8 hours ago, Boydstun said:
Those are all serious-thinking good points in this discussion.
I’d like to add that when Rand introduced her axiom that consciousness is identification, one function it filled was to say which meaning of consciousness she meant. She took that one to be the most fundamental and took all others, such as in dreams or hallucinations, as dependent on consciousness in her fundamental sense of it: identification. Although it came up as a side point, in her Objectivist epistemology treatise, she indicated that she thought even a honeybee has some consciousness. I imagine that wherever there is an animal with a nervous system and some encephalization, she’d be thinking that that animal had some amount of consciousness. (A sponge is an animal, but without a nervous system.) She was in step with Aristotle in thinking that only some higher animals have powers of memory and of perception to perceive existence in terms of entities. Her definition of consciousness as identification contains ‘entity’ and is introduced in the duo: Existence is identity, consciousness is identification. That is perfectly fitting with the idea that fundamental consciousness is consciousness of existence.
She had some trouble understanding earliest infant development in terms of this metaphysics, including the casting of consciousness in it. As here:
To say to someone that consciousness is consciousness of existence, I have noticed, is not something that could be grasped by someone who did not have such an experience in their repertoire already. Like talking to a person blind from birth about the colors on the clouds in this morning’s sunrise.
In connection with setting meditation in the context of the Randian setting of consciousness of existence as the primary and focal sense of consciousness, we might add the challenge of setting the awareness of such things as coldness, breathing, and other bodily conditions, which one had inarticulately from day of birth and retains to now.
I should mention that recognitions of thinking existence could not happen without such priors as breathing giving sense of self-existence. The cognitive self of I think emerging in the second year (said as “I know,” meaning “I know how to do it”) joins preexisting awareness of bodily and situational self, affective and interpersonal self, and agency self. There is, moreover, no ontological priority of thinking-being over breathing-being in a human being, notwithstanding the greater activeness, facility, and deliciousness of thinking-being.
Sidebar on intellectual history I have accumulated for “A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something”, the following:
Theaetetus 160b, in Plato; Categories 7b29–30, De Anima 427a20–22, Metaphysics 1010b30–1011a2, 1072b20–22, 1074b35–36, in Aristotle; Ennead V.1.6.46–50, in Plotinus; Abelard ca. 1119 (commentary on Aristotle’s Categories), quoted in Jacobi 2004, 139; Summa Theologica I Q14 A2, Obj. 3 and Reply Obj. 3, in Aquinas; Wolff 1752, quoted in Kitcher 2011, 58; Herbart 1824, quoted in Heidelberger 2004, 32–33; Ortega y Gassett [1928] 1964, 198–99; Sartre [1937] 1957, 40; [1943] 1953, 21–22; 1948; Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, 395–96; Edelman 1989, 159. Rand’s talk here of “a contradiction in terms” is effective for directing attention to the meaning of consciousness. In the old technical vocabulary, the contradiction she exposes is not contradictio in terminis, but contradictio in adjecto. More specifically, it is the self-contradiction Rand housed under the rubric “stolen concept fallacy.” See Rand 1957, 1039–40; Branden 1963; Salmieri 2016, 298–99.
Jacobi, Klaus. 2004. Abelard’s philosophy of language. In Brower and Guilfoy 2004, 126–57.
Brower, Jeffrey E. and Kevin Guilfoy, eds. 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Abelard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kitcher, Patricia. 2011. Kant’s Thinker. New York: Oxford University Press.
Heidelberger, Michael. 2004. Nature from Within – Gustav Theodor Fechner and His Psychophysical Worldview. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Edelman, Gerald M. 1989. The Remembered Present – A Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books.
Thanks for the incredibly well researched, and sourced response! It cleared some things up, and I learned a lot, but I’ve still got a question.
What if we reformulate the question more narrowly: how does Rand’s statement refute subjective idealism (or solipsism, and similar)?