - and perhaps only by letting go, so to speak, can orgasm be achieved. He suggests this deactivation may be the most telling example of an "altered state of consciousness" and one not seen, as yet, during any other type of activity.

There may be a simple explanation for the discrepancies between Georgiadis's and Komisaruk's work - they may represent two different paths to orgasm, activated by different methods of induction
 
Bioinspired Robotics : Wyss Institute at Harvard

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings--
they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.
I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.
Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on the ground:
then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.


...

- Craig Raine
Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the properites of making colours darker.
 
The Science of Stress, Orgasm and Creativity: How the Brain and the Vagina Conspire in Consciousness | Brain Pickings

“The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’” philosopher Alain de Botton argued in his meditation on sex, “the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.”

But in his attempt to counter the reductionism that frames human sexuality as a mere physiological phenomenon driven solely by our evolutionary biology, de Botton overcompensates by reducing in the opposite direction,

negating the complex interplay of brain and biology, psychology and physiology, that propels the human sexual experience.

That’s precisely what Naomi Wolf, author of the 1991 cultural classic The Beauty Myth, examines in Vagina: A New Biography (public library) — a fascinating exploration of the science behind the vastly misunderstood mind-body connection between brain and genitalia, consciousness and sexuality, the poetic and the scientific. What emerges is a revelation of how profoundly a woman’s bodily experience influences nearly every aspect of life, from stress to creativity, through the intricate machinery that links biology and beingness.
Female sexual pleasure, rightly understood, is not just about sexuality, or just about pleasure. It serves, also, as a medium of female self-knowledge and hopefulness; female creativity and courage; female focus and initiative; female bliss and transcendence; and as medium of a sensibility that feels very much like freedom. To understand the vagina properly is to realize that it is not only coextensive with the female brain, but is also, essentially, part of the female soul.
[…]
Once one understands what scientists at the most advanced laboratories and clinics around the world are confirming — that the vagina and the brain are essentially one network, or “one whole system,” as they tend to put it, and that the vagina mediates female confidence, creativity, and sense of transcendence — the answers to many of these seeming mysteries fall into place.
 
A pivotal player in this mediation is the female pelvic nerve — a sort of information superhighway that branches out from the base of the spinal cord to the cervix, connecting the latter to the brain and thus controlling much of sexual response. But this information superhighway is really more like a superlabyrinth, the architecture of which differs enormously from one woman to another, and is completely unique for each one. This diversity of wiring in the highly complex female pelvic neural network helps explain why women have wildly different triggers for orgasm.

... compare this to the plexuses (this should definitely be "plexii" - sexii plexii ... but it's not) in the heart and gut "gut brain" and "heart brain" ... of how many minds must we be?

But things are simpler for the male (of course) of the species ...

By contrast, the male pelvic neural network is significantly simpler, consisting of comparatively regular neural pathways arranged neatly in a grid that surrounds the penis in a circle of pleasure.

At least, according to what we now know, now. So, to update Pascal:

Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.
et
Le intestin a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.
et
Le vagin a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.

... the idea that two of the most powerful "altered states" - dreaming and orgasm are every day experiences available to almost everyone
 
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So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch
Wallace Stevens

On her side, reclining on her elbow.
This mechanism, this apparition,
Suppose we call it Projection A.

She floats in air at the level of
The eye, completely anonymous,
Born, as she was, at twenty-one,

Without lineage or language, only
The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture,
Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.

If just above her head there hung,
Suspended in air, the slightest crown
Of Gothic prong and practick bright,

The suspension, as in solid space,
The suspending hand withdrawn, would be
An invisible gesture. Let this be called

Projection B. To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux

Between the thing as idea and
The idea as thing. She is half who made her.
This is the final Projection C.

The arrangement contains the desire of
The artist. But one confides in what has no
Concealed creator. One walks easily

The unpainted shore, accepts the world
As anything but sculpture. Good-bye
Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.
 
Hm, I'm not sure if you're being serious or not. He seems a bit of a nihilist for your tastes (although I watched the YouTube clip only).

Re my last post: I'm still working my way through mind and life, but so far it has really reinforced for me the way in which mind and body are integrated. Consciousness and its "contents" appear to strongly correlate to physiological/neurological processes, and yet there is no place for subjectivity in the objective, scientific world view.

I still think Robin Faichney and the dual-aspect approach as he articulated it makes the most sense. (Not sure if he did so on his website or his paper. I can try to find it if someone is curious.)

@smcder you said awhile back—and I'll never find it—the one can't say consciousness is the "inside" and objective reality the "outside," but I still think those are powerful descriptors and feel intuitively right. Subjectivity cannot be objectively explained by definition. I'm rambling now.

Re Googles hallucinating neural nets. I saw that article too.

Something I wonder: Most men become aroused at the sight of a shapely, naked female body. This arousel is automatic (but can be surpressed to some extent).

Similar to the pixelated google images; I wonder how distorted of an image of a shapely body would cause arousel? I'm sure it would vary by individual and current mood etc.

I suppose it's not much different than the fear response; flight or fight response can be triggered by very abstract stimuli if translated by the organism in such a way.

Where am I going with this? Not sure. Our subjective reality correlates to a real, palpable objective reality. They are one and the same, experience is not virtual... But experience is subjective and with it and empathy we color what-is; we are "lived" bodies.

Really rambling now but anxious for Mind in Life to discuss "pre-reflective" consciousness, with and perhaps without self-consciousness.

Can one be aware (conscious) if one is not also self-aware? Do we experience green if we are not simultaneously experiencing "I am experiencing green"?

As I've shared many times, my sense of self often fads throughout the day, whether I'm focused on a stimulating event, deep in thought, etc.

Am I conscious at those times? Seems a silly question but it's a serious one!

Why am I conscious of the fly on my arm when I'm trying to meditate, but not consciousness of the fly when I'm watching a bear run at me? Why didn't the natives "see" the green patch until they had been told it was a green patch? (Perhaps different phenomena.)

Why are some physiological processes sometimes conscious and sometimes not conscious?

What happens where and how to allow/cause my stream of consciousness—my phenomenal landscape—to differentiate into this wonderful morphology and that wonderful morphology and then, at night, to just disappear?

There are a myriad of enviro-physiological processes that allow us to be thinking, feeling, sentient beings—but there's something else as well, I'm thinking, that allows us to be conscious, self-aware beings.

"@smcder you said awhile back—and I'll never find it—the one can't say consciousness is the "inside" and objective reality the "outside," but I still think those are powerful descriptors and feel intuitively right."

