What is consciousness?

I had an argument with someone who thought that maybe consciousness was somewhat like a flame but I disagreed with him.
These are my thoughts.
There are the earthy types.
“People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.”Ancients before Plato 428-348 BC

There are flowing conciousnesses, glacial as ice and boiling hot in their wrath. (I can of think of one person.)

There are those whose lofty company, mere mortals look up to but envy not their airy-fairyness.

I would rather be grounded in my common-sense and folk wisdom.
So you could say I am an earthy type.
***************
I then replied to the opening premise about people more fire-like in their awareness in his opinion.
I replied that for fire, he has explained a type of person that either burns brightly and explosively for a time, then suddenly burnt out or one that is like a candle, constant but faint, easily blown off. For people to be like this it means that at the slightest setback their consciousness can be just as easily snuffed off. How can that be? People are more resilient.
***************
The thing about fire is it can't exist without the air around it. It is not fuel that makes it burn. It is oxygen that makes flame flammable not fuel in itself. If you go by your metaphor or analogy, fire types can't exist without air types. What does it mean? It means that brilliant minds are not original at all and that great minds burn brightly but they owe their existence to hot air and baloney.

I think that consciousness might be closer to the royal family of metals, gold, silver and copper or just metals in general.
***************
I said the royal family because these three are not ferrous (no iron in them), they don't rust but oxidise like any other thing.
***************

The greatest minds among us are golden of course, they shine more brightly and they last forever.
Like metals, consciousness go through a cruscible of fire (strength in adversity), water (openness and resilience), earth (longevity-they rust if they don't have it) and air (every other essential qualities).
***************
Like the diversity of people, consciousness is made up of different alloys (personality, backgrounds and experiences).
***************
The golden minds endures, people remember them. They would last for as long as people exist.
***************
Golden minds are also spread as dust. An ounce can be extended as fine as human hair. The body of golden minds can turn into ashes but the conscious being in it is indestructible due to their being golden. We are talking about a unique conciousness - a type of consciousness that last in books, in memories of other people.
***************
Flame might be a better metaphor for life, organic life.
***************
When the last of us are turned into ashes, then they would would last for as long as what they created lasts. Their created things could be civilizations, worlds, myths -their material artifacts etc.
***************
Being golden can also be a matter of degree. There are alloys of gold, silver or copper. Platinum, Rhodium etc.
Golden ideas are precious, people die for them.

Transmuting base metal into gold is a myth.
Minds can acquire something but their essential qualities remain the same. A consciousness can be more learned, more anything but it is not transmuted but alloyed.

Knowledge is not a liquid you pour into a consciousness.
***************

Fire is not consciousness because flame is too volatile. . For instance there are idiot savants that are really very stupid but they are very brilliant in a one thing. They can't be explosive and then a candle at the same time. They are either one or the other.
***************
Here I went to answer his questions in the inital premise I disagreed with that consciousness is a flame. He cited the firing of neurons in the brain but he misunderstood what this firing means. As he said it is the 'bindings of chemicals that makes think' but it is an error. I explained what this process involvesusing grid iron football as a simile.

Synapses is a kind of auto-pilot, think of this process like a grid iron football. It just happens because mithochondrial DNA/coach tells these neuron transmitters and receptor guys to bounce with each other so that these guys runs with the ball/releases sodium ions, so that the 'ball' can get through the goal line (synaptic cleft-channels) and score.

If it doesn't happen there's brain death- no game. We think all the time. We only know things went wrong because one these guys don't do its job properly or no relay happens. Thinking is not all about the synapses. If there's a chemical imbalance (maybe toxic metal like cadmium got in there someplace that inhibits/stops the bouncing balls), its not the person's fault for failing to think or for choosing to think the wrong things. Shit happens someone said and there's very little we can do about it except pray it fixes itself or kick start those guys so they do whatever it is they are meant to do.

He supported this synapses example with the light spectrum phenomenon but he didn't know how light is perceived for the analogy to work. So I explained how we perceived light.

