Apparently, Heraclitus said, 'No man steps into the same river twice.'
I've been thinking about this with reference to the Dan Zahavi stuff I was talking about. You see, in his view, it seems, we all have a different cup and scoop out the same water of consciousness. The cup is like our umwelt... a term which essentially means the aspects of reality we are receptive to given our sense organs and the like. Expand it to incorporate our individual lens... I see the homeless man on the High Street as a person deserving of compassion, another might see him as a wastrel and yet another as a friend.
But what I am saying is that our umwelt is not static. the other day, my lens was rosy-tinted and I saw love and compassion joy and wonder everywhere. Now I see all that tinged with grief, somehow. My lens has changed. The For-me-ness of consciousness can never let go fully of these hormonal and chemical messages, surely?
And me - I am not just human DNA. More of the cells in my personal ecosystem are 'my' microbiome. They impact what I want to eat, my health and my mind. There seems to be evidence that the lack of certain gut bacteria correlates with an increased likelihood of depression and the lack of others may be related to autistic spectrum disorders. Who I am is not a me but an us.
What does that say about autonomy? About individuality? If my food preferences and mood change depending on those bacteria living in my gut then how can this 'I' be considered without considering them?
I have been listening to Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life and I have been wondering how much our philosophy would change with an entangled life view of existence... so much that it would be, I think, almost unrecognisable. Our traditional human conceptual frame is blind to so much. The privileges we assume falsify our reasoning. We are wrong. We are so, so profoundly wrong.
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