Like the TARDIS I'm bigger on the IMside than the outside.
 
Our subjective reality correlates to a real, palpable objective reality. They are one and the same, experience is not virtual... But experience is subjective and with it and empathy we color what-is; we are "lived" bodies.

Really rambling now but anxious for Mind in Life to discuss "pre-reflective" consciousness, with and perhaps without self-consciousness.


Maybe this helps. Phenomenological philosophy understands our condition as Dasein -- as 'being-in-the-world' -- to be already understood prereflectively, and gradually understood more fully through our passage into reflective consciousness: finding ourselves reflecting on our own feeling and thinking from the basis of what we experience in the world.

Our recognition is that what we experience is the core, the ground, of what we feel and think. With more attentive and reflective thought we understand that our experience itself is compounded of the subjective and objective poles of 'what-is' in lived -- experienced -- reality).

The capacity for empathy (a capacity in ourselves and in other animals) is the most vivid expression of the emerging sense of 'being-with' other living organisms, sharing the conditions of life, eventually enabling the development of our ideas of correct or moral behavior, social justice, and the desire to create 'the good society'. Everything arises from our primordial affectivity and sensed relation to, and increasing entanglement with, the others among whom we have our existence.

“All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
 
Yes, Thompson is discussing this now in MIL—pre-reflective self consciousness. Im still really struggling with it.

He says elsewhere:

Moderate transparency of awareness: we are not ususally aware of (intrinsic mental features of) our experience, but only of the objects and properties presented by that experience.

He says he is going to argue that this is true. I dont disagree.

What i struggle with, though, is how this accomodates a pre-reflective self consciousness.

My own experience—as ive said—mirrors the moderate transparency outlined above; for me, that means that my sense of self is typically "missing" when im experiencing the world. Im not sure how a self consciousness fits into this...

In the very next paragraph, he begins to explain by saying (paraphrase):

"When i see a wine bottle on the table in front of me, I experience (am visually aware of) the wine bottle. But I also experience my seeing."

pp 284-285

This second part is difficult for me. It doesnt seem to jive with what he says above about moderate transparency of awareness...

Sometimes I "experience my seeing," but mostly I do not. Is it possible that as a philosopher, as a phenomenologist, he is more attuned to his own self than a brute like me?

Its really the only concept presented so far that I cant grok; and it appears to be an important one. This idea that all consciousness is intrinsically self consciousness, an pre-reflective to boot.
 
From the SEP entry "Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness":

On the phenomenological view, a minimal form of self-consciousness is a constant structural feature of conscious experience. Experience happens for the experiencing subject in an immediate way and as part of this immediacy, it is implicitly marked as my experience. For phenomenologists, this immediate and first-personal givenness of experiential phenomena is accounted for in terms of a pre-reflective self-consciousness. In the most basic sense of the term, self-consciousness is not something that comes about the moment one attentively inspects or reflectively introspects one's experiences, or recognizes one's specular image in the mirror, or refers to oneself with the use of the first-person pronoun, or constructs a self-narrative. Rather, these different kinds of self-consciousness are to be distinguished from the pre-reflective self-consciousness which is present whenever I am living through or undergoing an experience, i.e., whenever I am consciously perceiving the world, whenever I am thinking an occurrent thought, whenever I am feeling sad or happy, thirsty or in pain, and so forth.

One can get a bearing on the notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness by contrasting it with reflective self-consciousness. If you ask me to give you a description of the pain I feel in my right foot, or of what I was just thinking about, I would reflect on it and thereby take up a certain perspective that was one order removed from the pain or the thought. Thus, reflective self-consciousness is at least a second-order cognition. It may be the basis for a report on one's experience, although not all reports involve a significant amount of reflection.

In contrast, pre-reflective self-consciousness is pre-reflective in the sense that (1) it is an awareness we have before we do any reflecting on our experience; (2) it is an implicit and first-order awareness rather than an explicit or higher-order form of self-consciousness. Indeed, an explicit reflective self-consciousness is possible only because there is a pre-reflective self-awareness that is an on-going and more primary self-consciousness. Although phenomenologists do not always agree on important questions about method, focus, or even whether there is an ego or self, they are in close to unanimous agreement about the idea that the experiential dimension always involves such an implicit pre-reflective self-awareness.[1] In line with Edmund Husserl (1959, 189, 412), who maintains that consciousness always involves a self-appearance (Für-sich-selbst-erscheinens), and in agreement with Michel Henry (1963, 1965), who notes that experience is always self-manifesting, and with Maurice Merleau-Ponty who states that consciousness is always given to itself and that the word ‘consciousness’ has no meaning independently of this self-givenness (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 488), Jean-Paul Sartre writes that pre-reflective self-consciousness is not simply a quality added to the experience, an accessory; rather, it constitutes the very mode of being of the experience:

This self-consciousness we ought to consider not as a new consciousness, but as the only mode of existence which is possible for a consciousness of something (Sartre 1943, 20 [1956, liv]).

The notion of pre-reflective self-awareness is related to the idea that experiences have a subjective ‘feel’ to them, a certain (phenomenal) quality of ‘what it is like’ or what it ‘feels’ like to have them. As it is usually expressed outside of phenomenological texts, to undergo a conscious experience necessarily means that there is something it is like for the subject to have that experience (Nagel 1974; Searle 1992). This is obviously true of bodily sensations like pain. But it is also the case for perceptual experiences, experiences of desiring, feeling, and thinking. There is something it is like to taste chocolate, and this is different from what it is like to remember what it is like to taste chocolate, or to smell vanilla, to run, to stand still, to feel envious, nervous, depressed or happy, or to entertain an abstract belief. Yet, at the same time, as I live through these differences, there is something experiential that is, in some sense, the same, namely, their distinct first-personal character. All the experiences are characterized by a quality of mineness or for-me-ness, the fact that it is I who am having these experiences. All the experiences are given (at least tacitly) as my experiences, as experiences I am undergoing or living through. All of this suggests that first-person experience presents me with an immediate and non-observational access to myself, and that (phenomenal) consciousness consequently entails a (minimal) form of self-consciousness. In short, unless a mental process is pre-reflectively self-conscious there will be nothing it is like to undergo the process, and it therefore cannot be a phenomenally conscious process (Zahavi 1999, 2005, 2014). An implication of this is obviously that the self-consciousness in question can be ascribed to all creatures that are phenomenally conscious, including various non-human animals.

