Bigadier Bigfoot

[Mark Kohut]

Young is also a gradation. Self-awareness is as well.....2-3 year-olds KNOW it is them in a mirror, in a picture. We all know it.

Updike's great story, PIGEON FEATHERS, is all about Damasio's "awareness" . I think I remember when I first knew I would die....but I may be deceiving myself....I even had a concave, so to speak, different fear first. 

I've read in like-Damasio's since my deep youthful fear of death: nothing has changed in the argument, it seems, except the neuro-science. 

Self-awareness sure seems to me like a QUALITATIVELY different level of consciousness, never the result of more neurons or understanding them better......even Frankenstein needed electricity. 

Sent from my iPad

> On Feb 3, 2015, at 6:23 PM, Mike Weaver <mike.weaver at zen.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> 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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