Self in Situations & Predicates

Self in Situations, Objects predicated on

It is obvious from the general analysis of experience that objects referred to differ in kind according to the communication situation. Telling dreams is obviously different from describing a remembered landscape, as content of dreams differ from content of perception. Thus, in a perceptual situation, objects are identified in one way; in a dreaming-sleep/trance situation, they are identified differently, by different laws, one thing changing into another.

If "self" is a sense of continuity, with feeling of familiarity (Russell) belonging to content remembered, "it" is the common totality of consciousness distributed through all sign-uses. We can therefore speak of self-awareness in a dream situation, phenomenal waking life situation, amorous situation, moral situation, egoistic existential situation, philosophical (metaphysical) situation, and theological (hypothetical closure) situation. These seven situations, in order of object complexity of content encompassed between dreaming and cosmic container, correspond to the seven "notes" between middle -C's on the musical scale.

The predicates appropriate to the objects experienced are determined by the self-situation. Predicates that apply to John, the person (Ex.: "...is 30 years old") do not apply, categorically, to congeries of sense-data or firings of neurones. Objects located in three dimensions of space including one's own body belong to a different way of ordering experience than by phenomenal complexity or micro-magnitudes.of energy. They have their own hierarchy of complexity, from organ tissue (including blood) to individual molecules, cells, chemical compounds and atoms. There are thus two hierarchies of complexity correlated with sign-use: external, through causal aggregation; and internal, through increasingly differentiated and more developed reactions to situations.feeding back through the processing loops to create higher level objects.