Thanks for your reply and sorry it's taken me a couple of days, which was because I got caught up in thinking about another thread topic. I am glad that you like this topic and the slant of it is more of about the development of consciousness than others, and also the experience of consciousness.3017Metaphysician wrote: ↑June 3rd, 2022, 2:18 pmHey Jack!JackDaydream wrote: ↑April 26th, 2022, 6:19 pm The main basis for this question is based on the writings of the psychology and philosophy of Ken Wilber. His initial theory of individual cognitive development was derived on the ideas of stages, described by Freud, Piaget and Kohlberg in psychology. He also looks at the emphasis on higher states of awareness in some systems of spiritual thought, including Christianity and Buddhism. I am aware that some people may see putting these two aspects together as unhelpful.
However, in his later writings he sees the emphasis on hierarchies of awareness as problematic philosophically. It may involve values about the superiority of the higher states of awareness in evolution. This leads to the underlying issue about whether development of consciousness in evolution and in individual awareness is also about increase, progression or ascent.
Jung's model of the human mind and consciousness involved integration of the lower and higher aspects of the self. Of course, this is bound up with a belief in the unconscious as a source of potential consciousness.
I don't wish to make this topic too obscure or theoretical at this stage. Initially, I am asking whether you this aspect of consciousness as important philosophically. I have put it into the section on metaphysics and epistemology because it is primarily about models of consciousness, but I am aware that it is both connected to spiritual models and those of science in thinking about the nature of conscious awareness in evolution. Is human consciousness the ultimate expression of it or not? Does the idea of 'levels' of consciousness make sense? It may come down to the question: what is consciousness?
Lots of great responses here to this wonderful thread. I read through some but not all. A couple examples that quckly come to mind in bullet-point fashion:
'Levels' of awareness:
1. The physicist who discovers a new mathematical formula that captures time travel/relativity, black hole information/entropy, the laws of gravity, ad nauseum. (This more or less assumes mathematics itself is not completely a human invention, i.e., that it's 'out there' waiting to be discovered. .)
2. The musician who becomes aware of the 'chorus' part of a piece in order to express the feeling of tension and release and completes the composition.
3. The baby who develops their own levels of conscious awareness through memory and experience.
4. The adult who was made aware of a different way of Being.
I'd like to briefly parse the last one. One can easily reflect on their past and come away with revelations of: 'gee, why did I do that 20 years ago, I would have done that differently now'. This also assumes that the blank canvas of consciousness gets filled with information that seems useful in a mostly good or virtuous way (assuming the behavior is so-called 'better' now). In this case, we almost have an Aristotelian 'paradigm' of, with knowledge (and less ignorance) comes a higher level of awareness (good or bad)... " The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think".
The evolution piece though is interesting. The questions for the extreme Darwinian, has ethics evolved? Has the feeling and desire for love, and the needs for connection and/or relationships with others evolved? Has the intrinsic human need for meaning, purpose and happiness evolved? If so, in what ways (?)
Mind you, that is not to be confused with having insatiable needs and/or living an ordinary life of striving (after one need is satisfied, another one takes its place-Maslow).
Just some quick thoughts...great thread!
One aspect which I wonder about is the parallel between the collective and individual aspects of consciousness. Of course, each person's development has unique features but it may be that the individual recapitulates processes which have been developed in the evolution of humanity. The idea of the individual as a blank state of consciousness, which is held by John Locke and Steven Pinker, is open to dispute, although it is unclear how the child's consciousness develops because it is so bound up with the development of language.
It is so easy to look back at things said and done in the past and query why? I even do that about my own responses in the last year or two. It may not be about major changes in consciousness necessarily but about how a particular situation looked while locked into though rather than merely a big change in one's consciousness. If anything, I feel that I have not changed that much in consciousness through life even though I have made lots of mistakes. Despite questioning so much my basic narrative identity seems consistent since childhood. I can remember my thinking processes back as far as starting school and a some memories before and feel that the essential 'I' has not changed. Perhaps, it will happen yet, with some grand enlightenment! I don't know if you feel that your consciousness has changed that much, or as you would like it to.
Maslow's ideas on conscious awareness are relevant. As far as I am aware the processes of meeting the various aspects of the hierarchy weave in and out of life. In some ways it felt easier to reach for the higher ones during childhood and adolescence when all the basic physical needs, and some social ones, were met whereas in adulthood having to find the basic ones, such as accommodation and money to survive distract from the ones of self actualization. However, that is not to say that creativity is not important like in childhood. The difficulties of the lower needs can be linked to the search for awareness though, in being incorporated in the quest for creative expression and in practicing some kinds of meditation. I don't always find it easy to meditate and a lot of people seem to find this, but I do find meditation and the associated quest for awareness more helpful in difficult times. This may be related to what some writers have spoken of as 'the dark night of the soul' being an important step in greater conscious awareness.