Strange Islands.

I’ve been tweeting long enough (3 years) to know that there is no necessary correlation between the interest generated by a post (in terms of retweets, likes or comments) and the interestingness of that post. Interests are subjective, vague, ever-shifting and, aside from that, it’s easy to miss stuff in our fast-flowing cyber streams.

Nevertheless, something I excerpted from and linked to on my tumblr a couple months ago has stayed with me, resurfacing in my thoughts like a childhood memory given a renewed light by the comment of someone who shared the experience with you from which the memory arose.

When apes experience human-rearing and are exposed to a human language they begin to display the human patterns of self-awareness and self-reflection by 6 months of age.

This is startling enough infomation though doubtless open to scientific debate. However it was what the author (Sue Savage-Rumbaugh) proceeded to say in the next paragraph that resonated with something that i had long been trying to understand, like finding some of the lost notes to a melody:

The doer/viewer duality of consciousness enables the youngster to think about what it is doing, the appearance of its action, and/or how the action will be perceived by others — all at the same time. When this dualistic process begins to operate, there emerges, within a single brain and body, the capacity to consciously separate the imaged self into that of the doer of one’s actions and the viewer of those same actions.

The interestingness quotient of this observation was, I believed, as I posted it onto my blog, amplified by the nature of our contemporary cyber experience. Were not our online activities as tweeters, bloggers and status-updaters heavily biased towards the imaged self as viewer - primarily concerned with the perception (and reception) by others of what we posted?

Now, I believe, it is true that this is as much a feature of our “real-world” interactions with family, friends, acquaintances and strangers. We are always thinking as much about how others perceive what we say and do as about what we are saying and doing (indeed it can be difficult to differentiate the two) . This may be a natural process, even healthy, though not without its complications.

Unlike the “real-world”, our online world is a reflective surface through which we cannot step. It is easy enough for the people we meet regularly in the embodied world to see through many of our postures and to regard us warts and all. There may be a hard grain of truth in the observation that others know us better than we do ourselves. At play also, of course, is our habit of projecting our own postures atop the ones being projected at us. Much of this is certainly done unconsciously and generally, though not always, may be quite harmless.

The problem, however, faced by the online cybernaut is that they are in danger of falling into the Narcisissean pond because of the lack of feedback for them as a person regarding the degree to which it is easy or rewarding to “get-on-with” them - since the warts-and-all perspective gained, involuntarily, and reflected back from the embodied, social interactions of the “real-world” is often absent from the relationships conducted through this electronic mirror we hold up before us.

My intention here has been no more than to paddle into the shallows and kick about some water. I lack the qualifications, intelligence and, most importantly, the time to explore in depth the issues raised. The tide is coming in, the light is failing. I step down from my flimsy soapbox and return into the madding crowd.

- Jamreilly (2012)

Source article referenced: Human Language -Human Consciousness by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.

Hat tip to Amira at Lapidarium Notes through which I found it.

When apes experience human-rearing and are exposed to a human language they begin to display the human patterns of self-awareness and self-reflection by 6 months of age. An obvious index of self-awareness is the use of a mirror to view the self as the self is being intentionally altered (or immediately after it has been altered). Many apes explore their image by seeking out a mirror to look at their teeth, their tongue, their ears, their eyes and other portions of their body that could be observed only in a reflected image. Linguistically competent apes expand this awareness by beginning earlier and by elaborating. They paint their faces, put on wigs, shawls and monster masks, and rush to the mirror to see how the look. They try to blow bubbles with bubble gum while using mirrors to watch their cheeks. They practice displays by adding fur capes as they swagger in front the mirror. They seek out live video images to see things that even a mirror would not reveal. Only a live camera image can reveal their epiglottis and allow them to learn to vibrate it in real time (Menzel, Savage-Rumbaugh, and Lawson, 1985; Savage-Rumbaugh, 1986).

Their concern with understanding the appearance of the self from the perspective of another arises from the bifurcated, or dualistic, view of the self, whose roots lie in the I/Me distinctions embedded in the structure of the human language which they are acquiring. The doer/viewer duality of consciousness enables the youngster to think about what it is doing, the appearance of its action, and/or how the action will be perceived by others — all at the same time. When this dualistic process begins to operate, there emerges, within a single brain and body, the capacity to consciously separate the imaged self into that of the doer of one’s actions and the viewer of those same actions (Bates, 1990). The viewer begins to sometimes hold an action by the doer in abeyance, or sometimes even to reflect upon the past actions of the self as doer with a certain amount of chagrin and dismay. This is the formative basis of mental time travel and the mental construction of alternative world views (Suddendorf and Corballis, 2009).

via Sue Savage-Rumbaugh: Human Language—Human Consciousness

h/t @ Lapidarium notes

Is consciousness a product of the brain? The only certainty here is that anyone who thinks they can answer this question with certainty has to be wrong. We have only our conceptions of consciousness and of the brain to go on; and the one thing we do know for certain is that everything we know of the brain is a product of consciousness. That is, scientifically speaking, far more certain than that consciousness itself is a product of the brain. It may or it may not; but what is an undeniable fact is the idea that there is a universe of things, in which there is one thing called the brain, and another thing called the mind, together with the scientific principles that would allow the one to emerge from the other - these are all ideas, products of consciousness, and therefore only as good as the particular models used by that consciousness to understand the world. We do not know if mind depends on matter, because everything we know about matter is itself a mental creation.

In that sense, Descartes was right: the one undeniable fact is our consciousness. He was wrong, however most would now agree, to think of mind and body as two separate substances (two ‘whats’). This was, I believe, a typical product of a certain way of thinking which I suggest is characteristic of the brain’s left hemisphere, a concern with the ‘whatness’ of things. Where it was so obviously a matter of two ‘hownesses’ in the same thing, two different modes of being (as the right hemisphere would see it), he could formulate this only as two whatnesses, two different things. Equally it is a misplaced concern with the whatness of things that leads to the apparently anti-Cartesian, materialist, idea that the mind and body are the same thing. We are not sure, and could never be sure, if mind, or even body, is a thing at all. Mind has the characteristics of a process more than of a thing; a becoming, a way of being, more than an entity. Every individual mind is a process of interaction with whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves according to its own private history. 

- Iain McGilchrist

excerpt from The Master and his Emissary : The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009).

Peter Hacker:

“The Greeks and Romans didn’t have a term for consciousness, although they raised problems akin to some of the problems Descartes and his successors raised. Descartes introduced the word into his Latin writing in 1641 using ‘conscius’ in a sense different from the mediaeval use. For the mediaevals ‘conscius’ simply meant shared knowledge, being privy to information. When Descartes introduces the notion of consciousness, it’s the means whereby I know how things are with me mentally or inwardly or in my mind. The ordinary use of the word in English begins a little earlier – 1603 is the first recorded occurrence – and proceeds happily to develop into a pretty useful if specialised tool of our cognitive vocabulary. We use it as one of the group of cognitive verbs signifying cognitive receptivity – like ‘aware’, ‘realise’, and ‘notice.’ Perceptual consciousness, for example, concerns having one’s attention caught and held by something one perceives. That is why one cannot voluntarily or intentionally become and then be conscious of something – for becoming conscious of something is not an act at all, let alone a voluntary act. That is why consciousness is not a form of second-order thinking, since thinking, unlike becoming conscious of something is, or can be, a voluntary act or activity.”

via TPM: Hacker’s Challenge