Bigadier Bigfoot

[Mark Kohut]

Okay, haven't read Damasio, probably won't but I want to ask this
simple phenomenological question: What do we call it when there are
self-conscious beings, young ones, who are self--conscious yet have,
it seems, no awareness of self-extinction?

Are there gradations of self-consciousness? Are there levels of
awareness of self-extinction?

Is self-consciousness different than consciousness? How does it come
into being?

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.
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> 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.
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> Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote :
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>> 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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