Each Of Our Lives Is A Part

The Great Cognitive Shift Is An Expansion Of Consciousness From The Perspectival Form Contained In The Lives Of Particular Creatures To An Objective, World-encompassing Form That Exists Both Individually And Intersubjectively. It Was Originally A Biological Evolutionary Process, And In Our Species It Has Become A Collective Cultural Process As Well. Each Of Our Lives Is A Part Of The Lengthy Process Of The Universe Gradually Waking Up And Becoming Aware Of Itself.

It Is Prima Facie Highly Implausible That Life As We Know It Is The Result Of A Sequence Of Physical Accidents Together With The Mechanism Of Natural Selection. We Are Supposed To Abandon This Naïve Response, Not In Favor Of A Fully Worked Out Physical/chemical Explanation But In Favor Of An Alternative That Is Really A Schema For Explanation, Supported By Some Examples. What Is Lacking, To My Knowledge, Is A Credible Argument That The Story Has A Nonnegligible Probability Of Being True.

If A Psychological Maxwell Devises A General Theory Of Mind, He May Make It Possible For A Psychological Einstein To Follow With A Theory That The Mental And The Physical Are Really The Same. But This Could Happen Only At The End Of A Process Which Began With The Recognition That The Mental Is Something Completely Different From The Physical World As We Have Come To Know It Through A Certain Highly Successful Form Of Detached Objective Understanding. Only If The Uniqueness Of The Mental Is Recognized Will Concepts And Theories Be Devised Especially For The Purpose Of Understanding It.

Fundamentally An Organism Has Conscious Mental States If And Only If There Is Something That It Is Like To Be That Organism--something It Is Like For The Organism.

Leading A Human Life Is A Full-time Occupation, To Which Everyone Devotes Decades Of Intense Concern.