Perspectives of Awareness

[Christopher]

Not frequently questioned but implicit within all human awareness are perspectives through which all consciousness flows. Civilization generally identifies these perspectives as I, We, and It. These three perspectives represent an awareness of self-identity, shared experience with other life (generally human), and the external world at large. These three perspectives appear to be universal through all cultures and languages with rare (if any) exceptions.

Logically, 3 perspectives makes sense. There is me, there are other people, and there is everything else. But the fact that humans perceive reality as such is epistemological in nature and not a function of making "cognitive sense." After all, it is expected that cognition conforms to the epistemology of our awareness and not vice-versa. Most individuals implicitly understand these perspectives from our youngest memories onwards. It is as if the very nature of each perspective represents a subjective experiential *truth* concerning our awareness to reality. There is the feel of the self (and everything identified with the self), there is the experience of empathy, and there is the experience of everything else that is not self or empathically-driven.

The two main theories most familiar to me regarding the nature of 3 perspectives as "universal truths" about human nature are Ken Wilber's Integral Theory and the CAD Triad Hypothesis. The CAD triad proposes that individuals are concerned and make judgments (moral and otherwise) according to three dimensions of thinking: ©ommunity, (A)utonomy, and (D)ivinity. Community refers to issues related to interpersonal dilemmas, Autonomy to dilemmas of independence, and Divinity to dilemmas concern the fundamental nature of the universe. The three dimensions of the CAD triad have also been empirically found to elicit different subjective (emotional) experiences when judgments are perceived through any one specific dimension. For example, negative judgments reflected through the dimension of Community elicit contempt, though Autonomy elicit anger, and through Divinity elicit disgust. The CAD triad functionally appears to align with the three perspectives initially stated, namely Community = We, Autonomy = I, and Divinity = It.

The fact that 3 perspectives exist epistemologically, in combination with the distinction that each perspective appears to correspond to different sets of judgments and corresponding experience, suggests that the mind itself is modularized to accomodate three mechanisms of awareness, each representing a singular perspective. Those who have read Jill Bolte Taylor's Stroke of Insight are well versed that there is an area of the brain in the left hemisphere primarily responsible for setting boundaries and distinguishing self (I) from everything else (It). When this section of the brain is not functioning, an individual cannot make an experiential distinction between his/her own boundaries and the feel of everything else that flows into awareness from the senses (such as the feel of the couch being sat on). Daniel Goleman, in his book Emotional Intelligence, further discusses empathic neurocircuitry (We) and the experiences driven through those parts of the brain that are subjectively not experienced as self but as other.

It does make one think about many things. For example, our culture divides things into 3s. 3 forms of matter, 3 topics in a list, 3 stages of growth (belief, disbelief, integration), etc. Perhaps the greatest miracle is that humans have a We mechanism, that humans don't regard other humans (and much of life) as an It, an object. It makes one also wonder, can empathic experiences generated in one's own mind ever be truly identified to the self, or is it the very nature of empathic experience that such an experience remains a force forever uniting us with all of life?

[Christopher]

I would enjoy hearing what others have to say on the epistemology regarding perspectives of awareness. Has anyone given much thought to the implicit manner (subjective experience rather than thinking way) in which we make such identifications in the world?