The Structure of Consciousness

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

According to Newton, every action entails an equal and opposite reaction, but we don’t necessarily want to view every action as conscious. A rock reacts to the force of gravity but it 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 the 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 feels itself being cold or that it’s aware of itself being 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 whenever I’m aware of myself being aware of it.

Alfred North Whitehead was on to this when he distinguished our direct conceptual prehension of an ‘eternal object’ (value) from our indirect physical prehension of that same value as it is realized in another actual entity.

That difference, similar to what Jacques Derrida called la differance, is a precursor of all conscious experience, be it human…or otherwise (dolphin or bonobo, octopus or 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 the input. And, per Marshall McLuhan, “the medium (of transmission) is the message,” and the message is la differance, the message is ‘I am’.

La differance may be understood as a quantum of information, a bit, or at least a quantum of consciousness. It is irreducible. 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.

Whenever A = -A (same = different) we know we’re not in ‘Kansas’ (aka the Set of Real Numbers) anymore. It is the same ‘cold’ but the different media of transmission mean that my experiences of that same cold differ slightly. La differance is short for ‘infinitesimal difference’.

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…” And so it was!

The Proust you know from the cafes was once the Proust of Italy and then the Proust of France but the Proust you know from RTP is the Proust of both Italy and France. Every then is now and every now is eternal. Proust does not remember Italy, he relives Italy, which is perhaps to say, he really lives it for the first time…but in France. When Proust was in Italy, his attention was divided between his experiences of Venice and his experience of himself experiencing Venice.

But when Proust relives Italy from France, his intermediary physical body disappears and now, for the first time, he can fully experience Venice. When Proust relives an event, he does not recall selected, superficial qualia associated with that event, like a tourist with a smart phone; 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 perception and/or memory, but from inside-out, as something unknown to Kant, noumenal experience. When Proust was in Venice, he was aware of Venice, but he was also aware of himself (as above). Likewise, when Proust is in France. But when Proust relives Italy-in-France, he is no longer aware of himself per se.

Finally, he can be directly aware of experience itself and yet he remains conscious of that experience because the infinitesimal separation between Italy and France now functions for him as la difference. The phenomenon of differánce enters into Proust’s experience twice, once as the infinitesimal unevenness of the titles, again as the infinitesimal separation between France-now and Italy-then. Separated by the spacetime continuum, the two venues are reunited by something even more substructural, i.e. experience. 

Effectively, consciousness effects/reflects a ‘fold’ in spacetime that invalidates the familiar 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 make proximate points ordinarily far distant from one another. I am reminded of p-adic numbers: the closer they are to zero, the larger the quantity they represent. 

I am also reminded of Bell’s non-locality (entanglement): two events indefinitely separated in space and time can nonetheless behave as one event.  

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, (B + C), France-and-Italy-now-and-then, has more value/weight/intensity for Proust than A itself. Or, for you fans of Doctor Who, Hot Link the Universe is simply a collection of ‘phone boxes’…phone boxes that house vast, hexagonal interior spaces, like the TARDIS.

 Either way, this potentiality for intensity is a product  of living in a non-Archimedean universe and/or of being conscious. Revel in it! The competing cosmology is summarized 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; and for that may I say, “Thank God!” For Proust, space and time are folded so that any two points may be arbitrarily close to one another. Events, no matter how far apart, 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 images, slightly askew - differánce as described above. 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, X is directly aware of Z and of itself being aware (Y) of Z. We could say that ‘X’s experience of Z’ proceeds from X’s awareness of Z and from A’s awareness of being aware (Y) of Z. 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 being, is ‘made in the image and likeness of God’…and that’s not half bad.

Image: Number 1, 1948 by Jackson Pollock