The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes (The Truth Series Book 12)

by Thomas Stark

Hegel described the most primitive form of consciousness as sense-certainty – “certainty at the level of sense-experience.” This form of consciousness does only one thing: it grasps whatever is in front of it at a given moment. It is immediate and direct. You open your eyes and see the world. Sense-certainty is about nothing except recording the data received by our senses at that instant. Hegel said that there is “knowledge” without concepts and knowledge with concepts. There is primitive consciousness and advanced consciousness. Today, we would say it is better not to regard mere perception as indicative of consciousness at all. Tellingly, psychologist Julian Jaynes wrote, “Consciousness is sometimes confused even with simple sense perception. Historically, we inferred and abstracted ideas of sense perception from a realization of our sense organs, and then, because of prior assumptions about mind and matter or soul and body, we believed these processes to be due to consciousness – which they are not.” This is a crucial consideration. Humanity’s truths do not derive from the facts but from the interpretation of the facts. The validity of the interpretative framework is therefore always at issue. A long-standing interpretation of consciousness conflates it with it sentience. It is exactly this connection that needs to be broken in order to make progress in understanding both sentience and consciousness. Jaynes continued, “If any of you still think that consciousness is a ...