Conversations On-Line
Journal of Consciousness Studies open forum

; Subject: Animal/body/human dissociation Date: 08/18/96

Consciousness .. not separate, not above

Greg Nixon wrote on 8/17/96:

Does our symbolic consciousness place us "above" the other animals? This is where many of you otherwise bright posters out there sometimes read the whole language thing wrong. The answer is definitely NO. Does it separate us from our own bodily life? The answer is YES. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
.....

JR: First, I need to make it clear that I personally make no chastisement of anyone's perceptions or point of view. I used the phrase: "As scientific and high-minded as *we* are ..." because everyone of us - and that definitely includes *me* - has preferences and biases, based on past experiences. My intention is only to raise new ways of thinking about things; trying to open up new connections and ideas for us to consider. To me, that's when our consciousness shines.

Science is a thoughtful and cautionary endeavor. It's end goal is to improve the awareness and (to use the hackneyed phrase) "raise the consciousness" of humanity as a whole.

The net point I was inferring re Reiss's lack of candor about dolphins during that interview, was that, "dissociation" is both a boon and a bane. We enact it because we are integral separate "identities" encountering the world. Yet to take that process to the extreme position - with the value judgement - that *our* Integrity has some kind of priority in the world, is to restrict us in the worst way. Not only does it make it more difficult - if not impossible - to share with the rest of our fellows that creation is a wonderful holism, but we limit ourselves also from exploring "possibilities".

We also set ourselves up to the presence of a "hard problem", where none may in fact exist! Just because we can evaluate a wave function as having amplitude separate from frequency we don't bother to struggle with "how" they are "connected"! Or why there is "spontaneous" temporal motion in spatial direction?

If the encounter-of-consciousness (externally observable) is separate from the experience-of-consciousness (internally observable), then why can't we examine it in it's most fundamental form - the wave function? Surely the dissociative "hard problem" resides there before (or if) anywhere else. Does a wave function "experience" itself? If so, why? If not, why?.

On the subject of language, my perspective stems from an attempt to congeal Piaget with Whorf. I would answer "no" to both of Greg's rhetorical questions. We are neither "above" the animals nor is our mental/linguistic aspect separate from our somatic existence. Any basic course in Etymology - the use, definition, and developmental history of words - makes it indisputably clear
that word-roots and phonic stems a as associations with physical phenomena, events and relationships. *Physical* experiences. No matter how ethereal or dissociatively Platonic our current assembly of "cognitions" ... their origins are in the physical enactions and encounters of our ancestors, and now, ourselves. Per Whorf(1938,1956), language takes its place as part of what we somaticly "encounter", and therefore can mold future "thinking". Language is a new dissociable quality of our existence, but it is inextricable "bound" with all else, especially our bodily existence.

I think, Greg, that was the point Al Scott was making to you in his last reply. You insist on clinical dissociations, yet tag-line all your notes with quotes that extol "pure" experience undiluted by additional "cognitive" experience, quite in opposition to most of your discussions. (Again, I am not value judging you, just making an observation.)

Since 1972 I've taken to calling myself a "Ceptualist", because the English word "concept" comes from two Latin roots: "con-" meaning "with, together", and "-cept"(or "-ceive") meaning "to gather". Two *physical* acts/relationships. A "concept" is something "taken in" and joined "with", made part of us. To me, encounter and experience is the primary activity. Even Heisenberg (and every follower of his Uncertainty Principle) says that information/energy is transferred between extants only by "encounter". So, from the standpoint of being an Integral Identity, what "I" know comes first from information/energy my
body/mind encounters and *gathers*. I am fortunate that my body is constructively capable of gathering, retaining, coordinating and using "derived" and "processed" and "reorganized"(aka, "new") information, in order to enable further encounters with the rest of the world. But, first and foremost, my body/mind "gathers" energy/information. I am a gatherer, a "Ceptualist", before
anything else.

INTEGRITY PARADIGM