DUCKPOND

Wikipedia provides the description, if not the definition as:

Consciousness is regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one’s environment.

The notion of consciousness has, at least for me, always presented some difficulty of understanding, and for that reason the explanation of its etymology in the Wikipedia article is revealing. The Latin word conscientia emphasized a shared understanding. Its’ modern meaning was, so we are told, philosophically defined by John Locke.

I am not sure that consciousness can be studied scientifically, or if it could be, it requires considerable ingenuity. Of course, using the mirror test, it is possible to identify whether beings are conscious and can perceive their own image in a mirror by watching to see whether they act to remove an object placed on them. Any discretionary behavior we might notice in the animal world, for example the Cockatoos gathering to eat the seeds I put out the front, might be seen as evidence of consciousness, or some form of elaborate machinery. Whether it is the former, or the latter, the question of boundaries becomes at issue.

The poets and mystics have delved into human consciousness, emphasizing connectedness rather than self identity:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. - John Donne.

Commenting on this well known refrain, Eknath Easwaran, formerly of UC Berkeley, suggests that there is a world of interconnected, not normally included in the description, that can be experienced. He said:

The unity underlying life is so complete and pervasive that when we inflict suffering on the smallest creature, we injure the whole. When we refrain from habits that harm others, when we take up jobs that relieve suffering, when we work to put an end to anger and separateness, we strengthen the whole.

There is nothing more important in life than learning to express this unity in all our relationships. Violence, war,and insensitivity to our fellow creatures are external manifestations of the disunity in our consciousness. When we begin to practice spiritual disciplines, right from the first day, however slowly, we begin to transform our character, conduct, and consciousness. When the divisiveness which has been agitating us and making life difficult begins to mend, we get immediate evidence in our daily life. Our health improves, long-standing personal conflicts subside, our mind becomes clearer, and a sense of security and well-being follows us wherever we go.

[The Thought for the Day is today's entry from Eknath Easwaran's Words to Live By: http://bmcm.c.topica.com/maajQKEabEHn9cabreMb/ (Copyright 1999-2005 by The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation.) ]

I find that a challenging set of opinions, but I do not find it strange. Is it true, for example, that my indifference to the pain of others is due to ” external manifestations of the disunity in [my] consciousness?

Some people more than others have a greater sense of the connection, for example between the human and animal world, and that is a mundane experience. My own direct experience, when one of my dogs picked up a tiger snake, which bit and killed him, and when I saw the snake moving away, I had the sense of my own responsibility and that the snake was just reacting in a normal way for it, and that it had its place in the scheme of things. Stories abound of the deadliness and ferocity of tiger snakes.

This experience, which was remarkable enough for me to remember, and wonder what it meant has a philosophical implication. For example, quoting from Wikipedia:

Marx considered that social relations ontologically preceded individual consciousness, and criticized the conception of a conscious subject as an ideological conception on which liberal political thought was founded. Marx in particular criticized the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, considering that the so-called individual natural rights were ideological fictions camouflaging social inequality in the attribution of those rights.

Marx, understandably, makes assumptions about the answer to the question, What is matter? which as far as I know he did not ask. Marx would suggest, I suspect, that dialectical materialism is an objective, testable construction of reality and the evidence can be sought and seen in history. The scientific paradigm has changed. So what is different about conscious living matter? There may be similarities between magnetism and consciousness, in the sense of an analogy of a force field and self organizing nature of a growing and developing organism?

I reflected later my apprehension,if not sympathy for the snakes plight, was evidence of a survival ability built into our brain processes by our longer history, evolution. Part of the reason we are destroying the natural world, I suggest, is that our experience is mediated through technology that distance us from the direct human experience of reality and consequence. I am not making a moral judgment regarding technology only observing that for instance riding in a car and walking are different ways of experiencing the environment.

Similarly, it seems to me that compassion, another mundane experience and observation, is critical to our survival. Despite the fact that history is displayed as a river of blood with violence as the necessary ingredient of survival, people then as now have always sought to satisfy their needs, and resorted to violence often out of threat or fear. Compassion is, I think, another survival mechanism constructed through evolution, and if true may mean that peace is more natural and necessary to survival than aggression and violence. If it was not in the past, given the condition of world, its technological and economic connectedness, it is now.

In the absence of knowledge, we could always use the pragmatic test, and see what works. It is the ideology we might have internalized – the paradigm – that restricts our freedom to engage in practical tests and supports the notion that violence and war and the preparation for war is inevitable and necessary.

Whereas it might be argued that oil is the source of the Iraq War, and its progression of inhumanity, including the increasing reliance on aerial bombing, there is also a disconnect from suffering. The disconnection from consequences of the leaders, the hands that sign the paper, is different in degree from the soldiers whose training incorporated dehumanization, not just in themselves but in the way they see, speak and think about other human beings.

(This post might have, for the time being, be considered a work in progress. Coherence, like perception, sometimes takes time to emerge. I never knew that my thoughts were so shadowy before I began to give then form.)