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Consciousness
Apr. 3rd, 2024 02:35 pmConsciousness is a reflection on the surface of the past, as the future rains down upon it. It has no thickness whatsoever.
At least, that's what we experience as consciousness, because we are creatures of chemistry, and we cannot experience anything at all unless chemistry is happening. Anything less is not experience, and would be more akin to a "state".
When we think of "state", we think of the positions of things. The arrangement of matter and waves around us in a particular moment. But if you look closely enough, position gets blurry. Go down enough decimal places with any measurement, and you have to start talking about probabilities, like, "this particle has a 50% change of being somewhere within this blob of space, delimited by this equation." A statement like that can be a fact -- and it can also be a fact that a statement any more precise would be wrong. That's a hard thing for beings like us to accept, but it appears to be true.
Complex arrangements of matter can be described as complex arrangements of probabilities in space, but that's not the whole story either, because space itself is flexible. We usually just assume three solid dimensions where everything happens in one connected place (i.e. the universe), because medium-scale math usually works for that, and because we evolved to see things that way, but physics experiments this last century have forced us to accept that the truth is far messier. Get far enough away from your neighbor, and you could both be going down different legs of the Trousers Of Time. Get back together, and you might find that, for example, your watches no longer show the same number. Not only was your experience different, the amount of your experience was different.
Slice that experience infinitely thin, and you get "the present", and at that point, there is absolutely nothing differentiating it, as far as consciousness is concerned, from any other moment. You think you're experiencing a particular moment only because every particular moment is buttressed with the changes in chemical state in the previous moment, presenting you with memories and predictions of what happened before and what may happen next. That arrangement is the process you think you are going through. I.e. that arrangement is "time passing", during which you are conscious. Closer to the truth is, you are in every moment, all the time, everywhere there is a you strung together by physical processes that can create that illusion of consistency.
That you has borders: Your birth, your death, every night of sleep you get, et cetera, but those borders are self-imposed. They are imposed by your sense of yourself as an individual. And that sense is entirely dictated by the needs of the body sensing it, and the way that body evolved. For example, you're conscious and your friend Bill is conscious, and you assume the two of you are separate consciousnesses because there are two bodies involved, both of which have a sense of self and a sense of other. Nope, it's just one consciousness, which is just one moment, everywhere all the time.
It's the bodies that claim otherwise.
They're liars. But they do it to survive, so we forgive them.
There is also every other moment, in every other place where there isn't a "you", but ... you personally will never have any memory or pending experience connected directly to those moments (was re: body), so you naturally - but unnecessarily - stake the borders of your own consciousness in front of them. Some mystically-inclined people may hallucinate "past lives" or believe they are psychic, but all such claims boil down to the insistence on a supernatural process that defies the probabilities that space and time are defined and organized by. The truth is far more insane: Everyone is in every present moment all the time, but no one - no living being as we define it - can "do" anything but think about the moment immediately preceding it, and express some reaction in the moment immediately after. Whatever moment you think you're in right now? It's not the only one you're in right now.
You're still in the moment you remember happening yesterday. You're already in the moment you assume will happen tomorrow. Insomuch as there is a you at all, which is a chain of thought in a brain undergoing the process of thinking, as your senses deliver heat, light, pressure, noise, and all those other expressions borne of the difference between moments, which - let me reiterate - only appear to be in any order at all, but break down into probabilities when you look too closely.
Think too hard about it, and consciousness starts to disappear. You feel like a skipping record. You end up obsessing about the moment you were in 20 years ago, or the moment happening to your friend Bill, or to a rock, or to thin air. How does it feel to be conscious as a thing that has no senses, and no metabolism? It doesn't feel any way at all, obviously. But we obsessively imagine it anyway. It's a habit. All this thinking is still chemistry of course but it's an interesting diversion.
Lively-seeming debates about free will start to look a little absurd. (Who is the 'you' that is free?) Belief in a divine influence making changes in "the past" to influence "the future" also feels a bit old hat. (What is this, but an instinctive concept of 'other' run amok?) Oh and don't get me started on this whole "we're inside a simulation" bollocks.
Human bodies and their flawed, self-serving theories, man, I tell ya... Just try and do the right thing in the moment. Remember: Whatever you do to your neighbors is also being done unto you. You're just not remembering it right now.
