Consciousness Of Self Research Articles

The evolution of narrative and the self

Narratives bring a range of disparate behavioral modes before the conscious self. Preliterate narratives consist of a loose string of episodes in which each episode, or small group of episodes, displays a single mode. With literacy comes the ability to construct long narratives in which the episodes are tightly structured so as to exhibit a character's essential nature. Complex strands of episodes are woven together into a single narrative, with flashbacks often present. The emergence of the novel makes possible the depiction of personal growth and change. Intimacy, a private sphere of sociality, emerges as both a mode of experience depicted within novels and as a mode in which people read novels. The novelist constructs a narrator to structure experience for reorganization.

Evolutionary aspects of love and empathy

Love has always been a central preoccupation in individual human lives, but there has been little consideration of it by psychologists or other scientists and little attempt to explain it as an evolutionary phenomenon. There are various possible behavioral precursors of love: animal “love,” empathy, group feeling, sexuality, and the mother/infant bond. The principal candidates are sexuality and the mother/infant bond. Sexuality has been favored as an origin by a few writers, but has characteristics which distinguish it sharply from love. However, neither does the mother/infant bond alone fully account for human love. Love evolved as the outcome of interaction between the genetic basis for mother/infant attachment and other capabilities of evolving humans manifested in and made possible by the increase in human brain-size: enlarged cognitive capacity, improved communication, and the evolution of language. The capacity of language led to the emergence of the conscious self, and with this the capability to recognize and empathize with the selfhood of others. The deepening of the mother/infant attachment into love plays, and still plays, an essential role in the transmission of culture from one generation to the next, and in making possible the cohesion of the human group. This account fits well with recent research into the process and significance of the mother/infant relation.

Women's mid-life experience: an evolving consciousness of self and children

This paper describes a hermeneutical and phenomenological research study of the mid-life spiritual experience of 10 women who are members of the United Church of Canada. Based on in-depth, face-to-face interviews, the paper describes the first of two simultaneous and interrelated experiences: an evolving consciousness of self and children. The five invariant themes that emerge point to a need for an expanded framework of human development that takes fuller account of women's experience and spirituality.

Book Reviews : D. Haber. Health Care for an Aging Society: Cost Conscious Community Care and Self Care Approaches. New York: Hemisphere Publishing, 1989. 175 pp. $29.50

Book Reviews : D. Haber. Health Care for an Aging Society: Cost Conscious Community Care and Self Care Approaches. New York: Hemisphere Publishing, 1989. 175 pp. $29.50

“This Self of All the other Selves:” Part I

In the Principles, James provided a lead with regard to which totality of mental-occurrence instances make up the person's conscious being (one of the common meanings of the word consciousness). That is, this totality may amount to a certain kind of mental occurrence, the kind James called “the self of selves,” “the central active self,” and “the innermost sanctuary of our life” in his chapter “The Consciousness of Self.” The present article pursues the character and nature of “this self of all the other selves” according to James's firsthand account of it. Also, this article provides replies from James's perspective to six objections brought by Stout against James's account of the self of selves. These objections pertain mainly to the latter's dimension of “spontaneity,” or activity.

The Writer's Identity as Self-Dismantling Text in Julien Green's Si j'étais vous. . .

Written between 1944 and 1946, Julien Green's novel Si j'étais vous . . . is one of the author's most fantastic and enigmatic texts, having generated interpretations ranging from the Freudian to the theological. Yet certain central features of the text have not yet been addressed and may lead to a different approach, one focusing on the problem of the writer's identity in his works. Despite the fact that his literary efforts are unsuccessful, Fabien is shown as being a writer like Green himself, but more importantly, he is a character in another writer's fiction. As metatext, Green's novel describes the conversion of an author into a succession of language objects which are similar and alien to him. In each of his different incarnations, Fabien transposes himself as text, marrying a residual consciousness of self to the desired attributes of his "host." Fabien's round-trip journey may, therefore, represent the process of turning the writer's reality into language, and the subsequent endeavor to resituate what that language had displaced.