The mineness in question is not a quality like being scarlet, sour or soft. It doesn't refer to a specific experiential content, to a specific what; nor does it refer to the diachronic or synchronic sum of such content, or to some other relation that might obtain between the contents in question. Rather, it refers to the distinct givenness or the how it feels of experience. It refers to the first-personal presence or character of experience. It refers to the fact that the experiences I am living through are given differently (but not necessarily better) to me than to anybody else. It could consequently be claimed that anybody who denies the for-me-ness of experience simply fails to recognize an essential constitutive aspect of experience. Such a denial would be tantamount to a denial of the first-person perspective. It would entail the view that my own mind is either not given to me at all — I would be mind- or self-blind — or is presented to me in exactly the same way as the minds of others.

There are also lines of argumentation in contemporary analytical philosophy of mind that are close to and consistent with the phenomenological conception of pre-reflective self-awareness. Alvin Goldman provides an example:

[Consider] the case of thinking about x or attending to x. In the process of thinking about x there is already an implicit awareness that one is thinking about x. There is no need for reflection here, for taking a step back from thinking about x in order to examine it…When we are thinking about x, the mind is focused on x, not on our thinking of x. Nevertheless, the process of thinking about x carries with it a non-reflective self-awareness (Goldman 1970, 96).

A similar view has been defended by Owen Flanagan, who not only argues that consciousness involves self-consciousness in the weak sense that there is something it is like for the subject to have the experience, but also speaks of the low-level self-consciousness involved in experiencing my experiences as mine (Flanagan 1992, 194). As Flanagan quite correctly points out, this primary type of self-consciousness should not be confused with the much stronger notion of self-consciousness that is in play when we are thinking about our own narrative self. The latter form of reflective self-consciousness presupposes both conceptual knowledge and narrative competence. It requires maturation and socialization, and the ability to access and issue reports about the states, traits, dispositions that make one the person one is. Bermúdez (1998), to mention one further philosopher in the analytic tradition, argues that there are a variety of nonconceptual forms of self-consciousness that are “logically and ontogenetically more primitive than the higher forms of self-consciousness that are usually the focus of philosophical debate” (1998, 274; also see Poellner 2003). This growing consensus across philosophical studies supports the phenomenological view of pre-reflective self-consciousness.

That pre-reflective self-awareness is implicit, then, means that I am not confronted with a thematic or explicit awareness of the experience as belonging to myself. Rather we are dealing with a non-observational self-acquaintance. Here is how Heidegger and Sartre put the point:

Dasein [human existence] as existing, is there for itself, even when the ego does not expressly direct itself to itself in the manner of its own peculiar turning around and turning back, which in phenomenology is called inner perception as contrasted with outer. The self is there for the Dasein itself without reflection and without inner perception, before all reflection. Reflection, in the sense of a turning back, is only a mode of self-apprehension, but not the mode of primary self-disclosure (Heidegger 1989, 226 [1982, 159]).

In other words, every positional consciousness of an object is at the same time a non-positional consciousness of itself. If I count the cigarettes which are in that case, I have the impression of disclosing an objective property of this collection of cigarettes: they are a dozen. This property appears to my consciousness as a property existing in the world. It is very possible that I have no positional consciousness of counting them. Then I do not know myself as counting. Yet at the moment when these cigarettes are revealed to me as a dozen, I have a non-thetic consciousness of my adding activity. If anyone questioned me, indeed, if anyone should ask, “What are you doing there?” I should reply at once, “I am counting.” (Sartre 1943, 19–20 [1956, liii]).

It is clarifying to compare the phenomenological notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness with the one defended by Brentano. According to Brentano as I listen to a melody I am aware that I am listening to the melody. He acknowledges that I do not have two different mental states: my consciousness of the melody is one and the same as my awareness of perceiving it; they constitute one single psychical phenomenon. On this point, and in opposition to higher-order representation theories, Brentano and the phenomenologists are in general agreement. But for Brentano, by means of this unified mental state, I have an awareness of two objects: the melody and my perceptual experience.

In the same mental phenomenon in which the sound is present to our minds we simultaneously apprehend the mental phenomenon itself. What is more, we apprehend it in accordance with its dual nature insofar as it has the sound as content within it, and insofar as it has itself as content at the same time. We can say that the sound is the primary object of the act of hearing, and that the act of hearing itself is the secondary object (Brentano 1874, 179–180 [1973, 127–128]).

Husserl disagrees on just this point, as do Sartre and Heidegger: my awareness of my experience is not an awareness of it as an object.[2] My awareness is non-objectifying in the sense that I do not occupy the position or perspective of a spectator or in(tro)spector who attends to this experience in a thematic way. That a psychological state is experienced, “and is in this sense conscious, does not and cannot mean that this is the object of an act of consciousness, in the sense that a perception, a presentation or a judgment is directed upon it” (Husserl 1984a, 165 [2001, I, 273]). In pre-reflective self-awareness, experience is given, not as an object, but precisely as subjective experience. For phenomenologists, intentional experience is lived through (erlebt), but does not appear in an objectified manner. Experience is conscious of itself without being the intentional object of consciousness (Husserl 1984b, 399; Sartre 1936, 28–29). That we are aware of our lived experiences even if we do not direct our attention towards them is not to deny that we can direct our attention towards our experiences, and thereby take them as objects of reflection (Husserl 1984b, 424).

To have a self-experience does not entail the apprehension of a special self-object; it does not entail the existence of a special experience of a self alongside other experiences but different from them. To be aware of oneself is not to capture a pure self that exists separately from the stream of experience, rather it is to be conscious of one's experience in its implicit first-person mode of givenness. When Hume, in a famous passage in A Treatise of Human Nature, declares that he cannot find a self when he searches his experiences, but finds only particular perceptions or feelings (Hume 1739), it could be argued that he overlooks something in his analysis, namely the specific givenness of his own experiences. Indeed, he was looking only among his own experiences, and seemingly recognized them as his own, and could do so only on the basis of that immediate self-awareness that he seemed to miss. As C.O. Evans puts it: “[F]rom the fact that the self is not an object of experience it does not follow that it is non-experiential” (Evans 1970, 145). Accordingly, we should not think of the self, in this most basic sense, as a substance, or as some kind of ineffable transcendental precondition, or as a social construct that gets generated through time; rather it is an integral part of conscious life, with an immediate experiential character.

