<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:16.3636360168457px">> the main appeal of exalting the peculiar self consciousness of ourselves is simple self aggrandizement</span><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:16.3636360168457px"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:16.3636360168457px">For me, the giveaway has been watching the response in philosophical circles to animal behavior studies over the years: tool use, culturally transmitted behaviors, more extensive and varied communications, etc. The humans-are-Special faction consistently moves the goalposts: "Well, yes, that newly observed behavior may be what Plato or Ashtavakra or Aquinas or Zou Yan or Leibniz or Erasmus Darwin would readily have called 'conscious,' but if you look at the current literature you'll see that it doesn't make the grade."</span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:16.3636360168457px"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style><span style="font-size:16.3636360168457px">I'm with Annie Dillard: "John Cowper Powys said, 'We have no reason for denying to the world of plants a certain slow, dim, vague, leisurely semi-consciousness.' He may not be right, but I like his adjectives."</span></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 12:55 PM, Joseph Tracy <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:brook7@sover.net" target="_blank">brook7@sover.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">This is not an argument with you, Mike, but I would not mind a discussion with anyone interested concerning the topic of consciousness and the I. My own pre-emptive position on the idea of the evolution of self consciousness is that most animals have it, are taught it by hunger and satisfaction, food and sex, the delight and information of sound, of water, of scent, of being part of a living and dying cycle of existence in which most are predators or prey or both; they avoid death and pain first for themselves then for their offspring. I feel the main appeal of exalting the peculiar self consciousness of ourselves is simple self aggrandizement, imagining that we are special and perhaps indispensable, may have actually, in our supreme cleverness, have invented the thing we call consciousness though we swim in a sea of it and haven't the foggiest where it begins or ends or if it is as much a part of the universe as gravity and light.<br>
 i have so far never heard a substantive argument about this that wasn't really just an expression of the fear of death.<br>
<div><div class="h5"><br>
On Feb 3, 2015, at 12:06 PM, Mike Weaver wrote:<br>
<br>
> The development of self-consciousness -Â the distinction between oneself and all else would have been accompanied by an awareness of the extinction or non-existence of self - and the creation of religion to counter that alarming thought.<br>
><br>
> I got started on M & D with full intention of joining the discussion but get sidetracked by the discovery of Antonio Damasio's book Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. On an evolutionary theory of the development of consciousness and self consciousness.<br>
><br>
><br>
><br>
> Monte Davis <<a href="mailto:montedavis49@gmail.com">montedavis49@gmail.com</a>> wrote :<br>
><br>
>> Yes, I see significant influence of Norman O. Brown on GR (with accompanying seasoning of Freud, Jung at al). Yes, Pynchon returns to how cultures engage with death as recently as Xiomara's account of Xibalba and how Windust fit into it (BE 442-444). Yes, as a Pynchon reader all that engages me, and we'll be spending a lot of time soon on questions such as "Is Rebekah haunting Mason or vice versa?".Beyond the books, though... Are there interesting differences in how cultures engage/avoid engagement with death? Sure: people who routinely hunt game, slaughter livestock, and see lots of their infants, children, and mothers in labor die -- and see ALL their old people die at home -- are bound to be interestingly different from us with our shrink-wrapped protein, vaccinations, and ICUs. But nearly every argument I've seen that "Germany / Europe / America / the West / modernity is uniquely oriented to / in denial of death" is built on a foundation<br>
</div></div>> of bogus ethnology/anthropology (one of Freud's specialties, BTW) and grinds some variation of the same axe: that simple, natural, Edenic tribe X -- or more often, unspecified "primitive peoples" -- had the True Mellow Understanding which we've lost.That's where I bail out. From the earliest Neanderthal burials we know of, through abundant observations of apes, elephants, whales, etc., to Facebook posts about dogs sleeping at gravestones, it seems to me that to have consciousness is inevitably to have an uneasy, more or less ritualized relationship with death. On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 10:20 AM, Mark Kohut <<br>
<span class="">><br>
><br>
><br>
><br>
><br>
><br>
> -<br>
> Pynchon-l / <a href="http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l" target="_blank">http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l</a><br>
<br>
</span>-<br>
Pynchon-l / <a href="http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l" target="_blank">http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l</a><br>
</blockquote></div><br></div>