Well, as Hegel emphasizes, consciousness isn't self-consciousness. I am not sure that just having experiences without any sense of self is enough for a first person POV, but if it is, certainly consciousness, in the sense of having experiences of other things, is a lot older than 30,000 years. Hundreds of millions of years is more like it; dinosaurs certainly had experiences. Did they have a first person pov?
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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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