Book Review: Health care for an aging society: Cost conscious community care and self care approaches

Book Review: Health care for an aging society: Cost conscious community care and self care approaches

WHO SPEAKS AND FOR WHOM? THE SEARCH FOR SUBJECTIVITY IN BROWNING’S POETRY

Consciousness of self is only possible if it is experienced by contrast. I use I only when I am speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It is this condition of dialogue that is constitutive of person, for it implies that reciprocally I becomes you in the address of the one who in his turn designates himself as 1. Here we see a principle whose consequences are to spread out in all directions. Language is possible only because each speaker sets himself up as a subject by referring to himself as I in his discourse.!

Monitors: Key mechanisms and roles in the development and aging of the consciousness and self

A network of interacting neural structures, called monitors, exists in the mammalian brain in which data derived from sensory inputs and from memory stores is precisely displayed within the brain. The key function of monitors is to provide an ‘ultimate monitor’, proposed to be the locus that generates the phenomenon of conscious self awareness, with information that defines or maps the positions of the parts of an individual with respect to each other and with respect to external objects or events at specific times. The resolution of at least some of these monitors (e.g. some concerned with vision) is extremely great and approaches, in the case of vision, the precision with which images of external objects are projected onto the retina. This conclusion is based on the fact that an individual is able to perceive visual images with an acuity that closely approximates the fineness of resolution of the retinal image. The sensory signals that provide information about body part positions and those that provide information about the exterior are evidently integrated with each other in a suitable hierarchy of monitors so as to provide a coherent representation of self- vs.-environment. The logical ‘framework’ monitor for this integrated dislay-mapping is proposed to be that the maps the body in space and it is proposed that the locations of objects perceived through the touch sense and senses that deal with more remote items in the environment become superimposed on a map that extends or extrapolates the body space map beyond the body's physical boundaries, a learning process that occurs during development. The ultimate monitor not only receives a display of the synthetic representations derived currently through the integrative functions defined above, but also is provided with at least four other inputs from other different classes of monitors. One of these is a monitoring system that generates timing signals needed to separate inputs into a time order and to assign an order to them. It is proposed that it is awareness of these timing signals by the ultimate monitor that is the essential and indispensible input that generates the phenomenon of awareness. A second input to the monitor that is the self is a selected part of its own activities. This awareness of what the ultimate monitor is receiving, doing or planning to do in the future is the characteristic necessary for awareness of self. A third monitored component input is information that is selectively retrieved from memory, including memories that define the past actions and states of the self monitor. The representations presented to the ultimate monitor from memory are generally much less precisely defined than those provided by current sensations. This implies that what is stored in memory as records of past sensations represents partially abstracted and simplified imagery or sequences that reflect the essence of sensory experiences denuded of fine details. The fourth kind of display transmitted to the ultimate monitor is one that represents the affective feelings associated either with current input or recalled out of associative memory. This last kind of experience or relived experience (recalled memory) is central to the use of the other information provided to the ultimate monitor in fulfilling its key role -- the making of decisions regarding which of possible alternative actions (usually movements) is most appropriate to a perceived relationship between an individual and objects in its environment. Alternative mechanisms through which representations possessing the observed precision may be generated in a mature vertebrate brain are discussed and it is concluded that a general or ‘coarse grain’ projection of patterns in the source a monitor displays is determined genetically-developmentally but that the ‘fine grain’ resolution that an adult enjoys is the result of learning during development. This learning, it is proposed, results from the fact that points nearby to each other in space or time in a source are more likely to be concurrently active, which fact causes a fine structure remapping of the monitors. The means through which symbolically coded representations of experiences are retrieved from memory and reassembled in a suitable monitor for projection to the ultimate monitor are assessed and possible means for attaining this structural retrieval are proposed. Finally, alternative mechanisms for the generation of timing-clocking signals are discussed, the precision of such timing is evaluated and two of these mechanisms are indicated as possible means. This paper provides the conceptual framework for an analysis of neuroanatomical structures and their relationships to each other upon which the tentative assignment of particular functions to particular brain structures is based, as described in a companion paper (Strehler, B., Mech. Ageing Dev. (1989) submitted).

