Fragment 174, word count: 176.

Tags: consciousness, agency, freedom, drama, ideality, perception, personality

The presence of a quality of stimulation from somatic sensitivity, say vision, or even a combination of many different sensory qualities, does not as such qualify as consciousness. Consciousness can lack any and all sensory stimuli. Rather, consciousness is a questing vigilance, a searching, or a recognition in forwarding the care-drama or sensibility of an embodied agent in a life in the world. Forwarding a personal care-drama is the act of a person as ideality, a point and arc of agency projecting itself as a particular caring into the absolute incompleteness, the non-existence, that is the future. This point and arc of dramatically caring agency, personality, cannot be constructed from sensory qualities but instead is what recognizes sensory sensitivity as presenting things of interest, certain things that matter personally. Conceptualizing freedom requires this life of ideality which is inseparable from the absolute incompleteness of existence in the passing of time. Freedom is real because of the co-existence and co-involvement of creative ideality and the absolute incompleteness of the world of actuality.

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.