We are 'other-conscious' before we are 'self-conscious'.
The ever wonderful Edge website posted a wonderful little article by the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran regarding the neuoscience of self-awareness. In it, Ramachandran argues that evolutionarily, it's probable that we learnt to recognize 'other minds' long before we learned to recognize our own, and that in fact, self-awareness in fact 'piggy-backed' on our ability to recognize others in the first place. In his own words: "I suggest that "other awareness" may have evolved first and then counterintutively, as often happens in evolution, the same ability was exploited to model ones own mind — what one calls self awareness." The full article is a worth a read, and it's only about three or so pages long.
I'm a big fan of this thesis since it fits nicely with the intuitions of phenomenologists who have long recognized that self-awareness is a form of perception no different to the perceiving of things 'outside' of us. Here is Alphonso Lingis, writing from way back in 1986: "[The] experience of my own conscious life... is not the immediate circuit that a pulsation of thought would form with itself, being given inwardly to itself. ... If I can perceive conscious life in my own body, I can also do so in another's body, and my experience of his life will be akin to that of my own." Key for Lingis is the emphasis on proprioception on the hand (the feeling of kinaesthetic sensation) and 'external perception on the other:
"My own body is given to me as consciously alive in two ways. On the one hand, it is given as a sensitive zone - a zone of susceptibility, of representational and affective, and also kinesthetic sensation. For my body as a sensation-field is always for me polarized by vectors of forces, axes of stance and motility, kinesthetically felt: it is by moving my eyes that I see, and by moving my hands that I feel ... On the other hand, my own body is something that I can perceive by external perception: I can see most of it, I can touch one member of it with another, I perceive my body visually, tangibly, audibly, olefactorily. IT is perceived specifically as a sensible object that is alive - and sensitive." He concludes: "Thus the perception of my own body by myself has a reflexive structure; as I perceive it I recognize the movement in it to by synthetically one with the movement with which I perceive it. In such a reflexict perception I perceive life in a body, conscious life governing a body, a recognize myself - my ego-identity - in that body."
For Lingis, this is exactly how we perceive others as well: "The other's conscious life is perceivebale in the form of movements of his sensible body. These movements are perceived as 1) spontaneous, originating in that body itself, and not perceivably transmitted to it from the outside; 2) teleologically relating to certain objects and objects in the world about him, a world I too perceive; and 3) consistent and coherent among themselves ... In perceiving a body that is moving with these kind of movements, I not only seem to be perceiving a body that is moving itself, I also seem to perceive a body that is sensitive to itself. And just like the perception of our own aliveness, "there is a reflexive structure also in my perception of the bodies of others. As I perceive their movements I get a reflexive sense of the sort of representational and affective and kinaesthetic sensations with which those movements are experiences from within; I get a reflexive sense of what one perceives and how one feels affected and how one feels mobile in the course of such movements." (Lingis, The Perception of Others)
In any case, there is no difference in kind between self-awareness and other-awareness. Now, Ramachandran's work is interesting to the extent that not only does it uphold this thesis, it in fact says that we perceive others even before we 'perceive' ourselves as 'having selves'. By stipulating that mirror-neurons are responsible for this fact, Ramachandran actually provides a neurobiological mechanism by which such recognition would takes place: "self awareness is simply using mirror neurons for "looking at myself as if someone else is look at me" (the word "me" encompassing some of my brain processes, as well). The mirror neuron mechanism — the same algorithm — that originally evolved to help you adopt another's point of view was turned inward to look at your own self. This, in essence, is the basis of things like "introspection'."
I think this is cool. Discuss.
I'm a big fan of this thesis since it fits nicely with the intuitions of phenomenologists who have long recognized that self-awareness is a form of perception no different to the perceiving of things 'outside' of us. Here is Alphonso Lingis, writing from way back in 1986: "[The] experience of my own conscious life... is not the immediate circuit that a pulsation of thought would form with itself, being given inwardly to itself. ... If I can perceive conscious life in my own body, I can also do so in another's body, and my experience of his life will be akin to that of my own." Key for Lingis is the emphasis on proprioception on the hand (the feeling of kinaesthetic sensation) and 'external perception on the other:
"My own body is given to me as consciously alive in two ways. On the one hand, it is given as a sensitive zone - a zone of susceptibility, of representational and affective, and also kinesthetic sensation. For my body as a sensation-field is always for me polarized by vectors of forces, axes of stance and motility, kinesthetically felt: it is by moving my eyes that I see, and by moving my hands that I feel ... On the other hand, my own body is something that I can perceive by external perception: I can see most of it, I can touch one member of it with another, I perceive my body visually, tangibly, audibly, olefactorily. IT is perceived specifically as a sensible object that is alive - and sensitive." He concludes: "Thus the perception of my own body by myself has a reflexive structure; as I perceive it I recognize the movement in it to by synthetically one with the movement with which I perceive it. In such a reflexict perception I perceive life in a body, conscious life governing a body, a recognize myself - my ego-identity - in that body."
For Lingis, this is exactly how we perceive others as well: "The other's conscious life is perceivebale in the form of movements of his sensible body. These movements are perceived as 1) spontaneous, originating in that body itself, and not perceivably transmitted to it from the outside; 2) teleologically relating to certain objects and objects in the world about him, a world I too perceive; and 3) consistent and coherent among themselves ... In perceiving a body that is moving with these kind of movements, I not only seem to be perceiving a body that is moving itself, I also seem to perceive a body that is sensitive to itself. And just like the perception of our own aliveness, "there is a reflexive structure also in my perception of the bodies of others. As I perceive their movements I get a reflexive sense of the sort of representational and affective and kinaesthetic sensations with which those movements are experiences from within; I get a reflexive sense of what one perceives and how one feels affected and how one feels mobile in the course of such movements." (Lingis, The Perception of Others)
In any case, there is no difference in kind between self-awareness and other-awareness. Now, Ramachandran's work is interesting to the extent that not only does it uphold this thesis, it in fact says that we perceive others even before we 'perceive' ourselves as 'having selves'. By stipulating that mirror-neurons are responsible for this fact, Ramachandran actually provides a neurobiological mechanism by which such recognition would takes place: "self awareness is simply using mirror neurons for "looking at myself as if someone else is look at me" (the word "me" encompassing some of my brain processes, as well). The mirror neuron mechanism — the same algorithm — that originally evolved to help you adopt another's point of view was turned inward to look at your own self. This, in essence, is the basis of things like "introspection'."
I think this is cool. Discuss.
Comments (151)
I'll provide my view on this question.
The neurons are interlinked and are activated accordingly by internal (genes, etc.) and external (people, scenarios, etc.). That provides the individual with self-awareness & other-awareness. The variables are nearly endless, so answers are mostly, if not all, opinionated.
The above view can be explained philosophically, but I don't have the right words to elaborate on.
I'd be glad if anyone can object my view reasonably because I am hoping for a better perspective than that.
One can't observe other minds. One can only observe phenomena that we assume is correlated to other minds.
Aside from that, I don't know how we'd be able to have any idea whether conscious creatures, phylogenetically, would have a concept of others prior to a concept of self. I can't imagine a way that we could do any sort of empirical test for that, a fortiori because we can't even be sure what third-person observable states amount to a first-person conception of self.
The eyes are windows to the soul, after all.
But animals aren't aware of themselves OR any other animal. They do not possess the quale of self-awareness or the quale of other-awareness. Imputing subjectivity to animals is about as scientific as imputing them a soul.
From another perspective, if an animal becomes aware of something - such as the fact that other animals are independent beings - then what law of physics or epistemology prevents it from awareness of anything?
Even those tragic souls who spend their time trying to convince themselves and others that apes and dogs can "talk", have never reported a single question ever being asked. The animals literally are unaware of the existence of the researcher, or themselves.
It is almost irresistible for humans not to see a (crippled, disabled, imprisoned) human-like entity behind a furry face. Thankfully, it is not there!
You can't account for the rich social life of many animals without positing awareness of others. There's also the mirror test, which suggests self-awareness in some higher mammals such as chimpanzees, elephants and maybe even birds.
Quoting tom
It doesn't follow from the fact that language is unique (as far as we know) to humans that non-humans cannot be aware of each other.
Really? This psychologist would certainly disagree:
https://sites.google.com/site/rwbyrnepsychology/publication-downloads
The classic "Byrne, R W (2003) Imitation as behaviour parsing." shows that awareness is not required for learning complex behaviours.
You made the claim, which I objected to that
"...animals aren't aware of themselves OR any other animal."
and you said:
"The animals literally are unaware of the existence of the researcher, or themselves."
But the paper you cite here in defense of that claim doesn't defend it. Byrne is dealing with the issue of "mentalizing" i.e. attributing intentionality to others not mere awareness of others, and he admits of rudimentary mentalizing capacities in other animals in any case.
Don't want to take this off-topic into a debate about animal consciousness. Suffice to say that if you believe animals are not conscious at all, you're unlikely to get anything out of this discussion.
Those rudimentary capacities, which obviously have to exist, do not include intentionality.
I find this very agreeable. It is by recognizing that others are living, thinking, beings, that we apprehend the mind as an object which needs to be understood. We then find that we have to reflect back on our own manner of thinking in an attempt to understand why the others are acting the way that they do. This causes self-awareness. In a sense then, self-awareness is the result of reflection, which is carried out as an attempt to understand others.
Quoting StreetlightX
This, I would not agree with though. I find that reflection, introspection, reveals to us that there are aspects of others which we cannot hope to know, implying inherent differences between us. Self-awareness is caused by looking at myself for the purpose of understanding others. The result of this is the conclusion that there are aspects of others which I cannot possibly understand by looking at myself. Nevertheless, introspection, and self-awareness proceeds, continues, not as a "looking at myself as if someone else is looking at me", it is a recognition of the opposite, that I can look at myself in a way that others cannot possibly do. It exposes a privileged perspective. Because of this, introspection magnifies the difference between self-awareness and other-awareness, it does not dissolve that difference.
All animals have a set of genetically determined behaviour primitives that they are capable of arranging in a variety of ways. They have no idea what they are doing or why. Apes cannot parrot, and parrots can't ape.
Non-human animals do not create knowledge; of themselves, of others, of "what-it's-like", or anything else.
If you really think this, that mentalizing (in whatever form) does not necessitate at least some awareness of the other (in this case, that an animal can mentalize with regard to another animal without being aware of that other animal), I would say that you're simply wrong. Mentalizing necessitates awareness of the other by definition. If you can't accept that, fine, we'll agree to disagree. As for the rest of your post, the broader issue of animal intentionality is worthy of a separate thread. I'll get involved if you want to start one, but we're somewhat off-topic here.
The fact that a non-aware machine can defeat the 2nd best human at an incredibly complex game should give you pause for thought.
Psyche always demands three dimensions; the observer, the observed, and well, whoever is claiming there is the observer and the observed The analyst).