One advantage of the phenomenological view is that it is capable of accounting for some degree of diachronic unity, without actually having to posit the self as a separate entity over and above the stream of consciousness (see the discussion of time-consciousness in section 3 below). Although we live through a number of different experiences, the experiencing itself remains a constant in regard to whose experience it is. This is not accounted for by a substantial self or a mental theater. There is no pure or empty field of consciousness upon which the concrete experiences subsequently make their entry. The field of experiencing is nothing apart from the specific experiences. Yet we are naturally inclined to distinguish the strict singularity of an experience from the continuous stream of changing experiences. What remains constant and consistent across these changes is the sense of ownership constituted by pre-reflective self-awareness. Only a being with this sense of ownership or mineness could go on to form concepts about herself, consider her own aims, ideals, and aspirations as her own, construct stories about herself, and plan and execute actions for which she will take responsibility.

The concept of pre-reflective self-awareness is related to a variety of philosophical issues, including epistemic asymmetry, immunity to error through misidentification, self-reference, and personal identity. We will examine these issues each in turn.

It seems clear that the objects of my visual perception are intersubjectively accessible in the sense that they can in principle be the objects of another's perception. A subject's perceptual experience itself, however, is given in a unique way to the subject herself. Although two people, A and B, can perceive a numerically identical object, they each have their own distinct perceptual experience of it; just as they cannot share each other's pain, they cannot literally share these perceptual experiences. Their experiences are epistemically asymmetrical in this regard. B might realize that A is in pain; he might sympathize with A, he might even have the same kind of pain (same qualitative aspects, same intensity, same proprioceptive location), but he cannot literally feel A's pain the same way A does. The subject's epistemic access to her own experience, whether it is a pain or a perceptual experience, is primarily a matter of pre-reflective self-awareness. If secondarily, in an act of introspective reflection I begin to examine my perceptual experience, I will recognize it as my perceptual experience only because I have been pre-reflectively aware of it, as I have been living through it. Thus, phenomenology maintains, the access that reflective self-consciousness has to first-order phenomenal experience is routed through pre-reflective consciousness, for if we were not pre-reflectively aware of our experience, our reflection on it would never be motivated. When I do reflect, I reflect on something with which I am already experientially familiar.

When I experience an occurrent pain, perception, or thought, the experience in question is given immediately and noninferentially. I do not have to judge or appeal to some criteria in order to identify it as my experience. There are no free-floating experiences; even the experience of freely-floating belongs to someone. As William James (1890) put it, all experience is “personal.” Even in pathological cases, as in depersonalization or schizophrenic symptoms of delusions of control or thought insertion, a feeling or experience that the subject claims not to be his is nonetheless experienced by him as being part of his stream of consciousness. The complaint of thought insertion, for example, necessarily acknowledges that the inserted thoughts are thoughts that belong to the subject's experience, even as the agency for such thoughts are attributed to others. This first-person character entails an implicit experiential self-reference. If I feel hungry or see my friend, I cannot be mistaken about who the subject of that experience is, even if I can be mistaken about it being hunger (perhaps it's really thirst), or about it being my friend (perhaps it's his twin), or even about whether I am actually seeing him (I may be hallucinating). As Wittgenstein (1958), Shoemaker (1968), and others have pointed out, it is nonsensical to ask whether I am sure that I am the one who feels hungry. This is the phenomenon known as “immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun.” To this idea of immunity to error through misidentification, the phenomenologist adds that whether a certain experience is experienced as mine, or not, does not depend upon something apart from the experience, but depends precisely upon the pre-reflective givenness that belongs to the structure of the experience (Husserl 1959, 175; Husserl 1973a, 28, 56, 307, 443; see Zahavi 1999, 6ff.).

Some philosophers who are inclined to take self-consciousness to be intrinsically linked to the issue of self-reference would argue that the latter depends on a first-person concept. One attains self-consciousness only when one can conceive of oneself as oneself, and has the linguistic ability to use the first-person pronoun to refer to oneself (Baker 2000, 68; cf. Lowe 2000, 264). On this view, self-consciousness is something that emerges in the course of a developmental process, and depends on the acquisition of concepts and language. Accordingly, some philosophers deny that young children are capable of self-consciousness (Carruthers 1996; Dennett 1976; Wilkes 1988; also see Flavell 1993). Evidence from developmental psychology and ecological psychology, however, suggests that there is a primitive, proprioceptive form of self-consciousness already in place from birth.[3] This primitive self-awareness precedes the mastery of language and the ability to form conceptually informed judgments, and it may serve as a basis for more advanced types of self-consciousness (see, e.g., Butterworth 1995, 1999; Gibson 1986; Meltzoff 1990a, 1990b; Neisser 1988; and Stern 1985). The phenomenological view is consistent with these findings.

Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

 
@Constance - you asked me what I thought about this article, what I thought the thesis is:

https://www.academia.edu/12589122/T...and_Consciousness_in_Physics_and_Sāṁkhya_Yoga

*the slides can be downloaded (.ppt) here:

Alfred Collins | Pacifica Graduate Institute | Papers - Academia.edu

The author starts here:

  • Consciousness, for the anthropic principle, exists for the sake of the world process.
  • Puruṣārtha asserts the converse, that the world process unfolds, or is enacted, for the sake of consciousness.

... and then attempts to "fuse the conceptual horizons of these two ideas"

He ends here:

If it is possible to do physics under the aegis of the puruṣārthic principle, what would scientific experimentation be like?

The answer must lie in the concept, articulated by Sri Aurobindo, of “knowledge by identity” as opposed to knowledge wrested violently from nature.

If each experiment is oriented pratiprasava (in the direction of the primordial state called avyakta, “the unmanifest” or mūla-prakṛti, “root prakṛti”), science would take on an enlightenment- or salvation-oriented perspective, flow rather than push to understand and control. The second aim of prakṛti for puruṣa’s sake must not be forgotten here. Science, like all action, would work for puruṣa’s enjoyment. Science, like all life, would become yoga. Its knowledge would not be acquired and possessed; it would be lived, practiced, and shared with the universe.
 
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The first slide states the question behind the paper this way:

Are these two things related?
  • the AP in quantum physics - (strong form) claims that to be made conscious (to be observed) is an aim of the physical universe ... consciousness is for the sake of the world process
  • purusartha asserts that consciousness (pure awareness, purusa) is the aim (artha) of the psychophysical process of the universe ... the world process is for the sake of consciousness
 
"@smcder you said awhile back—and I'll never find it—the one can't say consciousness is the "inside" and objective reality the "outside," but I still think those are powerful descriptors and feel intuitively right."

Like the TARDIS I'm bigger on the IMside than the outside.

Oops ... no, sorry today I'm bigger on the outside ... than the IMside.
 
