Consciousness
Consciousness is a divine mercy, by our conscious we can understand ourselves better and we can feel our presence in this world. Since we know that, consciousness plays a vital role in our existence, so we will explore the consciousness by scientists and artist viewpoints. We will further look at the question of how memory and patterns helps us develop our models of consciousness through three different themes from three pieces," The Uncanny" by Sigmund Freud , "I Am A Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter and "Matt Mullican's World" by Allan McCollum.
The first theme is about a short story by Hoffmann which was cited in The Uncanny essay. The tale begins with the childhood recollections of the student Nathaniel. From his childhood he was afraid of “the Sand-Man". The first cause can be that; on certain evenings his mother used to send him to bed early, she warned him that "the Sand-Man" is coming, in the mean time, he heard a tread of a visitor with whom his father would be occupied that evening. When he questioned about the Sand-Man, his mother said it is true and denied the fact that such a person could only exist in speech; but his nurse gave him more detailed information that, he is a wicked man who come when children won't go to bed" he pulls out naughty boys' and girls' eyes and carries them to the moon to feed his children. Nathaniel wanted to know how the Sand-Man looks like, one evening, when Sand-Man was going to visit Nathaniel's father, he hid himself in his father's study room and he recognized the visitor as the lawyer Coppelius, and he identified this Coppelius with the Sand-Man. The Sand-Man finds out that Nathaniel is listening to them, he seizes him and is about to drop grains of red hot coal in...
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...dead can be. The doll is certainly not dead as it was never alive at first place, but is a dead body deader or less dead. It looks like a living fictional person is more alive than the a real dead one. “ The truth, of course, is that we are trying to compare beings from two different worlds: the doll, which is alive only in a world of fiction, and the cadaver; which is dead in a world of fact. As simple a truth as this is, however, it is a difficult one to hold on to" (McCollum). As a result, this piece of Mullican's artistry, arouses a strong emotion and this feeling arises a powerful wish within us to locate death - "real" death within the fiction domain. Is it fair that a wooden doll, that came to life so easily and had no suffering or hardship in life and live the life indefinitely. Compared to a person, who suffers the hardship of life and die definitely.