But in 's terms, the observed is awareness as sensitivity to self in proprioception and related sensations - the feedback between babble and hearing for example. The observer is the mirror neuron modelling process reflected upon those direct senses, and the third is linguistic.
Which is unaccountably missing from the op.
This is part of the legacy of Western philosophy known as ontological monism, which takes the transcendent and distance as fundamental, which Michel Henry criticizes. I think it's backwards: you can get to exteriority from auto-affection, but not vice-versa. If you begin with the outside, you only get a sad facsimile of the self, as 'another inside of me.' That is what is fashionable in philosophy now, but it'd be a nice to see a return to the other direction, which was championed by the Cyrenaics and Descartes. The picture we have of the competing view is a sort of 'mutual emptiness' that Schopenhauer criticizes when he asks: 'this is all very well and good, but what the devil has any of it got to do with me?'
I'm passionate about this topic because I think unlike many things in philosophy it matters, and is going firmly in the wrong direction, away from life as lived and toward an abstraction of it. And once this abstraction is loved for its own sake, it takes a lot of hard work to get back to something interesting.
As for the thesis about consciousness of others here, it doesn't even do what it wants of course, because it also sees other people as things. And so just like we have a facsimile of the self, we have a facsimile of other people. Lingis' description, what we see of it here anyway, is bloodless and facile, and does not at all capture what experiencing another person is like.
This is clearly something that you need to believe for reasons no doubt far beyond my understanding but it simply isn't supported by any rational investigation of animal behaviour. How do you even begin to explain the odd couple bonds between animals of different species, not infrequently between predator and prey, mourning and depression. fostering and community care, recognition of specific animals and humans after extended periods of separation, and a whole host of other complex social interactions if there is no awareness of self and other at all?
The problem is, that awareness is prior to self-awareness, and to be aware is to have a particular type of relationship with your surroundings. All living things derive their means for subsistence from their environment, so awareness of the surroundings is developed from the necessity of subsistence. There is no such necessity to drive the evolution of the awareness of an inner self.
I don't think there is any such thing as awareness that's not self-awareness. All feeling is feeling of oneself, of the movements of one's own body.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes and no. The frog need not be aware of anything external to survive: it only needs to respond to certain motivating passions in ways that have evolved accidentally to result in an unintended external effect of which it's unaware and can't understand. Any tiny miscalibration here will result in it dying, and it will be unable to appeal to what is around it to save itself, because it doesn't/can't understand.
No prior awareness of the hunger of the self for subsistence then?
The frog's eye receives photons; the cornea transmits signals to the frog's brain; the signals are processed and a moving object is detected and minimally characterized; instructions are sent. The mouth opens, the tongue is advanced according to the brain's instruction. The frog catches a fly. The tongue retracts; the fly is swallowed; repeat.
It's really very complicated, but what doesn't happen (as far as we know) is that the frog is aware of its achievements in fly catching. The frog's senses also track threats, and the frog moves, or doesn't move, accordingly -- as directed by instinct. Presumably the frog feels almost nothing--no fear; no pride; no boredom; no etcetera. It doesn't have a lot of brain, and if there is the ability to respond chemically to threat (a spurt of cortisol) the frog doesn't have to process the experience.
For a frog, minimal awareness definitely seems to require no development of frog-self-awareness. Frogs are a successful organism without 'consciousness'. (I'm assuming that self-awareness and consciousness are pretty closely related.)
It is less believable (to me, anyway) that an intelligent dog operates the same way a frog does. Dogs have much more brain with which to perceive, process, and evaluate. They interact on some level with other dogs and humans in such a way as to suggest that they have limited self-awareness, limited consciousness. Maybe not much, but some.
New borns? Infants? A normal baby will develop extensive self-awareness; I'm thinking this starts from scratch. The new borne suckling from its mother's breast doesn't need self-awareness, initially. But soon it starts to distinguish between me/not me. Two year olds are terrible because by that age (before, often) they have divined that they not only exist, but as beings have a fair amount of power. They can say "no" to everything, for instance. The little bastard tyrant has come into his own.
You could argue that this robot is aware:
After all, if it was not aware of itself and the environment, then how could it possibly do what it does? Someone might even claim the robot is conscious, which I might accept for the sake of argument. However, if you claim that the robot possesses subjectivity, that there is a "what it is like" to be that robot, that it can suffer, I would disagree.
Animals are exquisitely evolved robots.
Not something that could ever be empirically confirmed. So what do your instincts tell you? Do they tell you it doesn't matter if you torture animals, because they don't suffer in the slightest? If they do tell you that then I feel sorry for you that you either have no sense of empathy or have fallen for an ugly load of bullshit to the degree that your belief overrides your capacity for fellow feeling.
When animals create knowledge and in particular when they transfer this knowledge by creating cultural artefacts, then there will be no explanation for that phenomenon other than they possess qualia. Same goes for robots.
Is "empirical confirmation" ever possible? What do your instincts tell you?
If a rock was not aware of its environment, how could it possibly do what it does?
Why do we have separate terminology then, awareness and self-awareness? I wouldn't say that "all feeling is a feeling of oneself". Sensation may be defined like this, classically, as an awareness of the activities of one's body parts, but I don't think that this is a correct description of what is occurring. Is seeing being aware of your eyes, and what your eyes are doing, or is it more properly described as being aware of the things which are being seen? Without a mirror, or poking you fingers in your eyes, you might not even know that you have two of them. Is tasting being aware of your taste buds, and what they are doing, or is it being aware of what is tasted? I never knew I had taste buds until long after I was tasting things.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Are you saying that the frog is aware of all of its internal activities which cause it to catch the fly, but is never aware of the fly itself?
Quoting John
I would not call pains and pangs an awareness. Furthermore, I do not believe that it is the pain of hunger which motivates one to eat. Eating is an habitual activity which is generally not at all associated with the pain of hunger. It takes a higher form of intelligence than what most animals have, to make this association between the pain of hunger, and the need to eat.
Seeing is first of all the feeling of light, color, and contour. Derivatively of this we then say that we see 'things.' We always see things by way of the former, but we never come to the former by means of seeing things. The sensory components of sight come first, and are never left behind. We are not aware of our eyes as objects, but rather feel their motions from the inside. We could never see unless we had self-sensing visual feelings.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The frog only needs to be compelled by hunger and instinct to behave in a certain way, which due to forces beyond its control or understanding lead it to being fed. It has no idea what a fly is, let alone awareness of any particular flies. Nor is this either sufficient or necessary: we could put it in a different environment where the same passions triggered in it caused it to survive by other means than eating flies, and it would never know the difference (so it does not need to be aware of flies at all), and on the other hand we could make it die in the presence of plenty of flies, by removing its impetus to action.
Eh, I'm of course exactly of the opposite mind, both historically and philosophically: the notion of auto-affection has been the theological thread that philosophy has had to untangle for thousands of years, and it's only recently we've managed to really think past it in a way most welcome. I think you'd very much enjoy something like Voice and Phenomena, by the way (re: the reading group), if only because it makes this point exactly with respect to Husserl - even if you would perhaps vehemently disagree with it.
Quoting The Great Whatever
To be fair to Lingis, although the quoted phrases don't indicate it, he has been one of the most persistent critics of intentionality in the phenomenological sphere. Indeed, he ends the chapter on 'The Perception of Others' with a series of what he calls the limitations of the views above, which have to do exactly with intentionality. A sample: "The type of account we have elaborated seems to us limited in two ways. First, it would seem that the mind in the sublime sense - the other's thought, judgements, decisions, evaluations, processes that have no kinesthetic manifestation - escapes any perceptual experience. ... But secondly, it seems to us that a whole class of perceivable behaviours escapes the kind of analysis we have offered in this chapter.. There are behaviours of the other which are of their nature not associated with mine, behaviours by which the other polarizes himself over me ... To call upon me, to address me, is not to associate with me, to elicit my sympathy; it is to invoke me, to judge me, command me, contest me ..."
He's basically alluding - without naming it - to the whole Levinasian account of the Other which is always impositional, etc. In any case, my interest was how the account offered nicely links up to a testable, scientific thesis.
--
A sample, from elsewhere, to indicate Lingis's awareness of the problems of intentionality: " The sensibility for the sensuous is not a synoptic receptivity for a multiplicity of sense data; instead light, darkness, chromatic density, sonority, warmth and cold are surfaceless depths in which the sensuous body is immersed. Sensibility is not intentional; it is an involution in depths. ... We breathe for the sake of breathing the good air, we eat in savouring the goodness of terrestrial nourishments, we drink in enjoying the tang and bouquet of the wine."
Auto-affection has not had any real mainstream proponents aside from, basically, Descartes, and maybe you can find echoes of it in Husserl's self-conscious revival of the Cartesian spirit (and as he notes, Descartes' treatment of it is not quite right, it's more of an inkling – I think his thoughts were more or less a pale reflection of several ancient philosophers' who have not received any mainstream attention). The idea that we are only now coming to think past it makes no sense to me: rather, what you're saying here, about the outside being prior to the inside, has always been the direction of Western philosophy, so I don't see in it anything new at all, only a culmination of previous, very old, prejudices. The self and experience generally has always appeared as a problem and outrage for philosophy, and its tendency toward it has always been flight, combined with a longing sense that some mystery has been overlooked or misunderstood.
To that end, seeing the self as just another outside object, and affirming that looking outward happens prior to feeling inward, is congenial to the project. Of course in this direction we end up with neither a self nor others, but just more rocks, albeit some that, as Lingins pretends, we can animate analogically with sensory powers, as if our eyeballs floated out in the middle of nowhere, then saw two bodies and noticed a regularity between them.
The problem is of course that we don't just see external things at all to begin with: they are formed only as a coagulation of feelings, and we only come to individuate them insofar as we understand how that affect us, and so other people arise from a common pathetic source, and not as things that we must first see as rocks and then imbue with life force as we notice that they move like another kind of rock (our body, which we look at from the outside out, rather than the inside out).
Quoting StreetlightX
There is not any account of other minds I'm aware of that's amenable to science in any way, and I'm not sure how this one is different. Any test I could imagine just piggybacks on preexisting metaphysical positions that beg the question. How do we know which observed behaviors are conscious?
If it is not pangs of hunger that motivate animals to eat, then what is it? Lions, for example, will not show any interest in prey when sated. It seems obvious they are aware of being sated, and stop eating at that point.
Animals don't need to "make an association" between pangs of hunger and a need to eat. They simply become aware of the urge to eat and then do what they do to satisfy it; all without any conception of satisfying an urge we would probably think.
The problem here would be that you simply set up an alternative dualism - the one of self and qualia instead of that of self and world. And so the problem is not dissolved. You are still talking about the observers of observables in a way that makes the observation as a process mysterious.
So solutions to this problem have to understand the self and its objects - ideal or real - in terms of a semiotic relation. The observer side of the equation must also be generalised (so that it no longer seems so mysteriously and ineffably particular). We must be able to talk about observers as something themselves individuated, rather than starting with them as some brute fact individuation.
