Good Morning

It's no wonder we believe in our own existence. We can hold someone's hand, talk to them, listen and respond. And yet I'm not sure I can point to anything beyond the physical extention and duration of a corporeal object. To be entirely clear: I'm not really concerned with rather or not we exist in a physical sense, but with to what extent, and in what way we exist as the person we experience ourselves to be. When emotions manifest with an undeniable physicality, it seems quite clear that that subjective sense of I exists. Sometimes, it just seems that "these feelings won't go away", and we feel utterly convinced that we exist, painful as our existence may be. I sometimes wonder about why it is that I feel more certain of my existence, more conscious of it, when I am sad than when I am happy.

What sort of extention and duration does our consciousness have? For the moment, let's conceive of consciousness as simply the capacity to be aware of oneself and the surrounding world. Our awareness off the physical world must of course be restricted by the extent to which we have sense-datum of it . If one prefers not to divide perception into the perceptual act and the mental objects created, that's just fine. I'm happy to simply say that our awareness of the physical world is restricted by our capacity to sense it. This is an obvious constraint, but I want to be clear that I'm not interested in entertaining any notions of psychic revelation.

So we have a physical body with clear duration and extension and we have awareness. I don't really care whether we believe our awareness to have extension or not. I don't hope to solve the mind-body problem, and as far as my interest extends at present, it doesn't matter whether awareness is a physical "organ" of our mind, or some sort of psychic capacity without a clear physicality (emergent or not—though I have hard time conceiving how it could be anything but emergent if it's not inherently physical). I am being a little disingenuous here: part of my concern does in fact directly pertain to the mind-body problem. I am creating a distinction between consciousness and awareness to examine to different facets of human experience that I think are often erroneously lumped together. The first, that I am calling awareness is simply our capacity to be conscious of observing the world and ourselves. (I can tell that this terminolgy is already horribly ill-conceived, but for now I'm going to go with it and editing will come later.) I don't much care whether or not awareness has extension. Its duration on the other hand is very important.

umm yeah. I need to do some work, so this it to be continued.

Oh, and Sufjan Stevens rocks my world (sad as it it).