If you like, you might look into how neurology is basically destroying the idea of a 'unified' consciousness as well. I hang scare quotes around 'unified' as an allusion to Kant's Transcendental Unity of Apperception, which may or may not be integrally involved in the argument. If our minds are disjointed flowing streams of perceptions, memories, etc. that only find vague and short-lived focus, what does that say about individuality? Still, the presumed delusion of a singular observer in there is so very compelling, if for peace of mind at least.

Livejournal philosophers love to (mis)label me as an eliminativist when I want to find a naturalistic explanation for consciousness, but I just don't think it's a transcendental thing, let alone supernatural. If it was, at what point in our individual development would it 'spark' on? At what point in evolution? That sounds like nonsense to me. Not even LJ philosophers take seriously the idea of consciousness-at-conception except for panpsychists, and I'm certainly not one of those.

Don't read my recent post till you get yours worked out. We seem to be engaged in dharma combat over very similar but not identical opinions. Mine seems obvious and old to me, too.

You might want to check out "Totality & Infinity" by Emmanuel Levinas and "Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett. The latter's title says it all, and the former deepens the idea of metaphysical co-creation.

This all sounds rather species-centric, eh whot?

You could save yourself years of mentation by performing the following experiment: Ask someone nearby to kick you in the shin and shout "Thus I refute it!".
No seriously, I think you're on to something, I am reminded of a shape that tessellates. It only makes sense as part of a tiling, individually it's just some squiggle. On the other hand, there is no limit to the sorts of things that can assume such a shape, be part of the tiling and still be utterly individual in substance, color, weight, density etc.
There is this weird feeling I get when I read antique or similarly culturally remote texts, that comes from realizing that people can talk, act and feel about the world in wholly strange ways, and still be perfectly recognizable as human beings. There seems to be an essential archetype of consciousness that we share, but also, at the end of the day, we seem to be unable to transcend our individuality.

"What we carry, and call our individual consciousness, is a momentary summation of the history of consciousness and its emerging from non-consciousness. Stated this way, my thought -- which struck me the other day as unique, wise, and liberating -- seems sort of old and obvious."

It is, indeed, pure Hegelianism. It is present everywhere in our culture. In fact, what passes for Oriental religions in the West, if it is intellectualized immediate becomes Hegelian.

The difference between Hegel and earlier conceptions, as Gnostic or Hinduistic, is that he sees not so much a development of individual consciousness (which has no independent existence for Hegel), but the development of the (unversal) Mind into the final Absolute. Classical formulations, to the contrary, view the Absolute not only as the end, but primarily as the origin - and consider it to be unchanging.

Probably the best, if rather idiosyncratic, introduction to Hegel is Kojeve. According to Hegel, an Other, similarly to us, is simply another self-conscious instance of the fundamental basic being of the world. Both a Person and the Other are essentially the same, since both are Mind existing in the world. This Mind lacks in the beginning the self-consciousness which it must gain. This is the purpose of the world – it is the stage on which the Mind (which created the world) can gain first selfconsciousness and then absolute knowledge.

Hegel sees the origin of self-consciousness in Desire. Animal desires are directed towards material objects: food, water, body. Human desires are directed towards desires of others: I desire a desire of another. I want to be loved, or at least hated – I want to be “recognized”. This is, according to Hegel as interpreted by Kojeve, why men can appear only in society. Moreover, the human desire must overcome the animal desires; the strongest animal desire is a desire for life. Therefore: “Man’s humanity “comes to light” only in risking his life to satisfy his human Desire – that is, his Desire directed toward another Desire. Now, to desire a Desire is to want to substitute oneself for the value desired by this Desire. For without this substitution, one would desire the value, the desired object, and not the Desire itself. … In other words, all human, anthropogenetic Desire- the Desire that generates Self-Consciousness, the human reality – is, finally, a function of the desire for “recognition”. Therefore, to speak of the “origin” of Self-Consciousness is necessary to speak of a fight to the death for “recognition.”

Because, according to Hegel, all society starts with fight to the death in which the one who is ready to die will be the Master, and the other the Slave. And this can, perhaps, suggest the reason for the anger of Tea Party: they seem unwilling to be slaves.

In fact, this criticism of libertarianism is remarkable in its opennes. It is the criticism of the oldest tradition of the West, and it starts from a non-Western position.

It is identical to the criticism of Evangelicanism (the ultimate Western type of religion) as expressed by Orthodox Christians.

http://ochlophobist.blogspot.com/2010/05/against-personal-relationship-with-lord.html

It is a criticism of the West which could come from one of Russian conservatives. I, of course, agree with it entirely, but I am astonished.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300112887

I always thought that the mental revolution of 1968 goes in that direction, but to read that love-poem to the Government is really astounding:

"And here is the source of the great anger: because you are the source of my being, when our love goes bad I am suddenly, absolutely dependent on someone for whom I no longer count and who I no longer know how to count; I am exposed, vulnerable, needy, unanchored and without resource. "

"This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable."

What are we to do without the Tzar? "Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come you and rule over us".

"Oh, these rags and tags of other people's making! Would he ever be able to call his brain his own? Was there, indeed, anything in it that was truly his own, or was it simply an education?" --from the novel Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley

A friend of mine says that those towers are made out of real ivory.

I say he's wrong.

What's the scoop? Mammoth ivory? What?

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Rupert Sheldrake calls this morphic resonanace. Most of his theories have been debunked, but they're fun. Check out "The Presence of the Past."

I think a corollary of your theory would have to be that creativity is just a kind of randomness--the general consciousness individuals just carry interacts with some quicksilver principle in one or more of those individuals to form lots of mistakes in perception or cogitation, some infinitesimal percentage of which turn out to be evidently more correct than the received notions they slightly distort, then some of these get recorded, get inscribed in the general consciousness, expand it.

In which case why not call that randomness consciousness? It might have something to do with why 'we' feel we exist--it makes perfect sense for some John Crowley to feel he's John Crowley, on your premises, but how could it ever be you, since you can't exist? I.e. who is the you being fooled into thinking he is a you? "You"'d have to either be the entire universe funneled into John Crowley form, or some isolated drop of chaos trapped in the level. But wouldn't that be a self, however minimal?

You could reply that randomness is not a "self", it's just randomness. But I think one could defend the term by analogy with a bubble (all due respect), which is, however ephemeral, a legitimate thing in itself, despite its total constitution by the imprisoned gas and denser imprisoning substance.

We are something that happens to things, not things ourselves, granted. But that's at least something. And something that can die, unfortunately.

I think we should split the US into several units.

You guys can have the northeast.

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In reality the Phantom Captain is everthere. Someone will always be the Alpha, and that's ultimately the one who calls the shots. We like to think otherwise (in our black, existential turtle-necks), but in the end we defer to the Sully Sullenbergers whilst we languish and writhe in the throes of our latest weltanschaung.
Fuller was right, and B.F. Skinner was wrong and J.C. is the master on this ship.

The fact that you *do* think of Marx when thinking about science is sad and more than a bit frightening.

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This is a very interesting discussion going on here. Thank you for that. It's deeply resonant with the ongoing discussion and mentation we have with friends trying to define what it is to be human in light of darwinism. I have little to contribute, except maybe to point out at a concept of "extelligence" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extelligence) about which I recently read.

A little off topic here... (Incidentally, I'm not convinced you're meaningfully Hegelian here... but, in truth, I'm not convinced Hegel was Hegelian either.) So there's nothing particularly substantive about this post.

BUT: Is it possible to get a copy of one of your books autographed for a friend's birthday?

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