Quoting The Great Whatever
You mean biosemiotic, not biochemical. You have to mess with the signalling, the system of interpretance, not the material state that is the subject of some interpretation.
Are you saying that the "system of interpretance" is not underpinned by any biochemical system that you could mess with in order to disrupt it?
If an organism has the actual choice to overeat or starve itself, then the materiality, the chemistry, is not really the issue, is it?
OK, then I guess I'm asking whether you think there is any biochemical system you could mess with in order to remove the capacity to have that "actual choice". I don't know, perhaps I'm missing some crucial point here?
OK, but isn't the light, colour, and contour something external? So isn't this "feeling of light", an awareness of something external?
Quoting The Great Whatever As I explained, I don't think it is hunger which compels one to eat. And being compelled by instinct cannot be classified as a form of awareness. Perhaps awareness could be classed as an instinct, but not vise versa.
Quoting JohnIt is the desire to eat, which motivates one to eat. At the first level it's habitual, at the deeper level it's instinctual, but pangs of hunger are not what stimulates the desire to eat. Compare how many times that you have had the desire to eat with how many time that you have had pangs of hunger, and check how valid your inductive reasoning is, which tells you that pangs of hunger motivate an animal to eat. Yes, after one eats, an animal is sated, and stops eating, but how does that imply that pangs of hunger motivate one to eat?
Quoting JohnCan we not establish a proper differentiation between pangs of hunger, and the urge to eat? Do you not agree with me, that these are two completely different, and very likely completely unrelated things? If the urge to eat only came about from pangs of hunger, there would probably be no obesity in the world.
No.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How am I even supposed to respond to this?
First up, I thought we were speaking about animals, not about humans.
In any case, you say that "at the first level it is habitual", but that can't be right since otherwise newborn animals would not feed. You say that "at the deeper level it's instinctual" but what could the instinct to eat be other than the felt urge to eat?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, I agree that we can establish such a distinction, whether it is a "proper" or improper one is an open issue, but in any case I can't see the relevance to the argument of our being able to establish such a distinction. Animals cannot establish such a distinction, and I think we must imagine that they eat when they feel the pangs of hunger, if food is available, or they go in search for it if it not. Alternatively we may say that they eat when they feel the urge, but whatever way we want to express it ,it is a feeling, an awareness, within the animal that motivates it to eat. And I had thought that you were arguing against TGW's position regarding "inner affection".
It's up to TGW to make sense of that claim. My point is that in talking about "chemistry", he is misdirecting us from the formal cause to the material cause when dealing with the issue of "mind".
Is that you don't think, or you don't feel? Or that you don't think you should feel? :)
To interject here, sometimes people eat because they enjoy eating, or because they're bored. You are correct in that we seem to eat primarily to get rid of an uncomfortable notification; indeed without this uncomfortable notification the only thing that would compel us to eat would be an understanding of biological functions paired with a general desire to continue to exist. Generally I would say that most people would prefer to rather continue to live without having to eat instead of being constrained by the biological necessity of fuel and the subsequent motivational discomfort.
Perhaps this is why Aristotle was quite reserved and pessimistic in his thoughts on the telos-attaining man. As I recall, Aristotle thought contentment and "happiness" was only available for those who didn't have to work hard, manual labor for their entire lives and had a certain degree of comfort and luxury. These comfortable people inevitably started doing philosophy, and reflected upon the human condition and thus we have existentialism/pessimism.
Just to clarify on this point – an important thing to note here is that hunger is not a notification in the sense of providing the organism with information. The organism learns nothing about the objective state of their body from being hungry per se (that is, not unless they are prior aware of some theory of objective hunger and take this sensation merely as an indicator of some separate state), nor what needs to be done to recognize this. Hunger is not a signaling of any state of the body whatsoever to the organism, who need know nothing objective about its own body at all in order to be hungry. Possibly it learns something that, for a human with speech powers, might be expressible with 'I'm hungry' while the sensation persists. But this could only be construed as a report of a feeling, not an objective state (thus it would be true even if one were 'objectively full,' but one's body were thrown out of whack to be hungry even when the stomach was full and no energy was needed).
Hunger simply compels us to act in a certain way like a whip does – we don't, by being hungry or following this compulsion, learn anything about the mechanisms affecting us, or their manner of resolution, or the objective effect we have on food or our own body by eating.
In such cases, the eating is still compelled by an appetite of some sort: the feeling of hunger is only an example, and not of intrinsic interest.
I like the idea of the subject and object being disentangled (starting with neither in its purity), but who is this "we" that must talk about observers being themselves individuated? It's as if we always already "believe" in the "we" and the "I."
This is precisely what I was referring to. Thanks to a familial relationships and pseudo-memories imbued within genes (i.e "instincts"), hunger automatically, or very quickly is learned to be, a signal for the need to consume something. A baby, when faced with the crisis of hunger for the first time, cries out in anxiety, and is then fed goopy food or breast milk. Soon the baby learns that there is a direct relationship between them experiencing hunger, crying, and getting food (a something that tastes interesting and goes in the mouth), therefore, the experience of hunger is connected to getting food. As the baby matures into a child and adult it takes responsibility for this necessity and gets food on its own without (usually) crying.
Obviously the Pragmatic "we" - the community of minds that is the limit to rational inquiry (see Peirce).
So yes, I already believe in that "we" and also say that is the thought it should have here. In doing so, I am urging an opinion on you which I am claiming would the inevitable destination of clear thinking. And that method of thinking is also defined in the same fashion.
In the end, everything is recursive - the view we establish from inside the problem we want to describe as if we stood outside it. But that entails no paradox if it is measurably true we are achieving the purpose we had in mind.
Hunger still affects the body, and is produced via the body which is outwardly connected with the world. All suffering seems to be bodily, which means it's an experience of being-in-the-world, an intentional consciousness.
And the experience of hunger would still be a hunger-for, wouldn't it? Even if one is hungry and it does not offer any theoretical information about how one procures a meal for themselves, consciousness is intentionally related to something that it's attempting to secure to stop it's suffering. So once it manages to find something that it holds onto, it develops a sort of theoretical frame of mind.
Thanks. That was a great answer. I'm not saying that all difficulties are permanently abolished, but it was a nice clarification.
These are all irrelevant points, as far as I can see. We were discussing your idea that animals are merely "robots". I asked you if that means it is OK in your book to torture them. Although of course if you really believe they are robots then the notion of torturing them would be incoherent for you, so I'll put it another way; would it be OK to burn them alive, starve them to death, cut off their limbs little by little, immerse them in caustic soda or what ever other kind of treatment you know would cause terrible suffering to a human?
Because to do any of those things (except for starving to death, which makes no sense in this context) to a robot or a computer, however well it might play go or chess, would be no problem, since we know they don't suffer.
So, cease to evade the issue by tossing out red herrings and answer the question honestly.
If we're looking 'from the inside,' then no: the point that hunger doesn't tell us anything about any objects at all, not even our own bodies, prevents it from showing us the body as in any way outwardly connected with the world. It might ultimately be so connected in fact, but the hunger itself does not help us understand this.
Quoting Marty
The point is that hunger is not intentional. It has a sort of internal telos to it, but that telos doesn't reach out toward anything else. An adult might understand that hunger requires an outside source to satiate it and so go looking for it: but hunger on its own does not help with this, it only compels the organism to act in certain ways, and those ways get more complicated as the organism becomes more intelligent.
If ultimately there is no difference in kind from the barest capability of sensation and the fully developed human, then even in the latter case one will not actually be looking for any sort of object to feed the hunger: the hunger will still be pushing within itself for certain actions to be taken for no reason, but some of that movement will have been projected into a sort of simulacrum-world, where part of the pathos gets parsed as 'hamburger,' leading to the false picture of intentionality.
I suppose we simply have different approaches to the history of philosophy then. The whole idea of self-affection is pretty much as old as God himself, who is the auto-affecting being par excellence. Is it any surprise that Henry is as much a theologian as he is a philosopher? Anyway, you find the same structure at work in conceptions of the soul, spirit, liberal individualism, DNA, computer code - any reductionist program where something is meant to be sovereign over itself without remainder. It's only recently that we're coming round to the understanding that such conceptions are entirely inadequate to the complexity of the world. And even then we have a long way to go. That such a prodigious philosopher as Henry could simply transpose such an ancient mythologeme into phenomenology and declare it 'radical' attests to that, I think.
What if I feel hungry for something - like something sweet rather than savoury? We can be satiated on steak and yet still discover an appetite for chocolate mousse.
Your apparent suggestion that appetites lack objects doesn't square with experience. it seems classic reification in support of some dualistic or panpsychic conception of qualia.
Do you, when you feel hunger, not feel the contractions of your muscles near your stomach? Do you not feel pain in certain areas they're bodily? Then will not further deterioration of your body cause a specific attunement which in advanced understands the world as "something-which-can-satisfy-my hunger/a-hunger-for-something?" This is no more than Heideggerian comportment. So it does change the ontological meaning of beings - it is that which is desireable for one to eat. Of course, we cannot in advance know everything that is edible, but then I wasn't arguing for a theoretical knowledge of what can actually fulfill my hunger, merely that consciousness is looking for something outside itself to fulfill that purpose, and interact with it.
How does an adult understand that hunger requires an outside source to satiate it, without feeling hungry? He can't in advance search for something that he has no understanding of. The understanding would have to come first, and then once he understands his hunger, he begins to go outside to search for what can stop it. This is all that's really required for intentionality.
I'm not sure who you're supposed to be criticizing here, me personally or the general Henrian program that uses the term auto-affection, but in either case this is a profound, profound misunderstanding. Whatever the conclusion ultimately is, you need to understand that this is not a real or cogent criticism, and that you don't have the intellectual privilege of this cursory dismissal. Understand that while you have a prerogative to disagree, you are not doing so in an informed way.
Also, I don't share Henry's Christianity, but it's not exactly a traditional onto-theological take on divinity, and he's gotten in trouble with the Christian community because of it. It's also worth noting that Henry's own Christianity, though I don't agree with it, is so opposed to the idea presented in your quote that only a total ignorance of the position could have caused you to say that. A huge portion of the Henrian theological project is the notion of passivity and having to freely receive oneself from an outside, which Henry associates with the Holy Spirit. And this is a Christian idea that your trite version of the history of phil. will not countenance.
Well, all I can say is I feel the same way. There is absolutely nothing radical or new in what you are talking about. It is old hat in the oldest sense of hat. It was in Aristotle, it was in Ryle. Ask yourself this: if what you think is so radical, why does everyone agree with you? Why is everyone tripping over themselves to say things like the title of your OP, and why is any mention of Henry in a serious context made in order to dismiss him as vociferously as possible? Think about the current intellectual landscape and where you stand in it, honestly. Then trace it backward.
I think much of the confusion hinges on the fact that while I am talking about monism and the primacy of exteriority and transcendence, you are talking about theology, which you are so scared of being accused of that you are unwilling to engage with the subject being spoken of.
