The Unconscious Ground of Being

The Review of Contemporary Scientific and Academic Studies, 2023

Determining the Self by a single notion is difficult. Yet, there are undoubtedly some details that define who I am. Nothing, in my view, is more intimately known to and specific to an individual than Consciousness, which forms the "I". It makes sense that there must be a self for the I Consciousness to exist. We need to treat consciousness seriously if we are to understand the authenticity of the Self. When an organism has conscious experience, it indicates that it has some sense of what it's like to be that creature. Without changing the underlying structure, one could appear or act like a certain creature, but their conscious experience would be entirely distinct from that of that particular creature. In this essay, I strive to find the "Self," but I am unwilling to eliminate or even reduce the body-rather, I want to affirm its significance in defining the self. How self-consciousness could be objectively understood without a specific perspective is unquestionably an open question. Understanding a person's point of view-that is, how he or she feels or sees the world-is the only way to truly comprehend that person. In the specified sphere of an endured world, this uniqueness starts with the body. Our bodies are the aspect that unifies us, contributing to what has been alluded to as a sense of ownership.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2017

As science continues to explore the mysteries of the unconscious, two critical questions remain. First, can unconscious impulses, desires, and feelings be willfully raised to the level of the conscious self?, and, if so, would the unveiling of unconscious mechanisms lead to genuine self-knowledge or empowerment? Second, can we methodically tap into the unconscious to gear ourselves along more creative lines? If the unconscious is a source of intuitive and creative inspiration, how might a more expansive understanding of consciousness help us to flourish? How can we harness the intuitive parts of ourselves to think "outside the box," transcending the limitations of preconceived categories? And along those same lines, how would an expanded view of the unconscious frame our spiritual experiences or offer spiritual nourishment? Writer Siri Hustvedt, historian of psychology Sonu Shamdasani, and neuropsychologist Mark Solms will tackle everything from noetic experiences and the ...

In current trends in cognitive sciences, the discussion on body crosses the classical divide between the body and the self in terms of nature and function. Embodiment theories have helped to bring in the importance of the role of subjective experiences to understand cognition, and place the process of knowing in a cultural and social context. This article is a critique of the growing trend in cognitive sciences, particularly in affective neurosciences, and approaches, to reduce the experiential self to a nonentity. It is shown that though the apparent goal is to highlight the inner qualitative nature of experience, what is happening in the background is a role reversal. The outer body becomes the inner self. The inner self becomes the outer body. The nature and functions of the self are founded on the body by theorizing embodiment as an alternate to neural reductionism. This article argues that one of the negative consequences of embodiment theories is that age-old concepts of freewill, character and moral choices become flimsy and fleeting in the process of embodying cognition. The age-old wisdom of philosophy and empiricism of sciences tells us that the body is outside and the self is inside. The distinction between the outer and the inner are not ambiguous conceptually. Further, while the life and physical sciences are to understand the object which is outside, the psychological sciences and philosophy are to understand the inner self. In other words, we have an outer body and an inner self that require different methods and approaches for their analysis. Baconian and Cartesian dualism supports such a stance. In postmodern and feminist philosophies, such wisdom is questioned, and the very notions of body are extended to be connected with the interiority of the self. The renewed notion of body is to give a specific phenomenological importance and place the body as the centre of experience. The body concepts from phenomenological and feminist traditions mostly enrich the concept of inner self than removing it.

We lack a clear definition of consciousness. This deficiency is not innocuous. It has resulted in confusion within the field and susceptibility to diversions like the Hard Problem. Consciousness is a biological phenomenon and as such, it can be grounded in our understanding of what life is. Doing so also tells us what consciousness is for. A definition of consciousness that is grounded in life provides many advantages. It disposes of the mistaken notion that explaining consciousness amounts to solving the Hard Problem. It provides the basis for a conceptually coherent theory of consciousness. It suggests avenues for research, provides a context for interpreting results and provides a context in which to manage the avalanche of data now being generated. A coherent definition of the target of our pursuit also makes the field more accessible to those at the periphery who could contribute but are reluctant to get involved because the object of study remains nebulous. In this brief article, I argue that consciousness has its roots in life’s physical structure and processes and that defining consciousness in terms of its function in life has many benefits.

