[MD] Intellectual activity

[Ham Priday]

Alice --

> Oh the Blank Slate! I absolutely disagree with this concept.
> If we were actually blank slates we would stay blank slates.
> Instead we are born into this world equipped to understand
> such things as the complexities of language and shortly
> thereafter actually participate in the conversation.
> Language alone requires an array of innate talents such as
> understanding time, space and causality. And the reason
> we are so good at it is because it so essential to our species
> and because it is essential to our species it is innate.  I know
> you don't like the human mind compared to a robot's, but it
> would seem that the Blank Slate is closer to that notion than
> is evolutionary psychology.

Okay, so you don't care for the 'tubula rasa' analogy.  How, then, are we to
understand the awakening of consciousness?   This is the defining step in
the becoming of proprietary awareness, and for me it is as important as
establishing nothingness as the primary differentiator in metaphysical
ontology.  Biologists, psychologists, and philosophers have  offered various
paradigms for the origin of consciousness.  Years ago, when I was working on
my manuscript, I tried to capture some of their descriptions in a chapter I
called "On Becoming".  Here are a few excerpts that you and Platt might
like:

"Long before the miracle of birth and individual consciousness, life forces
are directing and shaping a staggeringly complex interplay of biophysical
activities toward a specific goal which, from the finite persepctive, is
both a beginning and an end.  If self-awareness exists throughout the nine
months of of human gestation it is not objectively evident, not would it
serve a useful purpose in the monotonous uterine environment.  But the goal
of Nature is served, all the same, through an elaborate, predetermined
sequence of embryonic alterations that occur without conscious intervention.
The entire process is a marvel of engineering that would be the envy of any
computer designer.

"Knowing nothing of goals and purposes, nurtured placidly in its
automatically regulated chamber, its physical needs undifferentiated from
the maternal being which is its primordial nature, the unborn fetus is not
yet a 'thing-in-itself'.  We cannot say that its psyche does not exist, but
only that its sensibility is not that of an individuated Self.  Prenatal
movements appear to be localized, synaptic responses rather than activities
coordinated by a central intelligence.  By all appearances, the feal
organism simply 'vegetates' at the primitive level of organic sensibility.

"My own view is that self-awareness begins as an 'interruption of
equanimity'; that is to say, at some point in the development of the central
nervous system the fetus is capable of associating a particular feeling as
'something apart' from its holistic tranquility.  The source of the
disturbance may be pain, perhaps, as the fetal organism is well insulated
from external stimuli; but the precise nature of the feeling is
inconsequential.  Whatever its cause, it is perceived as a state or
condition of being in which sensibility is deprived of its former
'wholeness', thus distinguishing a particular sensation from
undifferentiated sensibility.  The momentary 'discomfort', experienced as it
is, not by a recollective consciousness but as a negation of holistic
completeness, marks the beginning of self-awareness.  It represents a
differential lacking or wanting  -- a definite 'minus' as opposed to
something 'added' to the former solipsistic serenity."

I go on to describe how subsequent sensations, auditory or tactile, form a
sequential series of homeostatic changes which begin to be consciously
recognized as happenings of its Self.  At this juncture the biological being
acquires the identity of a being-aware of itself.  But this is long before
the infant has the facility for language and communication that you refer
to.  I take being "equipped for" to mean a latent potentiality.  The
neurophysical development required for speech and social orientation is
still several post-partum months away.

> The only way I could perhaps agree would be if you are referring to
> conception and even then I would question "the passing sense of
discomfort".
>
> How did I become in the last two days, an agnostic?  I thought I was an
> atheist.

No offense, Alice, but I regard every self-proclaimed atheist as a
practicing "agnostic".  If you were not "begging the question", I doubt that
you would be here.

Essentially yours,
Ham