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Consciousness is a social experience

coberst

Active Member
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.
 

Radio Frequency X

World Leader Pretend
While the self-grasping mind is learned, it is learned relative to will. This has the potencial of both virtue and vice. We must learn to become/remain both "I" and "Me" in the pursuit of a more united "Us". However, to sacrifice "I" is to sacrifice ones true individuality over to the group, which is a vice.
 

doppelganger

Through the Looking Glass
Radio Frequency X said:
We must learn to become/remain both "I" and "Me" in the pursuit of a more united "Us". However, to sacrifice "I" is to sacrifice ones true individuality over to the group, which is a vice.

And we also must pursue "us" as that individual. The virtue is the balance between the two. The vice is imbalance.
 

coberst

Active Member


I learned all I know about these matters from Becker’s book. This is all new stuff to me. I was educated as an electronics engineer and 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.”
 

michel

Administrator Emeritus
Staff member
This is perhaps tied in to an idea I toyed with some years ago.

I felt what you have posted and wondered about the 'flip-side'. I realize that everything in life is subject to how we place that aspect in a frame of reference; the "I" therefore is the most egoist of all forms of consciousnes.

When You (who are reading this) think about it, you call yourself "me"; to be truly polite to you and to give full respect, perhaps I should call me "You" and you "Me"; I have toyed with this thought, trying to put it into peractice with friends (thank goodness I do have some equally nutty and understanding friends).
 

PureX

Veteran Member
I don't fully accept this premise (as I understand it).

I agree that we discover ourselves from the outside, in. But the "selves" we are discovering are there, and are real, to be discovered. We are born with specific brain structures that produce specific kinds of thoughts and reactions, and which cause us to experience the world around us in specific ways - specific to us. We are further specified as individuals by the unique conditions and circumstance into which we are born. So that both our genetic structure and our environment predispose us to think and feel and react in ways that are unique to ourselves.

All this is in us to start with, and we are only discovering it through the reactions of others in our world, to us. We feel "X", and we do "Y" because we feel "X", and then we observe that mother responds to us with discouragement, or encouragement, or whatever. And in time we may come to identify feeling "X", and action "Y", BY mother's response to these. But "X" and "Y" were there to begin with.

Our identity is not really being given to us from the outside, it's just being recognized and understood using the outside as a sort of mirror. If a person were to grow up in isolation, he would still be who he is. Granted, he would not be much aware of himself as who he is, but he would be who he is, nevertheless.
 

Random

Well-Known Member
You could load the consciousness of all humanity into one person though. It would not them be a social experience, hypothetically speaking.
 

Random

Well-Known Member
Okay, I just murdered the thread by throwing the above in, didn't I? :eek: Sorry...hope someone picks up the slack...
 

doppelganger

Through the Looking Glass
Godlike said:
You could load the consciousness of all humanity into one person though. It would not them be a social experience, hypothetically speaking.

Who would do the loading? And why?
 

michel

Administrator Emeritus
Staff member
doppelgänger said:
Who would do the loading? And why?

That scenario is one (to my way of thinking) that would occurr at the end of time, when all the individual souls return to God and become one with him again.
 

Willamena

Just me
Premium Member
PureX said:
All this is in us to start with, and we are only discovering it through the reactions of others in our world, to us. ... Our identity is not really being given to us from the outside, it's just being recognized and understood using the outside as a sort of mirror. If a person were to grow up in isolation, he would still be who he is.
I think I understand most of it. The OP is about the "me" that is built up through discovery. If you think of it as a being that is composed bits of knowledge garnered by putting ourselves in relation to the world around us, you will see where the OP is coming from. It is necessary to distinguish between a "real self" (he who is) and an identitified self (who he is).

Our self-identity is that which we build up with those pieces of knowledge about ourself, all together composing an "Image of Self" or a "me" that I in turn present back to the world at large as "ego." The symbol "I" that linguistically represents the real self taking in the world from its perspective --that is one of those bits of knowledge gained from being in relation to the world around us. I am aware of myself.

Our consciousness, that is our ability to be aware of things, is what puts us in relation to the world around us. Without it, from our perspective there is no being.
 
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