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8. Self and Conscious Experience....................................

Chapter 8 Experience

Consciousness is your momentary present. As soon as you pass it, it piles up in

the rearview mirror as memory.

Overview: Consciousness is the baseline from which all other mental functions
arise. It starts as the awareness of the environment; from there it develops into
the awareness of one’s own self, separating the “I” from the rest of the world. The
highest function of the mind is to reflect on one’s own mind, or to be conscious
of one’s own consciousness.
Various states of consciousness — alertness, drowsiness, sleepiness, dream-
ing, and coma — are correlated with electrical activity recorded from the brain.
Inside the brain, two systems are involved in consciousness: (1) a discrete system
responsible for the perception of specific stimuli, such as seeing a red flower or
hearing the beating of a drum; (2) a diffuse system that raises general alertness
without referring to any particular object.

8.1 Consciousness Polarizes Self and Non-self

Consciousness is the ground substance of all mental activities. The
emergence of consciousness marks the transition of self from the realm
of physics and chemistry to the domain of society and humanity. In the
cognitive sense, consciousness leads to the separation of self from
the rest of the world and eventually to the reflection of one’s own self —
the reflective self.
The changing perspectives of self during development are
portrayed in Table 8.1. When a child is born, there is no distinction