Cultural Diversity and the Test of Leadership

Cultural Diversity and the Test of Leadership Item: Last year, the valedictorian of the graduating class of the U.S. Air Force Academy was Hoang Nhu Tran, a boat person who was among the last to get out of Saigon in 1975. He arrived in the United States able to say Hello and little else. This fall, after finishing a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, he will take up a scholarship at Harvard Medical School. If you read the papers or look around your classroom, you will know Lt. Tran is not alone in his remarkable level of achievement--merely symbolic, the most newsworthy example of a particular minority that is making the American dream its own. Item: In California, officials last year predicted that this fall, a majority of all school-age children would be from some minority group (Black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian). As often happens, California is the leading edge of a major, national demographic change. We are more and more becoming a nation of minorities. Item: Sometime in the next century, the life expectancy of a newborn child will hit 100. For the first time in human history, it will become commonplace--the norm--for four generations to know and interact with one another. We have no models for a society constructed on that demographic premise, nor do we yet understand how to construct an intergenerational culture. Item: A recently published book gives a devastating portrayal of The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press). William Julius Wilson argues that America's cities have become the breeding ground for families and individuals whose behavior contrasts sharply with that of mainstream America, a socially pathological environment characterized by joblessness, disintegration of the family, and the increasing physical, social, cultural, and economic isolation of the poor. These items are indicators of massive subterranean shifts in our country and the makeup of our population. They are descriptors of the America in which the new generation of leaders in CEC must operate, and which will shape the agenda they must meet and deal with in the next decade and the next century. They represent both the hope and the dark underside of a swirling mass of issues that travels under the name diversity. The Baby Boomers. In the middle of all this is the average CEC member, born sometime between the end of World War II and 1964--a baby boomer. More than with any other, it is with this generation that I would like to have an evening by the fireside. And if I could, this is what I would want to say to you. Your generation has begun to succeed mine in positions of responsibility and authority. You are taking over, and you will have to lead. You're lucky. You were shaken loose from the foundations of my generation by the cultural earthquake called the Sixties, by the Vietnam War, the Peace Corps, the civil rights struggles, and yes, even by the Me Decade. You lived through a social commitment to do good when times were good. And that commitment has shaped you. Your challenge is the generation right behind you, those who have been born since 1970. And what you may not yet see is that they are more different from you than you are different from us. A big percentage of them are the video boomers, the kids-becoming-adults whose entire consciousness of self and society has been molded by television, by the easy availability of whatever they wanted, whether money or sex or drugs, by a social ethos which promised and delivered instant gratification. …

Higher education choice in Australia: Processes and impediments

This article outlines and interprets the results of a pilot study designed to evaluate the impact of various social and personal factors on the decision process stages (DPS) through which years 7–12 high school students proceed in choosing to undertake study in the university sector of higher education in Australia. The article also examines the associated effects of background factors influencing participation in higher education generally. Complex patterns of predictive associations between the factors and seven DPS which appear to operate differently during the various years of high school are outlined. The differences are described in terms of six general categories of predictors. Comparative studies evaluating the effects of background factors on participation in higher education are examined to broaden the contextual base of the research findings and to identify the contribution of theories of social change, with particular emphasis on the meritocratic thesis. The interpretation of the research findings is assisted by relating them to Erik Erikson's developmental framework concerned with the growth of the conscious self or personal identity.

