But Who Is the Builder
Apr. 29th, 2018 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jcsbimp01"The mind," "thoughts," and "consciousness" are all ideas we learn about how to conceive what we are and what we can do. Scientific inquiry has taught us that much of this happens in the brain, or at least has brain activity as central to it. But even before we learn these ideas, there is something in us that is what will learn them.
In our infancy, we seem to quickly become aware, if we are healthy, of how to look around, move, eat, and drink. Our cognitive and motor skills development concern themselves with building abilities in us, as being alive brings perception or at least reaction according to needs and desires. Until we can read, or even understand speech, we guide ourselves through an amazing amount of development using our own senses and desires as we develop their use. We do this without instruction.
Sometimes our development seems "normal" to the communicating, consensual organisms who gave birth to us and raise us to become part of their community. Sometimes it seems anomalous. We may or may not grow and develop to be their kind. And we may grow to talk about "the mind," "thoughts," and "consciousness," and be understood. But what we are, organisms that first set out to do these deeds, these feats of development, existed and responded to needs or desires to develop this way before our skills with language and symbolic ideas developed. Maybe even in the womb, our brains and ears worked well enough to take what we could hear and think and make vital building blocks out of them. As with our first few years of life outside of the womb, memories do not get formed that last into adulthood the way later childhood memories will do. Still, we make those building blocks that help us think of self, and of being conscious creatures, and of thinking.
In our infancy, we seem to quickly become aware, if we are healthy, of how to look around, move, eat, and drink. Our cognitive and motor skills development concern themselves with building abilities in us, as being alive brings perception or at least reaction according to needs and desires. Until we can read, or even understand speech, we guide ourselves through an amazing amount of development using our own senses and desires as we develop their use. We do this without instruction.
Sometimes our development seems "normal" to the communicating, consensual organisms who gave birth to us and raise us to become part of their community. Sometimes it seems anomalous. We may or may not grow and develop to be their kind. And we may grow to talk about "the mind," "thoughts," and "consciousness," and be understood. But what we are, organisms that first set out to do these deeds, these feats of development, existed and responded to needs or desires to develop this way before our skills with language and symbolic ideas developed. Maybe even in the womb, our brains and ears worked well enough to take what we could hear and think and make vital building blocks out of them. As with our first few years of life outside of the womb, memories do not get formed that last into adulthood the way later childhood memories will do. Still, we make those building blocks that help us think of self, and of being conscious creatures, and of thinking.
But who is the builder?
