OCCASIONAL COMMENTS ON PSCHO-ANALYTIC MATTERS + CONTIBUTIONS fromMICHAEL ROLOFF Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society this LYNX will LEAP you to all my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS: http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html "MAY THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS!" {J. Joyce} "Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde" [von Alvensleben]

Sunday, March 5, 2017

A COMMENT ON NAGELS BENNETT REVIEW



 Dear Professor Dennett,


Dear Professor Dennett,
you cannot imagine my surprise,

the surprise of the once

I will have the son of an OSS father know,

 immedidate post-WW-II

“Pet of the Bremen OSS”

[and fine hard drinking and dancing fellows they all were!]

 at coming on Professor Nagel’s review of your work in the NYRB 
and discovering that you claim that human [thus all kinds of mammalian consciousness, including my dreaming hunting dog’s] is a delusion - and not just, perhaps, a misnomer.

How is that feasible in the instance of someone who performs such a fine two-step process prior to reaching a decision, knowing, it seems, that he may have missed one or the other element that ought to have been part of his consideration, who perhaps factors in the inevitability of such a mishap since he appears to acknowledge the existence of an unconscious - no matter whether your concept, of what I regard a truly vast realm, coincides with mine.

Why oh why deny consciousness when it can be shown to operate in dreams while part of us is asleep & unconscious, say in the form of what is termed “secondary revision” , one of the last if not the last step in the dreamwork


But perhaps I am missing something,

it would not be the first time.

With kind regards nonetheless

Michael Roloff


-- 


Dear Professor Nagel,

I suspect that my suggestion that consciousness, and its various manifestations, is an essential necessity, a necessity for minds to function and be able to think in the many ways that mind and mind bodies think or think they think, also from a  developmental perspective, and therefore is no more of an illusion or less than other mental acts must be a position you have encountered previously. About Mr. Bennett’s approach Nietzche commented that “we are lived” is really all that needs to be said, and the good man ought not to have wasted his mind, and zillions of interesting observations about the innumerable being being lived can be made, including their mental functioning. 

One feature of human minds is that they have consciences, which implies that there must be a consciousness to produce a conscience, whatever it is that makes me feel guilty, makes me aware of that guilt, deserves the name consciousness within  the language game that we are a part of. Conscience even operates within dreams as most obviously demonstrated by the dream feature of “secondary revision” where an element of the dream is altered at the final stage of the dreamwork, to make it more fitting appropriate to the conscience, to the lying superego and its vanities and fears of pain! That all this has an electro-chemical and biological parallel is proved I suppose most definitely by psychosomatic events. There also exist fine and useful concepts as “pre-conscious” where you sense matters becoming conscious, which sometimes get suppressed or repressed again by the feature called denial or “attack on linking.”

Alas for poor Bennett, a wasted life, like certain theologians, brilliance wasted on a dead star.

Sincerely, Michael Roloff

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MICHAEL ROLOFF http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name exMember Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society this LYNX will LEAP you to all my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS: http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html "MAY THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS!" {J. Joyce} "Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde" [von Alvensleben] contact via my website http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html