Sorry this took so long. Have a poem.
Yeah, so I need to update more often. Dang it, there are only a certain number of hours in a day and... yeah. So I should quit complaining and update.
here's a poem I'm working on; it's not titled yet.
I sit and watch
the people pass by-
an uninterruptible flow.
Blink...blink...blink...
they go, and do not know
to stop.
I sit and watch
the birds swirl in lines
spiralling to spare the wing
they are the billowed flight
no end, no sight from the height
of wide life below.
I sit and watch
the clouds bob and mose-
to personify can't describe
the passion of the float.
They soak in sky
and I am left behind.
I sit-
close my eyes, to hope-
to lose myself-
the world is gone,
but I am, still.
I also just want to mention that running one's emotions through a blender is not the best way to keep up with one's studies. There is a story there, but its not to be told here- but the worst is over and the sun has come up.
And I thought "who am I?" was a Simple Question
This is written in response to Paul's comment in the previous post- so if you don't understand it blame him, not me- I was going to post it as a reply but then I thought about it and it got too long. First of all, my Japanese oral went alright. I consider it par for the course if I make it out of there alive, and this time my sensei sprung the hideous trap of having it recorded while my partner and I talked. Those fifteen minutes were probably some of the longest ever in my life. Anyway.
Paul mentioned actors, and how they use their abilities to convince themselves of a characterization that is not usually their own. I heartily agree with his assessment that this is a property of filters in the mind- I would probably classify it as 'faking' filters, just because they are completely temporary and can be dropped as soon as the scene is done- and I wanted to expound some more on the idea of human acting.
Humans are the best actors in the animal kingdom; they are, in fact, the only actors that have come up out of evolutionary processes. But wait, you say, what about those great imitating insects, the kinds that look like sticks and leaves so that predators can't get them? Or the predators that fake food sources to trap their prey? This, unfortunately, is not acting. They are playing out their lives in the appropriated way- as Aristotle would say, they are fulfilling their essence.
Humans, on the other hand according to Aristotle, are full of accidents. Here, accident means something that is part of a person but is not essential to that person's essence. Thus, by definition, the roles that an actor portrays must be accidents- if they can change what they are feeling, or what they are percieving (as Paul apparently manages to act so well that he fools himself 8P) then those feelings and perceptions are not integral to the essence of being human. It is all about consciousness, and what we are conscious of- but if consciousness can be fooled, or if it can be altered by things that are part of me, but are not my consciousness, then my conscioussness in itself is not my essential spirit- to us religious peeps, our soul. There must be more to us than that.
It seems a bit silly, at first, to consider so deeply the idea of acting when considering consciousness, but it is surprisingly something that has come up in arguments for and against certain interpretations on the nature of consciousness. On the other hand, acting has never been used, as far as I am aware, as a justification of a certain definition of consciousness, so way to go, Paul- you just got a credit in my book. Still, I find it interesting that acting, formal acting with standard rules for the societal audience to understand, was invented and became popular around the same time as people like Aristotle began looking into the nature of consciouness: at least within the same century. Coincidence? I think not.
I? I, also.
I have a Japanese oral exam in 23 hours and 40 minutes, but I have been obsessing about it for the last 56 hours or so; I need to be distracted from thinking about Japanese for a little while, and, hey presto! Distraction!
I've been thinking a lot recently about the nature of consciousness. Why would anyone think about this? you might ask. ('course, if you ask that about me, then we haven't known each other more than a few minutes.) Well, the little thing that I'm working on intermittently saved in my computer as "Magnum Opus" keeps demanding that I talk about consciousness as I slave away on it. Seriously, I'm not free to write the thing- it just keeps insisting that I sit down and pay attention to it for a certain time each day.
Anyway, my literary-schizophrenic tendencies aside, I've been thinking and reading a lot about the nature of consciousness recently. It's something that people have been considering and talking about for thousands of years- it might in fact be the most discussed topic in philosophy. The reason people are so interested in it is because it is essentially the core of human nature. How do you know you are human? Because I am able to know I am human. (Word up, Descartes.) Language may seperate us from the rest of the animal kingdom in the sense that it enables a new kind of interaction between the members of the species, but consciousness is what separates me from you. I am conscious of myself; I am not conscious of you.
Sartre, in his epic (and mostly intensely boring) work, Being and Nothingness, emphasized this fact (over the first 300 pages- thank you messr. Jean-Paul, but I get the idea). By definition, consciousness is consciousness
of something. There cannot, for example, be a disembodied consciousness in a vacuum.
This leads to an interesting, but ultimately flawed, idea. If consciousness is awareness of me, does that mean there are two parts- me and my consciousness? Rene would be doing backflips in the ground: he found consciousness to be the 'other half' contrasted to the body. If 'I' am not my consciousness, what, where, who am 'I'? What are we left with? The problem is that self-awareness is not an outsider peeking inside. There is no contradiction when my consciousness is me aware of me; it is an individualized phenomena- I am who I am aware of myself.
What does consciousness do? It shows us the world. My "Magnum Opus" is concerned with filters, things that affect our thinking and worldview by keeping things out of our minds. We have filters for our vision because we can only percieve a very small set of wavelengths- we are filtered in our hearing because there are only a few frequencies that we can hear. Consciousness keeps other things out.
Consciousness is mutable. The easiest example is when we are full of some strong emotion- the world suddenly looks different than it did when we were calm. Concentrated consciousness prolongs experience, diverted consciousness shortens it- this is why a watched pot takes forever to boil. Hopefully this doesn't seem too weird. The interesting thing is, consciousness only works as a filter as long as it is not conscious of the fact that is acting like a filter. Realize that the pot is taking too long to boil and time seems to regulate itself again. Realize that you are angry, and the world suddenly doesn't look quite so hostile.
This has some interesting connotations. We all (or at least I do) love to think that we are correct, and can usually come up with some good reasons that we are right. But perhaps there are some things that we are not aware of that is keeping us from some key datum that would show us our folly. Perhaps the importance we place on some entity is only because of the certain way our consciousness is filtering the world.
This is not really a new argument. How different is what I'm saying from the general idea behind Freud's theories about the unconscious? In some ways, it could really be a cop-out. I do things because my filters make me do them- but wait, if you can say that, then you are conscious of them and they are not filtering anymore! Free will is preserved. Yay for saving the phenomena.
I've gone on for far too long, but thanks for reading this- any feedback would be appreciated and could win you a place in a preface of a (far-flung) future book!