Electromagnetic radiation and the afterlife

The question of survival of bodily death is often considered to be beyond contemporary scientific methods and conceptual categories. However, recent research into spontaneous radiations from living systems suggests a scientific foundation for the ancient association between light and life, and a biophysical hypothesis of the conscious self that could survive death of the body. All living organisms emit low-intensity light; at the time of death, that radiation is ten to 1,000 times stronger than that emitted under normal conditions. This “deathflash” is independent of the cause of death, and reflects in intensity and duration the rate of dying. The vision of intense light reported in near-death experiences may be related to this deathflash, which may hold an immense amount of information. The electromagnetic field produced by necrotic radiation, containing energy, internal structure, and information, may permit continuation of consciousness beyond the death of the body.

On Mindfulness and Our Relation to Animals

qMindfulnessq is a gentle form of selfconsciousness, a consciousness of self without judgments, condemnations. It is a benevolent, an enlightened form of self-awareness. qMindfulnessq is a term applied to meditation. Indeed, meditation can be thought of as mindfulness; the reverse is also true: mindfulness is meditation. Then, in beingnn nmindful of animals, one is really entering into a meditation on and relationship with animals. This is important. The...

A Response to Perry Nodelman's "Beyond Explanation"

A Response to Perry Nodelman's "Beyond Explanation" Eleanor Cameron (bio) Books for children and youth are rarely accorded the full-page, or even longer, reviews that books for adults are given in the major reviewing media, reviews sometimes gathered later as collections of critical essays. Therefore the truly critical pieces on single works found in Children's Literature would, I should think, be of considerable interest to their authors. Of course it is a curious and even unsettling encounter to read the objective remarks of the critic who has taken apart and keenly penetrated this creative experience, because it is one which has, more than likely, been completely private, very often the work of the writer's unconscious fully as much as his conscious self. And it is the unusual reviewer who will have had the time or the space to cut through to whatever deeper levels of meaning the work might have beneath the surface of story. Therefore, what Perry Nodelman has written on Beyond Silence is something to make the author of it reread with close attention, so as fully to take in the way in which Nodelman's insights were gained over a period of time and then made clear through the three-part structure of his essay. (I say "over a period of time" because in his initial letter to me he said, "I wrote the first draft of my paper a few months after reading the book, having been unable to stop thinking about it.") It is a structure that reveals first of all the critic's exploration of his approval, then of his confusions, and with these two layers finally excavated, of the arrival at his resolution of both approval and confusions. It is an unusual approach, born of Nodelman's apparent desire to be honest in confessing he had difficulties in arriving at his resolution, rather than stating at once his final understanding, as if it had been there all along. To begin with, I will get past a few quibbles. When Nodelman says that my work affirms the "idea that the ordinary perception of time's passage ignores a larger reality," an idea that "underlies and gives order" to all my work, we first come upon that world order. We then [End Page 134] come upon it a second time in its negative aspect when he says that "she seems to value [the English tradition and its immersion in the living past] for its distance from contemporary American life, which she finds disorderly and dismisses as incomplete," and also in the following sentence where Nodelman speaks of the "glamor" the past has for us. We come upon it a third time and in a still different form when he speaks of "Domi's alien and satisfyingly orderly rooms" in the French Museum in The Court of the Stone Children. And there it is a fourth time in the following paragraph: "In Beyond Silence the homage to the order of the past and to the English fantasies that evoke it is more explicit."1 I must say that the idea that I pay homage to the order of the past is entirely Nodelman's, not mine. Perhaps he may unconsciously have got onto this false track when he first used the world order in connection with my conviction about the globe of time, the eternal moment, saying that it gives "order" to all my work (not all of it, actually, but certainly to the two time fantasies). It gives order to the works of any time fantasist, as a matter of fact, as the genre of time fantasy requires the intermingling of the past and present, and sometimes the future in one way or another. But when Nodelman says that I seem "to value [the English tradition and its immersion in the living past] for its distance from contemporary American life, which she finds disorderly and dismisses as incomplete," I must take issue. I do value the sense of the past one feels in the British Isles and have acknowledged in The Green and Burning Tree (as Nodelman observes) that undoubtedly that vivid and immediate sense of innumerable layers of history one...