No, you feel hunger. Nothing about suffering a muscle contraction will let you know that you have muscles. Feelings are not information about the objects felt, nor the objects feeling.
Quoting Marty
It is exactly the opposite. A hungry child has no understanding whatsoever of its hunger or how to satiate it. All it has are instinctual compulsions that act in response to the hunger. It's only once these satiations take on regular patterns that 'objects' begin to come to the fore as capable of satiating that hunger. Food is itself an objectification of hunger, just as physical objects generally are a kind of objectification of felt spatial possibilities.
[/quote]
Well, it's not a detached object. It's your body. There's obviously a difference between feeling your arm, and feeling your broken arm, right? Or say an extended metal piece that might be fulfilling that role. The prior is vital, and part of an embodied consciousness, and the latter sort of a lifeless thing - so there's a clear lack of "just raw sensations". Pain seems to indicate a vital part of you if it's in a particular area. Also, these don't seem like raw feelings to me, they seem to be a type of understanding. What do you think is particularly convincing in Henry's work that makes you think it has no directed intentionality? I don't buy into the intentionality project altogether - there's some work in Levinas that attempts to diverge from that type of philosophy. Anxiety, for example, seems to be one of the few types of moods that're unintentional. It has a general "intentionality" towards nothingness.
[quote=The Great Whatever;19766]It is exactly the opposite. A hungry child has no understanding whatsoever of its hunger or how to satiate it. All it has are instinctual compulsions that act in response to the hunger. It's only once these satiations take on regular patterns that 'objects' begin to come to the fore as capable of satiating that hunger. Food is itself an objectification of hunger, just as physical objects generally are a kind of objectification of felt spatial possibilities.[/quote]
I'm not sure how you can have no understanding of hunger if it's affecting you. Surely, it's not that type of know-how of hunger that correlates it to specific neurons in the brain, but it seems it's in a sense at least vulgar. Otherwise, I'm not sure what we're later rationalizing it into an object.
Can you sort of elaborate the reversal you have in mind more?
This is not something that you need any philosopher's work to see. It's just pointing out that any purportedly intentional experiences are themselves composed of a non-intentional substrate (this much even Husserl admits), and that a good deal of them, not only every day in waking life but pretty much all of them at the start of life, do not have any intentional object whatsoever at which they're directed. The non-intentional is prior to the intentional and survives without it – and, if I am right, the 'intentional' is only the purportedly intentional in the end.
Quoting Marty
The feeling itself tells you nothing about how it arises, how it will go away, what controls it, what effects it has on anything, or even whether there is anything. What it does do is enforce a kind of compulsion on the one suffering it, and enough compulsions in enough directions can develop into a sort of 'world' that pieces together the various pathways that these compulsions can move along. If I am right, this never amounts to anything like intentionality, despite what philosophers have traditionally believes.
You need not understand at all what the source of or cure of your suffering is, just because the suffering affects you.
I eat every day at pretty much the same time. If I miss this eating time, then I get hungry. Maybe you always wait until you get hungry before you eat, but I know with certainty that it is not hunger which compels me to eat.
Quoting John
Do you not consider a human being to be an animal? If you want to understand what causes animals to behave the way that they do, why not look at yourself?
Quoting JohnThis is just an issue of the direction of ordering, As evident to me, my awareness, habit is first, then instinct is deeper.
Quoting John
The instinct to eat, is the deeper urge to eat. The instinct to eat is not the feeling of hunger, it is classed with the habit of eating, which is clearly not the feeling of hunger, that is the point. These are two distinct things. Sometimes, if I don't eat when I normally do, I get hungry. If I reflect on this feeling, I will associate it with not having eaten, then I may get a strong desire to eat if I cannot quell this thought. That association, between the feeling of hunger, and not having eaten when I normal eat, takes a fairly high degree of intelligence to draw. I do not think that primitive animals have the degree of intelligence necessary to make this association.
Do you think that a worm has the intelligence required to make an association between the feeling of hunger, and not having eaten when it should have? Do you see the issue here? The instinct to eat compels us to eat when we ought to eat. Hunger only begins, as a feeling, if we have not eaten when we should have. Therefore hunger is not what compels us to eat, it only begins as a feeling, if the mechanism which compels us to eat has failed to do so.
One would do well to reflect on Plato's disassociation of pleasure and pain. Pleasure is demonstrably something other than a relief from pain. To place pleasure and pain as logical opposites, pleasure being logically equivalent to not-pain, is a mistaken approach
Quoting John
What I am arguing against, is the idea that human beings, as well as other animals, are "aware" of inner feelings, like the urge to eat. I think that the fact that we refer to these as "instincts" demonstrates that we are not aware of such things. An instinct is something which motivates us which we are not aware of.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Since, as I pointed out to John, hunger only kicks in when the mechanism which compels us to eat when we should eat, fails to do so, then preventing something from feeling hunger would not cause that thing to die immediately. And, we all die eventually.
Quoting The Great Whatever
If this is the case, then by what principle do you argue that hunger is a type of awareness? This is what is at issue here. To class "that which compels one to eat" as a type of awareness, we have to stretch, to absurd extents, the description of one, or both of these two.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is insane.
Of coarse, the Self that looms large because it faced down annihilation is something seen in the rear view mirror. I'm alienated from it. I'm just its shadow.
Fascinating. Can we apply this to other appetites too? I mean it totally explains my sex life.
To you, it appears to be insane, because you haven't taken the time to consider the reality of these issues. You simply accept as true, something which appears as logical to you, without delving into the complexities of the issue. Plato did much work on this subject, work which you display complete ignorance of.
Quoting Baden
Yes, I think it applies to all the appetites, this is the principle which Plato pointed to through many dialogues, and it is fundamental to morality. Pain and pleasure cannot be opposed in a system of logic, as the sophists tried. This is because, as Plato demonstrates, pleasure is not simply a relief from pain, nor is it a lack of pain. We naturally seek pleasures which cannot be described as a lack of pain, or a relief from pain. Consistent with this, many activities such as sex, and eating, are naturally sought because they are pleasurable, they are not sought as a relief from pain.
The ramifications of this principle, into moral ethics, are extensive. We are inclined to act toward a perceived good; not because we are presently suffering in a state of deprivation, but because we apprehend some form of pleasure which may be derived from that apprehended good. This allows us to remove pain and suffering as a necessity in obtaining the good. We can define "the good" in relation to a pleasure that is sought, rather than in relation to a prior pain or deprivation.
The fact that this fundamental moral principle is utilized, and works, is evidence that our actions are not primarily motivated by a desire to relieve ourselves from pain. The principal motivation of action is a perceived pleasure. This allows us to develop morally, through seeking rewards, without having to be first punished.
Actually, it appears to me to be insane because it is.
In fact MU points to problems for the position you want to promote.
Do we eat because we are hungry, because it is a habit, or because eating is pleasurable? Clearly if you want to promote some simplistic position here, you need to be able to show how you deal with this complexity of the issue.
It appears to be X, therefore it is X, is faulty logic. You have no premise to exclude the possibility of mistake. You can look at others, and draw your conclusions about feelings and emotions, based in some appearances, and unsound deductive reasoning, or you can look at your own feelings and emotions and see how far they are from the logic you wish to apply. You seem to derive some pleasure from the former.
Referring back to the op, not only do we reflect, or introspect, when we desire to please others, but when we see others insisting on false principles, such as you do, then we are forced to reflect upon our inner selves, to determine the truth. In either case, it starts with a recognition of the other.
Indeed, I don't have sex out of sexual hunger, I do it out of habit. My sexual hunger only kicks in when that mechanism that compels me to have sex fails. Of course, the only problem with this is that my lack of sexual hunger means I can never perform, so I never actually end up having sex. Weird.
Maybe what's weird is these kinds of mechanical accounts of mentality - hunger or whatever as bare qualia.
If you are forever constructing local observables in this fashion, you will forever be failing to deal with the phantasmal thing that is the "self" - the supposed observer.
That is why if you are going to talk about a construct like "hunger", it would have to break with the notion of it being just "the pangs I experience right here and now". What is hunger when it is stretched out over the kind of temporal span of a habit? Is it a concept rather than a percept now? Is it some very dilute version of the much more occasionally intense thing?
What TGW actually wants to argue is as usual quite opaque. He evades close questioning. But the problems with any kind of qualia-based account of mentality are pretty self-evident. It simply shows how strong a grip a mechanical notion of causality has on the popular imagination.
Hey, I'm not making any claim to 'radicality' here, but I don't think it's exactly a stretch to say that the idea that recognizing other-selves came 'first' phylogenetically is counter-intuitive. Perhaps it's even true that certain strands of philosophy and science have often questioned the self-evidence of self-consciousness of whathaveyou, but outside of a few small, academic circles, it's simply laughable to think that these ideas are as pedestrian as you'd think. The 'myth of the given', to use Sellars's term, still haunts all our discourse on consciousness.
And besides, not even 'advocates' can seem to discuss this properly; pretty much no one in this thread is actually discussing the OP, and as usual, things have taken a turn into qualia and other such mundane issues. No discussion of kinesthetics, of evolution, of mirror neurons, etc. Not complaining, as such (not that I've attempted to curate the thread in any particular direction either) - just saying, details are bothersome. As for Henry, I'm hardly someone to 'vociferously dismiss' him. I think he's a stunningly brilliant philosopher who took two steps forwards in his critique of phenomenology and then one step back in his positive conception of 'auto-affective Life'; a failed escape, but one no less impressive for the effort.
But I would have thought you would agree that TGW has been peddling the shit sandwich here.
The Vygotskian view is that it is indeed correct that introspective awareness is not a natural biological feature of brains/minds, but instead a socially and language scaffolded reflexive habit.
So we don't simply observe our pangs of hunger, we have to construct such an attentional state by way of learnt cultural concepts.
Of course there is something "in there" to be found. I've just checked in with my stomach and it tells me that although another part of me knows its lunchtime, it could take it or leave it another few hours. Yet I know from experience that as soon as I find something tasty leftover in the fridge, the gastric juices will start to flow and hunger pangs - being exactly that preparatory autonomic response - will appear.
So in a real sense, introspective awareness or self-consciousness does take the long way round to get there. It is a culturally evolved habit of thought that I need to master, a set of exterior concepts that I need to learn to apply in the right socially-approved way.
And in Philosophy of Mind, we all have to learn to introspect in a way that makes "qualia" seem a true thing. It's part of the induction process to be part of the club. People will laugh at you if you claim not to get the ineffability of the colour red, the smell of a rose, a pang of hunger, or the taste of a shit sandwich dressed with a cherry.
Speaking of shit sandwiches, that's a doozy from neuro-reductionism.
Sure, "mirror neurons" tell us something about embodied consciousness - the active construction of a self/world distinction. But introspective or self-conscious level awareness is a learnt cultural habit based on having the language skills to direct attention in a third person fashion.
