I recommend do-it-yourself (DIY) phenomenology. It is good for mental health to attend closely to our own experience, especially the ambiguous aspects of our inner lives, such as how we experience the will, the past, or our relationship to our own bodies. We should think about what we find when we introspect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The goal is not to discover truths that will make us happy. Instead, we want to reveal complexities and depths that we can appreciate. By seeing ourselves as much more than suffering machines, we can increase how much we can enjoy being<\/em> ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is an example of a phenomenological question that might attract your curiosity: Is your consciousness (or, you might say, your attention<\/a>) a single \u201cstream\u201d? <\/p>\n\n\n\n William James coined the phrase \u201cstream of consciousness\u201d in 1890 as part of an argument that consciousness \u201cdoes not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as \u2018chain\u2019 or \u2018train\u2019 do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A \u2018river\u2019 or a \u2018stream\u2019 are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.\u00a0In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life<\/em>” (James 1890, p. 239, italics in the original).<\/p>\n\n\n\n James acknowledges that we can be interrupted, but he thinks that interruptions are always absorbed into the stream. For example, \u201cwhat we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it\u201d (p. 241). He also acknowledges that our consciousness has an uneven pace. He says,<\/p>\n\n\n\n As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird\u2019s life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period (p. 243).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n However, other close observers of themselves do not find anything that looks like a \u201cstream.\u201d The philosopher Galen Strawson finds this metaphor \u201cinapt.\u201d For him, \u201cThought has very little natural continuity or experiential flow\u2014if mine is anything to go by. It keeps slipping from mere consciousness into self-consciousness and out again” (Strawson 2018, p. 350). Strawson observes that his own consciousness seems to launch repeatedly from \u201cprior state[s] of complete, if momentary, nonconsciousness. …. It\u2019s as if consciousness is continually restarting. It keeps banging out of nothingness. It\u2019s a series of comings-to.\u201d (p. 380)<\/p>\n\n\n\n I do not think this dispute has been resolved, which is good news if you want an open question to whet your curiosity about your inner life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It could be (as Strawson thinks) that people vary. Some of us have streams of consciousness, while for others, experience comes in disconnected blocs. If that is the case, an interesting question arises about what consciousness is, if it is subject to such variation. (This question is relevant to debates about whether a computer can be conscious.) Or it could be that either James or Strawson is right about consciousness, and the other one is interpreting his own inner life wrong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, you are free to decide for yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sources: William James The Principles of Psychology, <\/em>1918 (first edition 1890); Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc<\/em>. (New York Review Books, 2018). See also: joys and limitations of phenomenology<\/a>; some basics<\/a>; people as clusters of attention<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recommend do-it-yourself (DIY) phenomenology. It is good for mental health to attend closely to our own experience, especially the ambiguous aspects of our inner lives, such as how we experience the will, the past, or our relationship to our own bodies. We should think about what we find when we introspect. The goal is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35739"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35743,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35739\/revisions\/35743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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