I got you there up until the white light bit. White light is composed of all the colours of the spectrum but we don't perceive them as colours individually. We perceive them as light waves. Different colours have different wavelengths. A coloured fire cannot be applied to people's consciousness because if we really think and know what light is, it would mean that Einstein had the whole gamut, from the complete inutile to the genius.

Yet you posit the Einstein was the latter. He was no person with disabililty, Was he? He couldn't tie his shoe laces properly but who cares, he was great at Physics. Mileva Marić, his first wife was a brilliant mathematician, so who knows... where his ideas really came from.

The sad part is that he implied that people with disability are somehow weak-light individuals whose light are like 'dull embers'. This is totally unacceptable to me.
So I answered, albeit condescendingly,

Oh Uh.

That is very naughty of you, what do you think we should do with them then? Handi-cap? Sorry, is that the golf term?
People with handicaps (they are people first- then the issues come second) might be fantastic mathematicians, see equations everywhere but we normals just can't see them. Their bodies might not be pretty or sweet smelling though.

I have worked with (for a couple of weeks) some and boy, are they far from dull. How do you know they are dull embers, have you 'been' like them before before you got burnt out into normalcy?

He then asked if there is a spectrum of consciousness- highs and lows and I replied that,

'No sir.' There are different TYPES of consciousness, no degrees or heirarchies (superior or inferior). They are either conscious or brain-dead. We are equals. But someone with a brain age of a child would be immature, naturally would behave the same way. However, they have a consciousness that been deformed or undeveloped. If it was you, you would act or say the same things not because you have inferior consciousness or just close to charcoal as you like to put it.

He closed with the idea that we might urge people to burn more brightly. I again think this is distasteful and unforgivable. I said, 'Why? Everyone has the right to be who they are. We can't force them to be not what they are. Let people be.'
I was not sure if he remained convinced that consciousness is like a flame because as far I am concerned I know that the metal mettle of one's consciousness is tested by the fire of adversity.
******************

Philosophy and aesthetics

Art is:
-the measure by which a civilization's mettle is tested in time.
-legitimises an institution's idiographic frameworks.
-functional, pleases the eye and stimulates the mind all at once.
-expression (nothing to do with the Expressionist movement).
-representation 'memesis'-imitation (Plato).
-significant form, (Bell & Fry).
-frozen emotion (Tolstoy).
-pleases the divine nature of man, elevation of crude Phillistines into men of culture and refinement (Hegel)
-an organic whole and made from complex (early Weisz) disparate parts that would not have made sense if taken apart.
-too complicated to define (late Weisz).
-exercises the free play of the imagination (Kant).
-pure intuition (Croce)
-polemical in intention (Wittgenstein)
-intertextuality (Foucault)
-satisfies the imaginative need for social harmony (Parker) and 'group think' (Orwell).

What do I think art means? I think art has become a replacement or a substitute for the experience of the sublime in secular life for those embarassed by their inner need to commune with God, IMHO. I don't think it matters much to God how to get his hands on you, lol.
Personally, I think the aesthetic theories above are like segments of an orange, no less orange tasting than if you cut them up, diced up, or juice them up. It is still smells as orangey as when the rind is still attached. Then, the 'taste' depends where the orange come from, its climate, culture, hybridity, etc... If you are a purist and prefer only one of these theories- you'll only get a taste of one segment. How sad is that? In art its was said is the source of the sublime. I love that word 'Sublime', it is so elevated, a tad pretentious but bear with me.
************
Sources of sublimated experience:
-An exciting soccer game or when my team lost makes me cry (oh, the pathos of it).
-seeing a beautiful sunset/landscape-storm at sea/tall cliffs/view from a skyscraper, a view of earth in space as you look through the porthole.
-a circus show with perfect performances
-any experience with a beloved during courtship
-fantastically cooked meal
-a picture of virgin mary as a tomato sauce blot on a sandwich
-lots more, almost anything non-art can be perfectly sublime if you know where, how and when to look.

