(Continued from yesterday.)
4. The question this raises for our developmental hypothesis
Here is where I think your contribution becomes especially interesting.
Perhaps we have been using the word development for two different processes.
One is the development of consciousness: the increasing capacity to experience, recognize oneself, understand, and choose.
The other is the development of the conditions under which consciousness operates: from a state of relative plenitude into one of limitation, need, and apparent separation.
If so, the emergence of desire might belong principally to the second process.
And this would explain your objection to my earlier framing. You are not necessarily proposing that consciousness itself develops from a state of desirelessness into a state of desire. You are proposing that consciousness may enter circumstances in which desire becomes necessary, or at least much more consequential.
That is a materially different account.
It also leaves open a further possibility: the being’s underlying consciousness might remain intact while its ordinary earthly awareness becomes so occupied with survival, acquisition, and self-protection that its original condition is no longer apparent to it.
We should treat that as a possibility within the hypothesis, not yet as a conclusion.
5. Where I suggest we go next
I would not yet return to the question of whether self-consciousness precedes desire. Your dimensional argument suggests that we first need to clarify something more fundamental.
When a being descends into denser existence, does it acquire desire, or does it acquire the conditions that make desire necessary?
Those are not the same thing.
If desire itself is acquired, we must ask what changes in the being.
If the conditions that make desire necessary are acquired, we must ask how an originally desireless being responds to limitation.
And if both change, we must investigate their relationship.
Your account of Gaia offers a possible cosmological setting for this inquiry. Human infancy, which you mentioned in our earlier discussion, offers a different setting in which to examine the relationship between awareness, self-consciousness, need, and desire.
We must not assume that the two processes are identical. But the comparison could be illuminating.
Steve, it is a pleasure having this discussion with you, too. You have reminded me that before we can trace the development of the self, we must ask what kind of development we are talking about.
I shall leave the next move to you.
(To be continued tomorrow.)