The Structure of Consciousness

In the simplest possible terms, what do we mean when we say that something is  conscious. It is generally agreed that merely reacting to sensory input originating in the  ‘external world’ is not enough.  

A rock reacts to the force of gravity but may not be conscious. It ‘feels’ the tug but it is  probably not aware that it feels the tug or even that there is a tug. A rock is not Descartes  after all…is it? 

Likewise, when we dream, we process sensory input, but we are not always consciously  aware of the sensations we’re processing. And that last time you were in a coma, you heard  everything I said to you and now you even remember some of it, but you weren’t conscious of it, or of yourself, at the time. 

Most often, however, when we are aware of a sensation, we are also aware of ‘ourselves  being aware’ of that sensation. We’re not just cold, we also know that we’re cold. There is a  difference between being cold and thinking, “I’m cold.” Ice is cold but there is no reason to  think that it’s aware of itself being (or feeling) cold. 

On the other hand, when I’m cold, I’m aware that I’m cold, and I’m aware that I’m aware that I’m cold. (I complain, therefore I am.) While any ‘it’ I experience is always only and ever it, there is an infinitesimal difference between my direct sensory experience of it and the  indirect experience of ‘it’ that I have when I am aware of myself being aware of it. 

That ‘infinitesimal’ differential, similar to what Jacques Derrida called differánce, is a  precursor to all conscious experience, be it human…or otherwise (chimp, dolphin, parrot,  AI, or Alien). 

I experience the same input, but via two different media of transmission: (1) directly via my  senses and (2) indirectly via my awareness of myself experiencing sensory input; and, per  Marshall McLuhan, “the medium (of transmission) is the message.”  

The ‘cold’ that I experience directly and the ‘cold’ that I experience through my being aware  that I am cold are both the same and different. It is the same ‘cold’ but the different media  of transmission mean that my experiences of that cold differ slightly. 

Marcel Proust shares a similar insight in his Remembrance of Things Past (RTP):

“The sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon two uneven stones in the Baptistry of St. Mark’s had, recurring a moment ago, been restored to me, complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation… 

“…the past was made to encroach upon the present, and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other… The moment to which I was transported seemed to me to be the present moment…” 

The phenomenon of differánce enters into Proust’s experience twice, once as the  infinitesimal unevenness of the titles, again as the infinite proximity of France-now and Italy-then. Effectively, consciousness effects/reflects a ‘fold’ in spacetime that invalidates  the usual Euclidean metric. 

A tiny difference in the pitch of the tiles, the tinier the better, ideally the tiniest perceptible  difference possible, becomes a worm hole for Proust, bending spacetime to proximate points ordinarily far distant from each other. I am reminded of p-adic numbers where the  larger the number, the closer the value is to zero, and of Bell’s non-locality (Entanglement). 

Is this a manifestation of the non-Archimedean structure of the real world? Check  it out: If A is the combined experience of France-now and Italy-then, and B is the  experience of ‘France-now’, and C is the experience of ‘Italy-then’, then both B and C are  subsets of A but, counter intuitively, the union of B and C, France-and-Italy, now-and-then, has more value (weight, intensity) in Proust’s experience, than A. 

The ‘linear Proust’ you know from the cafes was once the Proust of Italy and is now the  Proust of France’ while the ‘non-linear Proust’ of RTP is both the Proust of Italy and the  Proust of France, eternally.  

Proust does not re-member Italy, he re-lives Italy, which is perhaps to say, he really lives it for the first time…in France. (Don’t nod too quickly! If you accept this, you may have to accept that life and consciousness are identical or at least co-incident, congruent at a minimum). 

And when Prouse re-lives, he does not re-call selected, superficial qualia associated with a prior event; he recreates the event entire, and like an ‘Ephesian Kierkegaard’, he steps into it, re-experiencing all its qualia at once…not from outside-in, as with memory or perception, but from the inside-out, as with experience…or being. The competing linear cosmology is summarized beautifully by T.S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday: 

“Because I know that time is always time/ And place is always and only place/ And what is actual is actual only for one time/ and only for one place/I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed face…”

I’d rather live in Proust’s world than Eliot’s; how about you? Fortunately, we do live in ‘Proust-world’; and for that may I say, “Thank God?” For Proust, space and time are implicate, i.e. folded, so that any two points may be arbitrarily close to one another. Events, no matter how far apart, even events receding from each other faster than the speed of light, may abut. 

While Proust’s epiphanies are dramatic, we all experience something similar most every waking moment of every day. Consciousness is the superposition of two slightly askew images, i.e. differánce as described above. The result is a faint cloud of uncertainty…where consciousness lives! (Penrose?) 

‘Cloud of uncertainty’ – hmm, where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, it’s like Heisenberg’s interpretation of Schrödinger’s Wave Function in Quantum Mechanics. 

I imagine I’d be happy if I lived in a small Tuscan village. When I get there, I experience all  the joys of living in a rural, agricultural community with a rich culture and a warm climate. I  am happy, but then I realize that I’ve brought along an unwanted travelling companion,  myself. 

I not only enjoy a generous sip of a gorgeous Chianti, but I experience myself enjoying it.  The sip makes me happy as I’d hoped, but experiencing the ‘sip making me happy’ means  filtering the sip through layers of anxiety, guilt, and self-loathing and suddenly I’m not so  happy any more. In fact, I am unhappy, Liverpool style, like Ringo “on a Saturday night…and  it’s only Thursday morning!” (Yellow Submarine) 

Wherever I go and whatever I do, I will always be there, and that’s likely to be a problem, a  big problem. But this is not a self-help program. Happiness is not the goal here; understanding is. So… I went to Tuscany and I drank some wine, and as I drank it, I also tasted it. I became aware of the wine and its taste but also of me tasting the wine. Ugh! 

Surprisingly, the reputedly esoteric experience of consciousness can be easily and simply  modeled using just the lowly triangle, the fundamental building block of the material world  (according to Plato, The Timaeus). Consciousness can be modeled simply by treating the  ordinarily static triangle as a dynamic process: 

A 

↙ ↘ 

B → C 

In this diagram, A is directly aware of the wine (C) and of itself (B) being aware of the wine (C). We could say that‘A’s experience of C’ proceeds from A’s awareness of C and from A’s  awareness of being aware (B) of C. In which case we would be characterizing 

‘consciousness’ using the language adopted by the Council of Nicaea (c. 325 CE) to describe ‘God’, i.e. Trinity. Does that mean that you are God? Far from it! But it does mean  that you, and perhaps every conscious entity, is ‘the image and likeness of God’.

Image: Number 1, 1948 by Jackson Pollock