Consciousness is a social experience

[coberst]

Consciousness is a social experience

 

A child’s symbolic action world is built from the outside in. We are sad because we cry; we do not cry because we are sad. I took a night course in acting and this is something I was taught. We were told to perform the action to induce the feeling. Only when we ‘look’ at our self do we know what is going on.

 

The child discovers first that s/he is a social product. Perhaps this will show us why we are so often mere puppets jerked around by alien symbols and sounds. Perhaps this is why we are so often blind ideologues (blindly partisan).

 

In order to separate the ego from the world it seems that the ego must have a rallying point. It must have a flag about which to rally. That flag is the “I”. The pronoun ‘I’ is the symbolic rallying point for the human’s ego; it is the precise designation of self-hood. It is concluded by those who study such matters that the ‘I’ “must take shape linguistically”. The self or ego “is largely a verbal edifice”.

 

Everything friendly is “me” everything hostile or unfriendly is “not-me”. “Speech, then, is everything that we call specifically human, precisely because without speech there can be no true ego. Every known language has the pronouns “I”, “thou”, and “he”, or verb forms which convey these reference points.” The large central control brain is there before language, apparently in a potential state just waiting to be galvanized into directivness by wedding itself to the word “I”. This wedding made possible the unleashing of a new type of creature to take command of the planet.

 

“The “I” signals nothing less than the beginning of the birth of values into a world of powerful caprice…The personal pronoun is the rallying point for self-consciousness.” The wedding of the nervous ability to delay response, with the pronoun “I”, unleashed a new type of animal; the human species began. The ‘I’ represents the birth of values.

 

Upon the discovery of the “I” the infant human becomes a precise form, which is the focus of self-control. The creatures previous to the arrival of humans in the chain of evolution had an instinctive center within itself. When our species discovered the “I” and its associated self-control center a dual reality occurred. “The animal not only loses its instinctive center within itself; it also becomes somewhat split against itself.”

 

Becker, the author of “The Birth and Death of Meaning”, notes that Kant was perhaps the first to impress upon us the importance of the fact that the infant becomes conscious first of itself as a “me” and then only as “I”. This order of discover has been shown to be universal. We all discover in order “mine”, “me” and only then do we discover “I”. Becker’s book is the source of the ideas and quotes in this post.

 

The fact that all humans establish themselves first as an ‘object of others’ before becoming the CEO of the self is vitally important if we wish to understand the human condition.

[HydrogenBond]

I sort of agree with that. There are two parts to the human personality, the inner self (the natural we) and the ego (I). The inner self is the natural part of humans that integrates us to nature, with the ebb and flow of the collective part of the evolutionary process. The ego or I places itself in the center of its own little universe, as though it is the center of the own evolution. Society is in the middle, trying to form a compromise between the two, that allows the dual evolution to exist side by side.

[coberst]

I am getting my info from Becker's book. This is all new stuff for me. I was educated as an electronics engineer and then later studied philosophy.

 

Becker goes on to say:

 

A container schema is a gestalt (a functional unit) figure with an interior, an exterior, and a boundary—the parts make sense only as part of the whole. Container schemas are cross-modal—“we can impose a conceptual container schema on a visual scene…on something we hear, as when we conceptually separate out one part of a piece of music from another…This structure is topological in the sense that the boundary can be made larger, smaller, or distorted and still remain the boundary of a container schema.”

 

We have discovered that the child becomes conscious of the ‘self as an acting agent’ in a symbolic world from the outside-in. The child discovers the ever present container schema early in life. The child learns the full significance of its acts from the world outside the container which is the self. From the consciousness of these knowledge fragments results coalescence, this coalescence is “mind”. This self-reflexivity makes possible a depth of experience at the cost of losing our animal directness. The child’s first identity is as an object, a social product.

 

There develops here a real dualism—the first identity is largely symbolic whereas the child’s first experiences of its powers are organic. Energetic movement gained through excitement and perception provides another sense of self. “He registers self-experience mostly when his own executive actions have been blocked: it is then that he has to ‘take the role of the other’ to see what his act “means”. The more blockage, the more the sense of the self is symbolic…If the child has been allowed to gain an “organismic identity” by relatively free actions and self-controlled manipulation of his world, he has more strength and resilience toward the vagaries of social symbol systems.”