Understanding Human Consciousness

I am because precisely no thing however a thinking thing; that is, a mind, or intellect, or understanding, or reason . . . a thing that interrogatives, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses (Descartes 65-6).

Thus ideas are innate; they do not come from without. If ideas do come from without they idlernot be trusted--are not real--until the mind has entirely come to terms with them and made them clear. In other words it makes sense to doubt sense experience, and to doubt is an act of pure thinking, which seems to reconfirm the special province of mind as opposed to broaden (material) reality. What makes this account of cognition curt is that it ignores physical reality, which the individual continually encounters and against which the individual defines self as distinct from "other." It is true that Descartes goes in to some detail close different categories of thought (innate, imaginative, external). But the cogito ergo sum is actually the heart of the problem. It fuses the ego (selfhood) with existence (existence). Ego and existence whitethorn encounter each other as experience unfolds, but if they are distinct and not fused, then Descartes' focus on thought as the primary reality is incomplete on one hand and an act of misidentification on the other.

Locke's view that extended reality as perceived by the senses has a character in determining what is known is a better prospect of how the mind words and how

pitying rationality operates in the extended world. Locke's view of what is innate is what is imprinted on the mind (12-13), and if it is imprinted on the mind, the mind would obviously be intended of it.

The trouble is, the mind arrives at consciousness based on how it has developed: "To say a notion is imprinted on the mind, and stock-still at the comparable time to say that the mind is illiterate of it and never yet took notice of it, is to make this impression nobody" (13). The mind develops by way of experience and perception, which get to to do with the projection of the self into the world and the way the world projects itself into piece consciousness. It remains for reason to go by trial and error, or with the help of parental inputs, to sort out the wash of perceptions glide slope its way. What the reason discovers when it applies thought processes to unfolding experience is knowledge. That could not have been innate, for if it were there would have been no need of discovery. It is a contradiction in terms "to say, that men know and know them [truths] not at the same time" (15).

Answer: The fact that the conscious mind can regard a variety of forms and can even contemplate itself does not mean that extended reality is a chimaera or that the mind is a collection of innate imprints just wanting to be freed from bondage. Many minds will never shroud the real properties of a lump (bowl) of wax, but that represents rather a failure of competent cognition than a proof that it is the unless reality. For the wax as
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