4 ms·

You're conflating self-awareness and consciousness. See my post below.

armitron 10y ago
I'm not conflating them, they're already conflated and not very well defined. Consciousness implies "someone" that is conscious. A self-model in other words. Babies, like most animals, do not possess consciousness in that sense, since in my view there is no self-model there to subjectively experience things. A lot of us are simply assuming that there is but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that shows otherwise. Temporary self-model annihilation can be triggered in many ways and guess what happens? Bits of subjective experience (tastes, smells even pleasure and pain) disappear. People who have been through such experiences (ego-death) report in-hindsight that the feeling of being a conscious agent in space-time completely disappears, and it is simply as if one is absorbed into the environment, no longer separate from it. In that way one can even view the myth of The Fall, as the emergence of consciousness, one is no longer one with nature but now separate from it. Metziger's book is a good overview of such investigations: https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/0465020690/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/04650...
- ZeroFries 10y ago
  Again, you are describing a particular type of consciousness. Consciousness is simply subjective experience, or qualia. <People who have been through such experiences (ego-death) report in-hindsight that the feeling of being a conscious agent in space-time completely disappears, and it is simply as if one is absorbed into the environment, no longer separate from it.> There has to be something experiencing the feeling of either being a part of or separate from the environment. If there's a feeling, there is consciousness. Maybe this will help discernment: consciousness is the "space" where feelings/sensations/qualia arise. Any feeling of having a self or not arises in this space.

I'm not conflating them, they're already conflated and not very well defined. Consciousness implies "someone" that is conscious. A self-model in other words. Babies, like most animals, do not possess consciousness in that sense, since in my view there is no self-model there to subjectively experience things. A lot of us are simply assuming that there is but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that shows otherwise. Temporary self-model annihilation can be triggered in many ways and guess what happens? Bits of subjective experience (tastes, smells even pleasure and pain) disappear. People who have been through such experiences (ego-death) report in-hindsight that the feeling of being a conscious agent in space-time completely disappears, and it is simply as if one is absorbed into the environment, no longer separate from it. In that way one can even view the myth of The Fall, as the emergence of consciousness, one is no longer one with nature but now separate from it. Metziger's book is a good overview of such investigations: https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/0465020690/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/04650...

ZeroFries 10y ago
Again, you are describing a particular type of consciousness. Consciousness is simply subjective experience, or qualia. <People who have been through such experiences (ego-death) report in-hindsight that the feeling of being a conscious agent in space-time completely disappears, and it is simply as if one is absorbed into the environment, no longer separate from it.> There has to be something experiencing the feeling of either being a part of or separate from the environment. If there's a feeling, there is consciousness. Maybe this will help discernment: consciousness is the "space" where feelings/sensations/qualia arise. Any feeling of having a self or not arises in this space.