Bigadier Bigfoot

[Mike Weaver]

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?

I'd say that young children are not self-conscious, they develop self consciousness as they learn to distinguish between their self and their environment, which might actually be the answer to your question about difference below.

> 
> Are there gradations of self-consciousness? 

I'd say there has to be if the evolutionary theory is correct, and those gradations are entangled with the development of language and communication.
>From "Me hungry, kill mastodon..."
to "I say chef, just what did you say this was?"

> Are there levels of awareness of self-extinction?

Two things come to mind - Samuel Delaney's line in Fall of the Towers that 'you are trapped in that bright moment when you learned your doom'.
and a page from Matt Groening's Life in Hell - Binky's Childhood Traumas or something like that, two of which are (from memory)First time you learn about death, and first time you realise that death applies to you.


> 
> Is self-consciousness different than consciousness? 

Damasio talks about the evolution of self consciousness (the autobiographical self) as being a development out of what he calls core and proto self. And you'll have to read more yourself if you want to know more - just read the first chapter if you come across it. That will give you plenty to ponder on.

>How does it come into being? 
Slowly, very very slowly.
No doubt it is a quantity into quality think where complexity of mind processes and, as Monte says, increasing social interaction reach a point where individuals can reflect on as well as react to sense data. 

Or - don't ask me, I'm only on chapter 2.

 
> 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/?list=pynchon-l





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