KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA32 (Muller)

Commentary 7

CONSCIOUSNESS AND MATTER
by Maurice McCarthy
30 November 2000, posted 19 December 2000

 

<1>
Consciousness is the activity of discrimination - perceiving, feeling,thinking etc. To ask "What" is conscious? is, in one way, a category error. Activity precedes passivity as a grade of being - Aristotle. In as much as the question asks for a real thing which is conscious, it is asking only to place a label on the activity such that it may be regarded as a thing. Legitimately, one may ask if it can be demonstrated in which way the activity is real.

<2>
Let reality be that which exists in its own right, not dependent on anything else. All the activities of discrimination reduce to two - feeling and thinking. The experience of sense perception as an experience reduces to feeling, as does volition. Feelings are perceptions and perceptions are feelings. Feeling is dependent on a given input and so can only be real in a diminished sense. Thinking, as the thinking about something, also depends upon a given. It is the distinguishing of concepts in the given percepts. Thinking, as the thinking about your own thoughts, has a given created by the activity itself. As not dependent on an other thing it is real. Form and content coincide - a form whose content is its own essence or a content upheld by its own form.

<3>
Thinking therefore precedes feeling and perception. The act of perceiving involves concepts; for instance the eye receives a chaos of input and the adding of concepts distinguishes the forms - see recent reports on the visual perception of 6 and 8 month old babies. Forms are concepts. All feeling involves concepts. Language expresses that we have concepts. We easily confuse this expression of concepts with the possession of them.

<4>
All thinking reduces to concepts. That concept with the mobility to assume the form of any concept whatever is the concept of the concept. It has the same self-supporting reflexive form as thinking about thinking: it is real in its own right. As the centre of all thinking it is the pure "I", the ego, before it has begun to move. That which may receive any form whatever is also called matter.

<5>
Matter and consciousness are polar opposites and in the extreme pass over into one another. This is illustrated by the remarkable observation that the 1850's saw the height of materialism when nothing could be considered real unless it could be seen, heard or felt etc. Yet Freud pronounces the "unconscious" - a concept which by definition cannot be sensed in any way and yet this was accepted almost without protest! Materialism presupposes consciousness by an act of omission. Phenomenology and Psychism are paired in a similar manner.

<6>
The pure ego is prime matter. The mind is intelligent sentience.

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Addendum

If the physical world is causally closed why do cosmologists have to invent 95% of the universe (dark matter)?

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Maurice Mc Carthy