I suspect the first-person POV goes back a lot longer than 30,000 years ago. As in, tens of millions. Consciousness isn't the thematic knowledge that one os having experiences, or even that there is a difference between oneself and other stuff (a problematic matter for a Heideggerian in itself), but the simple fact that you have experiences at all.
Time to go to work!
--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
Lyubo, bratsy, lyubo, lyubo, bratsy, zhit!
ËÞÁÎ, ÁÐÀÒÖÛ, ËÞÁÎ, ËÞÁÎ, ÁÐÀÒÖÛ, ÆÈÒÜ!
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