Consciousness is a work in process.
Each of us becomes conscious in relation with those around them. In a medium created by those before them.
Becoming conscious means figuring out about things. Not merely acknowledging their presence – dogs also do it, they don’t bang into close doors but once. Becoming conscious means attaching meaning to things. Figuring out their relative importance, how they work, ‘what’s in it for us’, etc, etc., etc. …
How is this done?
I don’t remember how I did it and I never really understood how my son had done it.
What I know is that it was a gradual process. He was able to communicate with us, his parents, way before he had learned to speak. He may not have had the concept of hunger but he was able to tell us he wanted to eat. What toy he wished to play with. And so on.
I grew up in a communist country. Born into a secular family. My relatives went to church, very rarely, because other people did it. On very specific occasions. God wasn’t present in our house.
At some point during my early adolescence I came across a bible. I had already learned, at school, about religion being bad for the people. I had also learned, from my family, that some people do believe in God. I decided to learn for myself. By myself. And started to read the book. I stooped when I reached the Book of Numbers. Too boring. But Genesis had fascinated me. Not that different from the Greek myths I had already read by that time.
I few years later, for whatever reason, I started again. Reading the bible. This time I finished it. Somewhere in the middle, I was wondering. What if this book tells not the story about how the world had been made by somebody? But the story about us discovering the world around us. At first, we had learned to speak. To use words. Logos. To speak about the difference between light and dark. Water and dry land. Heaven and Earth. Man and Woman. And so on.
At some point, one of us -one of our ancestors more exactly – had had an intuition. Discussed it with their peers. Discarded it. Or not. Somebody else, or maybe the same person, had another intuition. Discussed it with their peers. And so on.
In time, those discussions had built a specific understanding of the world. Of their world. The world of those people. Their weltanschauung. The paradigm they were living in.
As life went on, generations and generations of people living in that paradigm had slowly changed the world they were living in. Some changes had been meant to happen, others just happened. In time, that world was no longer the same with that in which the ancestors, the ‘Founding Fathers’, had developed the ‘original Weltanschauung’.
Somebody had an intuition. Discussed it with their peers. Discarded it. Or not. Somebody else, or maybe the same person, had another intuition. Discussed it with their peers. And so on.
Another weltanschauung was born. The world was very much the same as that of ‘last year’ but for them, for our new ancestors, it had changed dramatically.
Jupiter Tonans had been replaced by God. Or Thor… But the lightning had remained the same!
Now, that I’m preparing to wrap up, I must explain – for those of you who do not speak German, the ‘Entwicklung’ thing.
I first came across this word while learning to develop B/W film. That was how we made pictures 50 years ago. We put film into cameras, shot it, developed it, enlarged the image, projected it on photographic paper and, again, developed the image. In Romania, we used East German film, paper, chemicals. And the German word for developing something – from image to a lot of other things, is … “Entwicklung”.
Same thing here. The world is here. Laid out in front of us. All that’s left for us to do is to make sense of it. With our limited consciousness.
We learn about what we call reality by
analyzing the information we acquire through our senses.
We.
We, the human people.
We, the conscious human people.
We, because nobody has ever been able to become conscious – as in aware of their own self, by their own. Alone…
Learn.
We are not the only ones who are able to learn.
Our dogs learn our ways. And we continuously learn about more and more living organisms being able to learn. And to remember what they have learned. To fine tune their behavior according to the circumstances into which they happen to live.
What we call reality.
First and fore-most, reality is a concept. We call it ‘reality’. And many other names…
Believers call it ‘god’, scientists call it ‘physical world’ and the scientists who happen to believe are convinced that by studying the reality they will eventually divine the will of the Lord.
The believers being convinced that whatever exists, is here because the Lord wished it into existence.
So, basically, the main difference between the believers and the nonbelievers is the fact that the believers are convinced that the ‘out-there’, the ‘source of it all’, has a conscience of it’s own. A will of it’s own…
By analyzing.
