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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 13 Oct 2022

Taken: 06 May 2014

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Consciousness an Introduction •
Susan Blackmore •
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
One problem, claims Dennett, is our tendency to think about selves as all or none, existent or nonexistent. But just as we can be comfortable with fuzzy boundaries between species (cabbage and Brussels sprouts?), or between living and nonliving things (viruses?) so we should be with selves. They are biological products like spiders’ webs or bowerbirds bowers. They appeared gradually during evolution, and are built gradually in each of our lives. Every individual ‘Homo sapiens’ makes its own ‘self,’ spinning a web of a words and deeds to build a protective string of narrative. Like spiders and bowerbirds, it doesn’t have to know what it’s doing; it just does it. The result is a web of discourses, without which an individual human being as incomplete as a bird without feathers or a turtle without its shell.

But perhaps it is wrong to say that “we” build the narrative. We humans are embedded in a world of words; a world of memes that tend to make over, creating us as they go. As Dennett en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett puts it “Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source” ~ (Dennett 1991) ~ Page 130

CONSCIOUSNESS AN INTRODUCTION
3 years ago. Edited 3 years ago.

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