{"id":68,"date":"2025-07-25T11:24:15","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T11:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2025\/07\/25\/more-on-the-unity-of-consciousness\/"},"modified":"2025-07-25T11:24:15","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T11:24:15","slug":"more-on-the-unity-of-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2025\/07\/25\/more-on-the-unity-of-consciousness\/","title":{"rendered":"More on the Unity of Consciousness: From Self to Immortal Soul?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Suppose I see a black cat. The act of visual awareness in a case like this is typically, even if not always, accompanied by a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary awareness.  I am aware of the cat<\/em>, but I am also aware of being aware<\/em> of the cat.  How does the Humean* account for one's awareness of being aware? He could say, plausibly, that the primary  object-directed awareness is a subject-less awareness. But he can't plausibly say that the secondary awareness is subject-less.   For if both the primary awareness (the awareness of the cat) and the secondary awareness (the awareness of the primary awareness) are subject-less, then what makes the secondary awareness an awareness of the primary awareness? What connects them? The two awarenesses cannot just occur; they must occur in the same subject, in the same unity of consciousness.<\/span><\/p>\n

Suppose that in Socrates there is an awareness of a cat, and in God there is an awareness of Socrates' awareness of a cat.  Those two awarenesses would not amount to there being in Socrates an awareness of a cat together with a simultaneous secondary awareness of being aware of a cat.  But it is phenomenologically evident that the two awarenesses do co-occur. We ought to conclude that the <\/span>two awarenesses must be together in one subject, where the subject is not the physical thing in the external world (the animal that wears Socrates' toga, for example), but the I, the self, the subject.<\/span><\/p>\n

What I have just done is provide phenomenological evidence of the existence of the self that Hume claimed he could not find. Does it follow that this (transcendental) self is a simple substance that can exist on its own without a material body? That's a further question.  To put it another way: do considerations anent the unity of consciousness furnish materials for a proof of the simplicity, and thus the immortality, of a substantial<\/em> soul?  Proof or paralogism? <\/span><\/p>\n

__________<\/span><\/p>\n

*A Humean for present purposes  is one who denies that there is a self or subject that is aware; there is just awareness of this or that. Hume, Sartre, and Butchvarov are Humeans in this sense.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Suppose I see a black cat. The act of visual awareness in a case like this is typically, even if not always, accompanied by a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary awareness.  I am aware of the cat, but I am also aware of being aware of the cat.  How does the Humean* account for … Continue reading “More on the Unity of Consciousness: From Self to Immortal Soul?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,97,54,59,98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consciousness-and-qualia","category-hume","category-mind","category-soul-and-body","category-unity-of-a-complex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}