[lbo-talk] Self-Consciousness (was Re: Shakespeare)

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Mon Dec 10 23:59:48 PST 2007


Seems like it was about 30,000 years ago. That's about the date that people started to bury their dead and do cave art. But what you regally want to know is HOW they acquired the first person POV. Hey, I thought you were the Heideggerian. Me, the best story I know about this, although it doesn't mention neurotransmitters, is Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. We know ourselves through knowing others who know themselves through knowing us. That's a paraphrase of a famous sentence in the chapter on Self-Consciousness.

In some ways it doesn't matter that it's neurotransmitters that acquired them as long as whatever has them has enough complexity and carrying capacity, but also sufficiently similar physical characteristics to create thre kind of social and psychological relations that ultimately create self-consciousness. I'm that much of a functionalist (in the philosophy of mind, not the sociology sense): we could be made of something else and still have self-consciousness.

I don't go all the way with the functionalists who say that it is totally irrelevant what we are made of. The specific physical incarnation that we have matters in a deep sense: we are, in virtue of the kind of biological beings we are, social, sexual, mortal, mutually dependent, with tendencies towards hierarchy, aggression, and both solidarity and xenophobia. If we were immortal (or practically so, lived thousands of years, say), or asexual, or born with the physical and mental equipment in place to manage with years of dependence, we'd be very different kinds of critters. And the fact that we have neurotransmitters is actually probably relevant to all this.

But here I go, starting to fulfill my threat to not stop talking when I start on this. Bed now. This little 1st person POV needs a night's sleep.

--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:


>
> What I wanna know is when neurotransmitters acquired
> a
> first-person POV.
>
> --- Eubulides <paraconsistent at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
> > > On Dec 10, 2007, at 10:31 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> > >
> > >> But forward movement does require
> > >> getting rid of both the homonunculus and the
> > cartesian 'soul.'
> > >
> > > I don't think I disagree, but why? What's
> gained?
> > Doesn't it make us
> > > all seem like bots? Not that we aren't, but
> still.
> > >
> > > Doug
> >
> >
> > ============
> >
> > Neuroscientists got rid of homunculi a long time
> > ago.
> >
> > There is no necessity in deploying reductive
> > redescriptions of human
> > activity/behavior, nor is anything gained by
> > asserting that the brain makes
> > a mistake when the claim that 2 + 2 = 5 is made.
> As
> > if we could ever find
> > the guilty neurons. Or did the mitochondria do
> > it????????
> >
> > Ian
> > ___________________________________
> >
>
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> >
>
>
> Lyubo, bratsy, lyubo, lyubo, bratsy, zhit!
>
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>
>
>
>
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