Models vs. Consciousness
There's no model like an old model. But don't be fooled by it!
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What does consciousness have to do with anything? Specifically, what does it have to do with models? What is consciousness, anyway? Is it even a what? A something?
E. H. Walker uses a 368-page book to discuss consciousness and the conscious observer, so maybe there's more to it than meets the eye, so to speak. Referring to words by Julian Jaynes about his (Jayne's) inner thoughts and memories, here's what Walker says:
[Consciousness isn't] just the inner eye that glimpses its selfish thought, but the moment's whole world painted across the canvass of sensations. The red polish of a woman's nails and parted lips that mark the moment in forgotten sensations, immediately sensed, immediately known without reflection, without comment to others or even to one's own conscience. It is the full wide screen of living: the sounds of laughing, the sounds of children, of music, the clashing noise of striking metal, the quiet turning page, the distant horn's intrusion into the corner of the mind, the hum within a silent room. ...
The paragraph continues for several more lines, but you get the idea. Consciousness is everything and anything in experience that can be sensed: a glint of light off the window, the barely noticed hand that holds the book, the moment of pain or grief, or joy, and so on. (I don't see any difference between that and what I call everyday experience.) All your moment's being. "These things all together are the question, the puzzle of consciousness that is everything and yet cannot be found in the scattered parts of an ended life."
Here's what consciousness isn't:
Consciousness is not thinking. Consciousness is not thinking about one's consciousness. It is not self-reflection. Consciousness needs no words and needs no things. Those born blind or deaf or mute, they are as conscious as you or I. A fly blankly staring at a red table cloth in a red room will have redness consciousness. A man sitting at the beach at Waikiki, eyes closed, mind thoughtless...even after six months will still have consciousness. In fact he will be consciousness. He will be the consciousness.
Rather:
Consciousness is all things in totality. Consciousness is reality. Consciousness is the word on this page and the word that represents the thought. It is this book in your hands. Consciousness is the child playing beyond the window and across the street, consciousness is the trees and the houses, and consciousness is the beyond -- it is the very distance you see that your mind deceives you into believing separates you and that child playing out there.
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We talk about consciousness as if it were a separate entity, seemingly making it a thing, a something. Isn't that the nature of a thing, that it can be seen as an entity separate from others, that there is a distinguishing boundary between "it" and "them" in some space?
As an example of "things and other things," let's consider a mundane, unarguable example, such as a baseball bat. What is a baseball bat?
A baseball bat is a stick of wood, wouldn't you say? (It could of course be made of aluminum, but let's stick to wood.) But it's a stick that meets certain specifications, right? It has to be a certain length (plus or minus), a certain weight (plus or minus). In cross-section, it has to have a certain dimension of round, unlike a cricket bat, for example, which has a flat on it. These are class properties laid out by the rules of the game of "baseball." (Cricket has other rules and other dynamics.)
The definition also has to include how the bat is used in a "game." To know what a bat is you have to understand something about baseball. For example:
To recognize a baseball bat is to say one knows these things to some degree. It is also to say that if nobody knows the game, the bat itself isn't recognizable as such, that nobody perceives it, that in fact the "bat" doesn't exist -- that it's not an object, a thing. Stick of wood, maybe. Bat? No.
Isn't this the case for all "objects," that they exist only insofar as they are perceived as part of some context? Otherwise they aren't things. Aren't all objects to be perceived (recognized) as part of some scheme or class of things? And don't they exist only insofar as someone perceives them as such? What would it mean to exist if "they" aren't perceived as "them"?
What about the moon? Bats and hockey sticks and pucks and the like are man-made "things" and would disappear as such if we were to disappear. But what about the moon? It's not man-made, is it? Or is it? Would it disappear if we were to disappear? In fact, does it even make sense to talk about a moon if we were not around to experience it? Like the baseball bat, the "moon" is our own product (by virtue of seeing it, by singling it out as a thing in perception, whether "walking" on it or not). We model it as a moon. So who can say what is "there" if we're not "here" to "view" it?
Does that mean it's all in your mind? Or our mind? Or what!
If consciousness is a thing, wouldn't it be known, at least as the thing it's presumed to be, as a separate, distinguished something? Wouldn't that make it an object of knowledge, subject to the fate of all objects of knowledge, that it be bound by or in a model? Things we experience already have our imprint, our stamp. It's the only way we can experience. The experience defines us, as we define the experience. Your experience has to be unique; it has to be different from mine, otherwise you would be me. Heaven forbid!
Consciousness is somebody's consciousness, someone's experience. This is inescapable. Consciousness presumes a conscious observer. I presume, therefore I am. You presume, therefore you are. It is self oriented, and so has limits. My consciousness is different from your consciousness and is limited by that fact. But can it be a fact? You have your consciousness and I have mine, and ne'er the twain shall meet! (Liebniz's monads?) What's yours is yours; what's mine is mine. Separate but equal. Equal, but still separate.
How can your consciousness be my fact? I can't see "outside" my consciousness -- space, time, and thoughts are part of it. I can't make a distinction between my consciousness and yours, for example, except as a speculation. Your consciousness isn't part of my experience, so I can't put a boundary line between yours and mine. Indeed, if I could, both your consciousness and mine would be my consciousness!
So where are we? Can we even say you and I reside separately as entities in some other, unknown space? I don't experience your consciousness. I can't -- not without your world becoming mine and you becoming me. Yet that fact -- or should I say presumption? -- seems inescapable, that we're separate entities in separate space-times. Does my consciousness presume your existence? That's the idea as I get it. But why should consciousness be different from other "things"?
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It puzzles me that consciousness is something we can talk about, yet is something that doesn't have an experienced boundary, allowing it to be distinguished, other than by presumption. As far as I know, there is, for instance, no spatial or temporal limit to the world, and there's no limit in the psychological distance to, or separation from "ourselves." I can only imagine an outside. If I could experience it, it would be part of my consciousness and therefore not outside of it.
We certainly have many micro-worlds, or sub-consciousnesses -- if I may be allowed to stretch language a bit -- any one of which can be isolated within consciousness. But can the whole-ball-of-wax itself be isolated, at least in the same way? If not, what is there to talk about? And if so, doesn't that mean another model is presumed, commensurate with those required for micro-worlds, whether we're privy to it or not, that this overlying consciousness is our own object, and that therefore the "totality" is still another step or two away? Most of our models, after all, are unconscious, just as most of our neural processes are unconscious. As for an observing self, does the presumption of a model at this limiting stage of experience imply the existence of self any more or less than does a model at any other stage? Indeed, isn't consciousness a pre-condition of experience, as class structure?
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