Dispelling a Certain Danger

All concepts are a kind of simplification. One example of that is the counting numbers. While I might be able to hold in my mind, by visualizing it, five, six, or even seven things, beyond that number of things it becomes very difficult hold in consciousness. If I have a jar of pennies, I can see there are great many of them, but the only way I can be directly conscious of the actual number of pennies is to count them. I can now hold in my consciousness, by means of the word which is the last number of my count (one-hundred-twenty- two, for example) in my head.

There is a danger in this simplification however. It is easy to forget all a word does is identify an existent or class of existents (entities, events, attributes, or relationships), but does not, itself, tell us anything about that existent except it’s identity. The concept “means” the existent or existents it identifies, with all there qualities and attributes, but the concept itself does not include (or exclude) those qualities and attributes except those necessary to identify the existents. It is easy to think that knowledge consists of words and their definitions (as the logical positivists do), and forget that knowledge is only identification and the integration of those identifications into a non-contradictory hierarchy.

For example, apple is defined as “fruit with red or yellow or green skin and sweet to tart crisp whitish flesh,” but that is not the “meaning” of the word apple. Apple means actual apples and subsumes in that meaning all possible apples, past, present, and future, including all their attributes and all the knowledge that is possible about them. The definition only indicates what apple identifies, the meaning is apples and everything there is to know about them (whether anyone actually knows it or not).

There is a similar danger in more complex concepts and conceptual descriptions. It is very apparent in science. For example, the chemical structure of certain flavors correctly describes the nature of whatever has that flavor, but what the flavor actually is, as it is tasted, and the richness of the experience of that taste cannot be described chemically. All of that experience, and all that we can learn about that flavor, it’s use, and what it means, (e.g. cyanide smells like almonds, but so do almonds), is about the concept, not the concept itself.

In the case of my description of consciousness, there is a danger the description will be taken as consciousness itself, as it is experienced and what its significance is to a living organism. My description only identifies the various aspects of consciousness and their relationship to other aspects of a living organism, particular man. It’s significance and importance is to rid the concept of consciousness of its mystical and pseudo-psychological elements and to objectively identify its essential nature.

By conceptually separating these various aspects for purposes of identification, it might easily be supposed consciousness is a kind of machine or mechanism, but in fact, consciousness is an attribute of life, and what is being described is the functional nature of that attribute, in the same sense that h2o describes the chemical nature of water. That description makes it possible to understand the relationship, chemically, to all other substances and how water will behave chemically. All of the other things we know or can know about water cannot contradict the chemical nature of water, but cannot be learned or derived directly from that chemical description. What water tastes like, looks like, it’s importance to life, the quantity of it in the world, its contribution to weather, transportation, irrigation, power, and economy etc. must be discovered by other means.

My description of consciousness makes it possible to understand its essential nature and functional characteristics and no other knowledge about it will contradict that fundamental understanding. Everything else we know about consciousness, however, it’s subjective nature, the fact that it is for those creatures that have it, the essence of their identity, and in man, is the “I”that all other aspects of his nature pertain to, must be learned by other means.

Consciousness is an attribute of life and a full understanding of consciousness must include that fact. Because it is a living function, it is continuous and involves the entire organism and all its behavior. It is the life of the organism that sustains it as the kind of organism it is, and for conscious organisms it means sustaining them as conscious. That is why we say for a conscious organism, it is the organism’s consciousness that is its life and purpose of living.

That is also why I wrote at the beginning of my description of emotions, “desires are the motivators of life, and if we desired nothing, there would be no reason to do anything, even to think; and our feelings make it possible to experience and enjoy our lives directly, and without them there would be no reason to live.” Our consciousness is not an end in itself, the end, the ultimate purpose of living, is to enjoy life; but it is our consciousness, and our emotions particularly, that make that ultimate end possible.

Regi