From: hampday@earthlink.net
Date: Wed Jun 01 2005 - 18:06:49 BST
Hi Wim and Platt --
While you two are "leveling" Bo's SOL dissertation, I need to point out that
in every mention of Value there is a stated or implied reference to
"consciousness". So, in my simplistic (SOM) interpretation of this topic,
you're all really talking about subjective consciousness.
What fascinates me about conscious awareness is that, unlike qualia and
everything that constitutes intelligence (knowledge), consciousness is
proprietary to the self while its objects are external. Thus, we are all
"imaging" a universe presumed to be "out there" as proprietary knowledge,
and what we are dissecting, analyzing and evaluating is our private
perspective of that knowledge. The mystery, to me, is that these
proprietary images are sufficiently universal that we can all relate to them
in the same way.
I ran across a promotional excerpt from "The Art of Life: Body, Emotion, and
the Making of Consciousness" by Antonio Damasio, a Van Allen Distinguished
Professor and head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa
College of Medicine, and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute in La
Jolla, California. (I thought the title would appeal especially to Platt .)
The entire excerpt is accessible at http://www.science-spirit.org/index.php
What I've quoted below are three paragraphs dealing with the development of
proprietary consciousness from pre-conscious organic sensibility -- what Bo
probably means by "primitive intellectual". Whether or not you can
integrate Damasio's neurologically informed ideas into the Pirsig Values
heirarchy, I think you will find his perspective well worth reading.
______________________________________________________________
I suggest that the highly constrained ebb and flow of internal organism
states, which is innately controlled by the brain and continuously signaled
in the brain, constitutes the backdrop for the mind, and more specifically,
the foundation for the elusive entity we designate as self. I also suggest
that those internal states-which occur naturally along the range whose poles
are pain and pleasure, and are caused by either internal or external objects
and events-become unwitting nonviable signifiers of the goodness or badness
of situations relative to the organism's inherent set of values. I suspect
that in earlier stages of evolution these states-including all of those we
classify as emotions-were entirely unknown to the organisms producing them.
The states were regulatory and that was enough; they produced some
advantageous actions, internally or externally, or they assisted indirectly
the production of such actions by making them more propitious. But the
organisms carrying out these complicated operations knew nothing of the
existence of those operations and actions since they did not even know, in
the proper sense of the word, of their own existence as individuals. True
enough, organisms had a body and a brain, and brains had some representation
of the body. Life was there, and the representation of life was there, too,
but the potential and rightful owner of each individual life had no
knowledge that life existed because nature had not invented an owner yet.
There was being but not knowing. Consciousness had not begun.
Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must
add, of telling a story without words, the story that there is life ticking
away in an organism, and that the states of the living organism, within body
bounds, are continuously being altered by encounters with objects or events
in its environment, or, for that matter, by thoughts and by internal
adjustments of the life process. Consciousness emerges when this primordial
story-the story of an object causally changing the state of the body-can be
told using the universal nonverbal vocabulary of body signal. The apparent
self emerges as the feeling of a feeling. When the story is first told,
spontaneously, without it ever having been requested, and forevermore after
that when the story is repeated, knowledge about what the organism is living
through automatically emerges as the answer to a question never asked. From
that moment on, we begin to know.
I suspect consciousness prevailed in evolution because knowing the feelings
caused by emotions was so indispensable for the art of life, and because the
art of life has been such a success in the history of nature. But I will
not mind if you prefer to give my words a twist and just say that
consciousness was invented so that we could know life. The wording is not
scientifically correct, of course, but I like it.
_______________________________________________________________
Essentially yours,
Ham
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