So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch
Wallace Stevens

On her side, reclining on her elbow.
This mechanism, this apparition,
Suppose we call it Projection A.

She floats in air at the level of
The eye, completely anonymous,
Born, as she was, at twenty-one,

Without lineage or language, only
The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture,
Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.

If just above her head there hung,
Suspended in air, the slightest crown
Of Gothic prong and practick bright,

The suspension, as in solid space,
The suspending hand withdrawn, would be
An invisible gesture. Let this be called

Projection B. To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux

Between the thing as idea and
The idea as thing. She is half who made her.
This is the final Projection C.

The arrangement contains the desire of
The artist. But one confides in what has no
Concealed creator. One walks easily

The unpainted shore, accepts the world
As anything but sculpture. Good-bye
Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.


It's funny - after listening to this I thought how much hearing Stevens read helps me understand his poetry, most of the comments on this page:

Nothing to Say & Saying It: Stevens - So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch

complain about Steven's reading voice ...

I think poetry is best from a person, not on a page, but Wallace Stevens, I don't know, I just don't like his voice. I remember a video from years ago where James Merrill read some of Stevens's poems which I liked much better, so now it's James Merrill I hear when I read Stevens. For me, it's better this way.
Merrill also said he went to Stevens's poetry the way some people go to the Bible. For me, that was a great way into poetry. I started thinking of Stevens more as parable than anecdote. I don't knwo if that helped me "understand" Stevens, but it certainly helped me articulate my enjoyment of his poetry.

here is Merrill reading The Black Swan ...


one of the complaints about Stevens voice was that it was sepulchral, but Merrill's voice here has a bit of the Karloff to me ...

Finally, learning Spanish and French and brushing up on my German, spending time in other languages, make me appreciate English - both as my native tongue i.e. the ease and fluency, the familiar furniture of it - and as a powerful language in itself. It's good to leave and it's good to come home.
 
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Yes, Thompson is discussing this now in MIL—pre-reflective self consciousness. Im still really struggling with it.

He says elsewhere:

Moderate transparency of awareness: we are not ususally aware of (intrinsic mental features of) our experience, but only of the objects and properties presented by that experience.

He says he is going to argue that this is true. I dont disagree.

What i struggle with, though, is how this accomodates a pre-reflective self consciousness.

My own experience—as ive said—mirrors the moderate transparency outlined above; for me, that means that my sense of self is typically "missing" when im experiencing the world. Im not sure how a self consciousness fits into this...

In the very next paragraph, he begins to explain by saying (paraphrase):

"When i see a wine bottle on the table in front of me, I experience (am visually aware of) the wine bottle. But I also experience my seeing."

pp 284-285

This second part is difficult for me. It doesnt seem to jive with what he says above about moderate transparency of awareness...

Sometimes I "experience my seeing," but mostly I do not. Is it possible that as a philosopher, as a phenomenologist, he is more attuned to his own self than a brute like me?

Its really the only concept presented so far that I cant grok; and it appears to be an important one. This idea that all consciousness is intrinsically self consciousness, an pre-reflective to boot.

Sometimes I "experience my seeing," but mostly I do not. Is it possible that as a philosopher, as a phenomenologist, he is more attuned to his own self than a brute like me?

lol ... it's hard to think of you as a "brute" ... I bet if you start paying attention to it, it can become your way of experiencing it too ... plasticity ... where brain scans show the brain changes in response to practice and intention ... when I was diagnosed with OCD I did exercises that purportedly changed by brain's physiology - there is a circuit that runs hot in OCD saying "danger! danger!" - you simply relabel "it's not me, it's my OCD" and divert - doing something else for about fifteen minutes and endure the resulting anxiety, gradually training and rewiring the brain ... the circuit actually, literally cools off in time - so if you could change your basic way of thinking by paying attention to "experiencing my seeing" what does this mean for phenomenology and possible phenomenologies? Was it always there and you just pay attention to it - or do you develop it by building up your attention to it ... to what extent then can phenomenology claim this as "the way that it is?" - could we begin to see things that we never new were there? there don't appear to be any hard limits to conscious control of the body, some yogis have demonstrated the ability to reverse peristalsis - sitting on a puddle of water and absorbing it ... yes ... so what can we do with the brain? those faint, faint senses and intuitions can be developed and we call that "genius" because we don't have access to it - or could we look out into the dark and begin to discern things, using light we've never perceived before?

Another way to put this is:

would a brain scan show where Heidegger and Husserl differ? But if you think for a second, you see that empiricism, in looking outward for consensus ... has the exact same problem, so their is no refuge there. Again, it's how comfortable you are with untruncated thought.

Technology counts for its survival and development on our basic anxiety and desire for comfort to result in our limiting our thoughts.

I struggle with this aspect of phenomenology and of eastern philosophy ... if we begin with the subjective, how do we come to consensus? How do we verify statements like: all consciousness is intrinsically self consciousness? Where are we standing that we can say this? Can we afford to reject the otherwise experience? If Eastern philosophy is based on meditation, it seems the results of that meditation depend not only on the kind of meditation (how you breathe, where you put your attention, what you visualize) but also on the instructions you are given, the tradition of interpreting that experience ... that said, there does seem to be something that unfolds when you simply focus on the breath ... something that many people can agree on, regardless of tradition. Now how that's interpreted ... leads right back in to the same problem.

New age philosophy does make one point that I think shouldn't be lost, which is our creative contribution to reality.

Eastern philosophies start with the subjective too and come to take a different view(s) ... as the paper I just commented on demonstrates.

We can choose between schools of thought or we can try to synthesize (west: subjugate east: accomodate ??)

<--... the world exists for the sake of consciousness exists for the sake of the world exists ... -->

Like the tetralemma, these thoughts are alien, but that should put us on notice, shouldn't it? ... what are we to make broadly of an eastern/western split in thinking? Is it historically arbitrary? What if conditions existed for a third kind of thought practices?

Similarly the split in analytic and continental philosophy ... do these represent different hemispheres (McGilchrist's argument) or different kinds of minds entirely?

Philosophy as geography and biography.

