Social Self

[Guest guest]

===Greg: Yes, what Werner says is interesting.  Not sure if this is

Werner's take on it, but there's the notion of consciousness not

being any real " thing " in the first place.  That is, consciousness is

an explantory stance which makes it easier to think and talk about

other things in the world.  The things towards which we take that

stance are complicated objects which have some obervable

regularities.  These regularities are more economical to talk about

if we attribute " consciousness " to those complicated objects.  An

example of that is when we attribute knowingness and speech to our

computers.  " This computer doesn't know who I am " is a nontechnical

way to say that I get a technical error message when I try to log on

with the same password that I used successfully yesterday.

 

There are some very good books on this slant on consciousness. 

Daniel Dennett's _The Intentional Stance_.  But the best book, the

one that models how this attribution can arise in the first place

from mere differential reactivity, is Wilfred Sellars landmark

_Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind_.

 

--Greg

 

P: Yes, Interesting, Greg. I think Werner was referring to consciousness

as subjectivity, the qualia of it, and its function. Function, in biology,

is the only reason to be. An animal has no useless organs, and even

when we carry one, as in our tail bone, it's in the vestigial form of

something that once served a purpose.

 

That we project consciousness is not strange, our approach to the world

is deeply anthropomorphic. We project not only our consciousness,

but our humanity. We yearn to see a human universe, one filled with our

virtues, and faults. One that share our concerns and goals, and of

course, our gods, are human gods. It wasn't always this way, primitive

societies had animals, plants, mountains and rivers for gods. Of course,

those gods behaved in human ways, and were motivated by human

concerns. It seems that city dwelling took us beyond anthropomorphism

and into egocentricism.

 

So a huge step in liberation is to bleach human coloration from our world.

 

Pete