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conscience

It's that annoying voice in the back of your mind that tells you not to do some thing fun!8) Die Cricket Die!
 
According to Descartes, and simply put, it comes from every experience you have in your life and consists of an " internal forum" of people that have influenced you,( people you admire, people who you love) who make up a sort of internal jury to judge your actions from with in.
 
It's the inner voice that examines your moral code and actions and dishes out guilt when needed.
 
It is the moment when you are seeking mental focus rather than experiencing mental focus.

When you watch TV your mind is focused on something external to yourself, you are not conscious.

When you are replaying a memory in your mind, your mind is focused on something internal, you are not conscious.

When you are playing in your mind an encounter you hope will occur in the future (e.g., sexual daydream), you are not conscious.

When you are thinking, "What shall I think about now?" you ARE conscious. You are in the process of choosing your focus, rather than being caught in the grip of a previously chosen focus.

When you are listening to some one and are wondering, as you assimilate their words, what you will say in response, you are sort of conscious in that your wondering is thinking about focus.

When you are speaking to some one and are wondering what they are thinking about your words, you are sort of conscious, too.

I guess the bottom line is that consciousness is thinking about thinking.

~psychoblast~
 
How about: it's the true me. Not what everyone else hears when I open my mouth. Not what everyone sees when I walk into a room. Not what everyone else perceives. Thank god no one can take that one away from me!
 
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thank you all for the replies.
psychoblast, you gave a good answer just not to the question i asked. i asked about conscience not conscious. thank you though.
now to quote erich fromm, who seems to be saying the same thing as rantnrave, "conscience is the internalization of external social demands."
i was wondering if there was more to it than that.
do babies who have been affected very little by society not have a little voice in the back of their heads. and if they do, wat influences what that voice says.
thank you
 
Whoops...my bad.

Okay, I think conscience is the voice of that part of yourself that wants, more than anything, to be good. It is subjective, in that what that voice says depends on what you think a "good" person would do.

I think if people really considered whether they would prefer to be dead or to face the realization they are a bad person to the core, a blight on humanity, a lot of people might choose death. We may be selfish, want material possessions, want to succeed even if it means others must fail, but still inside somewhere there is a part of us that wants to be good. We often compromise between this voice, and the voice that tells us to do whatever it takes to get what we want, by rationalizing and finding ways to justify that we are good depsite selfishly trying to please ourselves at the expense of others.

Do children have a conscience? I think there is a first time the child finds itself conflicted in what it wants. The moment the child wants both to steal the candy and to have its mother's admiration, it is conflicted and it begins what we adults all take for granted -- the process of having multiple "voices" in our heads that often disagree on what we should do.

Prior to that conflict, the child was of singular, united mind in saying and doing whatever it wanted. Some might say the child was at that moment pure conscience, before the bullshit of society overlayed that purity with our garbage to create a conflicted individual. But then again, it is pretty obvious that young children act purely selfish, not purely selfless. So, it might be more accurate to say that a child starts out with no conscience and that the voice of our conscience is the intruder, the squatter, not the voice of our selfish desires.

It occurs to me the moment a conscience develops might be the precise moment a child first realizes that love is not unconditional. That it's parents' feelings toward it are dependent on how "good" they perceive the child as behaving. Since the child probably realizes at a very core level that it is dependent on its parents for sustainance, for protection and for comfort, it thus develops a strong urge to BE good that begins to wrestle with the prior pure, thoughtless selfishness the child had been used to.

I think at some point, the child's thinking becomes more complex, and it realizes that it need not BE good to have its parents' love, but only to be PERCEIVED as good. This may be the age when children learn to lie, and start misbehaving and then lying about it. Generally, they are so inept at it that it does not work, they are caught lying and perceived as even worse for having lied, and they go back the urge to BE good as the only way to ensure they have their parents' love. But the voices of unashamedly selfishness, and perhaps the newest voice of being secretively selfish, are still there and continue to war with the voice of being truly good.

Well, that is all theoretical child development. It is a little hard for me to accept (even though I wrote it) because I prefer the idea that children are born truly good. Hmmm...I wonder if pure, honest and unashamed selfishness might be good, with the caveat that we should view the "I" that is being selfish not as ourselves as individuals, but as ourselves as the human species or the Earth life entity or as the universal one-ness.

That goes back to my view on enlightenment, that pure happiness and fulfillment can be found in viewing yourself not as an individual, but as a part of the universal whole. You then lose your fear of death or pain and seek the good of the universe. While that may seem altruistic. if you are PERCEIVING yourself as the entire universe, simultaneous with devoting yourself to the GOOD of the entire universe, then you are purely releasing your selfishness in a way that you need not be ashamed of.

Maybe that is part of the joy of enlightenment, of having the sense you are one with the universe, because it allows you to reject all voices that were put upon you by society and culture, and become your complete, original and selfish voice and, moreover, to reconcile that voice completely with the later voices telling you to be good, or to hide your selfishness. Essentially, you stop having any crises of conscience, any internal conflicts over your actions, and you become one united voice in your head.

~psychoblast~
 
i am truly in awe. your ideas and writing are beautifull psychoblast. you have given me something to think about. (particularly the last 3 paragraphs.) thank you
 
Great reply, psychoblast. The only thing I disagree with is that a parent's love is the only unconditional love that exists. Also, conscience develops at approx. age 5. CatAgain, you might be interested in psychopathy. The defining feature is a missing conscience.
 
