Bigadier Bigfoot

[Lemuel Underwing]

It pops up in M&D in the form of The Wolf of Jesus...?

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
> >
> > 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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