What does "external" mean?

[Birdjaguar]

Is consciousness an individual thing or a group characteristic?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Is consciousness an individual thing or a group characteristic?

In the linguistic sense, depends on the context. For the purposes of this thread the focus seems to be on individual consciousness/interaction with "external environment", insofar that there is an actual difference aside from an illusion originating from the environment in a way an organ can't self-loop itself into grasping.

 

[Kyriakos]

Imo to have a notion (a concept, if you want to use that term instead) of an external, would already require some mental work (obviously also - or even mostly or entirely- of the non-conscious type). But if one goes by (which can be tricky, but at least is based on experience, something rare in mental examinations) the progressions in the earliest of childhood years (including pre-language ones), then it seems rather evident that at some point some mental creations/concepts rise without being that stable to begin with. For example, i do recall that many concepts i had (including about the external world) took time to 'settle in', which would mean that they aren't already pre-made and then used as-is but have to rise out of more fundamental or innate abilities.
Now that is just childhood. Prehistory is something we can't know empirically in this way. Yet one has to assume than humans/hominids didn't just start having a language at some point. It likely was a long and chaotic progression. This doesn't lend credence to the idea that a number of concepts which are used typically today were always there, which in turn (their non-being there) would seem to allude to a likely fleeting nature of those concepts both in the way they appeared and their continuous re-emergence in humans as they start (as children) to identify the world as something external.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Yet one has to assume than humans/hominids didn't just start having a language at some point. It likely was a long and chaotic progression. This doesn't lend credence to the idea that a number of concepts which are used typically today were always there, which in turn (their non-being there) would seem to allude to a likely fleeting nature of those concepts both in the way they appeared and their continuous re-emergence in humans as they start (as children) to identify the world as something external.

Yes, if you go far enough back language + concept of self/internal/external didn't exist, or at least wasn't conceived by humans (at some point, humans didn't exist). I would also agree that it is unlikely this notion just suddenly appeared in complete form in an instant, as that would be inconsistent with human development otherwise and we have no evidence for it.

It is also more reasonable to conclude it's fleeting than not. Concept of self/external isn't a fundamental property of reality, it's how our minds are presently configured to interpret themselves in the space of reality, using interactions we still don't completely understand.

 

[warpus]

Yeah, these concepts must have very slowly evolved in our minds, it's impossible that it was an on/off switch type thing, that's not how these things work