Compos Mentis

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.

posted by Emmett @ 12:11