For-me-ness

I've read a couple of papers written by Dan Zahavi - and bought his book which was silly as I have about eight on the go right now and am finding most of them less interesting than I thought when I bought them. With the exception of one by Jonathan Wolff about public policy and ethics. I like this because he takes what I think to be a very open minded and pragmatic approach. Did you know that the UK Government values our lives at £2,000,000 while the US Government seems to value its citizens at $10,000,000 each! Huh!

Anyway, Zahavi. The reason I was interested in him was what he said about empathy. He makes it embodied and experiential - through the gestures and body language of the other, one transcends the limits of the self to have an experience of the other. It's not an imaginative flight of fancy based on what one would feel in that situation, but a sense of what their experience actually is. It is all about the other.

Then I read what he had to say about the self. He says that in all consciousness, even without an explicit awareness of self, there is not just the qualia of the experience (the smell of lemon rind or the very specific blue of the eyes of one or the other of my cats), but also the inevitable fact that this is what it's like for me.

I have thought about this with reference to meditation. I have wondered whether one can extract thoughts, then feelings, then sense impressions and so on and have pure consciousness - now that part I am sure is possible, but then I wondered if that consciousness is just like a cup of water taken from one common pond... in that all cups of water from that pond will have the same mix of chemicals and so on... or, more extremely, if it is like pure H2O... or, my favoured interpretation, if everyone's consciousness inevitably has their neural fingerprint someone.

Now, that isn't quite what he's saying, but it's affiliated. What, I think, he's saying is that by being conscious one is having an awareness of pure consciousness for oneself... So, to go back to the cup, he is saying that the H2O may be the same but the fact it's in my cup makes it mine.

I'll need to think on that. Because I think that one might be able to extract some of the cup-ness, but one could never get all the microbes out of the water.