Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: An Inner View of the Outer WorldRight now my conscious experience is directed at part of the world.It takes in some aspects of things around me and not others.Some bits of the world occupy my attention, other worldly goings on condition or colour the character of my current perceptual experience.I experience buildings in view through the window, the clothes in the corner of the room, the colour of the walls, the plate with breads, the coffee mugs, the smell of fresh laundry, the muffled sounds of someone in the kitchen, the sounds from the street: a sequence of things that in turn capture my attention moment to moment.And all the while thoughts occur to me, modulating my conscious awareness.I have no doubt that the world and my place in it, together with my recent past history, explains the particular form my consciousness takes right now.But what shape does that explanation take?Things out there beyond the boundaries of my skin enter into the conscious events I undergo.The inner is in this way shaped and determined by those outer things that impress themselves on the mind.What is it, though, for consciousness of this kind to go on at all?To say that consciousness is, in certain crucial respects, dependent on the world and one's place in it, is not enough to say all that needs to be said about consciousness.There is a contribution I make to these events, there are the inner aspects of consciousness.Right now I feel the faint early signs of a headache, still off-shore but likely to take up more and more of my attention.There is the awareness I have -not always but there right now -that the things I see or hear are being seen or heard by me at the moment.I know that they are there, that they occur anyway whether I see or hear them at all.But no one else is having this very experience of them.As I look at the corner of the room, or out of the window at the buildings beyond, I am aware that no
Source: SAS-Space (University of London)
Author: Barry Smith
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1890222756