Oxford Companion to the Self (edited by Shaun Gallagher), 2011

We are embodied, and we are aware of our bodies ‘from the inside’ through different forms of bodily awareness. But what is the relation between these two facts? Are these forms of bodily awareness types of self-consciousness, on a par, say, with introspection? In this paper I argue that bodily awareness is a basic form of self-consciousness, through which perceiving agents are directly conscious of the bodily self. The first two sections clarify the nature of bodily awareness. We are aware of our bodies in many different ways. Some are conscious; others non-conscious. Some are conceptual; others nonconceptual. Some are first-personal; others third personal. The first section of this paper taxonomizes these different types of bodily awareness. Some philosophers have claimed that we have a “sense of ownership” of our own bodies. In section II I evaluate, and ultimately reject, a strong reading of this claim, on which the sense of ownership is a distinct and phenomenologically salient dimension of bodily awareness. In sections III to V I explore how bodily awareness functions as a form of self-consciousness. Section III discusses the significance of certain forms of bodily awareness sharing an important epistemological property with canonical forms of self-consciousness such as introspection. This is the property of being immune to error through misidentification relative to the first person pronoun. I explain why having the immunity property qualifies those types of bodily awareness as forms of self-consciousness (subject to two further requirements that I spell out). In section IV I consider, and remain unconvinced by, an argument to the effect that bodily awareness cannot have first person content (and hence cannot count as a form of self-consciousness). Finally, section V sketches out an account of the spatial content of bodily awareness and explores the particular type of awareness of the bodily self that it provides.

The solution of the mind-body problem as the problem of interrelation and interconditionality of mental and physiological faces contradictions when one proceeds from the classical subject-object opposition. Accepting the subject-object opposition only as the convenient way for a scientist to speak about the phenomena of this world (the way that shouldn’t be equal to the world itself), it is already senseless to look for the reason of a mental event either in biology nor in sociality. The subject-object opposition itself is possible, because the event of proportionality of human being and world have happened. In this event the human being and the world are defined by a finite way and until it neither the human being, nor the world can’t be defined. The human physiology (as well as a sociality which is sometimes unfairly identified with spirituality) can be considered as a marker of such definiteness, it is minimum of the being of consciousness. However in addition to this minimum there is also another aspect. Indeed, in every act of perception two events are realized simultaneously (not in a sequence): perception of a certain seeming (what is possible if human being and world are already defined, i.e. the act of proportionality of human being and world have happened) and a certain content. The content is always related to a certain idea. Ideas, in its turn, can be subdivided into two classes. To the first we will attribute the ideas which are the result of generalization of preceding experience and which give an opportunity to speak in an ordered way about the phenomena of the surrounding world. But there are also ideas of another sort – those that give an opportunity to the human being to newly recreate himself each time in the complete and ordered state. These ideas organize human life as human one, they are initiated by culture, but they are not a result of generalization. Such are a conscience, good, moral, love and the similar phenomena for which there are no external reasons – here the basis of a phenomenon coincide with the phenomenon itself. So, human physiology (including work of human brain) is the only side which characterizes the minimum of life of consciousness, it is the marker of human being and world are defined now. We are always after this definiteness (or, more precisely, inside it) when we perceive events of the world, and one shouldn’t search the conditions of any event of life of consciousness (the point of interests of ontology) either in biology nor in sociality. Every conscious act is complete and self-sufficient, and the consciousness basis (being actually the basis of human being) can be found only in consciousness.

Herrmann, Markus (ed.), Personhood, Self-Consciousness, and the First-Person Perspective, Brill/Mentis, 2023

This article enquires into the relation between pre-reflective awareness and the lived body and, in particular, into the notion of self-affection. It claims only the 'innermost' lived-experiences such as the affective awareness of my own body-self are immediately given as acts of an originally, pre-reflective proto-consciousness. What affective consciousness experiences is its own acts understood as the actualization of its capacity of sensing. Bodily self-awareness is thus the consciousness of my continuing selfaffection. It will further claim that the unity of body and consciousness in its totality is made possible by the force of bodily drives onto consciousness, which, on the grounds of an awareness of both the reflexive process of touch and of the kinesthetic freedom of the body, grants the subject a non-predicative self-knowledge or experiential knowledge. It further distinguishes between different modalities of self-affection, since not all experiences are self-aware in the same sense. It also enquires into their order of foundation, to arrive to a primal form of self-awareness, that of the awakening of consciousness to life. Here we grasp consciousness and self-consciousness in statu nascendi: to exist is to discover oneself as being existent. Hence, the primary form of self-awareness consists in the sudden realization of being alive.

2013

Reprint of Doctoral Thesis/Dissertation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2013