Post by Awaken21Awareness excludes lot's of things. Awareness is quite constrained and
filtered by our physical form, there are an infinite number of things
going on that we remain completely unaware of. Even within my very own
body I'm unaware of the majority of it's functions, so many that it
boggles the mind. And then take one step beyond the skin bag and
things really go wild.
Just so. I have (with a possibly culpable indulgence in some alliteration,
or is it assonance?) recently described the universe (or whathaveyou), from
a being's point of view, as nested thus:
All > Accessible > Available > Awareness > Attention
(using ">" to denote "contains", implicitly with stuff left over).
For me (for the time being, anyway), "All" is all the (finitely many)
"things" there are, all the (finitary) relations among those "things",
all the (finitary) relations among the "things" and relations, and so
on; but I'm not picky and am willing to allow others their ontologies.
What is "Accessible" is determined by physics (e.g., assuming that
business about the speed of light, and all, stuff outside O's lightcone
is unaccessible).
What is "Available" to a being O (where I am, as above, not [yet]
picky about definitions of "being"; my own impulse is to say that
a being is [some as yet unspecified, by me] sort of "relation of
relations of relations ... of relations among things", not merely
the "skin bag"-thing and its content-things) is determined by the
composition of O, in particular O's sensory armamentarium (oooh!!);
for instance, there's plenty of evidence that magnetic fields are Available
to various animals (tuna, turtles, lobsters, and honeybees, in addition
to the more familiar pigeons), but no evidence (that I know of) that
magnetic fields are Available to humans (without the use of tools:
I'm actually perfectly happy to include what can be "sensed" using
tools in the sensory armamentarium, and indeed--following Michael
Polanyi--to include tools, while in use, as included in O; but not
everyone is as generous, e.g.,. I think van Uekuell would reject
incorporation of tools in an "organism" [his word]).
Again, everyone knows that the sense of smell makes a *lot* Available
to The Lower Creation, and some, but surely much less, to humans; though
a recent study has shown that humans (or, at least, undergraduate students
at Berkeley) can follow a chocolate-scented path in the grass by smell,
without being aware that they are doing so--an example of something
being Available to O (and used by O!) but not in O's Awareness.
Finally, as I use the terms (which is not idiosyncratically, but not
to everybody's taste, either), what is in Attention (at any instant
[where I avoid problems with the meaning of "instant", "moment",
etc., by *defining* psychological time tautologically in terms of
Attention, and disclaiming {provisionally} any theory correlating
psychological time with, say, thermodynamic time]) is singular,
just one of a (probably strictly limited) number of "things"
that are in Awareness at that time. (Actually, I suspect that
there are both Awareness-time[s, several for several different
sensoria] and Attention-time[s, potentially, several for several
different and mutually independent "consciousnesses"]; but,
again, I'm not picky, I'm trying to elaborate a general framework.)
Lee Rudolph