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From: steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Consciousness
Message-ID: <246@scc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 17-Jul-84 12:16:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: scc.246
Posted: Tue Jul 17 12:16:06 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Jul-84 04:11:41 EDT
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Organization: Santa Cruz Computer, Aptos, Calif.
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****

	The recent discussion of "mind as filter" reminds me of
something Aldous Huxley once said about that idea:

    " ... The suggestion is that the function of the brain and
    nervous system and sense organs is mainly *eliminative* and
    not productive.  Each person at each moment is capable of
    remembering everything that is happening everywere in the
    universe.  The function of the brain and nervous system is to
    protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of
    largely irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we
    should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and
    leaving only that very small and special selection which is
    likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory ,
    each one of us is potentially Mind at Large.  But in so far as
    we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive.  To
    make biological survival possible Mind at Large has to be
    funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous
    system.  What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle
    of the kind of consciousness whic will help us to stay alive
    on the surface of this particular planet.  To formulate and
    express the contents of this reduced awareness, many has
    invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and
    implicit philosophies which we call languages.  Every
    individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the
    linguistic tradition into which he has been born -- the
    beneficiary inasmuch as language  gives access to the
    accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim
    is so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced
    awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense
    of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for
    data, his words for actual things.[1]

____________________
[1] Aldous Huxley *The Doors of Perception*,  Harper  Colophon  books.
1954. pps 22-23.


				Don Steiny
				Personetics
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