Instead of simply being plugged in the world like an animal, we can distance ourselves from ourselves by forming an intervening habit of self-representation. "This is me in here having my thoughts, feelings and perceptions."
It haunts our discussions mainly as something to accuse one's opponent of, in order to seem less like someone who would disagree with the sort of line you'r backing. Saying someone 'falls prey' to the myth of the given is like calling someone a racist – debate over. I've even seen it applied retrospectively to ancient philosophers. It's like the notion that a philosophy is in any way subjectivistic is immediate grounds for its dismissal.
Who would disagree with anything said in the OP of this topic in even a vaguely continental camp? Maybe some fringe analytics who no one take seriously and are crypto-dualists might. Even the vague nothing appeal to mirror neurons has become standard by this point, and the notion that this is supposed to be a discussion about biology isn't much of a cover.
It's not 'subjectivity' that's the issue - it's the matter of it's being accounted for. And yeah, any philosophy that posits subjectivity as brute immediacy or whathaveyou is immediate grounds for its dismissal.
I realize this, but thank you for admitting it. Generally speaking there are a number of pairs of checkboxes that you have to check one side of to be a real continental philosopher, and none of these so far as I can tell are supported by anything other than vague Zeitgeist. I think that this thread, insofar as it serves only as a signal of your position on that divide (having the correct opinion – I mean come on, what could be more of a dogwhistle cliché than quoting 'outside' like that) isn't conducive to discussion, and was not really created to have any discussion. So there it stays.
How do you live in the real world with such thin skin? But yes, you are being neuro-reductionist in your OP by going along with the idea that the evolution of the critical differences concerning the human mind are all biological mechanism rather than sociocultural, language-enabled, habits.
You might of course in fact agree with me on that further point. But it would be up to you say. Put your man pants on and give it a go.
I understand TGW to be claiming that first awareness is of the inner milieu and I would certainly agree with that.
But if you understand self-awareness to be a linguistically mediated event then of course we must be aware of others first in order to learn language.
On the other hand, this doesn't mean that I hold the opposite thesis at the level of development either - rejecting the notion that we are 'other-conscious before we are self-conscious' doesn't entail that we are 'self-conscious before we are other conscious'. I'd rather say instead that both self and other are derivative notions which become (roughly) sedimented into place based on a variety of developmental factors, both biological and social.
For example, the child developmental psychologist Daniel Stern notes the basic 'awareness' in infants probably takes the form of what he refers to as 'vitality affects', which are kinds of 'life-feelings', or life-qualities': "These elusive qualities are better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as ‘surging’, ‘fading away’, ‘fleeting’, ‘explosive’, crescendo’, ‘decrescendo’, ‘bursting’, ‘drawn out’, and so on. These qualities of experience are most certainly sensible to infants and of great daily, even momentary, importance."
Importantly, these vitality effects do not find their locus in a 'self' but are simply experienced 'as such': "infants experience these qualities both “from within” and “in the behavior of other persons” ... "In short, originary temporal structures of experience are cardinal in nature; vitality affects — surgings, fadings, and all such qualitative features of experience — are primary with respect to our experiences of ourselves and our experiences of others." In other words at this most basic level, there simply is no self-other distinction - there 'are' simply vitality affects. It's also important that these vitality affects are largely related to the infant's sense of proprioception and kinesthetic feeling, as per the OP.
That aside, the crucial thing is that vitality affects become differentiated into self and other by processes of symmetry breaking, as it were. The infant learns to be a 'self' - or rather learns to 'locate' these (trans-personal) affects within a self - by means of coming to grips with the regularities of bodily coordination which break the symmetry between self and other. These coordination processes are those of if/then relationships: if 'I' move this shape like so, then such and such follows. Nothing happens if I try and move the shape over there, however. Ipso: this shape is 'mine'.
Commenting on Stern's work, Erin Manning writes: "Stern's core sense of self is based on how these experiences veer the becoming-self toward new forms of relation. These new forms of relation in turn feed the process through which the infant becomes differentiated. Difference does not occur through the stratification of self and other or inside and outside. Difference emboldens processual shiftings between strata that foreground and background modes of experience, each of them affected by incipient reachings-toward, a reaching-toward not of the subject, but of experience itself. Senses of coherence emerge that unfold as feelings of warmth, intensity, texture, anguish."
Hope this clarifies things a little.
Yep. A dichotomisation that arises to structure the "bloomiing, buzzing, confusion".
Quoting StreetlightX
This is a good way to put it because it shows how early on there would just be a disembodied response. Raw sensory change would wash through the circuits like noise. The newborn would not be distinguishing between the changes caused by its actions vs the changes caused by a changing world. Either way, the same energy would be washing through with the direction not yet telling of a difference,
Quoting StreetlightX
Agreed. But that is an animal embodied level of self. And Stern is of course alert to the later Vygotskian development of the linguistically-distanced self.
So this is where I think your account so far halts too soon.
Children may not have a notion of self versus other, or be conscious of the distinction between themselves and others, but this doesn't mean they aren't self-conscious before they're other-conscious. Young children are roughly solipsists, in the strong sense that they have experiences of themselves, and don't distinguish between this and experience of another precisely because their own experience encompasses everything for them: there is no notion that there could be any such thing outside of them until a theory of mind begins to develop as the result of socialization.
In other words, self-feeling only requires sentience; other-feeling requires socialization, which is predicated on sentience. The latter is derivative, and awareness of others always arises out of solipsism, not vice-versa (and I would argue, this process is extremely incomplete and shaky, such that large traces of solipsism remain even in the adult human – people are literally incapable of experiencing others as they do themselves).
And so this:
Taken one way is right (the infant doesn't make the distinction themselves, thinking that an experience is happening to them as opposed to someone else), but this doesn't serve your purpose, because this realization is not what's at issue. But taken another way, it's clearly wrong, since these experiences obviously aren't just 'experienced as such,' but are localized to particular bodies and do not bleed into each other. And it's this stronger false sense you would need to establish any interesting thesis.
Again, this cannot make sense unless you assume the self is a social construction and that having a self = coming to the realization of the self-other distinction as the result of being socialized. But this is exactly what is at issue.
I don't think this can be right. The proprioceptive sense of the body comes on account of the actual sensations which belong to it, and are felt prior to any "if/then" kinds of inference. Proprioceptive and other 'inner sense": feelings as well as skin sensations would be immediately known not to belong to "shapes over there", I would say.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Instincts may motivate us in ways we don't understand or that we can't fully trace, but they primarily do so by means of feelings and emotions of which we are aware. You just can't cut that link and retain a coherent depiction of the human condition.
Quoting apokrisis
I would say we mediate our response to our awareness of the biological state / drive through the filter of the assimilated social other. Or that our (human) awareness of the biological state is framed by the assimilated social other. So, we lose the pure element of compulsion but we don't efface the awareness of the primary drive.
Quoting John
The linguistic mediation is gradual and organizes but doesn't replace the drives of the inner milieu.
Quoting John
I'd put it that the cultural mediation is experienced as self-conscious introspection such that the inner awareness of drives is no longer all-consuming but still prods through in a kind of a symbiotic competition with said introspection.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Yeah, it's the experience of the other internalized that fuels the development of the concept of self. Again, that doesn't mean children are not previously self-aware in the basic sense of being conscious of their drives. But that these drives are the substrate that when moulded into a (somewhat) coherent whole through the gradual internalization of the social world become what we call the "person" who is self-aware both of the drives in their remaining biological manifestations, and of the self as an observer of said drives and mediator of such.
This is a good way of putting it, and I'll add to the criticism above about a feeling-based account being incapable of thought: it's only passions that can possibly provide reasons, and thus allow for thinking (reasoning). Passions compel, which doesn't move the organism in the way gravity moves a stone, since the stone can't be compelled to do anything (it just does what it does), and thus has no reasons to do anything. Reasons are first and foremost so because in deliberation they are compelling: they are persuasive, the more viscerally the more they directly threaten us hedonically.
So a fully passionless being (a classical angel, say) has no reason to do anything, and so doesn't act except as an instrument of another's will.
But I'm not saying that the self is a 'social' construction (any more than I'm saying the self is a 'biological' construction); I'd rather say that it is something like a 'substrate-neutral' production. It would undermine the entire point - to give a differential account of the self - if I were to simply shift the grounds from a primordial 'self-other' distinction to an equally duplicitous 'social-biological' distinction (so much for Apo's diarrhetic blather about reductionism). So I absolutely do not 'assume' that the self is a 'social-construction' - the only assumption I make is that it is absurd to make assumptions about the brute reality of a primordial self as though it were written in the stars.
As for the distinction between 'realization' and 'sentience', of course it's the issue. We're literally talking about self-awareness: the word isn't hyphenated for fun, it is literally awareness of self that we're talking about. How is it not a dancing-on-a-rooftop-with-bells-on petitio principii to say "young children have experiences of themselves, therefore, they experience themselves first"? I mean honestly, really?
So of course young children have experiences, but that those experiences are 'of themselves' is precisely what's in question: It is precisely the self 'in' those experiences which are differentially engendered though development. Moreover, your phenomenology is inside-out: children aren't 'solipsists' because "their own experience encompasses everything for them"; they don't yet know what counts as their 'own' experience: if they've no notion that anything could be 'outside' of them it's because the very limits of what counts as 'inside' have not sedimented in any strict way.
Moreover, one you 'start' with solipsism, there's no getting 'out': you can't work from the 'inside-out' in the outside's already 'in'.
Short of subscribing to some myth of free-floating qualia, I simply don't see how this could be true. Proprioceptive sensing has precisely to do with our bodily asymmteries; we are weighty, fleshy bodies who have a centre of gravity which shift with our mass; moreover, in Lingis's terms, we are "polarized by vectors of forces, axes of stance and motility." We are postural beings, sensitive beings whose touch and movement is characterized by pressure, intensity, sharpness and texture, pleasure and heat: this is what it means to experience 'qualities'. This is how Stern puts it with respect to the child sucking her thumb (via Manning):
"When you suck your finger," Stern observes, "your finger gets sucked and not just generally sucked" There is no "the" finger-sucking that isn't inflected by the "how" of "a" sucking. "Which"? "This" one or "that. ... Depending on exactly how each event transpires and what else is present that may inflect it (a glance at a caregiver's face, the soft brush of a blanket on the cheek), each sucking in the series will take on its own unique vitality affect." In other words, the developmental trajectory of the infant individualizes it as 'an' infant, one who feels herself as such, a uniqueness that isn't simply brute and bound in some magical soul.
We are fleshly, weighty, differentially orientated, sensitive bodies of space and time, not free-floating, 0-dimentional 'feeling beings'.
--
Aghh, I think I accidentally hit 'edit' on your original post rather than reply and might have accidentally deleted some bits of it. I'm not sure :/
Again, only if you assume the only way to be self-conscious is through introspection, of oneself as transcendent object.
