Footnote Article: Conscious Awareness

Science can, however imperfectly, measure and map the elements of the physical universe. It can thence determine the laws that govern their behaviours. This inc­ludes the human body, and to a much lesser extent, the human brain. Science can, albeit to an even lesser extent, examine the emotional behaviour of the human mind when it responds impulsively to controlled provocation. But the conscious "I" that can rightly say, "I think, therefore I exist", seems to be beyond the reach of scientific instrumentation and examination. Science simply can't get a handle on it.

But what is it that makes me surmise that I exist? If I empty my mind by mindfully suppressing or instantly dismissing any encroaching thought that may try to enter it, then what is left? Try as I might, I find this very difficult to achieve. It requires, ironically, a lot of effort and concentration. However, when momentarily I am able to achieve such a state of mind, time ceases to flow. No events are taking place. It approximates to a state of 'conscious unconsciousness'. And it feels uncomfortable.

Thus, consciousness can only exist as a dynamic state. The conscious state of mind — being aware — must therefore be predicated upon the flow of time. If time were to stop, consciousness would cease to be. Thus, the driver of consciousness must be the flow of time. The flow of time can only be perceived by [be made evident to] a conscious self by virtue of the events taking place within that self's field of vision.

So a self can only be conscious while it is immersed within, and coupled to, a time-flux that is carrying signals per­taining to events. These signals can be either coming from the outside world via the physical senses or emanating from the memory. They continually converge towards the self. This suggests that the conscious self [the observer, experiencer and sufferer of events] is an individual object located within a restricted vicinity. It therefore seems conclusive to me that, although it may be formed by or out of something universal, consciousness itself is an individual thing. Each person must have a separate individual hyper-physical self within him or her.

Is the real "me" an individual hyper-physical "spirit", looking at the material world through the portal of my physical brain and body? Are my brain and body simply layers of some kind of "communication interface" that give this "spirit" access to humanity's common universe of time and space?

I am left with many fundamental questions that I feel compelled to ask but which science and philosophy cannot answer. For example, why am I here? What's it all about? If my parents had never met, would the conscious entity that is "me" have been born into a body procreated by another couple, or would "I" never have ex­ist­ed? To address these questions, I must start with my most fundamental piece of knowledge. And that is the fact that, whatever this "conscious me" is, it is aware. But of what is it aware? It is the subject that is aware, but what is the object of its awareness?

I am aware firstly of something that is not me. It is beyond me. It is outside of the conscious entity I think of as "me". It is what I think of as the outside world. Sec­ond­ly, I am aware of myself. This is how I deduce that I exist. However, I am aware of myself only indirectly. It is only by being aware of the world outside that I deduce by consequence that there must be something separate experiencing this aware­ness.

This begs the question: what is the dividing boundary between what I perceive to be the outside world and what I perceive to be the perceiver of that outside world? Where does "me" end and the outside world begin? Thinking superficially, I might presume that "me" ends at the surface of my body. So I would see my skin as the dividing surface between "me" and the outside world.

Is My Body "Me"?

Thinking more deeply, however, I notice that my body is something that "I" can look at objectively. I perceive it as something separate from my consciousness. It is also com­pletely dependent for its existence upon the outside world. To function, it needs air, water, food, clothing and shelter, which only Gaia can provide. This leads me to believe that my body must indeed be part of the outside world, an in­separable part of the Earth's biosphere.

Since I perceive my body to be part of the physical outside world, the boundary between what I perceive to be "me" and what I perceive to be the "outside world" must be inside the envelope formed by my outer skin.

If I were to lose my legs or my arms in an accident, they would be gone. But I would still be "me". If I were to lose control of all my limbs and all voluntary muscle move­ment through some kind of motor-neuron disease, I would be tremendously disad­vantaged physically. But I speculate that I would still be just as much "me". I would still be just as much aware, therefore I would still just as much exist.

But what about my brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys and other vital organs? Medi­cal science has managed to perform transplants of all but one of these vital organs. It has also created apparatus that can perform, in part, the functions of all but one. In the future, these will, no doubt, continue to improve and should ultimately al­most equal the performance of the corresponding natural organs.

If I receive, by means of surgical transplant, somebody else's heart, am I still "me"? Or am I partly "me" and partly the person whose heart I received? I feel that I would be still completely "me". I think the same argument would hold for all the other vital organs. Except for my brain.

Am "I" in My Brain?

Suppose I have a terrible brain disease but that the rest of my body is supremely healthy and fit. Suppose somebody else has a body that is degenerating rapidly but whose brain is perfect. We are both going to die in a few weeks unless something is done. It is decided that the good brain of the other person should be transplanted into my cranium. The transplant is performed. The other person's body and my brain are thrown in the trash. My body and the other person's brain now constitute a perfectly functional human being.

But who is it? Is it me? Or is it the other person? Or is it a bit of both of us? Intuition tells me that it is 100% the other person and that I am dead. This suggests that the bounding surface that separates the conscious entity I know as "me" from the "outside world" must be at, or within, the outer surface of my brain.

As I look at my hands typing on the keyboard of my computer, I have the sense that they are some distance away from "me", although I have full control over them. My sense of where I am, relative to my hands, is in my head just behind my eyes. It is also the point from where I hear sounds. Nevertheless, I cannot pin-point "my" position exactly.

I do not think that "I" am located at any precise point within my head. Rather, I sense that the conscious entity that is "me" is somehow distributed throughout my brain. I have the strong feeling that "I" am almost the width of my head and from just below the top of my head to just above the roof of my mouth. The whereabouts of the "conscious me" within my head is therefore somewhat fuzzy.

On the other hand, I also sense that the network of 86,000 million interconnected neurons, arranged in their various topologies, that make up my brain isn't "me" either. It is just a vast biological computing device hosting representative models both of the "outer world" (which includes my body) and my inner thoughts (my personality, my character, my philosophy, my knowledge and my wisdom).

Am "I" My Mind?

Analogies are never perfect but I find it useful to think of my mind as the software of my brain. Within my mind, processes are born, live and die. I am given to understand that these processes are manifested as churning galaxies of activity within my brain. However, instead of each having its own space as the diagram on the right suggests, each process is somehow distributed throughout much of the brain. The more dominant of these proces­ses appear as the involuntary thoughts that flit in and out of my conscious view like leaping mon­keys. I must capture and examine each as it app­ears, otherwise it quickly falls away and is lost.

I refer to this phenomenon as the Buddha Effect, after Buddha's notion of thoughts being like little monkeys that leap randomly into the field of view of the mind's eye and then fall back out of sight into the subcon­scious. Consequently, if it be of interest to me, I must mindfully capture any such fleeting thought before it falls back into the oblivion of my sub­conscious, otherwise I will lose it and probably be unable ever to recall it.

There appears to be a mechanism within the physical brain that somehow filters out all but the most dominant thought of the moment to present to the conscious "me". A sufferer of hyperactive attention-deficit syndrome is very unfortunate. His poor consciousness is battered unceasingly by a cacophony of a myriad simult­an­eous thoughts. His brain simply does not contain the filtering necessary to select just one thought at a time so he can give it his undivided attention.

These processes include neural models, which simulate events in the outside world. I am given to understand that, what I appear to be experiencing of the outside world is really coming from a neural model that is simulating it within my brain. Fur­thermore, the model itself is receiving most of its input from my memory, not from my senses. All that comes from my senses is a relatively small amount of data that supplies the prompts and cues needed to keep my model up to date and synchron­ized with what is taking place outside.

My mind also contains a class of built-in programs that monitor the outputs from such models and construct "appropriate" responses automatically. These built-in programs are collectively referred to as my instinct.

At times, I (the conscious "me") can "watch" my mind reacting automatically to an ext­ernal provocation. It acts out endless scen­arios that test the world's possible reactions to my reac­tions in vicious exchanges. Yet, as a conscious observer of such scenarios, I remain quite de­tached from my mind, my brain, my body and the world outside.

Sometimes, I see my mind being driven by my natural basic instinct. It reacts with blind emotion to an external provocation and drives my brain and body to expedite its desired physical response. On other occa­sions, I see my mind responding under the control of an acquired mental skill or physical training. It automatically avoids a dangerous encounter in fast traffic or sometimes materializes a finished Java method as if without conscious thought. It can automatically reason out calculated responses, taking into account both tactic­al and strategic considerations.

Yet "I" — the conscious observer — do not actively participate.

But I could participate if I wished. I have the capability of exercising conscious voli­tion to halt the automatic reactions unleashed by my mind, and of taking over de­liberate control of the situation. I could say "No, I am not going to react in this emotionally-determined way. I shall respond in the way I consciously choose ac­cording to the advice of my conscience with regard to the situation." I am thus forced to conclude that "I" am not my mind. I am something separate.

Am "I" Beyond My Mind?

I think, therefore, that this enigmatic conscious entity called "me" must be non-physical, even though it int­erfaces, in a distributed way, with my physical brain and my mind (which I think of as the software data, methods and processes taking place within my brain). Enigmatic is the right description. For, ironically, I find that I can know far less about "me" than I can know about the outer world into which I look. My conscious "self" is not something I can examine in the same way that I can examine my mind, my brain, my body, the world outside my body and indeed the vast universe beyond. This leads me to conclude that my conscious self must be an intangible entity that exists in some kind of hyper-reality that is beyond what I perceive to be physical. It must therefore be composed of some kind of hyper-material that is not what I would per­ceive to be physical.

My term hyper-reality here does not refer to a realm that is separate from the physical universe. It refers to the part of the one and only universe that is, and will forever be, fundamentally beyond the capability of the human mind and senses to examine. It must also be forever beyond the reach of any instrumentation that could be invented to extend the range, sensitivity and diversity of the human sen­ses. I see the universe as a single continuum of which physical reality is a sub-realm. Hyper-reality thus refers to that part of all reality that human senses can never perceive.

Physical Dependence

Notwithstanding, my consciousness needs my physical brain as an interface be­t­ween its realm of existence and what I perceive to be the physical realm. It is only through this that my consciousness is able to exert itself within the physical realm that accommodates my mind, my brain, my body, the world outside my body and the universe beyond. Without this physical interface, I have a strong feeling that my consciousness would be completely isolated. Evidence for this idea comes from considering sleep.

What I perceive to be "me" goes to sleep and wakes up again always in the same physical body. This lends weight to the idea that what I per­ceive as "me" is exclusively connect­ed to my physical brain, if not com­pletely embedded within it. And it is my phys­ical brain that exclusively de­ter­mines when I am or am not con­scious. It wakes "me" up and puts "me" to sleep again. The "wake-up" call comes from the real world out­side, via my physical body. My bodily senses pass the signal to my brain and my brain wakes "me" up. And I am always there apparently awaiting such a wake-up call.

Sometimes, this wake-up call comes prematurely or spuriously. It could be triggered by a relatively weak sound, flash or smell emanating from the real world. This is strong enough to reconnect the conscious observer but not strong enough to wake the brain physically. In this case, it awakes "me" while my brain is still reorganizing its memories. "I" thus become "conscious" within a dream.

Dreams are strange things. I can remember some clearly. Others I instantly forget upon waking. In a dream, I am not necessarily bound by the laws of physics. I can fly. I can shrink to explore an atom and survive a journey into a black hole. I find myself familiar with people I don't know. Dreams do not bear much relation to the real waking world. They seem to be the collateral effect, upon the consciousness, of the brain sorting out and reorganizing recent waking experiences and relating them with past memories.

Dreams seem to be, in some way, analogous to the defragmenting of a computer's hard drive. The process goes on unseen by the user. However, if the user were to display on his screen the blocks of data being moved around the disk, all kinds of disconnected bits of information would flash by. What he saw would not make any cogent sense. So, when my brain is reorganizing its connections during the night, the "conscious observer" may "return" prematurely from wherever he "goes", only to catch a glimpse of this reorganizing process. Ideally, the "conscious observer" should not be disturbed until the brain awakes and connects again, by way of the body, to the real outside world. I cannot conceive that dreams could be harbingic messages from beyond tangible reality.

So where am "I" when I am asleep? What happens to "conscious me" when my brain is in "sleep" mode? Perhaps my con­scious­ness is just one of many possible modes in which the complex dynamical process, run­ning within the neural net­works of my brain, can operate. When "I" awake, perhaps it is merely this same complex dynamical pro­cess flipping onto a different wing of its strange attractor (awake mode). When "I" fall asleep again, the process simply flips back to follow its dormant wing (sleep mode). If so, the "me", that I perceive my­self to be, must be no more than a part of the complex dynamical process taking place within my brain.

I am given to understand that a human being spends a third of its life asleep. This means that the conscious "me" is only two-thirds the age of my physical body. At the age of 66, therefore, I have only been conscious for 44 years. So, what is sleep? Is it merely the absence of input for the "conscious entity"? Or has the "conscious entity" gone somewhere else within the realm of hyper-reality from where it can reconnect to the physical brain when it starts to dream or wake? Or does the "conscious entity" cease to exist during sleep?

It seems that "I" am alive during each day, die each night, and am resurrected each morning to carry on from where "I" left off when "I" died the previous night. Thus, my consciousness is like a child's TV console game, whose state can be saved on a memory cartridge while the console is switched off. Its player can thus resume, at a later time, at the stage in the game that existed before the console was switched off. It seems that the real "me" is something that exists while it has communication with the outside physical universe, but ceases to exist when the communication link to the outside world is switched off by the physical brain when it gets tired and goes to sleep.

While "I" sleep, my brain and my body continue their journeys through time. My brain continues working. My breathing and digestion processes continue. But "I" do not. For my conscious self, the long night passes as if in an instant. On occasions when I have been forced to stay awake all night, such as when each of my children was new-born or when I was on military piquet duty, I experienced just how long a night really is. Yet the time I spend asleep on a normal night seems to pass in an instant. My brain is still operating, but "I" am not there. So is unconsciousness any different whether my physical brain is asleep, or dead?

While my body and brain sleep, time for "me" does not exist. "I" do not exist. It is as if "I" were dead. When "I" awake, my body has, albeit imperceptibly, aged a little. But "I" have not. It is as if my conscious self dies each night and is re­surrected back to life the next morning. This suggests that after death must be no different from being asleep, which, in turn, must be no different from not having been born yet.

The enigmatic entity I call "me" thus appears to depend entirely on my physical brain for its conscious existence. This suggests to me that my consciousness is nothing more than a part of the complex dynamical process taking place within my brain. If so, death must be the complete dissolution of being with no prospect of future existence. Life must be entirely transitory, marked only by its 5 phases of birth, growth, maturity, senility and death.

The above Materialist View allows only one sense in which my existence can continue after my death. I continue only as the knowledge and teaching I have imparted to my children and others, plus the physical and intellectual works I leave behind when I die. Almost all aspects of life, the universe and society can be ex­plained within the bounds of this paradigm.

The Enigma of Tiredness

There is, however, a strange twist to the notion that the consciousness is com­plete­ly dependent on the physical brain for its existence. I frequently have a burning idea I am desperate to commit to writing. Unfortunately, this often occurs when my mind is simply too tired to function. So I cannot write. I have no option but to rest or sleep. This, at times, causes me great frustration.

I surmise that if my consciousness were solely a function of my brain, I could not suffer this frustration. My consciousness too would be tired along with my mind. But the conscious "me" is raring to go. It is my mind that simply won't take it. So they must be separate entities. It seems, therefore, that my mind (the software that is running within the hardware of my brain) is simply a tool that my conscious self needs to use in order to gain access to the physical universe. If my brain (the computer) gets tired, the software (my mind) can't operate efficiently. Con­se­qu­ently, the conscious entity that is the real "me" starts to lose its connection to the physical world. When sleep arrives, the connection breaks completely.

After a long hard day, I become tired. I go to bed. I fall asleep. I am unconscious. The flow of sensory inputs stops. I have no sense of the passing of time. I have no sense of anything. It is as if I don't exist. It is as if I am dead. I wake up in the morning light. I become aware again. But the events of the night moved on without me. I know inductively that the long hours of the night took place and that time has passed during which I was not conscious of its passing. I know that my conscious­ness did not exist during the night. But did my self still exist? If it did, was it dead or was it still functioning but in some kind of stand-by mode?

When I am not conscious, I am not aware. Therefore I am not aware of whether I exist or not. So I cannot know. However, because it seems to connect immediately to the time-flux of events when the morning light wakes me up, I would surmise that it wasn't dead. If my conscious state is so instantly revivable, the event has much more the characteristic of a change-of-state or switching of operational mode rather than of a resurrection or a rebirth.

This leads me to suppose that perhaps our consciousnesses are all self-existent entities. But, because of the very nature of things, their existences are completely isolated from each other. The only way they can become aware of each other is through the physical universe. Their access portals to the physical universe are our physical minds running within our physical brains operating our physical bodies. Thus the universe is simply a medium that facilitates communication between otherwise isolated conscious entities.

This enigma of tiredness gives impetus to my inner compulsion to ask the following searching questions. After the death of my physical brain, will my consciousness cease to exist, or will it merely be asleep? Could it be awakened into a new physical brain at a later time?

Life After Death?

What I call the Resurrectionist View, which some people conclude from the Bib­lical texts, goes as follows.

At the end of this life, my body dies and decays. My consciousness ceases completely. My personal character and memory are preserved in an inactive state. An indefinite period of time passes. My body is resur­rected, that is, a defect-free exact replica is made. My original character and memory are 'downloaded' into my new brain. My mind reactivates. "I" reawaken, as if from a night's sleep, into a new and better world of the distant future. I live a new life for 100 years. At the end of this new life, I am either deleted completely, or my character and memories are copied across to an indestructible body made of some hyper-physical material (spirit) within which I continue my conscious existence forever.

This idea necessitates that all my personal character and memories be indelibly preserved on some kind of higher-reality medium capable of storing information. I imagine this medium as the "spiritual" equivalent of a diskette, tape, CD, hard drive or flash memory. It is outside or beyond what I per­ceive as physical reality, although it is still part of the cont­inuum of all reality. The information imprinted on it is what constitutes the real "me". The information recorded within this medium is eternal and indestructible. It cannot fail, fade or deteriorate.

The consequence of this is that, if and when my physical body wears out and dies or is otherwise destroyed or rendered totally dysfunctional, the hyper-medium re­cording is still there. The real "me" is not conscious just as when I slept each night during my physical lifetime. Notwithstanding, all the information necessary to re­activate the "conscious me" through another body is still there perfectly and in­destructibly preserved as a static recording.

I feel certain that all my memories and personal character are contained within the physical neural networks of my brain while I am alive. But is there a medium, be­yond my brain but still within the bounds of known reality, that could bear a de­tailed recording of my entire life, memories and personal character? One idea is as follows.

1) Space-Time Wave Memory

For this idea, I need to make 2 initial assumptions.

Firstly, the universe – by definition – is connected space. Con­sequently, the effect of any event occurring at any point in space and time must eventually be felt in some way at every other such point in the universe. To achieve this, every event, no matter how microscopic, must emit a wave of some kind that travels outwards from the event at or less than the speed of light. In fact, the wave is the event. Once the wave has left, nothing of the event remains at its point of origin.

Secondly, each indivisible element of thought occurring within my brain must be considered to be such an event. The information-content of each indivisible ele­ment of my thoughts, as they occur within my brain, will then travel outwards from me at the speed of light along my future event-horizon.

Thus, each thought that I have comprises a myriad fundamental events, each of which can be imagined as a change-of-state in some kind of finite-state machine within my brain. Perhaps a neuron is such a machine, whose various finite states are themselves complex-dynamical processes. Or perhaps these little machines are microtubules that make up the connecting bridges between neighbouring neurons. Whichever the case, when such a machine changes state, it emits a wave. Whether this wave be electromagnetic or some other kind of wave I do not know. Never­theless, modulated upon this wave is the essence of the thought that triggered the change of state in the elemental finite-state machine that generated it.

The information-content of my thought is thus now in the wave travelling outwards from my head in an ever-expanding sphere at the speed of light. After 3 nano­seconds, the wave has reached the person sitting next to me. After 28 milliseconds, it is passing through Europe. After 8 minutes, it will have reached the sun. In 2½ million years, it will pass through the Galaxy of Andromeda. In about 13 billion years, it will have reached where the edge of the known universe was when it started its journey.

While I'm alive, my future event-horizon is a sphere expanding at the speed of light. My consci­ousness is a fuzzy singularity at its very centre. When I die, my consciousness ceases. My future event-horizon then becomes a spherical shell. If, 1000 years hence, technology emerges that can capture this kind of inform­ation, it would be unable to capture mine. The waves produced by events in my brain would be contained in a spher­ical shell 1000 light years radius and 90 light years thick (assuming I live for 90 years). It would be as if all the information about me were stored in an open ended version of the delay-line memories used in early computers.

It is an irony of the structure of space-time that wave-borne information generated during my life-time is fundamentally inaccessible to people in my future here on Planet Earth. Similarly, wave-borne information generated by the brains of people in the past is fundamentally inaccessible in the here and now. Hence, it is impos­sible for me or anybody else to be resurrected in this way at some future time on Planet Earth.

Nevertheless, in 2½ million years from now, if there should then exist a sentient being on a planet somewhere within the Andro­meda Galaxy, he would be able to capture the in­formation-content of these waves as they arrive along his past event-horizon. This cap­tured information would present to him the unfolding history of my thought processes from birth to death. The entirety, of what and who I was, would thus be re­vealed. If his technology were sufficient, perhaps this alien being could reconstruct my body, com­plete with a new brain con­taining my per­sonality, character and memories, and breathe again into me the breath of life. Far-fetched? Yes, but nonetheless conceivable within the bounds of the laws of physics.

If the necessary technology existed now, the information waves emanating from my brain could be captured and stored locally. This information would then be available for resurrecting me at a later time. But the technology does not exist now. Nor is it likely to do so for an extremely long time, if ever. Consequently, nobody alive today or at any time in the past can ever be resurrected by this method.

Nevertheless, somewhere within the physical universe, all the information per­tain­ing to my life, memories, personality and character will forever exist within this ex­panding shell of waves. Unfortunately, this scenario has a sting in its tail. The in­formation will not last absolutely forever. It will become gradually eroded or de­graded by a phenomenon known as dispersion.

A familiar example of the degradation of wave-borne information by dispersion is the speaking-tube used many decades ago on ships to allow people on the bridge to communicate with people in the engine room. Over the distances involved on a ship, the voice of the speaker remains intelligible. However, were the speaking-tube to be lengthened to span the breadth of a city, the speaker's voice would be no­thing but an unintelligible echo to anyone listening at the other end.

Interstellar space is not completely empty. It is not a perfect vacuum. It contains atoms and dust particles, stars and planets. These act like the walls of the speaking-tube. Through reflection and gravitation, they will slowly but surely distort the waves that carry the recording of my lifetime's thoughts. Eventually, these waves will lose more and more of their fidelity and crispness until the fine details of my original thoughts are no longer recoverable from them. Thus, sadly, like an old soldier, I will eventually just fade away.

My only possible last saving grace would be if, 2½ million years hence, inhabitants of the Andromeda galaxy were to capture my event-waves, before dispersion had time to make them unintelligible. They could then reconstruct me from the inform­ation within them. Alternatively, they could simply resharpen the partially-dispersed waves and re­transmit them in pristine form so that an even more distant civilization could capture them later and reconstruct me from them.

But would what the Andromedan engineer reconstructed really be "me"? Could it possibly be "me"? Let us assume that he is able to use the ultimate technology that is possible within the bounds of the laws of physics. Could he then reconstruct a body containing a brain? It need not necessarily be made of hydrocarbon-based "flesh and blood". It could be made of whatever materials are most convenient to him, provided the resulting body and brain are functionally equivalent to the body and brain I currently inhabit. Could he then, without having to violate the laws of physics, upload into that brain my memories, personality and character that he captured from the passing waves? Could he then kick-start the whole configuration into life so that it became a living being?

Let us suppose he could do all this. Let us suppose he has done it. Question: would that reconstructed being contain the conscious entity that I now perceive myself to be? Or would it merely be a zombie with my character, personality and memories but with no conscious "me" inside? I cannot answer this question. Nevertheless, from it I can make an interesting deduction.

Suppose it really is "me"! 2½ million years hence, I wake up as if from a night's sleep, on a planet orbiting a star in the Andromeda Galaxy. This being the case, the conscious entity that I per­ceive myself to be must be entirely physical. It must be part of the material universe. It was borne intact for 2½ million years within the complex train of waves that radiated from my brain during my lifetime here on Earth.

Suppose on the other hand, the only thing the Andromedan engineer can construct, within the bounds of the laws of physics, is a zombie that appears to have my personality, character and memories. However complex and sophisticated it may be technologically, it is merely a machine. The conscious entity that I perceive myself to be is not inside it looking out into this Andromedan world. This being the case, the conscious entity that I perceive myself to be must necessarily be some­thing whose existence and being is outside the domain of what we perceive of as material reality. The physical train of waves could not contain it. They could not, therefore, convey it to Andromeda. It was left behind in another dimension.

My own intuition is that all the Andromedan engineer could reconstruct from the information borne in the spherical shell of waves arriving at his planet would be a zombie. It would appear to exhibit my personality and character. It would recall my memories. Perhaps it could even pass the Turing Test to convince people that it really was me. But intuitively, I don't think that "I" would be looking out through its eyes. My intuition is, therefore, that the self-conscious entity that I perceive myself to be, although dependent upon my physical brain in order to think and communi­cate, has its existence and being beyond those dimensions of the universe that can be humanly perceived.

If the conscious "me" does indeed have its being in hidden dimensions, this raises another question. Do things, including conscious entities, that are formed from the fabric of this higher reality have permanence of form? In other words, are they eternal? Or, once the physical brain dies, does the conscious entity evaporate and thereby cease to exist? If conscious entities are permanent and eternal, then in principle, mine could be reconnected via its fio de prata to the zombie built by the Andromedan engineer. The zombie would then become "me". I would have a new span of life.

If, on the other hand, the conscious entity did evaporate, then its evaporation is an event. It is a complex event, but nonetheless an event. Consequently, it will radiate and its essence will be propagated as waves within the fabric of the hyper-reality it inhabits. Then perhaps an Andromedan angel could capture this hyper-real radi­ation and reassemble my soul. He could then install it within the zombie that the Andromedan engineer had built. So, this way too, the zombie would become "me". I would live again.

There is, however, an unresolvable piece of collateral awkwardness in this idea. If the whole, of who and what I am, be contained in an ever-expanding spherical wave, then, with appropriate physical technology, many alien engineers in many far-flung parts of the universe could reconstruct me. Which one of the many resulting "zombies" would the real "me" inhabit? Would it be all of them? If so, then "I", as a conscious being, would become many. But these all must, of necessity, be separate conscious entities. All but one could not therefore possibly be "me".

I conclude, therefore, that the conscious entity, that is "me", must be indivisible, and that consequently, all self-aware consciousnesses must be indivisible entities. They must literally be: individuals. A conscious entity cannot be divided, nor in­deed, even replicated. The Greek word "atomos", from which the word "atom" is derived, means "indivisible". Each individual is thus an atom of consciousness.

The Anatomy of "Me"

Although it be indivisible, I perceive my conscious self to have internal structure. This is evinced by my ability to reason out deductions from my observations and experiences of the outside world. This process of rea­son­ing something out involves argument and counter argument. This re­quires the construction of two differing points of view, from which my ob­servations and experiences of the outside world must be considered. To facilitate this, my consciousness must be able to accom­modate at least two persons: one to propose the argument and another to counter it. The fact, that the points of view held respectively by these two virtual per­sons are different, creates between them what may be described as a sem­antic force-field.

Suppose "I" — the real "me" — am in favour of the argument. "I" need the second person — another "me" — as an antagonist against which to exercise the real "me's" argument. "I" then need a third "me" to arbitrate the argument, because "I" have a genuine desire to prove or disprove "my" argument fairly one way or the other. Thinking atomically, I imagine these three virtual "me's" as three quarks of consciousness. During the reasoning process, the real "me" thus flits, like a gluon, from one quark to the next in a cyclic manner. In other words "I" mentally place myself, in turn, into the shoes (so to speak) of each of these 3 people.

Notwithstanding, these three people in my head are not multiple "me's". There is only ever one "me". During the process of argument, the one and only "me" simply transfers its source of experience from my normal mental input to the other characters that I have deliberately and consci­ously constructed within my mind. I thus reject any notion that the other two characters in my play be components of a multiple self or separate ripples upon the surface of a universal pool of conscious­ness.

I could take the cyclic transfer of my conscious self between different characters in my mind to various levels of extremism as follows. 1) I could take on a character role, as does an actor, to play the part of the fictitious character I have built. 2) I could become so fanatical in this en­deavour that I find myself believing that I am that character. This is called full character immersion. 3) That character could become so dominant that I come to see it as a real external entity that has taken over my be­ing. I could even become cyclically "possessed" by a variety of "entities" or characters that I have constructed from both real and false memories.

My own intuition, from this space-time wave memory idea, is that a conscious entity maintains its form and functionality after the physical brain dies. That the consciousness continues to function after the death of the brain is supported by medical research into near-death experiences, which has demonstrated that con­sciousness can continue in a cadaver [brain-dead body] for a significant time.

However, I do not think that the conscious entity [the "me"] emits (and thereby becomes) an expanding spherical wave. But, being deprived of a brain and body, through which to experience and communicate with the physical universe, it remains [for the most part] in a state of sleep until somebody reconnects it to a means of accessing the connected universe and hence, other consciousnesses.

Notwithstanding all this, if there is to be life after death, then human memory and personal character must be preserved somehow. Indeed, there are other ideas about life after death for which the "space-time wave memory" simply can't work.

2) Hyper-physical Recording Medium

One of these ideas is what I call the Generic Christian View. The common belief, as I understand it to be, goes as follows. At the end of this life, my body dies and decays. My soul (the conscious "me") comes out of my dead brain. It is then trans­ported immediately to one of two hyper-physical realms, depending on whether my soul be lost or saved. If it be lost, it goes to a realm of eternal torment called Hell. If it be saved, it goes to a realm of eternal joy called Heaven.

In this view, the memories and react­ions that make up my personal char­acter are contained within my brain. Herein they develop throughout my physical life. My consciousness, on the other hand, is not physical. Although co-located with my brain, it exists with­in a hyper-physical realm, within which it is completely isolated. It has access to the rest of the universe only via my physical brain.

Consequently, "I" am aware only of those aspects of universal reality that can be perceived through my human senses. At death, my brain ceases to function but my consciousness continues. It is instantly transferred, along with all my memories and personal character, into some kind of hyper-physical (or spiritual) body. Perhaps the transferring process takes place continuously throughout physical life rather than instantly at death. In this view, the hyper-physical part of my being, namely my consciousness, memories, personality and character, are collectively referred to as my soul.

3) Soul Migration

Another view involving hyper-physical consciousness is what I call the Migrationist View. This goes as follows. At the end of my life, my body dies and decays. My soul (the conscious "me") is preserved in an inactive state within a hyper-physical re­cording medium. It then waits in this non-active state until an appropriate new host becomes available. My soul then migrates to become the consciousness of the new host — a new-born human, or possibly an animal. That new person or animal then continues as "me". This process repeats indefinitely.

This belief is said to be evinced by the fact that some people can remember past lives. I can remember nothing about any previous conscious existence I may or may not have had. Perhaps this is because I have not yet had a past life. This must be my first. From what I can gather, accounts of memories of past lives in others are, to say the least, very rare. And they all seem to be exceedingly nebulous and frag­mentary.

Until recently, the human population of this planet was increasing geometrically. Over the past century or so, population growth has been literally explosive. Only a few generations ago, therefore, comparatively few hu­man beings inhabited this planet. Consequently, relat­ively few of the people alive today could possibly have had a past life. There were simply not enough people around in previous generations for everybody alive to­day to have had a past life. Past lives, therefore, could only be had by a select few. Why should this few be thus privileged? If previous lives are so rare, then, in all probability, so are future lives.

Of course, everybody alive today could have had a past life, provided those past lives were lived over a large enough span of the past. Suppose that we divide the black area under the above graph into two equal areas. The people who lived in the long period represented by the left-most horizontal area are reincarnated during the much shorter period represented by the equal right-most vertical area. In other words, everybody who lived from 2000 BC to about 1600 AD are reincarnated during the 20th Century. That would work, but it would mean that most people would have had to wait an awfully long time for their second innings.

Yet another view is what I call the Transitional View. This goes as follows. At the end of my life, my body dies and decays. My soul (the conscious "me") comes out of my dead brain. It then takes on a more advanced state of being and "I" continue life on a higher plane (whatever that may mean). And there are yet other views.

4) Conservation Hypothesis

As a person ages, he becomes ever less mindful of the external world. Perhaps this is because he has already internalised most of what is relevant to him in the dev­el­op­ment of his inner self. The dimming senses of the ageing suggest that it is what is being built inside that is important and that what is outside is merely a catalyst to aid this internal development. Is all this development simply supposed to end with­out purpose at death? Perhaps. But we don't know.

The scientific observation and analysis of the physical universe strongly imply that it is a conservative entity. In other words, the universe — even in part — can never be annihilated: only changed. This notion is embedded in the foundational laws of conservation such as the Conservation of Energy and the Conservation of Mom­entum. Of course, a star can explode. It is thus destroyed. But it isn't annihilated. It simply transforms into radiant and kinetic energy plus dust and fragments.

Consciousness is real. It is consequently an element of the universe. Is it possible that, unlike the other metrics of the universe such as Energy and Momentum, con­sciousness uniquely can be annihilated by death? This question is particularly per­tinent in the light of the fact that a human life seems to be purposed to const­ructing the experiences, memories, personality and character of a conscious entity. This makes death somewhat of an incongruous discontinuity.

The flaw in this comparison is that physical metrics, like Energy and Momentum, have universal continuity, whereas consciousness is an atomised concept: it com­prises individual sentient entities. The concept of a universal continuum of con­sciousness is interesting but has little in the way of observational substance. Not­withstanding, consciousness may be conserved, even though it comprise separate individuals. It is just that each individual consciousness, when its host brain dies, must undergo some kind of change: it must become transformed.

5) Astral Body Hypothesis

From my extensive observations and thought experiments concerning what I see as catastrophic flaws in the Theory of Evolution, I cannot find any way to circumvent the unavoidable systemic necessity for an active universal intelligence, in order to bring life into being and to initiate its processes. Notwithstanding, this universal int­elligence does not seem to me to be or to have a personality. It does not appear to have the attributes of a 'person' or of a plurality of 'persons'. So the best notion that I can come up with at the moment is that it must be some kind of impersonal yet all-pervading field that exhibits the attribute of creative intelligence, which did such things as programming and scripting the processes of life.

Furthermore, this impersonal yet all-pervading field of creative intelligence may be us. At lease, it may be what each individual "me" is made of and/or powered by. But it can fulfil this function only while somehow coupled with a live physical brain with­in a live physical body. In this situation, a cusp, formed within this universal field, can act and interact through what we perceive as the physical universe. It thereby forms many instances of individual "me" that are able to communicate with each other and thereby each is able to develop as a 'person' and build relationships.

This cusp, however, is not formless. It has the form of a 3-dimensional map of the human body, which orchestrates the assembly of 36 trillion cells of 216 types to form a human body. In this sense, it may be regarded as what some term an astral body. Without such a global map, there is no systemic way for a fractally constr­ucted [cell-by-cell] biological entity to be formed into the functioning machine, at the macroscopic scale, we know as a living physical human body.