Kafka's Hierogram: The Trauma of the "Landarzt"

Ein Landarzt holds a crucial position among Kafka's stories. It is title piece in a collection published in 1919 and dedicated to author's father, whose reaction when volume appeared was predictable: it on table beside my bed.' This enigmatic tale was probably not intended for comprehension of any earthly father. It is a provocation, an act of defiance or lunacy,2 as if to say, is my world, accept it or reject me. The father depicted in story is hopelessly limited and narrow-minded (in narrator's perception [951]) -if it were destined to be read by his type of receptor, message could not possibly get through. But is it an encoded message, and if so, in what is it written, how does one go about deciphering it? Is it narrative of a dream, or as one critic has put it rather unsympathetically, incoherent . . . literal transcription [of a nightmare], basically unintelligible because Kafka failed to master [its] form?4 This begs question: what is form of story and its genre? It does appear to be a dream-narrative. If it is, will its Deutung have to be deferred to another lifetime? For as Freud was first to insist, dreamer's current stream of associations must supply connections which render dream-text intelligible. Since even everyday life and language is reducible in content to more primary and private processes of signification, skeptic must conclude logically that understanding is impossible -or that it means no more than charade of emission and counteremission of signs in a semiotic ritual, laws of which are unknown and inaccessible to our conscious selves. But this is another question, why the neurotic's individual myth appears to be written in at once most private and most universal of codes.' That is, isn't dream, after all, ultimately interpretable? The dreamer's code changes

Rousseau's Le Levite d'Ephraim: Dream, Text, and Synthesis

DESPITE HIS ENSHRINEMENT BY LITERARY HISTORY as the apostle of self-determination, as the most eloquent spokesman for an ethos of authenticity and independence, the shape of Rousseau's life and writing is very much the result of a constant, relentlesg, and often agonizing dialectic between himself as individual and a social order which, in all its various instances, he sensed as a force impinging upon, disfiguring, and attempting to silence him. From his earliest memories of childhood, Rousseau's consciousness of self is that of a passivity, an innocence (in-nocere: unable to do harm) unjustly victimized by forces for which he bears no responsibility: the death of his mother, the spanking for the broken comb, the apprenticeship to Ducommun, etc., etc. Perhaps for this reason, Rousseau accords, both in his representations of self within the autobiographical writings and in his representations of history and society within the political writings, a particular importance to what I would call the event: the sudden eruption of forces beyond human control, but having an irresistible and devastating effect on all whom they touch. Understanding the event, its occurrence, impact, and implications, provides, I would argue, a useful vehicle for getting at what is an abiding structure of Rousseau's textuality: a singularly complex interplay of proclaimed innocence and passivity which is nonetheless founded upon and orchestrated toward an active, continuing, and highly aggressive inculpation of the other. In attempting to do this, I would like to examine a work which,