Quoting StreetlightX
I think the lack of escape form solipsism is a lived reality, though, and is mandated if you are serious about there being other people. Some sympathy for solipsism is inseparable from the belief in other minds: those who have most scorned solipsism traditionally have also been those who have taken other people least seriously.
The appeal to magical souls and zero-dimensional beings is of course just rhetorical bluster. I think the real underlying impetus is the refusal to accept any idea of permanent closure or mystery, which must be equivalent to some deity or dualism so long as you're a materialist. But if you're not, this need not bother you, and you can indeed see the world as more complex than the materialist can ever allow, by recognizing that not even its notion as a common 'world' holds together in the first place. The insistence that we must know others in the same way as we know ourselves then just amounts to an insistence that there are not more things than are contained in our philosophy.
As for the question of why it should be that experiences amount to self-consciousness: again all feeling is a feeling of oneself. So long as the feeling is localized somewhere, it must be so phenomenologically: and thus all feeling is feeling as within that locality (and not in an abstract 'somewhere'). To insist that one has to retrospectively use these experiences to see oneself as a distant object is just to insist that the only experience is experience of something transcendent, which is belied by the fact that, as we've already established, all such experiences take place in a pre-intentional sensory medium.
An apologia for woo if there ever was one.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Dancing-on-a-rooftop-with-bells-on...
I'm not sure how the Morris is relevant here, but it's part of my heritage, so I'll join the dance.
It seems to me that to be self-aware is to be aware of (or to make) a distinction, self/not-self in experience. In which case, to be aware but not self-aware consists of not making that distinction, rather than not having one side or the other as experiences.
So a new-born has an instinctive reaction to a brush on the cheek of turning their head to that side and attempting to suck. It experiences, I think it is sensible to say, both the brush on the cheek, and the turning of the head, but does not distinguish one as external stimulus and the other as internal response.
Quoting The Great Whatever
So I agree with this in a certain sense, (it is the cheek that feels brushed, the head that turns) but it misleads, because if all feeling is a feeling of oneself, then one is simply not making the distinction that allows one to say it.
And, no one has put forward any argument to explain how, once "awareness" is attained, what exactly restricts its focus. If you are aware of something, then what mechanism prevents you becoming aware of something else?
It seems preposterous to propose that "awareness" - a property that we find it difficult to even describe - contains some detailed internal structure in which certain entities can be switched on or off.
No, I don't see a problem here. The successful completion of eating requires an external physical object just as much as the sex act. That is the point of my argument, eating is the result of an awareness of external objects, not the result of an awareness of an internal hunger. Sex is the same.
We cannot deny the role of the external object here. When we eat there is a particular external object which is eaten, and in the sex act, there is also an external source of tactile stimulation. So, we can start from the fact that a particular object is the object of desire because it is particular objects (persons in the sex act) which end up satisfying the desire.
TGW has reduced this desire for a particular, to a general desire, called "hunger". Now we have the general hunger for food, and the general hunger for sex, two distinct generalized appetites. The claim is that the general appetite produces the appetite for the particular. I have no problem with this, so I'll allow it, with reservations as to how we describe "appetite". Right now, it is defined as hunger, and desire. Where TGW makes the mistake is in the unjustified premise that the desire, or appetite, is the result of, or "is" itself, a pain of deficiency, or privation. This premise cannot be verified by induction, because the evidence does not support it. People continue to eat, therefore they have the desire to eat when there is no such privation. And with respect to sex, the same is true, unless you define "lack of privation" as having sex all the time, people continue to desire sex when there is no real privation.
The conclusion is that the desire for food, or sex, "appetite", is not a deficiency or privation, nor is it caused by a deficiency or privation, this is TGW's false premise, which is unsupported by the evidence. Therefore we must look to something else, to describe this desire, as the cause of desire, or appetite. Desire itself is internal, and without an object of desire, it is complete emptiness, void, nothingness. We cannot describe it as a feeling of privation or deficiency because that has been demonstrated as the false premise. So this emptiness, void, nothingness, can only be described as desire if it is related to an object. Therefore desire, appetite, is this void nothingness in relation to an object. It can only become a deficiency or privation when it is related to an object. Then in relation to this object, the object of desire, there is a deficiency or privation.
Awareness cannot be, in the primary sense, an awareness of one' s internal deficiencies or privations, because these are all instances of emptiness, nothingness, and there is no deficiency except in relation to something else. So there is nothing there, in the internal, to be aware of. It is when the nothingness of the internal is placed in relation to external objects, and the self becomes aware of the external objects, that the general appetite for objects is formed. Then deficiency is apprehended.
Quoting BadenIt is not the "awareness of hunger" which is at issue here, it is how "hunger" is defined. I describe hunger as an appetite, the desire to eat. This is necessarily directed toward external objects, therefore hunger is a feeling which is based in an awareness of external objects. TGW describes hunger as a feeling resulting from an internal deficiency. TGW's description is not consistent with the evidence.
Quoting BadenI am not out to deny that we are aware of feelings and emotions, what I am saying is that these feelings and emotions are themselves based in an awareness of things external.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I am not at all disputing the fact that passions compel, nor that we are aware of passions and their ability to compel. What I dispute is your characterization of passions. I believe that passion requires necessarily the awareness of an external object. There is no passion without an awareness of an external object. So despite the fact that passion is an internal feeling, it is consequent upon the awareness of the external object. You have declared that we become aware of passions or desires before we become aware of external objects, but this is impossible if passion and desire require an awareness of external objects.
How so?
This seems fair enough to me. I think it comes down to whether you think the primary awareness of the inner milieu counts as self-awareness, as distinct from the reflexive self-awareness brought about by cultural/ symbolic mediation.
I mean this primary self-awareness is what the 'higher' animals would most reasonably be thought to enjoy, isn't it? That said, some social mediation of self-awareness would seem to be possible with higher social animals, but not certainly not symbolic mediation, if they don't possess the capacity for symbolic language.
You have two realms, the known/unknown and the unknowable. The latter is an apology for woo because if something is unknowable, it's always a mystery without significance in experience. If we try to examine the unknowable, all we can say is there is a "mystery" or "nothing can be known"--i.e. "Wooooooo wooooooo, something happened but there is nothing to say or know."
Immaterialism is the argument for woo. That which is not equal on the knowable plane amounts to the assertion of a mystery force which is without significance or meaning in experience, not even something which extends beyond a description. Woo/Immaterialism is a contradiction with any philosophy which locates meaning in experience, even idealists such as Berkeley.
If the world is defined by the meaning of experiences, how can there be an unknowable? To suggest there is such a thing is to claim there is a world outside experiences.
Quoting StreetlightX
I'm not sure we are disagreeing about anything significant here: I don't deny that from the point of view of our discursive understanding of bodies and environments there are prior 'external' forces operating that we would think cause the infant to feel her "fleshly weightiness" but I think until a conception of outside forces and entities is developed it would all be felt as 'me' or 'mine', all 'inside'. The sense of the term "inside" in this context should not be thought as one side of a dichotomy but as an expression of what I imagine would be a sensation of complete immersion, a kind of 'oceanic' feeling, if you like. We can only imagine what it must be like for an infant, what it was like for each one of us; on the other hand why should an intuitive sense of that primary experience not remain with us?
That's right. There is a self in primary awareness, but it is "off-stage" as the animal's awareness is of the world (as that which is not "self"). So the awareness is purely extrospective in being the view from a self.
The question then is where internal sensations like pangs or hunger or lust may play into this. Are they parts of the "field of sensation" - part of the animal's umwelt - and so in that sense, the animal is seeing "into its self"?
The animal sees the lump of meat. And the animal sees its hunger. And then in unseen fashion, the animal decides the connection that links the two (which could be meat first, then hunger, or hunger first, then the meat).
We can see that talking this way, it is all starting to break down. There is something essentially wrong in treating inner and outer sensation in this fashion - as if they were all just different varieties of the general thing that is qualia.
You paint the situation in interesting ways here. I guess it comes down to the felt difference between the experience of hunger and the experience of meat. The meat is to-be-acquired, the hunger is to-be-acted-upon. In that sense they are different qualities or kinds of experience, but I am not sure it would be right to say there is a "general thing that is qualia".
Perhaps because the hunger is a kind of 'inner prompting' that exists in itself when the body is at rest and the meat as something to be acquired is elusive and uncertain and requires the effort of bodily exertion and stealth, even animals may feel the 'outer-directedness' of the desire to get the food as feeling distinct from the 'inner-promptingness' of the hunger itself. Perhaps it is these very kinds of animal feeling that form the basis of our conceptually elaborated distinctions.
My argument is that the generality of qualia is the socially constructed idea here and so due to linguistic self-awareness (the speaking which can talk about selves and their states).
So the meat that is to-be-acquired and the hunger that is to-be-acted-upon nicely points out the directionality, the fundamental embodiness, that is primary awareness. The view points from the self to the world, leaving the self outside what it sees.
That is why we call hunger a drive. It is the source of the action rather than the satisfaction. And in culturally-constructed self-awareness, we are meant to now start paying critical attention to the sources of our actions. And here we start to distinguish "pangs" that stand for this concept of "the hunger drive, the cause of eating behaviour".
We check in with ourselves and see if the stomach rumbles. Then we note those autonomic sensations and say to ourselves, see, we are actually hungry. We can sense ourselves in ways that betoken that idea.
Or else we might just be sitting down to eat out of clock-watching habit. If we ask ourselves do we really feel hungry, we might remember feeling nothing much before heading to the kitchen, but then the scent and sight of the food triggers "pangs" - the stomach reflexively gets ready with its surge of gastic juices, the mouth runs with saliva ahead of what it knows is about to happen. If we check in, all the boxes of our sensory definition of "hunger" are getting ticked.
So even if the drive to action is some social habit - the very human thing of stopping to eat because that is what the clock tells us to do - we still psychologise the whole affair and say, we eat because we felt hungry.
Quoting John
It is not as if there are no internal sensations to speak of. Our bodies are suffused with receptors. But then as SX points out, our embodied sense of self is still very much a plastic construction. We can feel a rubber hand as an extension of ourselves. The "mirror neuron" research is wildly overplayed as the neuro-reductionist secret of human self-awareness, but it does also show how we can empathetically feel the actions or reactions of others as if they were literally part of our "selves".
So yes, primary awareness has structure. It is divided into promptings versus their satisfactions. There is a self that is a collection of promptings and the world that is its satisfactions (and frustrations).
But human self-awareness is a whole new level of experience-structuring. We now represent to ourselves our promptings as a class of things in themselves. We say "I" ate the meat because I was "hungry". We no longer just eat the meat without further thought. We can provide a socially acceptable justification in ways that imply we have the further thing of willed controlled over our own desires.
I'll go through the rest of your response later, but I wanted to address this because you've misunderstood what I meant. When I said external physical effect (in males) I meant an erection, which is required to complete the act of sex. And sexual hunger is what causes the erection.
Isn't this just a projection of an overly mechanistic model of causality on to the reality of the situation?
