Bigadier Bigfoot

[Monte Davis]

What you said. Damasio is what vision/neuroscience genius David Marr might
have become if he hadn't died at 35 in 1980. From Marr I learned how we
construct what seems to be a rich, fully detailed visual hemisphere by
moving the tiny, sharp-focus central spot (fovea) around rapidly; the rest
is low-res blobs plus interpolation, extrapolation, and "nothing much
happened since I last focused there." Marr speculated, and others have
verified, that the same is true across most of our sensory and cognitive
experience: we think that the nervous system and brain are feeding "it all"
into consciousness, but most of what they do is filtering and chunking into
progressively higher-level abstractions. It feels like what we
know/remember is "there" like books on a shelf, but we're generating new
copies of more or less faithful abstracts. It feels like we're making
considered conscious choices all the time, but most of our moment-to-moment
behavior is driven by habit and unconscious preferences. A lot of this is
poetically intimated in Buddhist "monkey mind" teachings and Huxley's The
Doors of Perception; the science is well popularized in Tor Norretranders'
The User Illusion and Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.

So consciousness first does this great shell game, frantic as the Great Oz,
maintaining a rrap-around illusion that the world fits in three pounds of
jelly, and I Am On The Case. But that's only the beginning. When we notice
other "I"s around us apparently signing off, that's when we get *really*
creative :-)

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 12:06 PM, Mike Weaver <mike.weaver at zen.co.uk> wrote:

> The development of self-consciousness -  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.
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote :
>
> > 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 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 <
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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