In Socrates' thought the two marks of individual self-consciousness appear; it is practical and it is social.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Self-consciousness is really a form of egotism.
Having a self, even a simple self, allows you to look into the world and put a mark over what is more important and less important. It's a way of classifying the world in terms of your own needs.
I don't know why I developed a social consciousness, but I really think I have a consciousness; I feel connected to everything and everybody in the world.
For myself, I do not now know in any concrete human terms wherein my individuality consists. In my present human form of consciousness I simply cannot tell.
Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages - from Aristotle to Descartes, from Aeschylus to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman - have thought it wise to understand oneself and one's behavior.
Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.
Science, literature, and common sense tell us that the self is a fickle thing, subject to revision in real time, and that the chasm that exists between any two people exists inside each and every one of us.
The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
All along we find that social life - religion, politics, art - reflects the stages reached in the development of the knowledge of self; it shows the social uses made of this knowledge.
Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.
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