Where is the hunger beyond the throbbing of your penis? Does it really make sense to say a mental event is the cause of the physical event rather than that the mental event is an awareness of that physical event?
Or better yet - given you likely have no causal theory to connect mental and physical events in the first place - we start again all over and build accounts of experience/reality on a more generic causal foundation (like semiosis).
As in:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
MU wants to cut the link between sexual hunger and sex. But without the physical manifestation of the sexual hunger, you cannot complete the sex act.
It mostly all boils down to bad phrasing most likely - we simply lack good language for describing these things in philosophically rigorous way.
But don't we routinely make the joke that men think with their cocks. When it throbs, it is showing it has a mind of its own. So who is feeling the sexual hunger here and acting on it? Your penis-self or your brain-self?
Anyway, I felt MU did pull out a critical point in showing that we can eat out of socialised habit rather than felt desire. And that looked to strike to the heart of whatever it is that TGW might be saying - whatever that really was.
As far as I take it, the charge that 'oh you just don't like mystery' is literally no different to what proponents of UFOs, ghosts and shamanism would say. It's the perpetual fallback of every mystic and peddler of crystal healing from time immemorial and sides with an ideology of ignorance that is both ethically and politically compromised. I mean OK, this sounds harsh - it is harsh - but that's just honestly the level at which I see these sorts of claims about subjectivity and self-consciousness operating. Perhaps we're just ships in the night, perhaps you think this is incredulous, but I guess at some point the spade's just turned.
But I've never claimed it wasn't a 'production,' whatever that might mean. My claim was simply that people are separated in such a way as not to brook, ultimately, complete understanding of one another, and a kind of soft, empirical solipsism prevails, because there is no universal place in which everything comes together and no one world that can be explained by a single field of interacting mechanisms. There are, in other words, gaps that can't be filled. Whether consciousness is a 'production' or not is a separate issue from this: one might think it is, or is not. I tend to think it is, but in such a way that eludes understanding – not for mystical or brute reasons, but for quite principled ones I've tried to outline here. If you think about the notion that we know ourselves in the same way as we know others, really think about it, I'm not sure how you'll be able to maintain it with intellectual honesty. For one thing, if it were true, it'd sure be hard to tell which one of these external things we were!
I also think you're overvaluing the epistemic import of science, but maybe that would take us too far afield.
Quoting StreetlightX
So, am I right in characterizing your position as something like the following:
-Your position evokes some notion of mystery
-People who believe in UFOs and shamanism invoke some notion of mystery
-Therefore, your position is like positions (such as believing in UFOs and shamanism) to a significant enough extent that it is worth dismissing out of hand on pre-rational grounds, these grounds presumably being something like, 'do not brook what does not allow of explanation (possibly on some circumscribed ground within my philosophical school)?'
If this is not a fair characterization, what is wrong with it? If it is, in what way is 'oh you just don't like mystery' not a completely fair assessment of it?
I'm not sure that, even if I were to fall on your rhetorical sword, I'd be that offended – there are worse epithets than 'shaman,' and I've never been much of a 'true believer' in the sort of implicit positivism that seems to be the underlying appeal here. And I don't feel the sting of the moral/political charges that come with it either – the names don't hurt me, because I don't in my heart of hearts actually believe I'm guilty of anything untoward or unenlightened. If you do, then okay: I don't begrudge the believers their own beliefs, but only ask that they leave me alone in unbelief.
The interesting point here is that the penis per se, is not throbbing for anything in particular. So I would say sexual desire is something far more complex than the mere throb of the knob (sorry, couldn't resist a bit of schoolboy humour O:)).
In the sense you are talking about, yes. For something to unknowable means it doesn't have a meaning in experience. It is that which is beyond experience. Something which cannot possibly mean in experiential terms. Not even as something "unknown" or "beyond description." It's equivalent to the "world outside experience" which the immaterialist derides others for (supposedly) supposing.
The unknown and mystery only function when there is something which might be known. In either case, their significance is defined the the experientially thing to meaning which someone is missing out on, whether that be how some part of the world works, what another person is feeling, what happened in the past, what's going to happen in the future or even what's occurring in the present.
If there to be something which cannot be known, which is outside all possible experience, then there cannot be anything of significance. There is really nothing anyone is missing out on. You are caught proposing this thing which is not of experience and has no impact on anyone's life. Such "mystery" is nothing more than an appeal that we are explained by something outside our experience, as if we were defined by something beyond what's experientially significant.
Good, I prefer it that way.
No it's not the 'oh it's all mysterious' that gets me, its more like in the face of: 'look what we can say if we take this into account, and this, and this, and that'; only to have someone say 'naaaah, mysterious.'
To move to more interesting, philosophical ground, I don't think my position commits me to saying that there can be 'complete understandings of one another'. Indeed, one of the more interesting ramifications of the kind of thing I'm promoting is that we don't even have complete understandings of ourselves. The fact that the self is differentially constituted out of a trans-personal ground means that we always retain a constitutive relation to that ground, one that pretty much by definition exceeds us in ways which we cannot ever fully master. If it applies to the 'other', it applies to 'me'.
If I were to say that some position or another is 'radical', this would be it, because it affirms not just some sort of epistemological limit to our understanding, but an ontological one: the so-called 'mystery' is 'built in', naturalized from the very beginning, as it were. To use a quip of Zizek's: "the reality I see is never “whole” — not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it."
I relate to this, for what it's worth. We strive toward such a universal place, but the smallest unit of meaning is, in a sense, the unique personality as a whole. And what is explanation but postulated necessity that's cashed as a rule for action, in order to produce pleasure and avoid pain?
But I haven't said anything of the sort. I've given my reasons for believing what I believe in detail. I don't see your characterization of the way the conversation has gone as accurate.
Quoting StreetlightX
I don't see how that's a ramification of your position. It seems like it could be amenable to many sorts of positions. The OP was about a much more specific topic.
Quoting StreetlightX
The metaphor of a stain is telling here though isn't it? As if there were an epistemic ideal with a wrinkle in it. I think what I am saying is different: there there is nothing there to stain. I don't really have much sympathy with ontology, and epistemological limits are not limits of talent or transcendental limits, but limits of power and relevance. All around are things that you won't ever understand, that don't care about you and that you don't care about. And moreover that what is important is not my inclusion, but what is other than me. The self as a hole as opposed to a whole is very old (and it weirdly, even in your formulation, gives a super-important placement to oneself – and notice also the upset coming from subjectivity again). The kind of incompleteness I have in mind isn't so banal as to be reduced to or driven by me.
I think that a consequence of Cyrenaic epistemology is that we don't even strictly speaking see anything in the classical Aristotelian sense. That to me is the interesting thesis.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
What is this other than the insistence that, to the extent I can allow anything to mean anything, it must mean something to me and so on my terms? If you have no sympathy for that all-seeing impulse, then the appeal of this falls away.
The proponents of "mystery" are the ones always seeking an explanation. For them, it's never enough to describe (or not describe) something some particular thing (i.e. have incomplete knowledge). They are always seeking a reason for why a specific description applies. What ever we might say about the world, it's not enough. There always has to be a "mystery" behind it.
In the face of not knowing everything (e.g. only one person, a limited part of oneself, only individual states of the world), they run to "mystery." I might say, for example, that I know my friend is feeling sad. An instance of incomplete understanding, which only grasps (to one level or another) one feeling my friend is. What does the proponent of "mystery" (i.e. you) say? That I can't have this instance of knowledge because I don't know everything about my friend.
Supposedly, they are in a separate realm which I can know nothing about merely because I don't know everything about them. They (supposedly) become a "a mystery."
"Mystery" is an attempt at universal explanation. When people appeal to it, they are trying to bring all the separate pieces of knowledge under one thought, such that if we say "mystery" we finally have enough to understand everything in one thought. It is to run from incomplete knowledge or understanding.
Not at all. Part of what makes something mysterious is that the mechanism behind it is not know, and so there are infinite ways, not one, for something to be mysterious. Mystery is a negative term insofar as it only disavows its amenability to me. To insist that everything must be completely explicable to or by me, on the other hand, is to always demand further explanation.
It takes a certain kind of pathology to insist that one knows or can know everything there is to know about someone else's sadness.
No-one said it was explicable to you or that it must be. To say anything could be known is not to insist that it is known. People never know about a whole lot of things. To claim anything could be known is not in conflict with people never knowing about a whole lot of stuff.
You already insisted that in saying there was something unknown. It's meaningful to you even if you never find out about it-- "that thing (with a meaning) I do not know." Sure it a "mystery," but only in the sense that you aren't aware of it, not because it cannot possibly be known.
This is what I mean about "mystery" acting as the universal explanation. You weren't willing to just say: "I don't know that, but maybe someone else does."--i.e. it might be known, but I do not know it. To insist that everything be completely explicable to you is not required at all.
Your lack of knowledge had to be "explained." What you just don't have (an understanding of what you don't know) is equated with "mystery," so you can proclaim to know something about it (even though you don't know it at all). You are unwilling to have incomplete knowledge. It's always "further explanation or bust."
This is where we meet the vagueness of the external/ internal boundary. I don't see how an erection is external. My penis is part of myself, just like my hands, feet, lungs, and heart. Why would you single out the penis as part of yourself which is external?
In any case, other than through the means of imagination, the erection is caused by awareness of an external thing, not by an awareness of an internal pain of deficiency. That is the position I am arguing. The pain of deficiency is caused by failure to satisfy.
Quoting Baden
Well that's the point, isn't it? There is a divide here, it's the inversion of the is/ought divide, a divide between what is desired and what is the case. We cannot proceed logically from X is desired, to the premise that there is a deficiency of X, because we cannot even say that a desire for X is necessarily recognized as a desire for X. What if the desire for X is recognized as a desire for Y? Having a sexual desire does not mean that you are aware that you have a desire for sex, nor does it mean that you are aware of a deficiency of sex, because this would require that you know that the erection is a desire for sex. That's why we have sex ed. in school. You and TGW want to jump this chasm, to proceed on the premise that if you have an erection, you are aware that you have a desire for sex.
Quoting JohnThat's the idea, young boys play with themselves, their hands play the role of the external objects which cause arousal. They are not aware that a hard on is a desire for sex.
The penis is classified as an "external sex organ" (for obvious reasons). I didn't just pluck that out of the air. Of course, it's not external to myself in that it's part of my body but it's a part where the physical manifestation of the sex drive is obviously apparent.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The awareness is a desire for sex / the sexual hunger is a form of awareness. If it wasn't, it wouldn't work too well. Evolution may not know what it's doing but it ain't stupid. So, you're still a long way from solving the problem of my paradoxical sex life. I guess I may have to ask Dr. Phil.
I still haven't found this paradox you are referring to. The problem appears to be that you are incorrectly describing your erection as "desire for sex". It is not, and you are invalidly proceeding from the described situation, "having an erection", to the conclusion of "desire for sex". To exemplify this invalid procedure, we could explicate completely what "having an erection" actually means, and what "desire for sex" actually means, and find that there is a huge gap between these two. You assume that there is no difference between these two, and this causes your apparent paradox.