We have been able to build our conscience – our ability to ‘observe ourselves while observing other phenomena’ (Maturana, 2005), because we have a big enough brain, the ability to share complex and meaningful information using language and the ability to put in practice some of our wishes/thoughts through the use of our hands.
At a certain point in its evolution, human conscience has become sophisticated enough to need explanations. It was no longer satisfied with mere ‘connections’ – If… then…, it had started to wonder about why-s. ‘Why does this happen as it does?’ ‘Will it happen again tomorrow?’
Using our by then already established ability to speak up their minds, our ancestors shared among themselves these ‘anxieties’. Discussed them around the fire-place. Started to analyze. The reality. What they perceived to be real. The ‘thing’ which continuously generates the circumstances in which we – all of us, have to make do.
Information.
In order to analyze, the analyst – each and everyone of us, has to separate the meaningful information from the surrounding noise. In order to do that, we have started by coining the very concept of (useful/meaningful) information. As being different from ‘noise’. The difference consisting, obviously, in us being able to find its use and/or pinpoint its meaning.
We acquire.
Information is acquired on an individual basis. For an ‘event’ to become information, it has to be ‘noticed’ by an individual. It has not only to be sensed but also identified as useful/meaningful. Different from ‘noise’.
Which process of identification implying methods which had been agreed upon by the members of the community. Music would be a good example of how various groups of people make the difference between sublime/abhorrent and white-noise. While ‘use of language’ is a very poignant example of how people can both share information and mislead one-another.
Senses.
Everything that we know, had entered our mind through our senses.
Before setting it aside as information or discard it as noise, we have to get in contact with it as a sensation.
Or as a thought. A conjecture. A few pieces of information which put together have given birth, inside our individual mind, to new information. To ‘something else’ which passes the threshold into being information. At least according to our own mind…
Which transforms our minds into our famous sixth sense.
In the sense that our individual minds are capable of building ‘sensations’ on their own. Starting from information that has already been stashed in our memory.
Which brings us to the third reality.
We have – in the sense that we have agreed upon its existence, the surrounding reality. The things we – as in most of us, consider to be real. The mountains we climb, the air we breathe, the pebbles which happen to sneak into our shoes. The reality which is being studied by science. The reality to which we have access through our senses. Our minds and our sense enhancers – scientific instruments, included.
We also have the ‘out-there’. The things we know we’ll never be able to grasp. During our lives! The things our followers might be able to figure out…
And each of us has their own reality.
Individually built even if ‘carved’ from the same (type of) material as the reality shared by the rest of us.
Individually built even if using more or less the same (culturally accrued) methods.
Individually built even if neither of us is alone.
H.M. Romesin, 2005, The origin and conservation of self‐consciousness: Reflections on four questions by Heinz von Foerster
A planned after-thought.
Rumsfeld is both wrong and right. There are unknown unknowns but they are no longer unknown since we speak about them…
Which actually proofs the limits of our languaging.
The imprecision of the manner in which we gather, share and analyze information.
– In which direction?
– I thought we were talking about a glass ceiling, not a glass bottom…
You see, we have to deal here with the difference between depth and thickness.
A ‘coat of paint’ has a certain thickness – we know where it starts and where it ends, while a sea has a certain depth. We know it’s there, we know where it starts – at the surface of the water, but we’re never exactly sure where it ends. How deep it actually is!
Another way to put this would be to compare the depth of human consciousness with the thickness of the cerebral cortex.
The depth of the reality we perceive using our brain and the thickness of the cerebral tissue where this perception takes place.
The depth of the reality we, humans, have built during our history inside the relatively shallow portion of the Earth where we feel at home.
We use a small number of phonemes to communicate among ourselves.
A relatively small number of words to convey hugely complicated concepts.
Two digits, 0 and 1, to build artificial intelligence… inside a wafer thin ‘slab’ of doped silicon.
– OK, enough introduction. How about making in clear what you really meant?
A glass ceiling or a glass bottom?
Whether it is a glass ceiling or a glass bottom is a matter of perspective.
