(S3,Ep16) Andy Blunden on Conscious Awareness

In response to a question from a Chapter 6 excerpt from Thinking and Speech, Andy expands the passage and weighs in. (Originally published August 14, 2020)

Relevant and related content from Andy is here: http://tiny.cc/aw84iz

Here is the passage in question, from Thinking and Speech, Ch. 6, pp. 190-1:

"To perceive something in a different way means to acquire new potentials for acting with respect to it. At the chess board, to see differently is to play differently. By generalizing the process of activity itself, I acquire the potential for new relationships with it. To speak crudely, it is as if this process has been isolated from the general activity of consciousness. I am conscious of the fact that I remember. I make my own remembering the object of consciousness. An isolation arises here. In a certain sense, any generalization or abstraction isolates its object. This is why conscious awareness – understood as generalization – leads directly to mastery.

Thus, the foundation of conscious awareness is the generalization or abstraction of the mental processes, which leads to their mastery. Instruction has a decisive role in this process. Scientific concepts have a unique relationship to the object. This relationship is mediated through other concepts that themselves have an internal hierarchical system of interrelationships. It is apparently in this domain of the scientific concept that conscious awareness of concepts or the generalization and mastery of concepts emerges for the first time. And once a new structure of generalization has arisen in one sphere of thought, it can – like any structure – be transferred without training to all remaining domains of concepts and thought. Thus, conscious awareness enters through the gate opened up by the scientific concept."

David Kellogg's close-reading of this same passage is here: http://tiny.cc/9vansz