Benjamin Cain
1 min readDec 30, 2022

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I'm not sure about resonating consciousness, but sure, there are meetings of the mind. I've had some "mind melds" or heart-to-heart conversations, often over beer when discussing philosophies. In fact, I think that's one reason why the ancient Greeks preferred oral to written philosophy, to facilitate that personal meeting of minds via the mentor-initiate relationship.

There are different kinds of alienations, and what I'm saying in this article is that consciousness seems to be the source of them all. Animals are conscious, but not so self-conscious. That is, animals model their external environment better than their internal being.

People, then, are hyper-conscious, and that's alienating because once you have a model of the self, you have the problem of how the self fits into the rest of the world. Self-awareness and all the simplified conceptions that sustain the mind, the personality, and the home territory (the person's extended self) extract the self from everything that's foreign by comparison. Animals do this too with their friend-or-foe, fight-or-flight instincts. But presumably they lack the understanding for cosmic alienation since they lack the concepts of nature, universe, physicality, and so on.

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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