Consciousness is a social experience

Consciousness is a social experience

A child's symbolic action world is built from the outside in. We are sad because we cry; we do not cry because we are sad. I took a night course in acting and this is something I was taught. We were told to perform the action to induce the feeling. Only when we ?'look' at our self do we know what is going on.

The child discovers first that s/he is a social product. Perhaps this will show us why we are so often mere puppets jerked around by alien symbols and sounds. Perhaps this is why we are so often blind ideologues (blindly partisan).

In order to separate the ego from the world it seems that the ego must have a rallying point. It must have a flag about which to rally. That flag is the "I". The pronoun ?'I' is the symbolic rallying point for the human's ego; it is the precise designation of self-hood. It is concluded by those who study such matters that the ?'I' "must take shape linguistically". The self or ego "is largely a verbal edifice".

Everything friendly is "me" everything hostile or unfriendly is "not-me". "Speech, then, is everything that we call specifically human, precisely because without speech there can be no true ego. Every known language has the pronouns "I", "thou", and "he", or verb forms which convey these reference points." The large central control brain is there before language, apparently in a potential state just waiting to be galvanized into directivness by wedding itself to the word "I". This wedding made possible the unleashing of a new type of creature to take command of the planet.

"The "I" signals nothing less than the beginning of the birth of values into a world of powerful caprice…The personal pronoun is the rallying point for self-consciousness." The wedding of the nervous ability to delay response, with the pronoun "I", unleashed a new type of animal; the human species began. The ?'I' represents the birth of values.

Upon the discovery of the "I" the infant human becomes a precise form, which is the focus of self-control. The creatures previous to the arrival of humans in the chain of evolution had an instinctive center within itself. When our species discovered the "I" and its associated self-control center a dual reality occurred. "The animal not only loses its instinctive center within itself; it also becomes somewhat split against itself."

Becker, the author of "The Birth and Death of Meaning", notes that Kant was perhaps the first to impress upon us the importance of the fact that the infant becomes conscious first of itself as a "me" and then only as "I". This order of discover has been shown to be universal. We all discover in order "mine", "me" and only then do we discover "I". Becker's book is the source of the ideas and quotes in this post.

The fact that all humans establish themselves first as an ?'object of others' before becoming the CEO of the self is vitally important if we wish to understand the human condition.