About tradition in art

I am for tradition actually especially in defence of the chronological rather that the thematic teaching of history. Unlike Derrida's relativism, students need to learn the facts in context and when they occured and happened in its own respective eras rather being lumped together willy-nilly. For instance, so many would argue that Delacroix was the first modern or before him Caravaggio, when he started using prostitutes and murderers as models for his art or Velasques, the court painter who painted empty space because the Spanish royal family was impoverished and sold the contents of their palaces. Oh come on...

I must say that I support that students need to learn the discipline of their art, for writers they need to learn the basics of grammar, idioms and mitre or cadenza, knowing your octave from an overture etc in music before breaking the rules. I have to learn what the rules are before I can break them. I so dislike this 'everything goes' mentality.

*******
Sources of sublimated experience:
-An exciting soccer game or when my team lost makes me cry (oh, the pathos of it).
-seeing a beautiful sunset/landscape-storm at sea/tall cliffs/view from a skyscraper, a view of earth in space as you look through the porthole.
-a circus show with perfect performances
-any experience with a beloved during courtship
-fantastically cooked meal
-a picture of virgin mary as a tomato sauce blot on a sandwich
-lots more, almost anything non-art can be perfectly sublime if you know where, how and when to look.

Imagination in the classroom

I have tried using philosophy in the art classroom. I had some mixed results. It helped some kids and I suspected it might have been too over their heads to a few who had no background knowledge. What was interesting was that it worked very well for the older years, especially when they had taken up the post-modernism frame. The nihilists and existentialists were specially very popular to my chagrin. What mattered most was that the art was particularly good. Philosophy was a good means to an end. I had to be particularly careful when matters of belief and religion cropped up. It is not a safe subject by any means. If you are going to do the same, exercise a lot of caution when in a private religious school and a lot of questioning and preparation would help a lot, otherwise you might just confuse the younger ones but I never thought my interest and wide reading in philosophy would ever came in handy.

The salient pattern was that helping kids think also stimulated their imagiNation. I can tell how excited they were to visit this under explored country-the last frontier.

I definitely recommend that even younger children, possibly from age 7 should be encouaraged to learn the history of ideas, if they display any enthusiasm. The younger the better since kids are very perceptive, only adults seem to think they are not.

Nakedness and nudity

I have posted this on a social networking site and I think it is relevant enough that I should include it here.
people have commented and replied to this post so it would be added on as more people participate.

What is the difference between nakedness and nudity?

I always thought that nudity was tasteful, the rude bits are discreetly and strategically covered up with drapery.

Nakedness to me implies a no-holds-bared expose of everything.

In other words it is pornography to provoke lust. The nude has always been controversial and that there is fine line between nudity and nakedness. Nudity is sublimating desire for physical perfection and beauty into art while being naked in feminist terms is very confrontational. It is being militant in in-your-face protest about carnal desire for sexual meat or a political comment on the commodification of women's bodies.

As the Guerrilla Girls asked, 'How do you get a woman artist into the Met? Get her naked!'
In the case of Orlan, her beauty is truly beyond skin deep, well scalpel deep.>>>>

Flora by Jo Gibbs-

Click on the photo to see it in greater detail.


'recycled from blue silicon coasters'





These earrings are made from anodised aluminium, plastic, recycled polyethyelene electroplated steel, blue silicon, leather from old shoes, belts and bags, recycled brick-a-brac, foam, PVC, leatherette, kitchenware, rubber, industry waste, old and antique jewellery attached to Sterling silver finding and gold plated steel findings.


My creativity is an ongoing project and lately, I have been out of work because my University coursework has become so intensive and as a result I am broke so I need your support.

Please email me for details if you are interested in buying my jewellery, also please feel free to contact me especially if you are a business retailer. If you are one or if you have a website and you want me to include your link on my this directory, please click on the green highlighted 'email' text & link shown above.



My practice has sort of become more commercial after 2009. The earrings are also available at Drews Pharmacy $24.95 each pair.