more nonsense.

[Nick Thompson]

Dear Bob Lancaster,

For some reason, The Friam Server has lost the ability to pass email to my Email Program, so I am copying your message in below.  Also, I am having my problem of endless lines, again.  
So, if the message is unintelligible, please get back to me.
 
"Hi Nick. I have to say that the New Realism's definition of
consciousness appears to me to be nonsense.  Few psychologists and/or
philosophers in recent times have adopted the radical idealism of
Bishop Berkeley, although it is, of course, not susceptible of
disproof, and Dr. Johnson's supposed refutation demonstrates nothing at
all.  But in fact, the peculiar example of the searchlight and its
surroundings comes much closer to validating this idealism than to
supporting any variety of realism, since the objects  revealed by the
searchlight would not have been revealed except for the searchlight,
and hence may be argued to exist in their peculiar configuration only
because of the searchlight.  Without belaboring this point,  
consciousness is essentially a  condition of awareness.  To suggest
that this awareness is ontologically contained in that of which one is
aware implies that the awareness would still be there even if the
conscious being (the awarerer??) were gone.  It is questionable if
consciousness even requires an awareness of any specific existent
outside the conscious being.  Some meditative states cast doubt on such
a necessity."

Thanks for this interesting and throughtful comment.  Derivatives of the
New Realism have proven too useful for it to be simply to non-
sense.  So, I must have failed to explain it well.  In idealism, I gather, since everything
around is our creation, it disappears when we cease to have awareness of
it.  In realism, it is there whether or not we are aware of it.  Clearly the
searchling metaphor accomplishes that, since the things picked out by the
search light are there whether the light is turned on them.  What is not there
when the searchlike pans away from X is the relation, searchlight illuminates X.
That relation is consciousness.  The analogue of to the searchlight in the metaphor
is not  some mysterious beams of the mind but the patterning in my behavior that
highlights some features of the environment and not others.  Since you can see
that relation, you can be conscious of my consciousness, i.e., patterns in your
behavior can highlilght  the relation between my behavior and features of the
enviornment that constitute consciousness, in this system of thought.   By the way,
the new realism is a form of materialism, since materialism consists of the
proposition that everthing real consists of matter and its relations and
consciousness, on the above account, is a relation between material things.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
[hidden email]
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/
[hidden email]
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