roachboy

micmahsi:

it seems that you have a particular notion of consciousness that would seperate it (strangely enough) from everyday perception--i say that because, if you linked the two and thought about cnss as, say, the organizing center of a visual field (what you see) and then think for a moment about what shapes your relation(s) to that visual field, it becomes pretty clear straight away that phyiscal orientation--movement---and the schemata that come to be condensed around movement, that enable it to be coded at once as itself and again as a function subordinated to processes of--um---resolution (say--i hesitated because the word drags one into traditional subject-object style thinking in that a meaningful object is assumed to be simply present to consciousness----are the result of a directing of attention toward.....or of intentionality (means the same as directing toward...)---constitution/resolution then entails a process of recognition of what is present in the world--which is false)---and so are integral to the functioning of this curious platform across which normal perception unfolds that we call consciousness.

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in general, i think that consciousness is an effect.

kids develop a sense of their own agency within a given situation as a function of their level of language acquisition---at about 4 years old, they have trouble following instructions in ways that are not embedded in imitation (within the situation, say)--by a year or so later, they can act with considerable autonomy within the same situation.

what seems to change is the sense of relatedness of the "i" to its surroundings--that is, the relation of the "i" to the world comes to be modelled across grammatical relations (the first person pronoun (subject) engages in an action (verb) that involves interaction with the world understood as an accumulation of objects external to the self (object))---in the earlier phase, the relations to the world are still heavily embedded in imitation--in the later phase, the grammatical relations seem to have been internalized more and so a range of possible actions appears to be thinkable insofar as the seperation of subject from environment seems to acquire a kind of givenness that it does not previously have.

first person pronoun-verb-object seems to be a primary mode of staging interaction with the environment. this same structure also functions as a sequence of objects amenable to investment on their own--that is, the linguistic particles (and their attributes as words--their properties/effects) stage relations--but they are also themselves objects (words)--they become nodes around/upon which other schemata are fashioned---these schemata are shot through with the characteristics of linguistic elements----the characteristics of which come to be fundamental characterisitics of the world processed through them----and of the elements that perform/shape that processing.

so the "i" is at once an element that functions in staging relations with the environment and is itself the root particle in schemata that function recursively---the result of these recursive schemata is the development of a sense of the "i" in its various aspects---central to these is perception and the experience of the conditions of possibility of perceptions (largely, in the context of this thread, the wide range of features that are loosely referred to as consciousness--i say loosely because of how the term slips around here)

even from the little outline of developmental psych research above, it is pretty clear that the result--a sense of autonomy relative to the environment--leans on a ton of social factors, the primary relay of which are the people who surround the kid--the parents, etc.--and that much of the preconditions for acquiring a sense of self are thereby social. which makes sense, particularly if you find yourself thinking about this kind of process with some end of explaining how folk come to function socially.

not all traditional western philosophy does this--quite the contrary, in fact. if you view the world through a determininist ontology, questions of the social nature of the "i" are bracketed almost from the outset because these factors would appear to be changing and so accidental---while "knowledge" is transcendent (a function of the framing assumptions--to be is to be determined, in this case)---the goal of philo is the generation and clarification of transcendent statements--so the traditional genre "philo" requires a bracketing of questions that relate to the social.

anyway, these grammatical particles come to at once stage relations to the world and to function as a framework for thinking about relations to the world---this a function of the properties of the particles themselves and/or the status particular social groups impute to them (hard to know the difference, if there is one)---you could follow this out: the first person pronoun stipulates a kind of relation in a simple grammatical sequence---the first person pronoun is also a form of noun in itself, and so functions to stabilize the notion of consciousness by linking its modalities back to an unchanging core. you can see this as following from the characteristics of the "i" as a noun.
this core is itself an object of affective investment. these investments, like any other, really, is to a significant extent socially conditioned---that is most types of investment in the "i" are socially sanctioned to the extent that they are functional.

the "i" then, as a linguistic element, is at once immanent and transcendent--its transcendent features come to be filled out variously as there are many discourses that speak to the content of the "i"--and as a transcendent element, the "i" is amenable to multiple types of investment--investments that, with time and reinforcement, come to BE how you function in the world.

so you could simultaneously hold a number of positions relative to the nature of the "i" and its acts (perception)---
in real time, consciousness is a function--it is the organizing center of any given visual field--you process information around your own viewpoint such that you are functionally the cause of the phenomena (one wya to think abuot how you can account for your own movement within the riot of visual inputs that any complex scene brings with it)--you use this organization of the visual field as a primary way to limit information (and the limitation of information is as or more important a function as taking in information)...at this register, one of more or less immediate experience, the content of the "i" is continually shifting insofar as it is only present as effect of organization.

but you can shift very easily to a more analytic level (a possibility generated by the same range of relations to linguistic elements embedded in the stuff i wrote above) and ask questions about the various features involved in everyday perceptual acts. it is at this level you see the power of frame-effects---when you shift to thinking about perception, your have a number of possiblities for giving this shift orientation.

if you think in traditional western philosophical terms, you have the enormous weight of the assumption that there is a soul which drags across thinking about perception in debilitating ways--it is the origin of the mind-body split, for example, and can correspond to a certain view of the nature of the ego/consiousness (it tends to result in the imputing of an essence to the ego/consciousness which is of a piece with a wide range of moves to delimit the topic of the ego/consciousness such that developmental factors are not relevant)---with this move, the ego becomes a variety of a thing and so is thought about as such--as bounded (by the skull relative to the environment, by the experience of perception taken on its own terms relative to the body, etc.) as identical to itself across time, as unconditioned socially in any meaningful way (social conditioning would at best be split into a sequence of a priori results that could be accounted for via a cut analysis on eht one hand, and understood as accidental on the other---so it is that the condition of possibility for any functioning ego at all get dissolved as a result of frame assumptions). thinking about the ego as a variety of a thing impacts upon ways in which cognitive science frames problems of linking patterns of brain activity to consciousness as a result--you see this relation in the assumption that there has to be sequences of stable neural networks within the brain--so the analysis of the biological underpinnings of perception are organized around the same philosophical assumptions as traditional western epistemology--so the locating/positing of these stable neural patterns is shaped, at one level or another, by a search for essence which only even begins to make sense from within a very particular conceptual framework--that is, that the ego is a variety of object--to know an object is to know something of its essence (a set of predicates)---more recent work in cognitive science have developed very different conceptual frames which have opened up very different ways of looking at brain activity that do not simply replicate these more outmoded philsophical assumptions--check out the work of fransisco varela in cognitive science (the embodied self in particular), henri atlan on the philosophical implications of recent developments microbiology and how they force a reconceptualization of scientific activity itself (from enlightenment to enlightenment in particular, but much of his work speaks to this)....

i think i have been rattling on for a while.
i have been working on a project that deal with some of this stuff and so it is on my mind--sorry about the length....

summation:
consciousness is an effect.
how you think about that effect is itself an effect.
the mechanism that gives content to these effects is projection.
the root of projection is patterned affect.
these projections are shaped fundamentally by your own biography.
you encounter patterns as given as a function of your socialization.
you later have the possibility of pushing into or through these patterns analytically.
you can link them, their structure and effects, to general modes of thinking that operate without necessarily being avowed as such---so thinking about real-time percpetion can lead you to questions of ontology and these questions can route you back into thinking about everyday perception----and so it goes, continual self-alteration that you may or may not experience as such as a function of the frame assumptions that you drag across.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite