Meditation 2

Are we conscious?

We human beings might like to think that we are conscious, conscious enough to build airplanes, automobiles, skyscrapers, and so many other complex things. These man-made designs are all complexly intriguing by their own right. Humanity has come a long way indeed, from stone age to the information age. This leap appears almost unbelievable; from a time when man could hardly differentiate his right from his left, to a time when man uses portable contraptions with billions of invisible things called transistors. A long way indeed, but the question still persists; are we ‘conscious’?

In order to answer this question we would first have to define consciousness; what is consciousness? In my previous reflections some time back, I came up with a rather technical and deductive definition for consciousness. I defined the ever ambiguous concept as the ‘ability to differentiate’. Reflecting on consciousness creates more problems than it offers solutions. The main complication; how do you talk about consciousness from the view point of consciousness? Such an attempt proves paradoxical, it defeats the purpose. It is like using words to describe what a word is. I am conscious, and I am trying to decipher my consciousness, my state of being. I am trying to reduce my self, to break down my self, so that after doing this I can see my true self. This doesn’t sound right, logically, because what then is the ‘I’? After breaking down the I, what is the I that is left to know the I?

So what am I? Who am I? What is I? Am I? Because no matter how much I deduce my self I never really come down to that I, that conscious me. So this forces anyone to ask; who am I in the first place? Or most importantly; am I? That is, do you even exist in the first place? You have tried to decipher yourself, in fact, you have come to the realisation that it is ridiculous to try to decipher yourself. You can entertain the idea that it is whimsically possible, but the reality of it is stupendously paradoxical. We are not privy to René Descartes proposition in his Discourse on the Method:

Cogito ergo sum — I think, therefore I am.

Descartes, in his second meditation, writes that;
Even then, if he (God) is deceiving me I undoubtedly exist: let him deceive me all he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing while I think I am something. So after thoroughly thinking the matter through I conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, must be true whenever I assert it or think it.

Descartes was bent on proving that although he doubts, he can’t doubt himself, his existence. But let’s take this train of doubt even farther; what is existence? or a more troubling question is, why is existence? Why? This is doubt, by applying the technique of dissociation that I mentioned in my first meditation. I doubt, and it is because I doubt that I am writing this meditation. Now, sometimes I get distracted, and I lose my perspective of doubt. What really happens when I get distracted is that I temporarily doubt my ability to doubt, but soon again I get in phase and the feeling comes back. Before I push to ascertain if I can genuinely doubt my self, the fact that I exist, I first have to doubt existence itself. This is the grandest of doubts, to doubt existence itself in its entirety. A while back, I pushed my doubt even further by plunging headstrong into the concept of nothingness. This is existential doubt. During this period, existence had no meaning; Why? ‘Why’ is a perpetual state of doubt in which the thinker seeks universal answers to his questions, he is confused as to why anything exists at all and how possible it is for nothing to exist. What is nothing? I guess the initial point Descartes was trying to stress is that to even think of nothingness then you have to think from the perspective of something.

The ultimate logic here is that the fact that I can doubt existence itself, creates a premise for me to doubt myself. I think, therefore I am: this statement first preconceives the existence of ‘I’, such that ‘I think’. Consciousness is a language problem indeed. How do I describe consciousness using words? Words are subjective, and to use them to pinpoint the nature of a phenomenon is somewhat futile. I could read a string of words and they could mean something to me, you could read the same string of words and they’d mean something entirely different to you. So, such a means can’t be trusted in exposing consciousness. Language is a byproduct of consciousness, so how can you use the byproduct to accurately explain the phenomenon itself. I have to be conscious at first in order to speak, in order to formulate words, so it is not the words that matter to me, it is the state from which the words are produced. That state called consciousness, that quintessence, that thing in me as me that I’m always trying to define but cannot pinpoint.

So if I cannot perfectly define consciousness, then how do I know that I am conscious? How do I know that I am ‘I’? Words don’t suffice in trapping the essence of consciousness, words are subjective and they continue to beat about the bush. I think, therefore I am: ‘I’ in this statement already presumes too much, it already states that you exist even before ‘think, therefore I am’. How do you know that you think? How do you know that you are you, that there is a you, let alone that you even thinking? I don’t know if I am conscious, it would appear that I am conscious, but not conscious enough to know what existence or reality truly is? Then am I as conscious as I would desirably want to be? What is existence, why are we here, what is here, is there something else other than here? I don’t know! Therefore I am not conscious!

Human existence is what I term a ‘reactionary existence’. We never feel fully in control, it is as though events are happening TO us rather than by us. Someone makes a statement: my head is aching me. In this statement there are a lot of complications. First, this person preconceives a ‘me’ in ‘my’, that is he has a perception of himself already before making this statement. ‘My head’; now what he is doing is that he’s stating a ‘part’ of himself, a part of the whole. He is consciously ‘differentiating’ his head from the rest of his body (this is the epoch of consciousness). ‘My head is aching me’; after separating his head from the whole, now he gives a mutually exclusive consciousness to this head, now the head is acting on him. The head is aching him, as though the head has a mind of its own separate from he himself. Consciousness seems to be happening TO us rather than by us. So, it is increasingly difficult to say that ‘I am conscious’, what I should in fact say is that ‘consciousness is me’. In Descartes First Meditation, he states that:

“I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely dreams that the demon has contrived as traps for my judgment. I shall consider myself as having no hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as having falsely believed that I had all these things.”

This is interesting. Descartes just like myself, doubts parts of himself; his body, senses, et al. What does this mean? In my first meditation I stated that doubt is a technique of ‘dissociation’ whereby the thinker wilfully detaches himself from his immediate reality as a means to find answers to his curiosity. So, when you doubt, you are actually disintegrating your self, your consciousness, at the same time being conscious! What is conscious when all parts of the whole are separated? This creates many logical problems. Somehow, by doubting my physical self, I have reduced my self, but still I have not lost my self, still, my self retains its identity after I have shredded it with doubt. Mathematically, this is incorrect, this is very wrong. Mathematically, consciousness is incorrect, flat out wrong, unacceptable. It is like there is a me in a me in a me ad infinitum. The self is a component of the self which is also a component of the same self ad infinitum. Set theory (mathematics) doesn’t treat such paradoxes of the self kindly. On math.dartmouth.edu, an excerpt from Rudy Rucker’s article titled Infinity and The Mind reads:

“A mind, M, which has M as one of its components. Such an M is already fully self-aware, and M plus “M” is no different from M. In terms of sets, M U {M} = M.

So, in set theory, a self of a self of a self is still the same self. No matter how you disintegrate consciousness, you still result in consciousness. Consciousness is then depicted as an infinite array of consciousness being the same consciousness. How can many things be one thing, right? This is very unlike our real world where 10 oranges remain 10 oranges. The complexity here is ‘infinity’, 10 oranges are finite and can be counted, but infinity is a very controversial reality. So, when the philosopher doubts his hands or legs or other parts of his body, he is differentiating (separating) his self, at the same time being his self. So he now has mutually exclusive selves that are separate from his self. It doesn’t stop there; now these mutually exclusive selves begin to happen TO him, to his self. This is the phenomenon of doubt, thus the phenomenon of consciousness. This is why the human (physical) existence is a ‘reactionary’ existence. I am not conscious, consciousness is me.