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.

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

Tolstoy was asked in a letter by a pacifist group if he could give them a definition of religion and, if he could do that, to explain to them the relation between religion, that is, what a person believes, and morality, that is, the way he acts in accord with some notion of how he ought to act.

Tolstoy worried about this letter, and then as I recall it, he said:

“I can only go back to myself. I look around myself and I see every year that, no matter what people do to themselves and to one another, the spring constantly renews itself. This is a physical fact, not a metaphysical theory. I look at every spring and I respond to it very strongly. But I also notice that every year the spring is the same new spring and every year I am one year older. I have to ask the question: what is the relation between my brief and tragic life and this force in the universe that perpetually renews itself? I further believe that every human being asks this question. He cannot avoid asking it—it is forced upon him. And his answer to that question is his religion. If he says the relation between me and this thing is nothing, then his religion is nihilism. As for morality, what ought I to do? I wish I knew.”

via Paris Review: Interview with James Wright

Bertonneau:

Especially for people under the age of thirty the name Colin Wilson (born 1931) and the label “The New Existentialism” might not ring a bell. A few older people will remember Wilson, but will have retained no suspicion what the label designates; or they might vaguely recall the Icarus-flight of a young author in the late 1950s who soared up and, as far as most of the reading public could tell, either crashed down or flew off into the depths of space, not to be heard from again. At a literary conference at SUNY New Paltz three years ago, among people who I thought would be positively disposed to Wilson, my mentioning of his name resulted in any number of arched eyebrows and suavely disparaging remarks. Now this might itself be, not an affirmation of justified oblivion, as one could easily assume, but rather a kind of indirect evidence for intrinsic merit. I stress the academic character of the event and the self-assured oiliness of the dismissal. In context, the reference seemed to carry a distinctly un-PC valence so that the reaction to it, as I picture it in retrospect, resembled that of a patrician vampire to garlic.

That Wilson started like a meteor no one can gainsay. His first book, The Outsider (1956), vaulted him to literary stardom with a cover story in Life Magazine about a self-educated boy-genius. Life’s hyperbole aside, the real story was grayer and grittier. A science-college dropout and vagabond who had spent the last few months sleeping outdoors on Hampstead Heath, Wilson wrote The Outsider in the reading room of the British Museum, consulting his chosen texts as he wrote, day by day. Most literary sensations require the confessional éclat of a coming-of-age novel or a road diary that fiercely denounces established authority in favor of gypsy insouciance. The Outsider, a mixture of literary criticism and philosophy, had something of youthful Bohemianism about it; but it was ultimately more serious. A book length non-fiction essay, The Outsider addressed the fallacies of existence that Wilson located not only in a stultified liberal-bourgeois establishment of postwar Europe but also and equally in the forms of cheap social rebellion and doctrinaire radicalism that marked the 1950s in the West. Wilson’s view converged somewhat with that of the continental Existentialists, about whom he wrote, but crucial differences separated him from them and grew stronger over the years. Wilson’s view was apolitical tending to the anti-political.

Colin Wilson: The Persistence of Meaning by Thomas F. Bertonneau

“But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence . . . truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”

—Ludwig Feuerbach

Preface to the second edition
of The Essence of Christianity (1843)

via The Culmination of Separation

Original preface at wikiS