Eastern: accomodating, based on experience in meditation and observation (analytic approach to inner experience tied to traditional interpretations) - many schools of course, like in martial arts some are hard and some are soft, water over rock, engineering in accordance with nature and a deep view into cycles, patterns of nature, man not apart from this

Western: Continental/Analytic - subjugating over all, man drives destiny, decision and intention at the root, long history of challenging the gods - engineering is in spite of nature, man is alienated from nature ...

analytic derives force from (western) logic and empiricism

continental systematic view into experience (but assumptions of experience based on the Western tradition) - uses logic and analytical tools but also language ... derives its force similarly to the eastern tradition - analytic approach to inner experience tied to interpretation ... force also from schools of thought, like all other branches ... consensus

My concern with all these thought traditions then is something like what happened with religion when pluralism became unavoidable (... I think this is what maybe drove Heidegger to "dasein" and his peasants? ... and also what is behind the perennial appeal of the perennial philosophy and things like shamanism and animism ... ?) ... but the concern is that you start with some assumptions, in the case of continental philosophy, some of these are in reaction to the major tradition ... and you begin to build a scaffolding, a structure of thought ... phenomenology and eastern thinking can come back to their various methods of grounding, of course, but nonethelesss things get elaborated ... in Western analytics the problem seems to be, on the contrary, forgetting that these assumptions aren't the way things "actually" are ... and to just keep building and building ... because the methods to keep coming back to ground aren't there as in eastern/continental approaches ... and that's the main gripe with science now ... but look at the metaphor ... science is on the way UP - progress is UP and the stars are UP so we shouldn't be surprised, wheras such concerns aren't a part of the other traditions.
 
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From the SEP entry "Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness":

On the phenomenological view, a minimal form of self-consciousness is a constant structural feature of conscious experience. Experience happens for the experiencing subject in an immediate way and as part of this immediacy, it is implicitly marked as my experience. For phenomenologists, this immediate and first-personal givenness of experiential phenomena is accounted for in terms of a pre-reflective self-consciousness. In the most basic sense of the term, self-consciousness is not something that comes about the moment one attentively inspects or reflectively introspects one's experiences, or recognizes one's specular image in the mirror, or refers to oneself with the use of the first-person pronoun, or constructs a self-narrative. Rather, these different kinds of self-consciousness are to be distinguished from the pre-reflective self-consciousness which is present whenever I am living through or undergoing an experience, i.e., whenever I am consciously perceiving the world, whenever I am thinking an occurrent thought, whenever I am feeling sad or happy, thirsty or in pain, and so forth.

One can get a bearing on the notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness by contrasting it with reflective self-consciousness. If you ask me to give you a description of the pain I feel in my right foot, or of what I was just thinking about, I would reflect on it and thereby take up a certain perspective that was one order removed from the pain or the thought. Thus, reflective self-consciousness is at least a second-order cognition. It may be the basis for a report on one's experience, although not all reports involve a significant amount of reflection.

In contrast, pre-reflective self-consciousness is pre-reflective in the sense that (1) it is an awareness we have before we do any reflecting on our experience; (2) it is an implicit and first-order awareness rather than an explicit or higher-order form of self-consciousness. Indeed, an explicit reflective self-consciousness is possible only because there is a pre-reflective self-awareness that is an on-going and more primary self-consciousness. Although phenomenologists do not always agree on important questions about method, focus, or even whether there is an ego or self, they are in close to unanimous agreement about the idea that the experiential dimension always involves such an implicit pre-reflective self-awareness.[1] In line with Edmund Husserl (1959, 189, 412), who maintains that consciousness always involves a self-appearance (Für-sich-selbst-erscheinens), and in agreement with Michel Henry (1963, 1965), who notes that experience is always self-manifesting, and with Maurice Merleau-Ponty who states that consciousness is always given to itself and that the word ‘consciousness’ has no meaning independently of this self-givenness (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 488), Jean-Paul Sartre writes that pre-reflective self-consciousness is not simply a quality added to the experience, an accessory; rather, it constitutes the very mode of being of the experience:

This self-consciousness we ought to consider not as a new consciousness, but as the only mode of existence which is possible for a consciousness of something (Sartre 1943, 20 [1956, liv]).

The notion of pre-reflective self-awareness is related to the idea that experiences have a subjective ‘feel’ to them, a certain (phenomenal) quality of ‘what it is like’ or what it ‘feels’ like to have them. As it is usually expressed outside of phenomenological texts, to undergo a conscious experience necessarily means that there is something it is like for the subject to have that experience (Nagel 1974; Searle 1992). This is obviously true of bodily sensations like pain. But it is also the case for perceptual experiences, experiences of desiring, feeling, and thinking. There is something it is like to taste chocolate, and this is different from what it is like to remember what it is like to taste chocolate, or to smell vanilla, to run, to stand still, to feel envious, nervous, depressed or happy, or to entertain an abstract belief. Yet, at the same time, as I live through these differences, there is something experiential that is, in some sense, the same, namely, their distinct first-personal character. All the experiences are characterized by a quality of mineness or for-me-ness, the fact that it is I who am having these experiences. All the experiences are given (at least tacitly) as my experiences, as experiences I am undergoing or living through. All of this suggests that first-person experience presents me with an immediate and non-observational access to myself, and that (phenomenal) consciousness consequently entails a (minimal) form of self-consciousness. In short, unless a mental process is pre-reflectively self-conscious there will be nothing it is like to undergo the process, and it therefore cannot be a phenomenally conscious process (Zahavi 1999, 2005, 2014). An implication of this is obviously that the self-consciousness in question can be ascribed to all creatures that are phenomenally conscious, including various non-human animals.

The mineness in question is not a quality like being scarlet, sour or soft. It doesn't refer to a specific experiential content, to a specific what; nor does it refer to the diachronic or synchronic sum of such content, or to some other relation that might obtain between the contents in question. Rather, it refers to the distinct givenness or the how it feels of experience. It refers to the first-personal presence or character of experience. It refers to the fact that the experiences I am living through are given differently (but not necessarily better) to me than to anybody else. It could consequently be claimed that anybody who denies the for-me-ness of experience simply fails to recognize an essential constitutive aspect of experience. Such a denial would be tantamount to a denial of the first-person perspective. It would entail the view that my own mind is either not given to me at all — I would be mind- or self-blind — or is presented to me in exactly the same way as the minds of others.

There are also lines of argumentation in contemporary analytical philosophy of mind that are close to and consistent with the phenomenological conception of pre-reflective self-awareness. Alvin Goldman provides an example:

[Consider] the case of thinking about x or attending to x. In the process of thinking about x there is already an implicit awareness that one is thinking about x. There is no need for reflection here, for taking a step back from thinking about x in order to examine it…When we are thinking about x, the mind is focused on x, not on our thinking of x. Nevertheless, the process of thinking about x carries with it a non-reflective self-awareness (Goldman 1970, 96).