A matter of where you are when looking at it. Above or below.
The only thing which really matters being the fact that you see it despite of it being made of glass.
Despite it being transparent.
Transparent to our eyes but not to our conscious mind.
– But if it’s already transparent, why is it such a big thing to break through it?
We already know what’s behind/above it…
Seeing is not the same thing as knowing… just as 0 and 1 scribbled on a computer chip is not enough to make an intelligent computer…
The title is misleading enough to become an abomination!
What Leschziner said during the interview was:
“what we term reality is entirely a construct of our nervous system.”
Guy Leschziner is right.
And the guy who wrote the title is an a$$hole!
In the sense that for that person, ratings – a.k.a. ‘money’ – are far more important than presenting an as accurate as possible version of reality…
Hence the public belief that ‘media are not to be trusted’.
A reality created by the greed with which we, as a cultured species, attempt to transform everything into money…., power…, or any other kind of ‘influence’/relevance we happen to covet….
http://perflensburg.se/Berger%20social-construction-of-reality.pdf
My father uttering this, again, convinced me to share with you the interim conclusion of my informal study. “The consequences of our limited conscience”
Consciousness is a ‘phase of matter‘ which has an intrinsic characteristic.
One which closely resembles inertia.
The prevalent tendency of consciousness is to preserve itself, even if this means putting the individual hosting it in mortal danger.
Doesn’t make much sense?
How many of you still smoke? Or did smoke? Had an occasional ‘one drink too many?’ Carry around a couple of ‘extra pounds’? Used drugs?
All these knowing too well that ‘it’s bad for you’?
I challenge you to remember the arguments you used to quell your worries.
More precisely, the arguments used by your conscience to quell its worries…
‘I’ll give them up ‘sometimes’.’
‘One cannot hurt me.’ Much…
‘My grandad lived for almost a century and smoked to his last day.’
See what I mean?
Our consciousness is more concerned about keeping itself ‘together’ rather than preserving the well being of the host it inhabits. On which it depends. For its dear life…
It actually prefers to lie to itself rather than face the reality.
Until the shit hits the fan…
And sometimes no amount of ‘wake-up calls’ can do the trick. I know a few people with cirrhosis of the liver who continue to drink – ‘I’m already dead, why bother?’ and a few people who cough their lungs out in the morning and go on smoking.
Same thing in politics.
After an individual had made up his mind…. it is very hard for him to change his opinion. It would mean to accept that last time he had been wrong. That he had been duped.
So he keeps looking for the flimsiest reason to continue on the old path …
Or, if the guy/party he had chosen doesn’t have any chance… he prefers to stay at home, rather than to vote for a looser. Which would mean he had knowingly placed himself on the loosing side. Unacceptable.
I’m sure you’ve already figured out what I want to convey.
It is rational to consider that one cigarette won’t kill you. But it’s unreasonable to smoke. Period.
It is rational to consider that one glass won’t kill you. If you don’t drink and drive, of course…. But it’s unreasonable to drink yourself to death!
It’s rational to stay at home if ‘your team’ has no chance to accede to power.
But your staying home doesn’t spell the whole truth. By staying home you transmit the message that you don’t care. That you are satisfied with what’s going on around you. Or too ‘tired’ to care…
Which practically gives carte blanche to whomever gets elected!
‘If so many of them do not care about their own well being, why should I? Let me take care of my own people and to hell with the rest’.
See what I mean? Not everything our consciousness feels good about is actually good for us.
We really need to get our heads out of our asses if we want to look forward.
Nothing will ever happen unless:
– There’s enough, and suitable, space.
– There are enough, and suitable resources. In that place, of course.
– Something starts it.
Trivial?
Good!
What you’ve just read being trivial for you only means you’ve already figured this out.
That you cannot master anything
– which happens outside your consciousness,
– you don’t really understand,
– you haven’t set your mind on.
The quote comes right out of an article written by David Berlinski and Juan Uriagereka. Never heard of any of them.
