concept of consciousness :: essays research papers

An individual is someplace in space-time, and not somewhere else. Except for God, of course, who was invented to instantiate all contradictions in beatified 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 delegate of view, a perspective, and forecasts the world, so far as it can 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 notwithstanding those individuals that can view something can presumably have a point of view. Thus Searle again Subjectivity has the further consequence that all of my assured make ups of intentionality that give me information about the world independent of myself are of all time from a special point of view. The world itself has no point of view, just my access to the world through my conscious states is alw ays perspectival. (ibid. 95).5 In itself, however, that could be true of both other living thing. Nor is it a requirement to be alive an artificial eye has a point of view. More generally, as shown in the excellent discussion of this subject in (Proust 1997), aspectuality can be seen as a consequence of mere differences of informational channels, and doesnt therefore require any level of consciousness. Perspective top executive 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 fairly contrastive problems. For there are different ways in which we might occupy about the effects of our actions in distant space, and in different times. Time is asymmetrical in this sense (among others) we care more, or kinda differently, about what happens in the future than about what happened in the past. But although the things we care about may, of course, be unevenly distributed, space has no uniformly privilege direction. So temporal perspectivity appears seems to constitute a more serious species of subjectiveness than the spatial kind. Now perspectivity is sometimes equated with subjectivity in general, as suggested in the last quotation from Searle above. Yet 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.