A similar view has been defended by Owen Flanagan, who not only argues that consciousness involves self-consciousness in the weak sense that there is something it is like for the subject to have the experience, but also speaks of the low-level self-consciousness involved in experiencing my experiences as mine (Flanagan 1992, 194). As Flanagan quite correctly points out, this primary type of self-consciousness should not be confused with the much stronger notion of self-consciousness that is in play when we are thinking about our own narrative self. The latter form of reflective self-consciousness presupposes both conceptual knowledge and narrative competence. It requires maturation and socialization, and the ability to access and issue reports about the states, traits, dispositions that make one the person one is. Bermúdez (1998), to mention one further philosopher in the analytic tradition, argues that there are a variety of nonconceptual forms of self-consciousness that are “logically and ontogenetically more primitive than the higher forms of self-consciousness that are usually the focus of philosophical debate” (1998, 274; also see Poellner 2003). This growing consensus across philosophical studies supports the phenomenological view of pre-reflective self-consciousness.

That pre-reflective self-awareness is implicit, then, means that I am not confronted with a thematic or explicit awareness of the experience as belonging to myself. Rather we are dealing with a non-observational self-acquaintance. Here is how Heidegger and Sartre put the point:

Dasein [human existence] as existing, is there for itself, even when the ego does not expressly direct itself to itself in the manner of its own peculiar turning around and turning back, which in phenomenology is called inner perception as contrasted with outer. The self is there for the Dasein itself without reflection and without inner perception, before all reflection. Reflection, in the sense of a turning back, is only a mode of self-apprehension, but not the mode of primary self-disclosure (Heidegger 1989, 226 [1982, 159]).

In other words, every positional consciousness of an object is at the same time a non-positional consciousness of itself. If I count the cigarettes which are in that case, I have the impression of disclosing an objective property of this collection of cigarettes: they are a dozen. This property appears to my consciousness as a property existing in the world. It is very possible that I have no positional consciousness of counting them. Then I do not know myself as counting. Yet at the moment when these cigarettes are revealed to me as a dozen, I have a non-thetic consciousness of my adding activity. If anyone questioned me, indeed, if anyone should ask, “What are you doing there?” I should reply at once, “I am counting.” (Sartre 1943, 19–20 [1956, liii]).

It is clarifying to compare the phenomenological notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness with the one defended by Brentano. According to Brentano as I listen to a melody I am aware that I am listening to the melody. He acknowledges that I do not have two different mental states: my consciousness of the melody is one and the same as my awareness of perceiving it; they constitute one single psychical phenomenon. On this point, and in opposition to higher-order representation theories, Brentano and the phenomenologists are in general agreement. But for Brentano, by means of this unified mental state, I have an awareness of two objects: the melody and my perceptual experience.

In the same mental phenomenon in which the sound is present to our minds we simultaneously apprehend the mental phenomenon itself. What is more, we apprehend it in accordance with its dual nature insofar as it has the sound as content within it, and insofar as it has itself as content at the same time. We can say that the sound is the primary object of the act of hearing, and that the act of hearing itself is the secondary object (Brentano 1874, 179–180 [1973, 127–128]).

Husserl disagrees on just this point, as do Sartre and Heidegger: my awareness of my experience is not an awareness of it as an object.[2] My awareness is non-objectifying in the sense that I do not occupy the position or perspective of a spectator or in(tro)spector who attends to this experience in a thematic way. That a psychological state is experienced, “and is in this sense conscious, does not and cannot mean that this is the object of an act of consciousness, in the sense that a perception, a presentation or a judgment is directed upon it” (Husserl 1984a, 165 [2001, I, 273]). In pre-reflective self-awareness, experience is given, not as an object, but precisely as subjective experience. For phenomenologists, intentional experience is lived through (erlebt), but does not appear in an objectified manner. Experience is conscious of itself without being the intentional object of consciousness (Husserl 1984b, 399; Sartre 1936, 28–29). That we are aware of our lived experiences even if we do not direct our attention towards them is not to deny that we can direct our attention towards our experiences, and thereby take them as objects of reflection (Husserl 1984b, 424).

To have a self-experience does not entail the apprehension of a special self-object; it does not entail the existence of a special experience of a self alongside other experiences but different from them. To be aware of oneself is not to capture a pure self that exists separately from the stream of experience, rather it is to be conscious of one's experience in its implicit first-person mode of givenness. When Hume, in a famous passage in A Treatise of Human Nature, declares that he cannot find a self when he searches his experiences, but finds only particular perceptions or feelings (Hume 1739), it could be argued that he overlooks something in his analysis, namely the specific givenness of his own experiences. Indeed, he was looking only among his own experiences, and seemingly recognized them as his own, and could do so only on the basis of that immediate self-awareness that he seemed to miss. As C.O. Evans puts it: “[F]rom the fact that the self is not an object of experience it does not follow that it is non-experiential” (Evans 1970, 145). Accordingly, we should not think of the self, in this most basic sense, as a substance, or as some kind of ineffable transcendental precondition, or as a social construct that gets generated through time; rather it is an integral part of conscious life, with an immediate experiential character.

One advantage of the phenomenological view is that it is capable of accounting for some degree of diachronic unity, without actually having to posit the self as a separate entity over and above the stream of consciousness (see the discussion of time-consciousness in section 3 below). Although we live through a number of different experiences, the experiencing itself remains a constant in regard to whose experience it is. This is not accounted for by a substantial self or a mental theater. There is no pure or empty field of consciousness upon which the concrete experiences subsequently make their entry. The field of experiencing is nothing apart from the specific experiences. Yet we are naturally inclined to distinguish the strict singularity of an experience from the continuous stream of changing experiences. What remains constant and consistent across these changes is the sense of ownership constituted by pre-reflective self-awareness. Only a being with this sense of ownership or mineness could go on to form concepts about herself, consider her own aims, ideals, and aspirations as her own, construct stories about herself, and plan and execute actions for which she will take responsibility.

The concept of pre-reflective self-awareness is related to a variety of philosophical issues, including epistemic asymmetry, immunity to error through misidentification, self-reference, and personal identity. We will examine these issues each in turn.