At least, that's what we experience as consciousness, because we are creatures of chemistry, and we cannot experience anything at all unless chemistry is happening. Anything less is not experience, and would be more akin to a "state".
When we think of "state", we think of the positions of things. The arrangement of matter and waves around us in a particular moment. But if you look closely enough, position gets blurry. Go down enough decimal places with any measurement, and you have to start talking about probabilities, like, "this particle has a 50% change of being somewhere within this blob of space, delimited by this equation." A statement like that can be a fact -- and it can also be a fact that a statement any more precise would be wrong. That's a hard thing for beings like us to accept, but it appears to be true.
Complex arrangements of matter can be described as complex arrangements of probabilities in space, but that's not the whole story either, because space itself is flexible. We usually just assume three solid dimensions where everything happens in one connected place (i.e. the universe), because medium-scale math usually works for that, and because we evolved to see things that way, but physics experiments this last century have forced us to accept that the truth is far messier. Get far enough away from your neighbor, and you could both be going down different legs of the Trousers Of Time. Get back together, and you might find that, for example, your watches no longer show the same number. Not only was your experience different, the amount of your experience was different.Slice that experience infinitely thin, and you get "the present", and at that point, there is absolutely nothing differentiating it, as far as consciousness is concerned, from any other moment. You think you're experiencing a particular moment only because every particular moment is buttressed with the changes in chemical state in the previous moment, presenting you with memories and predictions of what happened before and what may happen next. That arrangement is the process you think you are going through. I.e. that arrangement is "time passing", during which you are conscious. Closer to the truth is, you are in every moment, all the time, everywhere there is a you strung together by physical processes that can create that illusion of consistency.
That you has borders: Your birth, your death, every night of sleep you get, et cetera, but those borders are self-imposed. They are imposed by your sense of yourself as an individual. And that sense is entirely dictated by the needs of the body sensing it, and the way that body evolved. For example, you're conscious and your friend Bill is conscious, and you assume the two of you are separate consciousnesses because there are two bodies involved, both of which have a sense of self and a sense of other. Nope, it's just one consciousness, which is just one moment, everywhere all the time.
It's the bodies that claim otherwise.
They're liars. But they do it to survive, so we forgive them.
There is also every other moment, in every other place where there isn't a "you", but ... you personally will never have any memory or pending experience connected directly to those moments (was re: body), so you naturally - but unnecessarily - stake the borders of your own consciousness in front of them. Some mystically-inclined people may hallucinate "past lives" or believe they are psychic, but all such claims boil down to the insistence on a supernatural process that defies the probabilities that space and time are defined and organized by. The truth is far more insane: Everyone is in every present moment all the time, but no one - no living being as we define it - can "do" anything but think about the moment immediately preceding it, and express some reaction in the moment immediately after. Whatever moment you think you're in right now? It's not the only one you're in right now.
You're still in the moment you remember happening yesterday. You're already in the moment you assume will happen tomorrow. Insomuch as there is a you at all, which is a chain of thought in a brain undergoing the process of thinking, as your senses deliver heat, light, pressure, noise, and all those other expressions borne of the difference between moments, which - let me reiterate - only appear to be in any order at all, but break down into probabilities when you look too closely.
Think too hard about it, and consciousness starts to disappear. You feel like a skipping record. You end up obsessing about the moment you were in 20 years ago, or the moment happening to your friend Bill, or to a rock, or to thin air. How does it feel to be conscious as a thing that has no senses, and no metabolism? It doesn't feel any way at all, obviously. But we obsessively imagine it anyway. It's a habit. All this thinking is still chemistry of course but it's an interesting diversion.Lively-seeming debates about free will start to look a little absurd. (Who is the 'you' that is free?) Belief in a divine influence making changes in "the past" to influence "the future" also feels a bit old hat. (What is this, but an instinctive concept of 'other' run amok?) Oh and don't get me started on this whole "we're inside a simulation" bollocks.
Human bodies and their flawed, self-serving theories, man, I tell ya... Just try and do the right thing in the moment. Remember: Whatever you do to your neighbors is also being done unto you. You're just not remembering it right now.
