The phenomenological approach projects a radical criticism of scientific naturalism,which assumes that the object of science is to find laws that govern reality, where the person isconceived as another object of nature.

it is a mental construct

The Buddhist doctrine of no-self implies that our fundamental repression is not sex (as Freud thought), nor even death (as existential psychologists think), but the intuition that the ego-self does not exist, that our self consciousness is a mental construction.

Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality. “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man,” Schiller wrote in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “and he is only wholly a Man when he is playing.”

Simone de Beauvoir said that when she became an atheist, it felt like the world had fallen silent.

But Wanberg sees no contradiction in fighting gadgets with gadgets. “Can you sit down for three hours and just think about one thing deeply?” he asked me. “Because I can’t. And this device helps me.”

the really insidious part about it is not the idea of the noble savage actually there is no noble savage in Russo's 00:54:51 discourse because his state of nature involves creatures which are like humans but actually lack any sort of philosophy at all because what they call do is project their own lives into the 00:55:05 future and imagine themselves in other states they're constantly inventing things and chasing their own tails or rushing headlong for their own chains as he puts it they invent agriculture but 00:55:18 they can't see the consequences they invent cities but they can't see the consequences so we're talking about no imagination

there's an exception ah yes indeed there is an exception to that which is largely 00:08:28 when you're talking to someone else so in conversation and in dialogue you're actually can maintain consciousness for very long periods of time well which is why you need to imagine you're talking 00:08:41 to someone else to really be able to think out a problem

We report the first neural recording during ecstatic meditations called jhanas and test whether a brain reward system plays a rolein the joy reported. Jhanas are Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) that imply major brain changes based on subjective reports:(1) external awareness dims, (2) internal verbalizations fade, (3) the sense of personal boundaries is altered, (4) attention is highlyfocused on the object of meditation, and (5) joy increases to high levels. The fMRI and EEG results from an experienced meditatorshow changes in brain activity in 11 regions shown to be associated with the subjective reports, and these changes occur promptlyafter jhana is entered. In particular, the extreme joy is associated not only with activation of cortical processes but also with activationof the nucleus accumbens (NAc) in the dopamine/opioid reward system. We test three mechanisms by which the subject mightstimulate his own reward system by external means and reject all three. Taken together, these results demonstrate an apparentlynovel method of self-stimulating a brain reward system using only internal mental processes in a highly trained subject.

Its life out of its center enters into a relationship to it; the reflexive character of the centrally represented body is given to itself. Although the living being on this level is also absorbed in the here/now, lives out of the center, it has become conscious of the centrality of its existence. It has itself; it knows of itself; it notices itself -- and this makes it an I. (pp. 269-70)

The human sphere is defined by a jump from centric positionality to that further level of detachment that uniquely allows for that purchase upon its center that Plessner calls "excentric positionality." The human "I" which is the unique result of excentric positionality becomes the constant companion of human positional positing. It preserves, and inhabits its centered lived body, while also constituting its excentric detachment from its center by way of its reflexive awareness of its posited center.

On the view that experience, like thought, has representational content, this can be understood as the view that experiences, like thoughts, can have content that is first-personal.

After all, self-consciousness is presumably a form of consciousness

On this account, every belief involves the self-ascription of a property and so, arguably, is an instance of self-consciousness

first-personal thought and language is irreducible to non-first-personal thought and language, and is essential to the explanation of action

“I”, “me”, and “my”

and increasingly so since the seventeenth century

for the related Hegelian view that various forms of self-consciousness depend on intersubjective recognition

Flora Hogman conducted a case study of Second and Third-Generation, and in her sample of the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors she noticed that they feel a sense of pride and awe of the survivors. This awareness of the suffering is part of the fabric of their lives, but is channeled into empathy, political activism, greater consciousness of others suffering, and a reluctance to intermarry.

your focus of attention remains at the point of your Consciousness. This is why you are finding yourself successful.