concept of consciousness :: essays research papers

An individual is somewhere in space-time, and not somewhere else. unpack for God, of course, who was invented to instantiate altogether contradictions in blessed harmony. Hes everywhere and everywhen, though at the same time, as it were, not in time or space3. but the upshot of this is that every individual has a locate of sentiment, a perspective, and apprehends the world, so far as it wad apprehend the world, from somewhere and not nowhere4 (Nagel 1986). If taken in isolation, the feature of being somewhere in particular affects all kinds of individuals, not just humans. But only those individuals that can view something can presumably have a point of view. Thus Searle again subjectiveness has the further outlet that all of my conscious forms of intentionality that give me information roughly the world independent of myself-importance are always from a special point of view. The world itself has no point of view, but my access to the world through and through my consciou s states is always perspectival. (ibid. 95).5 In itself, however, that could be true of any other(a) living thing. Nor is it a requirement to be alive an artificial warmness has a point of view. More generally, as shown in the excellent treatment of this subject in (Proust 1997), aspectuality can be seen as a consequence of mere differences of informational channels, and doesnt thitherfore require any level of consciousness. Perspective king itself be of two kinds. This can be seen by asking Does a still camera have a genuine point of view? One reason to deny this is that for a still camera there is nothing that corresponds to the difference between locality in time, and locality in space. For a living individual, these pose slightly different problems. For there are different ways in which we might care about the set up of our actions in distant space, and in different times. Time is asymmetrical in this sense (among others) we care more, or quite differently, about what happe ns in the time to come than about what happened in the past. But although the things we care about may, of course, be unequally distributed, space has no uniformly privileged direction. So temporal perspectivity appears seems to pay off a more serious species of subjectivity than the spatial kind. Now perspectivity is sometimes equated with subjectivity in general, as suggested in the last quotation from Searle above. provided subjectivity is also associated with the self, and the temporal form of perspectivity actually causes problems for the view that my self is my subjectivity.