Bigadier Bigfoot

[Monte Davis]

Good questions, and mostly damned if I know. Obviously, most of what I said
is my own rumination: the science I cited was in the service of the premise
that consciousness is a lot skimpier and less encompassing than it seems.
It's *in the business* of seeming omnipresent and filling the world -- in
the same way that your eyes are *in the business* of moving focus to the
fovea so deftly that you're rarely aware only a tiny patch of the visual
field is actually sharp (and totally unaware of the blind spot unless you
make a special effort).

I have noticed that even the philosophic pros spend a lot of time wrestling
with "Is self-consciousness different than consciousness?" Sometimes they
say the distinction is false or misguided. Sometimes they say there's a
crucial distinction (but everyone else gets it wrong). My suspicion is that
it has a lot to do with being social, maybe even more with language: what
we mean by "self-conscious" is not far from "I'm imagining or even
subvocalizing telling 'someone else' what I'm thinking." This ties into the
quite popular evolutionary theory that the very fast expansion of our
frontal lobes and cortex over the last million years had a lot to do with
growing social complexity: it takes a lot of processing to model others'
minds as well as doing your own housekeeping. So maybe solitary species
have consciousness, but you need interaction with others, and a rich
symbolic repertoire, to upgrade to the self- model?

Re children: let me rephrase the earlier line as diachronic, not
synchronic. "To have consciousness [and to contemplate death] is inevitably
to [be impelled toward] an uneasy, more or less ritualized relationship
with it."  So yes, there are degrees of awareness, depending on exposure,
age, and practice. Fortunately, we can't all be Charles Masons.

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 4:31 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
>
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