Bigadier Bigfoot

[Mark Kohut]

i think self--consciousness ruminations are right on.....

and, in M & D and elsewhere Pynchon seems to believe what many have
observed: we seem to hear what others-- usually quite close to us----
are thinking sometimes, ---far beyond
statistical chance......

I will NEVER FORGET the night I called home when my son was under
2......my wife said "I knew you were going to call...impatiently, I
said, yeah, cause I call every day and I hadn't yet cause very
busy........"........No, she said, your son pointed at the phone about
5--10 seconds ago and said Daddy,,Daddy..while he looked at it and me"
....right about the time,
I parked half-on a sidewalk and got out to make a phone booth
call...to ask her to keep him up until I got home....

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 5:44 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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