Ah! The veil lifts!
It turns out we were talking about two different things, Chimpertainment ... and yet the same thing. go figure. Anyhow:
 Originally Posted by Chimpertainment
We both agree about the nature of consciousness, but perhaps we have some disagreements about its function.
Here is the problem I see:
We as humans have existed for a long time. This consciousness we seek has been here all along. So it is not something I see being created, but something discovered. What after all is doing this "natural selection"? It seems to me the traditional view of evolution is just a form of reverse interpretation of history. I would see this in theological studies a lot. People will import their cultural views onto historical evidence. There is no way of getting around it unless you consciously think outside culture.
Though consciousness has been around a very long time (more in a minute), humans as self-aware purveyors of consciousness have not. How long have homo sapiens existed anyway? Maybe a million years or so, three million at the most, with "modern" man around for less than 20,000 of those years? I could be way off, but considering the age of the universe, and even earth itself, we just got here. By comparison, intelligent races of dinosaurs (raptors are my personal favorite for this) could have thrived for millions of years before they met their end -- they would have considered 20k years an eye-blink, I think! For that matter, consider other potentially sentient creatures, like whales, whose ancestors were swimming -- and possibly sentiently thinking -- tens of millions of years ago. And don't even get me started on how long ant colonies have existed (another of my favorites for advanced sentience -- forgive me).
Bottom line: we as humans have not existed for a very long time. Indeed, we just got here, and we just became self-aware yesterday, historically speaking. We are very new at experiencing and understanding this eternal condition you call consciousness (more in a minute), much less manipulating it, truly tapping it, and using it to improve or transcend the nature of our existence. We are still toddlers, searching for our spiritual legs at this point, barely a few generations removed from the last major physical evolutionary jump that "selected" our brains in the first place. In other words, we are very, very new to this game of self-awareness, I think, and many "baby-steps" away from actually understanding consciousness, self-awareness, and our place in the universe. For what it's worth, I consider LD'ing one of those baby steps...
We as a culture are very proud of our conscious mind, and ego. Freud is placed on a pedestal while Jung is ignored. True self-awareness comes from being aware of the sub-conscious mind. It is this same egocentric perception that distorts peoples view of natural evolution.
That sort of paraphrases the problem of human arrogance right there, given what I said above. Also, I never ignored Jung, and your mention of him in a sentence shows that others are still not ignoring his work, even after all these years. And for what it's worth, for me "True self-awareness comes from being aware of the sub-conscious mind," is precisely the opposite of how I (and I assume one or two others) term self-awareness.
Now:
Here is my basic premiss. Consciousness is an inherent quality of nature. Before there were animals eating each other, there were stars being born and destroyed. All this nature is about more than survival. It all coalesces into shapes, and meaning yet at its root its still just energy. Everything at its root has this quality of consciousness. That is to say, it begins inert, and becomes more complex. That seems integral to any kind of development, physical or ethereal.
In my mind, sentience is the ability to become aware within that sphere or proverbial ocean of consciousness. To say that we are expanding and elevating consciousness against its very nature seems overly pretentious. Like the wise man said, there is nothing new under the sun.
Agreed. And here is where I discovered my confusion: I wasn't talking about consciousness!
I was talking about self-awareness, which is the pinnacle of sentience, which in turn is both the result of and fueled by consciousness, which, in turn, has indeed been around for a very very long time, encompasses, well, everything, and very likely finds manifestation in ways that stagger even the wildest human imagination. Everything alive (and possibly many things we don't currently consider alive), possesses some form of consciousness; it truly permeates everything. Indeed, I have a feeling -- call it a hope -- that should the uber-physicists create that Higgs particle and "discover" a Higgs field, they may wind up discovering consciousness itself. Something to think about. But that's consciousness, and, though it is the source of human self-awareness, it is not the same thing as human self-awareness.
And finally, yes: consciousness is certainly an entropic driver of evolution, and is very much the "miracle" behind human dominance on earth. But it still is just the fuel, or the ocean, that drives evolution, and drove us to be able to think, to wonder, to imagine, and to defy the "system" installed by evolution (also fueled by consciousness). Sentience may be exactly what you say, an "ability to become aware within that sphere or proverbial ocean of consciousness." But self-awareness is the ability to step outside that sphere, and that may break some rules.
Also, I never said I wanted to expand or elevate consciousness (I deeply dislike those terms, BTW); I said that the process of using self-awareness to do LD's flies in the face of the natural rules that nature -- perhaps through consciousness -- put in place to see that we go to sleep each night with as little trouble as possible --no expansion implied or intended. And that last sentence might have actually brought us back on topic, so I'll stop here.
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