[Marsha]
... but it does seem to be clearly proprietary.
[Arlo]
Well, sure. Its proprietary due to the unique sensory trajectory of
the biological organism. But it is not *only* proprietary. Our
"selves" are the social construction of thousands of years of shared
dialogue, the thoughts and memories of our culture as we appropriate
this "collective consciousness". The "self" is both proprietary and
shared. As I said, to give dominance to one is fall into a
politically motivated sham.
[Marsha]
That individual conscious awareness would seem to be what John meant
by his phrase "experiences itself as experience."
[Arlo]
This is the illusion (or "delusion", according to Einstein). The
"self" is a convenient (pragmatically useful) social construction
that organizes the narratives constructed by the biological organism
through the assimilation of a shared "culture". In Western culture,
the "self" is a story that has increasingly adopted the "myth of
independence", and this is why those in the East (or many indigenous
peoples) have quite a different understanding of the "self" narrative.
Prior to the appropriate of a shared, cultural consciousness, the
human organism has a sense of the world exclusive to its sensory
experiences. Its sense of differentiation from "the world" is
entirely informed by its sensory (biological) experience. When a wolf
eats a rabbit, it is informed (simplistically here, of course) by the
sensation of the substances on its tongue, and the lack of pain input
received by its brain. Why I mention "pain" is that experiments done
on rats (always rats, everyone hates them) has shown that by removing
certain parts of the brain that register pain, rats would actually
begin to eat their own bodies when hungry. They no longer had a sense
of "differentiation" regarding their own legs, eating their own leg
was (to these rats) an identical sensory experience to eating
"something else". The rat is trapped with nothing but this
"proprietary" sensory trajectory to inform its sense of
"differentiation" from the "world".
As social humans, having appropriated a shared, dialogic narrative,
our sense of "self" is actually our escape from this "proprietary"
trajectory, by giving us a narrative that transcends that boundedness.
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