Bigadier Bigfoot

[Monte Davis]

> the main appeal of exalting the peculiar self consciousness of ourselves
is simple self aggrandizement

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."

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."

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 12:55 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> 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.
>  i have so far never heard a substantive argument about this that wasn't
> really just an expression of the fear of death.
>
> On Feb 3, 2015, at 12:06 PM, Mike Weaver 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 <
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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