Kindle Notes & Highlights
analytic philosophy, at least in the view of this writer, is more appropriate for solving chess problems than for understanding of the nuances of consciousness.
To completely understand this concept we must get comfortable with the notion that conscious experience always involves some form of perception.
that our experience of ourselves and the world in which we live is a product of the ways in which we perceive them.
to understand the nature of conscious experience means to understand that at each moment it is grounded in our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world around us.
outer and an inner dimension--an outside and an inside.
inanimate objects such as stones, cell phones, computers, and book jackets, do not have such perceptions because they are not alive and are not conscious.
To understand consciousness as lived experience we need look beyond abstract reflections to actual moment to moment reality. In other words, we must seek the texture of our lived experience.
This texture is colored by many elements such as the flow of thoughts, memories, and feelings through our awareness as well as the kaleidoscopic flux of sounds, images, and sensations that impress themselves upon us from the external world. How all this jells together to paint for each of us a canvas of personal reality depends on a number of things, none more important than our own level of growth and maturation.
What this means in plain English is that skills rely heavily on experience.
the point of all this is that we become skilled, knowledgeable, and competent in those areas in which we have the most experience.
We are all familiar with states of consciousness2 because we each experience several of them each day. They include waking, dreaming, and though we often do not remember, non-dream sleep as well.
Charles Tart developed a systems theory of consciousness that illustrated why, when we enter a particular state of consciousness, the tendency is to enter it completely.8 He reasoned that each state of consciousness is composed of a number of basic psychological processes such as memory, thought, sense of time, body-perception and the senses of hearing, smell, taste, and so on.
Tart's idea about states of consciousness was that the various psychological functions that come together to comprise a state--short and long term memory, the operation of the various sensory modes, sense of humor, the kind of "reasoning" that goes on in the state, etc.--fit together like pieces of a unique puzzle.