Reading that article, I remembered the reason for which I tend to avoid modern philosophers. Or linguists. Hard to discern which is which, anyway…
Let me return to the quote itself.
“An explanation for the extraordinary fact that a Japanese child raised in Paris will acquire French, but not Japanese, and a French child raised in Tokyo, Japanese”.
Read this to anybody who isn’t familiar with the notion of ‘Chomsky’. You’ll get a laugh and a troubled look. ‘What’s so extraordinary here?!? People will always learn whatever language is spoken around them… but only if they come in contact with the ‘exterior’ world!’
Home-school those Japanese/French children in Paris/Tokyo while preventing them from getting in touch with anybody else but their immediate family/trainers and they’ll learn only whatever language(s) their trainers/family will have chosen for them.
As an aside, what does Chomsky mean by ‘French’ and or ‘Japanese’?
‘Genetically’ French/Japanese? What if one parent is French/Japanese and the other German/Korean? What will the child be? Like the father or like the mother?
‘Culturally’ Japanese/French? According to their ‘mother’ tongue?!?
Forget it…
“Universal Grammar, Chomsky concluded, must be a species-specific characteristic of the human race, biologically encoded, genetically transmitted”.
‘Species specific characteristic of the human race’… told you these guys have a lot of humor… or, maybe, they cannot make up their minds…
What are we, humans?!? A species or a race?
OK, let me move forward.
Hidden underneath all this ado, there is a piece/gem of ‘harsh’ reality.
The simple fact that if/when we want to, we are able to understand each-other. To communicate with each-other. To exchange ideas. To trade meaning.
And there is indeed something species-specific about this ability of ours. Nobody else has it… according to our present knowledge about the world, anyway.
‘Nobody else has it’… yeah, right… as if you hadn’t watched, time and time again, two dogs ‘greeting’ each-other in the park.
OK, those dogs were interacting in highly unnatural circumstances. Walked by people, in a people infested environment …
Fact is that all animals have ‘procedures’ for interacting with other animals. Belonging to the same species or belonging to other species. Some of the procedures being inbred while others had been acquired trough learning or training.
Cats, for instance, have an inbred ‘procedure’ for chasing anything which might become a prey but need to be taught by their mothers how to finish the chase. How to kill that prey.
And yes, cats do have a species-specific, biologically encoded and genetically transmitted characteristic which allows them to kill and eat their prey. Or to play with the people who take care of them. They kill and eat using their claws and teeth while they play using their brain. OK, the brain also contributes during the chase… don’t be a nit-pick.
Let me summarize.
So cats have a specific set of tools, teeth and claws, which are ‘coordinated’ by a brain which needs to be taught in order to become fully functional.
And the overall ‘functioning’ of any given cat depends simultaneously on how well their organism works AND the quality of the learning they have been able to amass.
Then where’s the difference between humans and cats?
What is so species-specific in our ability to interact with the world?
I’m exaggerating, of course. We are able to understand each-other far deeper than the other great-apes, our cousins. There is something species-specific in all this.
But only in ‘depth’, not in ‘nature’.
We’ve been able to teach chimps to write. And cats to play with strings instead of catching mice. All three of us ‘share’ the more or less same kind of brain and surprisingly similar anatomies.
What really sets us apart is our learned ability to watch ourselves while doing something. To observe ourselves observing, as Maturana puts it.
And our ability, learned again, to formulate information in a transmittable form. To ‘build’ highly specific messages using rather ‘fungible’ building blocks and in such a manner that those messages might be transmitted from one individual to another. From one generation to another, even.
To make good use of the Universal Grammar noticed by Chomsky.
Can any of this be construed as species-specific? Of course. Without the huge brain we’ve got – or without the ability to articulate sounds, we most likely wouldn’t have been able to reach this stage of our evolution.
But to reduce everything to mere biology … I’m afraid that would be too simplistic.
Consciousness – or self-awareness, opens up huge evolutionary venues. Powered by our very ability to communicate so intensely. To use ‘Universal Grammar’, even without being aware of its existence.
