Re: Am I Conscious of my own Consciousness?

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Re: Am I Conscious of my own Consciousness?

Group: alt.philosophy · Group Profile
Author: Ed
Date: Mar 12, 2008 06:20

On Mar 12, 2:29 am, "andy-k" wrote:

> In De Anima III.2, Aristotle writes:
>
> "Since it is through sense that we are aware that we are seeing
> or hearing, it must be either by sight that we are aware of seeing,
> or by some sense other than sight. But the sense that gives us this
> new sensation must perceive both sight and its object, viz. color:
> so that either (1) there will be two senses both percipient of the
> same sensible object, or (2) the sense must be percipient of itself.
> Further, even if the sense which perceives sight were different
> from sight, we must either fall into an infinite regress, or we must
> somewhere assume a sense which is aware of itself. If so, we
> ought to do this in the first case."
>
> Aristotle seems to be arguing that unless consciousness is reflexive,
> there must be a logical fallacy in our understanding of consciousness.
> A little while ago I was conscious of birdsong, but at that time I was not
> conscious of my consciousness of the birdsong, so the proposition that
> consciousness is reflexive is clearly false. What, then, are we to make
> of the impression that we are conscious of our own consciousness?
>
> The idea rests upon the impression that there is a subject of consciousness
> over and against the objects that constitute the world, an 'experiencer'
> over and against the 'experienced'. But, consistent with the use of the term
> 'consciousness' to refer to the brute fact of the existence of the epistemic
> "all there is" (i.e. the existence of this "subjective perspective" upon a
> world), where would this subject/experiencer reside? Would it reside
> outside this "all there is" looking in? If so then we seem to have fallen
> into substance dualism, and William James quite rightly dispensed with
> the idea of consciousness as substance in his 1904 essay
> "Does Consciousness Exist?":http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/consciousness.htm
>
> It should be clear that the consciousness of consciousness amounts to
> nothing more than the fact that the very *idea* of the existence of the
> epistemic "all there is" may be entertained as part of the contents of the
> "all there is". When we are entertaining that idea we might say that we
> are conscious of our own consciousness, but most of the time we don't
> entertain that idea -- we simply get on with our lives. The upshot is that
> consciousness is *not* reflexive, and that it is our understanding of
> consciousness that needs to be addressed -- specifically the
> interdependent ideas of subject and object.

I just watched a program on difficulties that young children have with
separating symbol and what a symbol represents. Experiments showed
that they do have such difficulty, they recognize, say, a baby bottle
very clearly but are uncertain how to treat a color photograph of a
baby bottle. They attempt to treat it exactly as they would treat a
"real" bottle, trying to pick it up for example. Only after training
and maturation do they acquire the ability to treat the picture in the
way adults treat symbols; pointing to the picture instead of trying to
pick it up, for example.

One could view the brain as "making" symbols of sensed objects, those
symbols are part of the "world view" that the brain maintains all of
our awake time. A birdsong, as perceived, is not the actual birdsong,
which is a disturbance in the air, but some brain symbol for the
birdsong. A memory of a birdsong is also a symbol which refers to the
perception of the birdsong, which was a symbol that referred to the
actual birdsong.

The brain does the same thing for "internal" objects, stomach aches,
for example. It seems to do the same thing for brain activities to
the extent that those impinge on our awareness. Many brain activities
go on "in the dark" and we are not ever conscious of them; like
sorting through all the memories to find just the one that is relevant
to the exigencies of the moment. We remember the name of someone we
encounter but we are not aware of the process that presents that name
instead of some other, irrelevant, memory.

We are conscious of what we focus on; usually to the exclusion of
other sense data. If we listen to the birdsong, we are not generally
conscious of the feel of the wind on our face. If we focus on solving
a math problem we are generally not conscious of the feel of our
clothes on our skin. If we focus on our consciousness we are aware of
something that we are not generally aware of as we focus on other
things. All of these things we can choose to focus on are brain
symbols, not the things in themselves.

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