Your complimentary articles
You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please
If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.
To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.
If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.
Letters
Letters
Conscious Correspondence • Sceptical About Skepticism • No Madness in Philosophy Now • Dissonance Dissidence • Time & Time Again • Epistemically Essential Epistles
Conscious Correspondence
Dear Editor: The articles on consciousness in Issue 121 stimulate many further thoughts. For instance, our experience of being conscious involves a basic duality: we are conscious of being conscious, but our consciousness also contains things of which we are conscious. The awareness of these not-self things depends on a particular location in space and time, and therefore information gained through the senses. This seems to me to undermine panpsychism. What could an atom be conscious of? Could it possibly extend its awareness, to become conscious of something new? Since a kind of dynamism, an ability to extend, is so intrinsic to our consciousness where does that leave the stone – perhaps stuck inside a wall and probably doomed to die of boredom? And is my car conscious of being a car? If not, at what level, and by what processes, do conscious objects, from atoms upwards, become part of something with a greater richness of coherent individuality?
Christine Avery, Plympton, Devon
Dear Editor: Prior to learning language, infants are often described as egocentric – everything they see or grasp is part of them.
…