Susan Blackmore proposes that current models of understanding consciousness may all be based on an illusion, and that the key to understanding consciousness would be figuring out the trick the brain pulls on us.
“To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it. Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no-one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity.”
Theodor W. Adorno: Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life (translated by Edmund Jephcott) (via fuckyeahphilosophy)
I’ve got to drop that phrase into a conversation someday.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
“Pixar’s Finding Nemo is an exceptionally beautiful film, and will probably be cited by marine biologists in years to come as the childhood event that first kindled their fascination with the ocean and its teeming denizens. But it is also a kind of dream-work in which an initial trauma is systematically displaced and transformed in order to fabricate a fantasy life-world, a “biological imaginary” that can be lived with.”
Poetix: Some Further Uses Of Enchantment
“Entitativity means the consideration of something as pure entity, i.e., the mental abstraction from attendant circumstances. In psychology, it typically refers to the perception of a group as pure entity (an entitative group), abstracted from its attendant individuals. It is different from holistic perception. Operationally, entitativity can also be defined as perceiving a collection of social targets (e.g., individuals) as possessing unity and coherence (e.g., a group).”
Entitativity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
