Compos Mentis

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!

posted by Emmett @ 12:58