Head Dust


ERUCTED THOUGHTS, MIDDEN SIFTINGS, HETERONYMOUS DISJECTA.

GRAMMAR AND CONSCIOUSNESS

What we think of as nouns are inherently speculative and arbitrary pieces of conceptual shorthand for either commonly associated adjectives or for subjects/objects posited to ornament verbs. It seems to me that quality, action and state are robust (certain) compared with entity and identity, which are tenuous and open to doubt (uncertain). We experience qualities but the thingness of things is meta-experiential. Adjectives may label qualities 'out there' but nouns label only convenient speculative mental constructs.
Perhaps 'consciousness' is a verb mistaken for a noun, just like 'mind' and 'soul' and 'person'. When the doctors dissected my legs they couldn't find any 'running' (and now I can't run).
Our idea of ‘consciousness’ is usually predicated on the weak pseudo-concept ‘self’, a pseudo-concept that has no determining adjectives and so cannot be a noun. The self is no entity. Yes there seems to be consciounessing going on (not particularly interesting in itself), but all this talk about ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ and ‘things’ and ‘objects’ is epistemologically feeble. Such talk has functional convenience only. It is not worth thinking about.
The pseudo-problem of ‘consciousness’ is grammatical, not epistemological.


OSCAR LIPSKIN