Neurol_Shock:

After posting that, I had some further thoughts on parents having unconditional love for a child. I have for a long time thought that, no, unconditional love does not exist. You may say a mother's love for her child is unconditional, but we can imagine a child being so horrible and seemingly evil that the mother herself would reject that child (or at least I thought so).

But then it occured to me that perhaps the only thing we can love unconditionally is our creations. Because if we create something, then any flaws in that creation we must blame on ourselves, not on the creation. So, you inherently release the creation of blame for any flaws within it, and take such flaws as being your own flaws. From this perspective, perhaps parents can unconditionally love their children because they are their creations and any flaws in the children -- no matter how severe -- the parents will view as being the result of their own flaws that were foisted onto the children. So, in that sense, perhaps parents can unconditionally love their children (with the caveat that if a child exibits flaws that the parent views as coming from outside forces beyond the parent's control, so that the parent does not take blame for those flaws, perhaps those flaws could diminish the parent's love.... I'm not sure about that.)

I also thought that perhaps we can only unconditionally love ourselves. But, as stated in my prior post, we can extend our sense of self beyond our own physical body. Anything a person creates can be perceived as an extension of that person. So a parent may unconditionally love a child because that child is seen, in some fashion, as an extension of the parent. Or a person close to their whole family, may view all their family members within their "zone of self."

If, as I currently believe, enlightenment is to view yourself as being the entire universe, merely operating through one particular fragment (your own body), then you view everything and everyone as part of yourself, and so you may then be able to unconditionally love everything. Which would be quite a feat.

But, getting back to the idea of a child developing its conscience, it does not matter whether the mother's love is unconditional, only whether the child PERCEIVES it as unconditional. When children are yelled at for misbehaving by their mothers, I think they get the impression they are loved when hugged and praised, and not loved when reprimanded and punished. Even if the child is wrong about this, it is the PERCEPTION that the mother's (and father's) love is conditional that leads to the formation of a conscience as the voice that tells the child how it should act to fulfill what it perceives are the conditions it must fulfill to be sure of keeping its parents' love.

Thus, it may actually be detrimental to children developing a good conscience if parents were able to convince their child from early on that, despite any reprimands or punishments, the parents' love was unconditional. That might theoretically stunt the child's development of a conscience.

~psychoblast~
 
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Again, excellent. Just a quick one on the last paragraph. Believe it or not, the absence of an unconditional bond can interfere with the development of a conscience. Basically, it is this parental bond that defines the idea of being able to feel empathy towards others. This is essential for the formation of a conscience. Unless the person is a psychopath, it is always possible to develop a conscience - though 3 years old is the ideal time.
 
I think conscience is the morals and ethics that society has bestowed into our brains. The unnatural wrongs and rights that religion and our government dictates to us to believe. The mass conspiracy of mass media and corporate amerca, everyone has to be a size 2, drink starbucks, and drive a bmw, because by tge time we start to actually develope our own life, our brains are left with a huge indentation of a mass of nonesense that forces all to think alike, and make sure that society's ethics are predetermined for the next generation, that no one will really step out of line. We are living under big brother except with the name democracy, choice is given to us but we can't use it. We don't know how to choose, our choices are made by the mataphorical chip in our subconscious mind. We are under mind control to make sure our conscience tells us the same thing.

Right and wrong are arbitrary, or at least they are supposed to be, however since we live in a society, they fail to be. Our conscience is how the corporate world takes over our souls.
 
oops, i posted that one ^^^^^by accident under his name, sorry sashkat. i love you
 
Because if we create something, then any flaws in that creation we must blame on ourselves, not on the creation.
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Very true, genetically and environmentally. However, not every parent has it.
 
It's the superego. It's that ideal we sketch in our minds that we're constantly striving to align to and always falling short of living up to. And we keep kicking ourselves in the asses about it. It's that image of `who we should be' opposed to `who we think we are' or `who we appear to others to be', and it probably began construction long ago when our parents, teachers, and other authrority figures ingrained into our minds what was appropriate and inappropriate. And those nagging, dictating external voices became nagging, dictating internal voices that are now often the background noise to our thoughts but certainly no less influential. And way back when it was good, it served it's purpose, because we were vulnerable little children and adapting to the environment and doing what was expected of us had a kind of survival advantage... but we've kept this nagging little voice for too long, and for many of us it's outgrown it's use. Not to say that we should have no conscience, but we should question the cricket to be sure that s/he is doing more good than harm. We should communicate with our cricket rather than follow the little green guy's orders blindly. And if he gets too antagonizing, we should remind him of how small he is, and how big and heavy our foot can be.
 
Again, excellent. Just a quick one on the last paragraph. Believe it or not, the absence of an unconditional bond can interfere with the development of a conscience. Basically, it is this parental bond that defines the idea of being able to feel empathy towards others. This is essential for the formation of a conscience. Unless the person is a psychopath, it is always possible to develop a conscience - though 3 years old is the ideal time.
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Where did you hear this?
 
rewiiired said:
Not to say that we should have no conscience, but we should question the cricket to be sure that s/he is doing more good than harm. We should communicate with our cricket rather than follow the little green guy's orders blindly. And if he gets too antagonizing, we should remind him of how small he is, and how big and heavy our foot can be.
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essentially it would be the cricket crushing himself. so our conscience is not just the result of our societies influence on us but also our ability to question these imposing ethics aswell as choose what to accept and what to disregard. our conscience is not one voice telling us what to do, but a number of voices presenting choices and we are let to decide.
:p
 
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