Re: [xmca] Consciousness, Piaget

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Whoa!! total agreement. And I Looooove unicorns.
My initial question was something like Martin's. "Tony, what does it mean
(for Peirce) to be 'aware of signs AS signs." Sounds a lot like thing in
itself.

In my classes, i ask students if they have ever seen a unicorn.  No one
ventures a yes. Then I ask them, are unicorns good or bad? They mostly all
raise their hands and say that they are good. Then we get into a good
discussion. Sounds like I have intuited myself toward what you two are
agreeing about.
mike

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 6:51 PM, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:

> I completely agree
>
>
> On Sep 21, 2009, at 7:54 PM, Tony Whitson wrote:
>
>  On Mon, 21 Sep 2009, Martin Packer wrote:
>>
>>  I've tried to stay out of this thread, because it's a difficult topic and
>>> I'm no philosopher (though I can't seem to put their damned books down!).
>>> But my 2 cents, for what they'll buy, are that one needs to begin with an
>>> acknowledgement that Cs is, as I said in my last message, relational. I
>>> don't mean by this that it is a relationship between mind and matter, I mean
>>> that Cs is a relationship between matter and matter. I think we'd all agree
>>> that Cs is a property, an aspect, only of living organisms. I completely
>>> agreed with your earlier post, Andy, that Cs is not simply present or absent
>>> but is a matter of degree or type. My favorite Hegel is the phenomenology,
>>> which is a story about the education of Cs over time. So not all living
>>> organisms have the same kind of Cs, and humans don't all have the same kind,
>>> of have one kind all their lives. Cs develops. But it is always to be found
>>> in interaction between organisms (material) and other material stuff.
>>>
>>>
>> It seems to me that it might help a lot to think of consciousness not as a
>> property or aspect, but as an activity. It is certainly a relational,
>> material (with formal) activity, in relation to other activities in
>> ourselves and in our world.
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