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Re: [xmca] Consciousness, Piaget



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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