On Oct 3, 2008, at 1:18 AM, William Conger wrote:
It's true that no one can say what consciousness is independently of
biology and physiology. Is consciousness merely biology in action or
is it something independent, even if produced by biology? If we
knew, we might conclude that life is not worth living because if
consciouness is merely biology in action, our "selfhood" is a
fiction, a lie, a delusion; if consciousness is produced by biology
but independent of it (like the chick from the egg) then why would
anyone bother with the travails of life and avoid pure unembodied
consciousness?
Maybe consciousness is the quest for it: the more we employ it the
more we have it. In other words, we create consciousness by living
and employing it in evoking or creating "notions" through conversing
with ourselves and with others. (There is a large hunk of
involuntary consciousness that prevails without our direct control
or awareness -- like maintaining a heart beat, for instance).
I think I disagree with Cheerskep's insistence that one person's pre-
existing notion must be matched by another person's very, very
similar notion before there can be communication. I prefer to think
that we are always shaping and reshaping our "notions" in self-
conversation, as it were, and in communicating with others we
inspire them to create similar notions, even those that they did not
have previously. So, notions are consciousness in action, I mean
biology in action, pretending to be independent of it for the sake
of inventing selfhood.
I am reminded of two different experiences.
This first one is an analogy to the problem Cheerskep keeps bringing
up, namely trying to evoke a suitably suitable notion in the other
person. The second experience is an analogy to getting a grasp on
consciousness, and a small demonstration of Cheerskep's notion-evoking-
notion notion.
1. Think of how we experience ourselves, that is, how we think we
sound and appear to others, from "within" ourselves, from "inside" our
eyes and ears and viscera. But then, we see ourselves in recordings
and are, perhaps, surprised by our appearance, by the way we look and
move and sound. The disparity between what we feel (and thus believe)
about ourselves from within as we are talking or moving and how we
appear to others (the recording) can be a strong shock. But often the
effect is negligible for others, who can never experience the "inside"
view we have; all anyone can know of us is the view from outside, the
view on the recording. (Needless to say, I'm speaking about my own
experience, but other people have reported similar things, such as how
odd or different their voice sounds to them on a recording than what
they experience when they speak. It took me a long time to get used to
how my voice sounded on tape; as for pictures, I was mostly unhappy
with my weight, not so much with general appearance or gestures.)
2. With the notable exceptions of the sun, moon, and the occasional
meteor, I cannot begin to fathom how people can see celestial
movements. Yet even the ancients could do that. They looked up at "the
dome of the heavens" and saw ... a dome, the inside of a sphere, in
fact, the inside of concentric spheres. They recognized the wandering
stars (in Greek, planets), they tracked repeated motions and could
infer predictable events like eclipses with surprising accuracy, and
they even had the imaginative flexibility to construct elaborate
theories, such as Ptolemy's epicycles, to explain the retrograde
motions of the outer planets, which they thought orbited the Earth.
The analogy for me in this marvel of perception and interpretation is
to how we discuss consciousness and self-awareness--which, btw, are
different but closely related notions. Consciousness is a creature's
functional awareness of its integral body, and self-awareness is the
creature's awareness of being aware of itself. As far as we know, only
humans have self-awareness--the ability to invent and use the pronoun
"I," although perhaps some other species may also be able to form
threshold mental constructions of self-awareness. Most animals have
the awareness of their own bodies, of their location in space and
their sensations of existence--or so we understand (and I think this
is a pretty uncontroversial assertion).
Again, this is an analogy--an "as if," as William puts it--my
imaginative projection of a similar attempt to grasp some phenomenon
from within its operations. In this analogy, consciousness corresponds
to seeing the celestial movements, and self-awareness to recognizing
that those motions are a construct that we devise to describe the
spatial relationships of celestial bodies.
And for you, Cheerskep, here's another celestial analogy about
notions: I remember any number of times, in my youth and later as an
adult, when I'd stand outside with another person at night and I would
make a remark about a star. "Which star?" "That one," pointing to the
sky. "Which one?" "The bright one there." "Which one? They aren't that
bright, and there are a lot of them." "Here," sticking out my arm
along my friend's line of sight, "that one next to the three little
stars." "I see four or five little stars. Is it one of them?" "No, no,
it's next to them. And there are only three. I don't think you're
looking at the right place." "I'm trying to see where you pointed."
Etc. etc. (Which also sounds like William's remark that notions are
"consciousness in action.")
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
