Being alive presents numerous contradictions. One of the most fundamental contradictions concerns what we are doing. On the one hand, most of the time, each of us individually is neither conscious nor self-conscious about what we (as an individual) are doing. We are simply doing something--going about a task we have done before without thinking about it or about ourselves.
Our bodies perform the motor actions needed for the task, our sensory system receives input about the objects and our motions, some part of our brain monitors the environment and our behavior, other parts of our brain coordinate the various actions underway. We might be with someone else--perhaps driving a car and talking to a passenger. We might be alone--walking across a field. We might be with someone else engaged in a coordinated action that requires no speaking yet we do together without thinking or awareness or self-consciousness--for instance, dancing. The particulars don't matter as long as we understand, for the point of analysis, that we can, often do, and more often than not, engage in a sequence of actions without awareness. We might be on auto-pilot for all we know. We could say that we are acting out of habit, or "unconsciously", or out of instinct; but the result is the same. We are doing something without knowing what we are doing as we do it.
This situation is familiar in philosophy. Acting out of habit (or instinct) is the starting point of the analysis of human action by the American pragmatists of the early twentieth century (e.g., Dewey), as they tried to apply Darwinian functionalism to understanding human behavior.
Because we are acting in the world without awareness, we cannot be actively guiding ourselves in our actions with active intent. We might have formed an intention in the past, which is available to us as a memory, but on auto-pilot, the memory is not conscious to us. If the brain is accessing the memory, it is doing so by itself (so to speak) without us consciously directing it to do so as we go along.
On the other hand, the fundamental task of living is to make our way. How can we make our way without knowing what we are doing? We have to traverse a distance by walking from point A to point B, or to move an object with our hands from position A to position B. Often, we have to interact with other persons. We might have to shout a warning to a young child, who might be about to cross a street in front of a car. We might wish to request someone to bring back a new pencil when they return from the office supply room. How could we do any of these actions without knowing (whether with awareness or not with awareness) what we are doing? That doesn't seem to make sense.
How do we make our way when most of the time we don't know what we are doing? Part of the answer involves the sensory system and brain function. The brain monitors our environment and, when a threshold of stimulation is reached, prompts other parts of the brain (for instance) to wake us out of our sleep or make us aware or self-aware of what is going on in our environment. (See this discussion of the reticular formation.) In this process, our brain might alert us to form an intent or it might initiate a responsive behavior of which we remain completely unconscious.
Part of the answer to the question (viz., how do we make our way in life when we are unaware of what we are doing?) must somehow involve "recognition". We do not simply go from being on the auto-pilot of an habitual (or instinctive or genetically driven) behavioral pattern to fully aware behavior guided by intent as a single jump. There must be steps involved in the change of modalities of living, beyond the neurological/biochemical/motor stimulatory sequence (let's call it NBMS, so I don't have to type out the words again) involved in the initiation of the responsive behavior. One step must be recognition that we are in a situation requiring response.
What might recognition be? Recognition would have to be, first, realization. Realization might simply be a brain function entirely without involvement of awareness or self-awareness. We should therefore mean by "realization", as a simplest definition, acceptance (by NBMS) of interruption of a habitual pattern of behavior. But what determines the response? Part of the answer--courtesy of Darwin--is that initially we automatically respond with patterns of behavior that natural selection has provided for us. If they don't work (and if we are still alive), then we have to innovate. Innovation might involve consciousness and it might not.
Both habitual emergency response patterns and innovative responses would require that we are oriented in our environment. Our response would have to be directed, either unconsciously or intentionally, toward an outcome. How do we (as a sum total of NBMS, memory, reflexes, and, sometimes, intent) orient ourselves?
The answer, I think, is values. We orient ourself by perceiving values in our environment. Our environment is not completely neutral to us. Once alerted by our NBMS, we search the environment for values that will inform us of (what we think of as) appropriate responses. We perceive these values as objective components of the environment around us. The values are as much outside in the environment as rocks, trees, leopards, cars in the wrong lane hurtling at us, the shadow on the ground that looks like a man holding a rifle.
Our perception of values transforms the environment into a "situation". Transformation of the environment into a situation, through realization of values in our environment, is "recognition". We recognize that we are in a situation. That recognition occurs simultaneously with and is the same as behavior directed toward an outcome.
The answer to my conundrum is, then, that even when we are going through life without awareness or self-awareness, which is most of the time, we are nonetheless being guided by values. Most of the time we don't realize that we are being guided by values. When we are alerted to our environment, we recognize our values and then, either our NBMS or our awareness, directs a behavioral response toward an outcome (of whatever conflict stimulated our NBMS to alert us).
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