[lit-ideas] Re: Tune in and turn off

Carol  wrote:

It seems we can clearly get
a 'feeling' when we pinch our finger


ck: This is physical sensation. Feelings commonly refer to emotions, not sensory input. But before we get carried away and quibble ourselves into a frenzy, is this thread the same that began with "self-awareness" vs. "self-consciousness"--that is, losing self-consciousness when you're fully focused on an activity?

The very thread. We do use the word 'feel' indifferently between e.g.
'I feel angry,' and 'I feel numb' (by way of reporting to a dentist that the anesthesia is kicking in). If someone denied that numbness was a feeling I wouldn't know what they were trying to deny, but Carol's right, such ambiguity doesn't show that bodily sensations and 'mental states' (feeling blue) are the same kind of thing, whatever that kind is.

When I responded to an early post in the original thread by wondering what it was to be aware of oneself, as opposed to being aware that one was making choices ('mental choices,' maybe) in solving a problem that requires them, as one must at the forks Suber mentions, I was met with stony silence. There is no such entity as the self, he said, wishing that Hume's ghost would sign onto lit-ideas.

Robert Paul
Reed College
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