It seems clear that the objects of my visual perception are intersubjectively accessible in the sense that they can in principle be the objects of another's perception. A subject's perceptual experience itself, however, is given in a unique way to the subject herself. Although two people, A and B, can perceive a numerically identical object, they each have their own distinct perceptual experience of it; just as they cannot share each other's pain, they cannot literally share these perceptual experiences. Their experiences are epistemically asymmetrical in this regard. B might realize that A is in pain; he might sympathize with A, he might even have the same kind of pain (same qualitative aspects, same intensity, same proprioceptive location), but he cannot literally feel A's pain the same way A does. The subject's epistemic access to her own experience, whether it is a pain or a perceptual experience, is primarily a matter of pre-reflective self-awareness. If secondarily, in an act of introspective reflection I begin to examine my perceptual experience, I will recognize it as my perceptual experience only because I have been pre-reflectively aware of it, as I have been living through it. Thus, phenomenology maintains, the access that reflective self-consciousness has to first-order phenomenal experience is routed through pre-reflective consciousness, for if we were not pre-reflectively aware of our experience, our reflection on it would never be motivated. When I do reflect, I reflect on something with which I am already experientially familiar.

When I experience an occurrent pain, perception, or thought, the experience in question is given immediately and noninferentially. I do not have to judge or appeal to some criteria in order to identify it as my experience. There are no free-floating experiences; even the experience of freely-floating belongs to someone. As William James (1890) put it, all experience is “personal.” Even in pathological cases, as in depersonalization or schizophrenic symptoms of delusions of control or thought insertion, a feeling or experience that the subject claims not to be his is nonetheless experienced by him as being part of his stream of consciousness. The complaint of thought insertion, for example, necessarily acknowledges that the inserted thoughts are thoughts that belong to the subject's experience, even as the agency for such thoughts are attributed to others. This first-person character entails an implicit experiential self-reference. If I feel hungry or see my friend, I cannot be mistaken about who the subject of that experience is, even if I can be mistaken about it being hunger (perhaps it's really thirst), or about it being my friend (perhaps it's his twin), or even about whether I am actually seeing him (I may be hallucinating). As Wittgenstein (1958), Shoemaker (1968), and others have pointed out, it is nonsensical to ask whether I am sure that I am the one who feels hungry. This is the phenomenon known as “immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun.” To this idea of immunity to error through misidentification, the phenomenologist adds that whether a certain experience is experienced as mine, or not, does not depend upon something apart from the experience, but depends precisely upon the pre-reflective givenness that belongs to the structure of the experience (Husserl 1959, 175; Husserl 1973a, 28, 56, 307, 443; see Zahavi 1999, 6ff.).

Some philosophers who are inclined to take self-consciousness to be intrinsically linked to the issue of self-reference would argue that the latter depends on a first-person concept. One attains self-consciousness only when one can conceive of oneself as oneself, and has the linguistic ability to use the first-person pronoun to refer to oneself (Baker 2000, 68; cf. Lowe 2000, 264). On this view, self-consciousness is something that emerges in the course of a developmental process, and depends on the acquisition of concepts and language. Accordingly, some philosophers deny that young children are capable of self-consciousness (Carruthers 1996; Dennett 1976; Wilkes 1988; also see Flavell 1993). Evidence from developmental psychology and ecological psychology, however, suggests that there is a primitive, proprioceptive form of self-consciousness already in place from birth.[3] This primitive self-awareness precedes the mastery of language and the ability to form conceptually informed judgments, and it may serve as a basis for more advanced types of self-consciousness (see, e.g., Butterworth 1995, 1999; Gibson 1986; Meltzoff 1990a, 1990b; Neisser 1988; and Stern 1985). The phenomenological view is consistent with these findings.

Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The dividing point here, with Eastern philosophy seems to be the concept of the ego. Eastern philosophy sees consiousness as primary and fundamental, what that looks like, I have no idea - those who claim knowledge of it from meditation aren't able to articulate it (which makes a lot of sense to me, articulability isn't necessarily a requirement of truth - western traditions depend on it though, so may be limited by this dependency - truth as only what you can convey to others and have them agree on) Western traditions all see the consciousness as a result of individuality, as co-evolving with individuality - if we extrapolate this - what is the end of this process? The structure of the body in other traditions (eastern and occult - sorry, now we are up to four thought-traditions!) is a reflection of the cosmos - Gerald Manley Hopkins on physiology and "Jacob's Ladder" the Septenary system ... and the great chain of being is a now occult but still core concept of the Western tradition ... we all use it every day. In Western tradition it seems to me something that has grown in defiance of the forces of nature ... there is at least that implicit story below it, a heroic tale and a tale of the subjugation of nature - this goes all the way back in Western thought to the Socratics, but not before (as Heidegger realized) ... tying phenomenolgy into neurology was no fix for this particular issue until it began to reach back out into the environment, which is what is fascinating to me now about Lovelock's work (see LaTour on Lovelock for some beautiful interpretations of Gaia - a most destructive Goddess by the way, a bitch in fact) - and about environmental philosophy because it comes back to these very perennial ideas. But they wouldn't be perennial if it didn't.

So it seems to me, because of the impact we've had on the world as individuals, the subjugation of nature, that we may be turning, for survival purposes, finally to a recognition of interconnectedness and of our species as not an inevitability or a destiny but as a rung on the ladder. And, as they say, ask not for whom the bell has rung ... ;-)

We also largely have ignored the role of gender, sexuality and masculine/feminine in our exploration of consiousness - this thread has been full of male energy - (and I'll punch anyone who says differently! ;-) ... but consciousness arises from these differences and there intermingline and painful separation:


The truth of this myth is that we don't, as individuals, have access to whole consciousness ... this is a point I haven't seen much emphasized (but I bet I now start seeing it everywhere) Jung did recognize it with the anima and the animus ... but look at the difference in physiology in the above account of female sexuality with a rich, branching neural system vs the relatively simple male physiology (again, I think this may be wrong and that richness may exist elsewhere for men OR may be developed with attention, men can learn to be multi-orgasmic, can learn to orgasm without ejaculation (see Taoistic practices and modern day books) and so perhaps we can build up our own circuits ... but what of transgender and homosexuality as well as those who claim to be nulls? What happens to celibates? What can we do with this sexual energy? That latter is a question at least partially explored in the Eastern tradition -- and in Western mystical tradition where it finds expression in a union with the ultimate (God).

But a basic question that I've not seen explored - and now I'll have to go looking for it, is can the individual as a single male or female body, achieve full consciousness or does that require an intermingling of gender energy? The study above had a female bringing herself to climax - what if we put male and female and male and male and female and female and other combinations in the scanner? What will we see in the brains? Can that be achieved by individuals alone or only when together??

Also, there is this:

Science, Technology and Society VII: On Gender and Science | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog

progress of the soul.png

Alex Grey "Progress of the Soul"
 
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