In process...May 26th, 2012....
I have tried for the most part to stay away from the most mind-numbing problems of the Big Philosophers....but I can't stay away from them completely....A few of the problems -- most notably, issues concerning consciousness and the self -- are attached to any so called model of the human psyche, the self, and/or the personality....
So what is consciousness? Let's start with The Grand Doubter -- Renes Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes said that he/you/I can doubt anything we want to but we can't doubt the reliability and the actuality of our own consciousness. 'I think, therefore I am.' was his main philosophical motto that he became famous for.
Agreed! I have no trouble with that assertion. I could sit here for the next five minutes and just start writing down everything that came to my mind. It would probably be more interesting -- and more 'psycho-dramatic' -- than the essay that I am writing. Because this is the essence of Psychoanalysis -- or at least Freudian Psychoanalysis -- 'free association', invented by Freud gradually somewhere between 1892 and 1895.
So I could sit here rattling off free associations from my consciousness -- and what further can we say: that these streams of consciousness are from my 'self'? Or from my 'self-representation'? Or from thin air?
It wouldn't take me very long to get to a point of 'psychological resistance' because as soon as someone tells you to say whatever comes immediately to your mind, you are going to likely think automatically of the worst -- and/or most extreme -- thing that could or would come to your mind. That would seem to be some sort of 'automatic law of mind'. Or am I overgeneralizing? Perhaps you would think of the most boring things you could possibly say -- and then say them. That would probably get the person off your case who is 'trying to penetrate your innermost consciousness' after an hour or maybe less (hopefully, you are not paying $200 an hour for this) -- and then you could go back to thinking what you wanted to think about -- privately.
The same would probably go here. In my conceptuology of 'The Self' (we are getting ahead of ourselves a little here), there is a 'Central Ego' -- which is our main personal centre of functioning, deciding, associating, discriminating, choosing -- and choosing what communications to make public through our 'Public Personna-(Ego)' (Jung influenced) vs. choosing what we wish to keep to ourselves in what I am calling our 'Conscious Private Shadow-(Ego)' (which is different from both Jung's concept of 'The Shadow' and Freud's concept of 'The Id' -- both of the latter two concepts of which are deemed 'unconscious' as opposed to the phenomenon that I am discussing here and saying involves 'conscious self-restraint in the moment' -- not unconscious lack of awareness or 'defensive, purposeful unconscious lack of awareness', i.e., 'repression'. We are talking conscious suppression here, not repression).
Now, if we have 'consciousness', can we say that this consciousness is germinating from our 'Self'? Or our 'self-representation (i.e., 'self-image')? Or no self at all? (David Hume's argument calling the 'Self' just a 'convenient generalization' but not 'reality-based' because we cannot see any such generalization as 'The Self'.)
In contrast, it would seem that both Descartes and Kierkegaard associate consciousness with The Self as being one and the same thing (or very closely related)...Again, turning back to Descartes, we have his statement: 'I think, therefore I am' (my living, breathing Self).
And again, Descartes stated that we can't doubt the existence of our own consciousness....consciousness being our most immediate connection to our living, breathing Self....and visa versa...
Yet Kierkegaard took issue with this point arguing that you can doubt consciousness just as presumably you can doubt yourself or your Self.
However, in this regard, Kierkegaard was moving away from Descartes intended meaning and changing what Descartes meant by (our 'first and primary immediacy') of consciousness.
Descartes wasn't talking about 'what our consciousness was supposed to represent' because, most certainly, we can doubt this. And this was what Kierkegaard was writing about when he argued that we most certainly can doubt our consciousness -- i.e., what it represents, and whether what it represents is 'real' or not....
