[MD] atheistic and content

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Marsha]
... but it does seem to be clearly proprietary.

[Arlo]
Well, sure. Its proprietary due to the unique sensory trajectory of 
the biological organism. But it is not *only* proprietary. Our 
"selves" are the social construction of thousands of years of shared 
dialogue, the thoughts and memories of our culture as we appropriate 
this "collective consciousness". The "self" is both proprietary and 
shared. As I said, to give dominance to one is fall into a 
politically motivated sham.

[Marsha]
That individual conscious awareness would seem to be what John meant 
by his phrase "experiences itself as experience."

[Arlo]
This is the illusion (or "delusion", according to Einstein). The 
"self" is a convenient (pragmatically useful) social construction 
that organizes the narratives constructed by the biological organism 
through the assimilation of a shared "culture". In Western culture, 
the "self" is a story that has increasingly adopted the "myth of 
independence", and this is why those in the East (or many indigenous 
peoples) have quite a different understanding of the "self" narrative.

Prior to the appropriate of a shared, cultural consciousness, the 
human organism has a sense of the world exclusive to its sensory 
experiences. Its sense of differentiation from "the world" is 
entirely informed by its sensory (biological) experience. When a wolf 
eats a rabbit, it is informed (simplistically here, of course) by the 
sensation of the substances on its tongue, and the lack of pain input 
received by its brain. Why I mention "pain" is that experiments done 
on rats (always rats, everyone hates them) has shown that by removing 
certain parts of the brain that register pain, rats would actually 
begin to eat their own bodies when hungry. They no longer had a sense 
of "differentiation" regarding their own legs, eating their own leg 
was (to these rats) an identical sensory experience to eating 
"something else". The rat is trapped with nothing but this 
"proprietary" sensory trajectory to inform its sense of 
"differentiation" from the "world".

As social humans, having appropriated a shared, dialogic narrative, 
our sense of "self" is actually our escape from this "proprietary" 
trajectory, by giving us a narrative that transcends that boundedness.