Childlike Wonder and the Truths of Science Fiction

Childlike Wonder and the Truths of Science Fiction Madeleine L'Engle (bio) For the last hundred years, the number of people who read fantasy and science fiction has been growing. One of the baffling things about this group—baffling to those who are not hooked on the genres—is that it has no age limits. Afficionados usually start reading as children and continue throughout their lives. I blundered into science fiction when I was a child, with the works of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and E. Nesbit. I have read it ever since. In science fiction I found the questions about the meaning of life that all of us ask sooner or later. Children have always been interested in these cosmic questions and riddles which adults often attempt to tame by placing into categories fit only for scientists or adults or theologians. Only recently have fantasy and science fiction been published with age levels in mind, and readers seem to be ignoring such labels. Science fiction and fantasy appeal to a certain kind of mind and not to specific stages of development. On the surface, science seems to be the most rational of all disciplines, relying solely on intellect without need of the intuitive self. Simple equations—or at least simple in appearance—neatly encapsulate great problems. E = mc2 clearly teaches that "energy equals mass times the speed of light squared." Yet this equation has become so familiar that we forget its wildly imaginative implications. The world of contemporary science, of astrophysics and cellular biology, is itself so fantastic and poetic that it almost seems like fiction. A star that is known as a degenerate white dwarf, or another known as the red giant sitting on the horizontal branch—they sound more as if they come from fairy tales rather than from serious books on astrophysics, such as White Holes: Cosmic Gushers in the Universe (Dell, 1977), by John [End Page 102] Gribbin, an astrophysicist who sometimes cites science fiction writers in his studies of astronomy. Science fiction, we must remind ourselves, often relies upon contemporary science. Space technology and places such as Cape Canaveral, Mount Wilson, or Alamogordo frequently appear in science fiction; and scientists, as well as writers with no particular scientific training, write science fiction. Fred Hoyle, the English astrophysicist, write both science fiction and articles for academic journals. Why does a man such as Hoyle bother with fiction when he is so successful in the "real" world of science? The answer is that science depends as much upon the imagination as upon the intellect. Like a poet, the scientist uses inspiration and intuition. In The Double Helix, the book about the discovery of DNA, James D. Watson, who received the Nobel prize for his work in genetics, says several times, "It's so pretty, it's got to be true." Inadvertently he echoes Keats's "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." If a scientific equation is "ugly" the scientist is suspicious; the scientist, like the artist, appreciates aesthetics and balance. Lay people often envision scientists in white coats, perched on stools in immaculate laboratories, clipboards on their laps, working out problems. Most scientific discoveries, however, come in a flash, often when the scientist is not in the laboratory at all. Einstein's theory of relativity came to him full-blown, and only later did he work out the equations to prove it. Then, because he was a genius but not very good at mathematics, he made several mistakes that other scientists had to point out to him. Both the scientist and the science fiction writer understand that imagination, improvisation, and intuition are as important as rational thinking. For a good many centuries we have denigrated the subconscious, intuitive self and elevated the conscious, intellectual self. We have forgotten that the conscious self is only that small tip of the iceberg, whereas the subconscious self is the larger part below the surface. Abraham Joshua Heschel, in God in Search of Man (Harper Torchbooks), writes that out of his religious tradition comes "a legacy of wonder." Heschel is talking of "The Religious Man" [End Page 103] but he could equally well be talking of the writers and...

On a Painter's View of Self-Development and Creativity

I am a painter and a philosopher and I am interested in the question: What is the relation between my selfdevelopment and my artistic development? (Examples of my paintings are shown in Figs. 1 to 3 and Fig. 4, see color plate.) I shall set out a personal program or a schematic map to help locate my 'self in it. Though Karl Popper's schematic map is rather different from mine, he makes clear his view that such maps are 'part of our ordinary consciousness of self. Popper says: 'This model or map, I suggest, with our own position marked on it, is part of our ordinary consciousness of self. It normally exists in the form of vague dispositions or programmes; but we can focus our attention upon it whenever we wish, whereupon it may become more elaborate and precise. This map or model is one of a great number of conjectural theories about the world which we hold and which we almost constantly call to our aid, as we go along and as we develop, specify, and realize, the programme and the timetable of the actions in which we are engaged' [1].

Consciousness of self and painful self-consciousness.

Consciousness of self and painful self-consciousness.

Words and Language in Father and Son

Edmund Gosse's memoir, Father and Son , presents itself, as the subtitle has it, as A Study of Two Temperaments , and at an early point Gosse insists that "There came a time when neither spoke the same language as the other. . . . " In a sense this is almost literally true, and the burden of the book is to show how Gosse's developing consciousness of self is manifested through a consciousness of words in opposition to his father's belief in "The Word," the fundamentalism of the Plymouth Brethren.