How do you know that you are hungry? How do you know that it is sunny outside? How do you know that 1+1=2? How do you know that you like something or love someone?
To answer all of these questions you need to be aware of something, for example the hunger pangs in your body alerting you to eat, looking outside to see if it is bright and sunny, seeing one apple and then another apple bringing them together to see them both, eating an apple and enjoying it, liking its flavor and texture, holding hands with your loved one and kissing her in your loving embrace. It is the awareness of all these things, sensations and acts that validate your understanding of how you know them.
The Oxford dictionary defines epistemology as “the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion”, from the Greek epistēmē knowledge, from epistasthai “know, know how to do”. For my purpose here I’ll regard epistemology as the basic understanding of how we know what we know.
Consciousness is defined as “the state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings; the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.” From Latin conscius ‘knowing with others or in oneself’.
An implicit aspect of the conscious state of awareness is the duration of focus a man can exercise in his interaction with others or with objects in the world. You don’t need a high degree of focused awareness to realize that you are hungry, yet to calculate how much food you need to pack for your three day journey away from home will require a higher degree of focused awareness.
The pain - pleasure principle teaches us to pay attention to how we feel and what we feel. The cause and effect mechanism teaches us to identify the source of what we feel and understand why we feel the way we do.
Metaphysically, man is endowed with the faculty of reason. Epistemologically, he must use his mind through the perceptive mechanism to identify and learn the facts of reality. Metaphysically, man is predisposed to recognize the value of the pain - pleasure principle. Epistemologically, he must discover the cause and effect mechanism in order to choose what is good for him.
The child’s realization that the pain from hunger will be alleviated by food is the basis for the integration of reason and emotion. He does it implicitly in numerous instances, until he makes an explicit identification of the connection between the two states of his body and mind.
To achieve normalcy, the infant must clearly interrelate the state of his body with the state of his mind. It is through the perceptive mechanism and faculty of reason that he accomplishes the cycle from rational identification to emotional reaction.
Technically rationality is not manifested until the child reaches his critical period of development at age two when intense integrative process takes place in his nervous system.
In identifying the pain in his tummy the infant’s mind alarms his surroundings with a cry. This phenomenon is automatic and does not require the conscious, explicit realization: “I am hungry”. Throughout the developmental stages of growth the child relies on this metaphysically given mechanism to survive in nature. Epistemologically, the burden is on his consciousness to discover and understand the relationship between entity and identity.
The indispensable link between body-state and mind-state is correlated with the integration of body, entity; and mind, identity. When a person achieves the stage of conscious identification and explicitly knows how to identify his body- states, his mind reaches a level of independence from the autonomic processes of his organism. It is at that level of development that the link between his mental identification of body-states, i.e., thinking about the way he feels, must accurately relate to one another, i.e., he must build a strong foundation of integrity between body and mind, between how he feels and how he knows what he feels.
The psychological, conscious, integrative mechanism of maintaining homeostasis is rooted in the virtue of philosophical, epistemological independence of the child. To succeed in preserving his integrity the child is required by nature to choose a veridical relationship between entity and identity. “My tummy hurts, that makes me cry, my tummy hurts, because I am hungry, I eat, that makes me feel better, food relieves the pain in my tummy. I am glad I ate.”
It will take many occurrences of pain in the tummy, crying for attention and help, eating food to satisfy his hunger, and relieving the pain, before the child start associating pain with hunger, and food with satisfaction. Even then, the process remains implied by the condition of the body state the infant is experiencing. It is yet, to become an identification of the mind.
To understand the link between pain and pleasure, the child needs to identify the link between the pain in the tummy and the relief he feels after he eats. The child has to abstract the feeling in his body at a future time as projected by the state of the body he has experienced in the past. The realization of the cause and effect in the interrelation of hunger and food has to be experienced as a mental state against the background of perceptive, body experience for the child to make an explicit connection in his knowledge of his body and mind states.
Once the link has been made, the pain in the tummy won’t be as alarming. The sight of food will be a source of content via a projected state of homeostasis that he has previously experienced and identified.
The child’s ability to see the interrelation of the pain - pleasure link is a function of his rationality. It is through reason that the child brings the implicit in his body state pain experience to the explicit mental state of pleasant feeling.
Going through toilet training the child is encouraged to pay attention to his body-states and learn to control himself. To achieve control over his body-state, the child must identify what outcome follows from given sensation, i.e., the urge to urinate, results in urination. Implicitly, the child will realize that, to hold the urge, he must focus his mind on the body, and order himself not to urinate, now. The intensity of the urge to go, is proportionate to the degree of focus required in its control.
When the child reaches the stage of explicit identification of his body-states, he is in position to predict what action must he take in order to relieve pain, and prolong pleasure. In abstracting his prediction of what might follow as consequence of his action he is capable to exercise a willful act. In the case of toilet training; “If I let go, I’ll get wet, and that’s uncomfortable. If I hold, and go to the bathroom, I’ll stay dry, and that is comfortable. Let me go to the bathroom, now.” In the case of hunger pangs; “My tummy hurts, if I ate, I will feel better. I prefer feeling better to feeling the pain in my tummy, I want to eat now.”
The child’s volition follows from his identification of what is good and bad for him. His faculty of reason helped him identify the state he is in, his identification inspired his fidelity to what he feels, armed with the integrity of his independent assessment of a future effect that food will relieve the pain in his tummy, holding his urge to urinate will keep him dry, and that in turn makes his volitional act to eat, or go to the bathroom, valuable.
The selection of value is a natural phenomenon rooted in the rational identification of existence. Choosing one value over another is a function of independence as a result of satisfying the necessary autonomic states of homeostasis.
In this episode I traced the link between the second branch of philosophy, epistemology, with the second branch of psychology, consciousness. The faculty of reason, through differentiation and integration of the interpersonal, extrospective and introspective experiences of a child form his independent judgement to preserve the integrity of his experiences and develop a healthy emotional attachment to his senses and perceptive mechanism.
The child’s ability to identify and explicitly hold an object, act or a person in his conscious awareness along with the memory of such encounters empowers him with the ability to exercise his volition and choose a course of action based on his developed sense of value.
To arrive at understanding value and how does it play out on a interpersonal level will be the subject of my next episode.