Brigadier Bigfoot

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

 > 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." <

With this "suspicion" you're in good company!

> Hegel [in the/Phenomenology of the Spirit/, 1807] moves from the discussion of 
consciousness in general to a discussion of self-consciousness. Like the 
idealist philosophers before him, Hegel believes that consciousness of 
objects necessarily implies some awareness of self, as a subject, which 
is separate from the perceived object. But Hegel takes this idea of 
self-consciousness a step further and asserts that subjects are also 
objects to other subjects. Self-consciousness is thus the awareness of 
another’s awareness of oneself. To put it another way, one becomes aware 
of oneself by seeing oneself through the eyes of another. Hegel speaks 
of the “struggle for recognition” implied in self-consciousness. This 
struggle is between two opposing tendencies arising in 
self-consciousness—between, on one hand, the moment when the self and 
the other come together, which makes self-consciousness possible, and, 
on the other hand, the moment of difference arising when one is 
conscious of the “otherness” of other selves vis-à-vis oneself, and vice 
versa. Otherness and pure self-consciousness are mutually opposed 
moments in a “life and death struggle” for recognition. This tension 
between selves and others, between mutual identification and 
estrangement, plays out in the fields of social relations. <

http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/hegel/section2.rhtml

Do also see George Herbert Mead's /Mind, Self and Society/ which 
additionally - your point of "language" -  analyzes, before it goes into 
"play" and "game", the "optimal self-affection through vocal gestures" 
(or words to that effect), --- with instructive comparisons to singing 
birds!



On 03.02.2015 23:44, Monte Davis 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 
> <mailto: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 <mailto: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
>     <mailto: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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