Seems like there are "vitality effects" which just randomly occur, in nature, not within a self, or in a particular location where there is a thinking being which has established an internal/external differentiation, but there are just random occurrences of vitality effects, and therefore "experience", around the world.
This makes sense.
If we only had self reference we would not be able to define self.
It would be logically impossible.
You have to have an "other" or reference to self is ill defined.
That is to say if there is no other, then self has no meaning.
There is also the matter of theory of mind tests that young children, and autistic children later on, are unable to pass, that apparently require some degree of self-consciousness (the ability to recognize one's own memories and perceptions, and the difference between 'what I know' and what 'I don't know'), but evidence struggle with the notion that other people have analogous self-consciousness. This shows that other-consciousness develops at some ontogenetic stage, and probably at a later stage than self-consciousness.
Children also show a telling pattern when mastering first and second person pronouns. On the production side, they master the first person pronoun before the second. On the comprehension side, they master the second before the first. In other words, children learn to recognize themselves as referents of pronouns before recognizing an other or addressee, even when grammatically they have mastered the discourse function of both the first and second person. In other words, the grammatical category appears not to be missing, only the psychological category of an other – the first and second person make sense just fine, but only when the child understands itself to be the reference, as author or addressee.
I think this can be accommodated by the ideas articulated in the OP, with some modification. It would require taking into account the plasticity of brain development, in which neurons 'wire' differently depending on the developmental history of the organism. To the extent that feral children lack the chance to learn self-other distinction through interaction with other people, objects become bulwark against with all interaction becomes measured, and the loss of brain plasticity through age makes it harder for other people to be recognized as others after a certain time. It's a matter of taking a longer term view upon developmental history than the OP accommodates for, which largely deals with the 'ideal' case of a very plastic, young mind.
I posted a thread on autism not to long ago which jibes with much of what I wrote here too, and the case of grammar is neither here nor there I think, but I realize I'm not going into brusque with these last two points.
Quoting The Great WhateverOf course, for the child, it's all about "myself", what "I" need. So "I" might be learned prior to "you". But this doesn't indicate that the child does not recognize the mother as the one fulfilling the needs, prior to recognizing the needs themselves. As I argued earlier, the act which satisfies the need (involving external object) is recognized before the need itself is apprehended.
In many cases, "mommy" or "daddy" is the child's first word, not "I" or the baby's name, so obviously you're barking up the wrong tree.
Case studies have been done with naturally occurring feral children that are the result of neglectful parenting. You can feed a child without speaking to it or cuddling it.
Still skeptical, and you cannot say that feeding a child, and providing the necessities of life is not "significant interaction with others". That is contradiction.
You should recognize that your argument makes absolutely no sense. The child is fed, and given the necessities of life, by other human beings. Your claim appears to be that the child goes on to learn how to supply itself with food and the necessities of life, without ever having noticing the existence of those who previously provided it with food.
Yes, I think that it is fair to say, in terms of ordinary parlance, that your animals recognize you. It is logically fair to say as well if it is fair to say that they cognize you in the first place. In fact cognition seems to be interdependent with re-cognition; one cannot exist without the other. But then the question becomes a more subtle: What icounts as cognition?
Is linguistic ability necessary for the sort of cognition that requires that the re-cognizer conceives of the re-cognized as a separate entity exterior to itself and/or is merely 'picking out' of the re-cognized as a kind of bare gestalt "affordance" 'to-be-responded-to' sufficient to qualify as what we would call 'recognition'? It seems that something like that must be the foundation, in any case.
What counts as cognition, is being aware of, and this leads us to perception, sensation, and the external objects. That is what I've argued for the entire thread.
Quoting JohnClearly, linguistic knowledge is not necessary for an animal to recognize separate entities, like my pets recognize me. All this requires is sensation, perception, and the ability to apprehend one thing as distinct from another.
But now you want to change the subject, and discuss whether my pets recognize me "as a separate entity", this would require that the pet knows what "a separate entity" is, and that's a completely different question.
The point it that the cases are irrelevant to the question at hand.
This seems crazy. Other people's pain exists beyond what I can access, so how on earth is there no difference in kind between how I know my own pain and how I know yours? I would hazard its the complete opposite - rather than there being no difference, it's so different in kind to the point that it's basically impossible to understand another's pain from a first person perspective. Whereas I directly know my own, it inflicts itself upon me! It's immediate and inescapable. I cannot 'not know' my own pain, but I can certainly 'not know' another's.
I would think this fundamental difference in the way we know ourselves verses others is what actually makes others, others. Other people really are 'other' to us - we cannot access, experience, know, in principle, everything about them. They transcend us. Sure, this leads to doubts about solipsism - perhaps serious doubts (solipsism is not just some silly idea which can prima facie be rejected off hand - it's a fundamental philosophical issue), but that's whats required for others to actually be 'not me'.
People want to erase the gaping void between us - I suppose to get closer, but all you end up doing is erasing the actual 'otherness' of others in the process. I mean if you know and access everything that composes others, then in what sense do they have an existence beyond your own experience?
It's also fundamentally confused and flawed to try and ground consciousness within biological theories. Cells and brains and sensory organs are objects of consciousness - they're experiential. So you're trying to explain consciousness with it's very own objects. You have to basically posit that your sensory organs and brain are the cause of their own existence.
Science applies to things we perceive, not perception itself. That is, our brains and sensory organs do not give rise to our conscious experience (because if they did, then our brain - as something we consciously experience, would therefore give rise toitselfa)
I take Thomas Metzinger's work to be reductio ad absurdum argument for why its wrong to explain consciousness scientifically. If you take explaining consciousness using brains (and the mirror neurons therein) to its logic conclusion, you end up stuck in Thomas Metzinger's absurd little internal theatre as some onboard homunculus living in its own private world. Not to mention the crippling epistemic problems that plague the onboard homunculus/self-model.
If you try and explain the experience of self/others using mirror neurons, the logical conclusion is that the rest of conscious experience is also 'generated' by (or perhaps equal to) brain processes, and therefore the brain that produces consciousness (including of self and others) can't be the pink jello ones we think are in the head we experience with touch/sight etc, rather, our entire bodies and the world around us are entirely produced by an 'actual' brain in the 'real' world.
Basically if self/other consciousness is equal to, or produced by, mirror neuron functions, then mirror neurons aren't located within your head you experience. There's no actual brain within your head you touch, and the mirror neurons you use to explain your consciousness are epistemically cut off from yourself- existing beyond what you can access. How can you know a single thing about these neurons? They're noumena. Thomas Metzinger just assumes that a physical body models itself and it's surroundings internally in some epistemically magical way, so that from the position of the onboard self/world/others model, knowledge of the 'actual' world (and actual mirror neurons) existing beyond the model can be had. It makes no sense, and what does even mean to experientially model non-experiential noumena?
'Because i can be tricked into mistaking my hand for a rubber one, my hand, body, and the world around it, including other people, is entirely generated by, and exists as an onboard self/world model within, a physical brain existing within a world noumenal to what I have access to, yet I can know things about this world (such as, it gives rise to this model I exist as) because I (without epistemic justification) assume that an experiential model can in some magical way be veridical to a non experiential noumenal world which transcends said model.'
''There is no difference in kind between the experience of myself, and of others, because in an external world which transcends what I have access to, the very same physical neurons are involved in producing/causing both experiences. And the evidence for this is that when I look at (what is actually an internally generated, by a human physical brain, onboard model of) an MRI computer screen (existing within a noumenal world which transcends what I can access), I see the same area on the computer screen light up when (what is an internally generated private model of) a (physical) monkey (in the world transcendent to my experience) sees it's own hand, and when it sees (what for me is also an internally generated within a physical brain model of another physical monkey in the same transcendent physical world as the first physical monkey, along with the physical body and brain of the physical human which produces my experiential world which contains models of both monkeys and an MRI screen which i am presently being tricked through an evolutionary quirk into believing that both my body, the two monkeys, the MRI, and the entire world we all appear to share are not actual monkeys, MRI machines, human bodies and brains but rather, almost like a robot computer modelling it's surroundings, myself and everything around me is an onboard internal self/world model existing within the physical brain of a physical human which is in a world which epistemically transcends the experiential model that is my existence , which i perpetually mistake for being the real thing because the grand illusion is just so seamless except for when I'm tricked into mistaking a rubber hand for my experiential hand which exposes the whole grand illusion to myself!) another (physical) monkeys hand.''
It's a reductio, a domain/category error to a apply science to conscious experience itself. Science exploits the regular, sequential structure of the things within conscious experience. It doesn't work when you take it broader and try to apply it to the whole of conscious experience.
If consciousness is produced within a brain, then the brain that's producing your present conscious experience cannot be the brain you believe is within your head that you can feel, touch, and sense in other ways. This is because these sense experiences themselves must already be being produced by a brain. As in, you know about your head using sight, touch, etc, but sense experiences are produced by a brain, so your experience of your own body including it's head, is a product of brain functioning. Your lived body must therefore be a homunculus within an physical brain, and the world around you is merely an indirect private representation of the world beyond said brain. Basically if you hold that cells/brains give rise to conscious experience, then you can't logically locate those consciousness causing cells within your lived head (because your lived body is brainless!). Your lived head must itself be the function of cells within a brain, an experienced head/body/world within the physical brain of an actual physical human body in an external noumenal world.
This position is not only absurd, it also suffers from crippling epistemic issues. For example, from the position of being an onboard self model, how is it that you can know a single thing about the external world beyond the model/representation? How do you know there is physical neuronal brain cells causing your experience, when the part of reality those cells inhabit transcends your epistemic access?
And more conceptually, what does it even mean to speak of non-experiential brain cells? The only cells I know are the images/depictions used and described in the biological sciences - we talk about them Write about them, draw them, observe them in a microscope, posit they're existence, use them within our scientific theories and explanations - they're experiential, part of the lived world. So if we aren't talking about those cells, then what are we talking about?
Einstein said, 'If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.'
Neurologists have already proven that on their most fundamental level of their organization the mind and brain substitute for each other's jobs whenever one is malfunctioning and for greater efficiency and reliability. In other words, there is no clear dividing line between what is the mind and what is the brain because one without the other is a contradiction in terms. I know, it sounds silly to bring up neurological evidence in midst of a pissing contest.
You can look up the evidence for yourself, but all the indications are the mind and brain form the particle-wave duality of quantum mechanics and neurologists are about to go down the rabbit hole tracing all the pattern matching all the way into indeterminacy. Already Roger Penrose's theory has receive two experimental confirmations that quantum microwave induced vibrations are created in the axions or microtubules of the brain. What that means is the metaphysical reality and metaphorical reality are converging within the brain and self-awareness is being aware that you are never who you think you are and wonder remains the beginning of wisdom.