Nick -Now that Doug has established that Swine Flu has Intelligence (is it Collective?) I am left wondering if it (Swine Flu) has a First-Person Experience? I am so taken with your (Nick's) suggestion that 1st-Person Experience of Consciousness is really an epiphenomenon of 3rd-Person Observation that I am now trying to relate it to my recent readings of the Trialogs of Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake. I have always had a hard time swallowing both Sheldrake and McKenna for somewhat different reasons, but for better or worse, I find that your 1st/3rd-person duality makes their schlock (or is it?) more palatable. This is not a criticism of your observations/suggestions, but rather a report from my own reaction to it. One of the biggest problems *I* have with the "the universe is all one big slap-happy consciousness and the you that thinks it is you is just one little tiny facet of it" is the ever-present *I* that *I* experience! But somehow this is harder to hold onto after your description of how 1st Person Experience might very well be an illusion of 3rd person observation. It seems as if this 3rd/1st Duality supports collective consciousness in some way or another? I have never (wanted to?) viewed Collective (un)Consciousness as a literal understanding. This takes me to another (quite eloquent) statement you made earlier. "It's metaphors all the way down!" As an acolyte of the reverend George Lakoff in the Church of Metaphor, I will have to go see what he and Rafael Nunez have to imply about that in their "Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being". It's a great allusion to "Turtles all the way down!" but my own theories of layered metaphor complexes (or complex layered metaphors, depending on when you ask) depends on metaphor grounding out in experiences (ala Nunez & Lakoff and embodied mind). I am willing to accept (perhaps) that there is some sort of bootstrapping process where metaphors are first built upon primary experience and then elaborated by inserting other metaphorical maps between the original metaphorical source and the experiential target, and repeatedly abstracted until the original experiences are lost to the fogs of time or the influence of other's. Damn fine material for avoiding deadlines. Thank gentlemen, one and all! - Steve |
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