But since both self-awareness and talking depends upon learning them from/with the others… biology is not enough. Necessary, indeed, but not enough.
Not by a long shot.
According to Humberto Maturana, what we call consciousness – our ability to ‘observe ourselves observing‘, is the result of what sociologists would call a ‘cultural process’.
Meaning that consciousness has been developed in time – as is millennia, and is constantly shaped through daily interactions between us.
I don’t intend to discuss its genesis now, I’m just gonna point to one of its many consequences. Our need to explain everything.
We’ve developed our consciousness by talking to each-other. If we are to accept Maturana’s theory – of course, which I do.
At some point in time, during this process, there must have been an ‘aha’ moment.
Or, more precisely, a ‘what if’ moment.
Until then, everything was ‘natural’. Sun up, sun down, birth, death… and everything in between.
While learning to ‘observe ourselves observing’ one of our ancestors must have noticed that we make a lot of decisions. Unconsciously – until that moment, of course, but, nevertheless, still momentous. To ‘flee or fight’, which fig tree to climb, which cave to use tonight, which pelt to skin, which flint to flake…
The very next moment our ancestor must have asked their-self:
What if the Sun doesn’t get up next morning? Will I wake up from sleep tomorrow?
Who decides these things?
Are there only rules – like ‘every time you touch a flame you get burned’ and ‘ice is always cold’ or on top of the rules there is somebody who calls the shots? As in ‘decides whether this time the lion will attack on sight or it will let this one go’?
And we’ve tried to explain away our fears ever since…
By determining which are the pertinent ‘natural rules’, by placing the responsibility on somebody else’s shoulder – read ‘God’, or both at the same time. Again, I’m not going to develop this subject either, I’ll just remember you that Buddhism – for example, doesn’t reject older creeds. The Japanese, for instance, follow both Buddhist precepts and Shintoist traditions. Also, many Christians entertain a lot of local and not so local superstitions. Like never start walking with the left foot or having a very strong ‘respect’ for the third number after 10.
Let me make a short recap.
We taught ourselves to speak, we talked to each other until we developed something called consciousness to such a level that we’ve started to ask ourselves existential questions and then we came up with more or less credible scenarios meant to allay our fears.
‘OK, … and your point is?’
Don’t be so ‘surprised’ when somebody ‘irrationally’ defends their own ‘story’. ‘Their story’ encompasses their world. That’s where they had been living, together with everybody they used to know/consider their kin.
Don’t attempt to force your story upon them. Let aside that you might be wrong yourself… any attempt to forcefully impose a narrative upon somebody else is nothing but “rape”. Don’t do it unless you are prepared to get raped yourself.
And keep in mind that it’s not ‘their story’ that harms you but ‘their actions’.
No story has ever harmed anyone. For any story to have consequences, people must act upon it. According to how they have chosen to relate to the it. That’s where we can see eye to eye, regardless of the stories each of us keep dear.
Are we ready to accept that we might be wrong? That our story might be incomplete? That our explanation of the world might need some adjustments?
Are we ready to understand that enlarging our explanation to encompass others will actually increase our own ability to survive?
Or are we going to defend ‘our’ version, no matter what?
Are we going to keep looking for explanations or to become the subject of yet another one?
Things consist of what makes them what they are.
These very constituents impose upon things their definitive limits.
Take life, for instance. It’s exactly that which makes the difference between a collection of inanimate chemical substances and a living organism which leads to its eventual demise.
Or our skeletons. And all our organs. They make us what we are and, simultaneously, set the limits of our existence.
Each of us can grow only that high, eat and drink only that much, sprint only that fast and live only that long.
Take our brains.
That’s what we think with. And we make errors with.
That we remember and forget with.
That we love and hate with.
That makes us aware of some things and leave so many others out of our knowledge.
That is capable to understand the nature of our limits and, too often, chooses to ignore that opportunity.
nicichiarasa 