Free will again (Humans)

by BBella , Friday, March 09, 2012, 21:06 (4640 days ago) @ dhw

..Romansh revived the Susan Blackmore article, which seems to me nothing but a series of reflections on different levels of consciousness...But I'm not sure myself what she's actually trying to say, and would be interested to know what you think she's getting at. -I could be wrong, but what I gathered from her article, or rather identified with her experience of "becoming conscious", was the act of awakening from identifying with mind chatter. The realization I am not the chatter but have been abducted by it, so to speak. For me, I described it myself as an awakening. I had no guidance on this...it just happened. It was as if my ears and eyes were suddenly turned outward instead of stuck inward. Of course, I could see and hear before, but before my "awakening", what was going on inside my "mindfield" took precedence and colored everything subjectively that I witnessed outside myself in a very intrusive and debilitating way. My focus was out of control and what was going on in my mindfield controlled me. -> You wrote earlier: "Thought can't be controlled. Only what you choose to focus on can be controlled." That is not only an insight into the possible nature of free will (if it exists), but also sums up the targeted nature of your own thinking about consciousness. I can't see any such focus in the Blackmore article. I see nothing there except a pointless reiteration of the fact that she doesn't know how conscious she is.-Susan's article appears to me to be just a fragment of her experience. In reading it, this part of her experience sounds to me like she is expressing "how" she became aware of her own ability to control her focus. We express our experience's in different ways. She recognized, that by choosing to direct her focus from inside her mind to outside herself, a change came over her. She suddenly felt as though she had just become aware/conscious of everything around her in a new way (without her incessant subjective mind perception). Which made her feel as if she had become a different/brand new person. This is why I stated, when I am conscious I feel more like myself (my right now self). When I am caught within my mind chatter...I feel more like whatever "old" paradigm of thought process I had been translated to before I was conscious/aware. 
 
> My own further reflections were not about her article as such, but about the dangers of too much self-awareness. Self-conscious is a good expression here, because it entails awareness of the self combined with insecurity and even embarrassment. -To me, self-consciousness is more times than not a negative action (I'm sure it has a positive action too). I see self-consciousness as suddenly identifying at any given moment with our most "vulnerable" thought/picture/etc identification of ourselves. As if, in one moment, we are suddenly abducted from what's going on outside ourselves ourselves into our mindfield watching/hearing a certain circling, usually, negative film of ourselves. These moments usually happen in "public" for most people. This is how I see self-consciousness.->(I'm afraid I also find Susan Blackmore's style embarrassingly self-conscious, but that is a matter of taste.) My use of "deadly" was indeed a reference to the actor's career, but I think that is a very good example both of levels and of the problem of excessive self-awareness.-I can see how self-consciousness would definitely get in the way of an actor's career, and even stop it in it's tracks (until they get some therapy anyway). But, to me, there would be no danger of an actor losing their job by becoming excessively self-aware (the word excessively can't even pertain to awareness, you either are or aren't). I think self awareness would make a person a better actor. Mind chatter (circling vultures I call it) would no longer be in control of their focus. Self-awareness takes you outside mind chatter. Self-consciousness drags you back in. ->I'd put this on a par with what I've called the philosophical level of thinking, which leads to a similar loss of security ... nothing is certain, nothing is real.-Not sure what you meant here. ->If Susan Blackmore's students run around wondering whether they are conscious or not, they will end up not perceiving objects but only perceiving themselves perceiving objects. However, perhaps I really have misunderstood the whole piece.-It sounds to me like you have misunderstood it, or have it backwards. I could be wrong. The way I see it, becoming conscious makes your perception more aware of your surroundings, therefore more objective of it(because your focus is outside the mind). Her act of asking herself, "Am I conscious?" is a reminder to step out of the mind and into this world fully objective, without the subjective perception of mind chatter. It's like setting your clock to remind you to pick up the kids. Whatever you are thinking or doing when the clock goes off, you drop and put all your focus on one thing...picking up the kids. Susan is giving her students a "trigger" question to wake them up from the mind chatter, directing their focus outward. -Hope this is not even more confusing...-bb