Philosophical Context: Consciousness

Consciousness is, amongst other things, a means of self-regulation. By reflecting upon an aspect of life, one can reflectively assess it. "How do I feel and how have I been feeling lately? When was the last time I ate?" One can also attempt to consider the totality of life. "How good is my life and how good has it been? What do I want to do with myself?" These broader questions need to be asked more than they are and are answered much less than they are asked. Why? The answers are discomforting when ambiguous and debilitating when determinately unsatisfactory. We prefer the discomforts we can more immediately address than the ones that require severe or pervasive measures. We fill the obvious holes while living in the valley.

Consciousness vicariously houses a nutritive need as it is the inspector for the person's capacities. It needs stimulation. As appetitive, emotional, rational, and social beings, people contain many capacities for such stimulation. These sources are more or less vital depending on what and how they much they contain.

Some objects are more stimulating than others. Objects that captivate our attention are entertaining. A thing captivates that meets a need. It fills up an empty space. Some objects hold interest longer than others. Objects of perception tend to hold a person's interest little longer than the perception that occurs.

Objects of interest exist in a spectrum of immediacy. Some objects of interest please the senses. They are the most immediate objects of interest. If what is sensed is of interest rather than the act of sensing, then what is interesting is more abstracted than aesthetic interests. Furthest down the road of abstraction are those objects of interest that are ideas. Though these are sensed on some level (i.e., being seen as words on a page or heard as sounds from a mouth), they are primarily thought about or rationalized.

A Trial of the Self

Nietzsche made a curious observation in a passage expressing his doubt as to the reality of the self. He noted that thoughts are rarely ever intentionally prompted, It is more often the thought that springs itself upon the thinker. Thinkers don't think thoughts; thoughts think thinkers.

If one reflects upon that stream flowing through one's consciousness, how many of the waves appear self-generating? One does not first intend awareness of perception and then categorize the perception. The perception presents itself. Even the more complex items of consciousness, the strands of linguistic thoughts often flow without any aid from the thinker. One sits in a waiting room, hears the sound of a woman scratching her arm, and is taken from thinking about dry skin to thinking about the American revolution. At the end of so many strands one wonders, "how did I get here?" How unruly are the contents of the mind! How often is a man's concentration broken by wandering thoughts? How easily does a train of thought become derailed! In all this, we are taken away from our "selves". In all of this victimization, we bare no responsibility. It was either a thought-object against our will or an unwilled thought-object that nevertheless took our field of consciousness over. How can there be a self that endures through the extent of one's life if there is not a unifier between a cross-section of one's consciousness? How can we proclaim the existence of a self when so much of what constitutes the purported self is involuntary and the self is fundamentally an agent (i.e., that which acts voluntarily)?

The unifier is the cohesiveness of the subjective experience. Every conscious moment contains a personal element. All of the contents of the mind, everything remembered of the reality previously experienced, and all the day-dreaming projections of the future, have the characteristic of being intuited in the same way. I can doubt the origins of a thought, but not that to be thought is the same--it is always something before me. Whether this "me" is a soul, self, mind, or body is a question for consequent investigation. At the moment of being thought, the quality of its being thought is the same.

How does one know there's something unifying one's life? One can never imagine a thought without thinking it, and thus stamps it with the characteristic of consciousness. The uniformity of consciousness is the evidence for a self.

Unnaturally Natural or Naturally Unnatural?

May 1, 2009

Our minds never tire of raising certain grandiose questions. How could consciousness ever be constructed out of unconscious materials? How could dead matter ever combine, on its own, to become living?

Some respond to the persistent mystery surrounding the answers to those questions as proof of their nonsensicality. Nature tends, by her impersonal machinations, to prefer individuals to survive and perpetuate their winning traits. At times, however, accidental traits pass-on and endure. These accidents are those attributes of individuals that do not secure their survival (initially) and there perpetuation (eventually). These superfluous mutations remain, so long as they do not hinder nature's ends. If the mutations are disadvantageous, then those individuals and the species they belong to become extinct. Humanity's great mutation, the peculiar extent of their consciousness, has been of the utmost benefit to them. Never before has adaptation been so swift and fluid. More than any other animal, humans exploit their surroundings, thereby securing their survival and perpetuation.

Aspects of consciousness are not of equal import. Some aspects of consciousness, like those questions posed in perennial philosophy, fail to meet either of the two basic needs for which nature selects. To the extent that consciousness does not benefit the species, it is accidental. That we can at once ponder and not benefit by pondering questions concerning consciousness and life demonstrates the accidental, mutated quality of philosophical thought. We can study those frustrating questions to offer hypotheses as to how they ever could have arisen, but we will always treat them as a sixth toe or second head: a grotesque curiosity.

Some respond to the persistent mystery surrounding the answers to those questions as proof of their necessity. Because of the precarious position consciousness and life have in the natural world, they are distinguished from it. Rather than calling them natural and supposing they do not belong, they are called supernatural and supposed to belong elsewhere.

If we were never perpetuated by wondering about certain truths, why can we not be rid of questions? How could something spring from nature that is so patently unnatural? Could it be that there is something unnatural in us?

Nature commands: live and then die! A human's interiority commands: live! Either humans are fundamentally deranged (at once mindful of part of what nature requires and resistant to the other) or they are in some way transcendent.