In one philosophy book I read - God alone knows which one, but I bet they haven't bothered to keep track (I checked their preferred pronoun) - I came across a reference to a novel by a philosopher called Dan Lloyd. The novel, Radiant Cool, is like a detective story and also a theory of consciousness and it's followed by Lloyd's actual theory of consciousness. Sound confusing? It is... but it's pretty good... in some ways... not so much in character development, maybe.
The part that got me thinking (I had to understand in order to think so my thinking was a little more limited than I might have hoped) was the idea - and, as it happens, I'm not sure that this is what he was saying at all... but it's what I thought - that consciousness might not be a state so much as baubles, if you like, of experiencings.
This fits in with my theory that what we are 'aware' of are the things that the system is 'writing on the list' to be addressed through actions. Actions might be mental actions - putting into memory or 'making sense of' or learning.
What we are conscious of is what consciousness IS, but what we are conscious of is also 'in' consciousness, as it were, not out there in the world. We are conscious of how the world is manifested in our consciousness. Our brain is stuck n a skull getting electrical and chemical messages from sense organs and making sense of much of it below the level of consciousness and, perhaps, as I suggested in a previous post, through predictions. Consciousness is this hallucination of experiences that have different qualities about them by their very nature... consciousness is the experience of being consciousness so there is no way to say what consciousness itself is like. It's only like what it is an experience of.
Hmmmm..... let me try again.
OK, matter. In a very prosaic way. My laptop is matter. So is my mug and my marmalade on toast. Matter is not some other thing aside from the laptop, the mug or the toast. And likewise my conscious experience of typing on a laptop in a room in an office looking out over a dark car park with some thoughts about consciousness going on and the sound of typing and some air conditioning system and occasional discomfort in lower back and shoulders with a mask appearing in the lower part of my visual range is what my consciousness is right now. That is what it is - like the matter of the laptop. The experience is not so much in consciousness as what it's made of.
Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that because my experience of typing, office, car park, discomfort is all not just itself... each one of these 'means' more than it is because there are resonances to memories and imaginings and hopes - but those are all more 'matter' of which the experience is made. So that 'car park' is not a representation of the car park that is outside, but a hallucination painted with my desire to get in the car and go home and my memories of how slippery it was out there on Monday and....
The world of matter out there becomes a world of consciousness in here.
Comments