Part of this astral body is the [astral] brain. The physical brain seems to arrive ready pre-programmed with such things as basic motor control and the functionality for reasoning and learning language. Since human DNA has an information capacity of only 750 MB [megabytes] to purportedly direct the construction of the entire human body, it seems unlikely that this cerebral pre-programming could be contained in the DNA. Besides, DNA or any other programming embedded within the generic cell can only operate at the microscopic [or cellular] level. But neural pre-programming of the brain is at the macroscopic [or whole-body] scale. Consequently, the only place this pre-programming could come from is the 'astral body map' of the brain — neuron-by-neuron, link-by-link.

My hypothesis is that perhaps, throughout physical life, a human being's physical brain drives its astral image. In other words, changes in neural connections within the physical brain are actively mirrored in its astral model. As memories are formed and personality built, these are backed up in the astral model of the brain. It is somewhat analogous to my weekly run of the Unix rsync utility, which backs up my work onto my 'cloud' data storage.

An article I read in The Guardian appears to me to lend substance to this hypothesis. It relates how, in the rare cases when a dying patient's heart and brain happen to be both being monitored for electrical activity, the brain is seen to undergo several bursts of intense activity many minutes after the heart has stopped.

In one such case, after life-support had been switched off, the scope traces showed wave synchronisation between different parts of the brain, in 3 bursts of 4 to 5 min­utes each with intervening lulls of about 20 seconds or so. These indicated intense inter-communication between areas of the brain responsible for conscious attention and memory formation, among others.

Why memory formation during the dying process? There is no point that I can see for laying down new memories if you're unconscious and will be stone dead in a few minutes. Why this seemingly well coordinated intense 3-stage activity? It make no sense unless the brain is doing a final update to its astral model and then conduct­ing a graceful final log-out. I think that the consistency of accounts given by people, resuscitated after clinical death, regarding out-of-body experiences, visions of light, feelings of tranquillity, and their entire life flashing before them would suggest a final rapid 'upload' of a conclusion or life-summary, then final sign-off.

But this hypothesis too still leaves awkward questions. What happens to people who get shot through the head? Their astral brains would lack a final life summary and ordered log-out. Deprived of real-world inputs, is the brain simply just desperately trying to reconnect with it any which way? And what about people with Alzheimer's who live many years unable to lay down new memories? The answers are funda­mentally elusive.

The Λόγος

The ancient Greek philosophers rightly perceived that, in order to explain the whole of reality, it was necessary to venture beyond physics. Within the material universe operating exclusively according to the Laws of Physics, life — certainly sentient life — fundamentally cannot happen. For this reason, those ancient Greek philosophers included, within their model of reality, an additional universal essence they called the λόγος [logos], which can be translated as 'word', 'discourse' or 'reason'.

The λόγος would thus appear to be a kind of all-pervading "force field" upon which is modulated the information needed to:

1. Program the 'operating system' and sub-system functions of the living cell, and initialise its generic DNA sequence. This need only be done once, when the life process [Gaia] is first brought into existence and activated.

2. Construct and sustain the 3-dimensional structural map of each life-form's functional sub-systems, such that it grows synchronously with the life-form. This is so that each generic [stem] cell can 'know' into which of the 216 functional cell-types it must switch, according to its position within the body.

3. Pre-install basic instinct in the brain of each animal, including human, for optimised survival within the Gaian biosphere. This must be done at the macroscopic [or whole body] level: it fundamentally cannot be done at the microscopic [or intra-cellular] level.

4. Pre-install in humans the instruments of perception and reason; namely, the Laws of Thought. These empower the Conscious Self to mindfully acquire a natural language [such as English or Portuguese] and contrived languages [such as Logic, Mathematics and 'C'].

5. Pre-install, in humans, an innate Moral Conscience, which equips each Con­scious Self with universal terms of reference [a Social Protocol] whereby it is able to mindfully judge whether any action of one human being towards another be fundamentally right or wrong.

6. Construct and sustain the Conscious Self, with a Mind's Eye that can enable it to view thoughts taking place within the brain's 86-billion neuron network. Some of the possible means whereby the Mind's Eye could connect with the physical brain are discussed later.

Items 3, 4 and 5 above could be part and parcel with Item 2. Basic Instinct, Laws of Thought and Moral Conscience, as macroscopic [whole body scale] phenomena, fundamentally cannot be borne within a microscopic entity, namely a biological cell. So the specific brain pre-programming that carries the Instinct, Laws of Thought and Moral Conscience could be part of the hyper-physical 3-dimensional structural map of the whole body, which I have somewhat whimsically referred to elsewhere as the Astral Body.

Continuing, it is abundantly self-evident that these six vital requirements cannot be met by physical metrics acting solely under the Laws of Physics.

The λόγος cannot be simply a static essence or force-field. It cannot just contain all this information: it has to convey it to each biological body or conscious mind. For this reason, it must be in continual motion. Specifically, it must move continually towards each individual life-form to which it is conveying its cont­ent. The only way I can visualise this as happening is for this essence to be in a con­tinual state of convergent flow towards each individual life-form.

In my article on Time and Space, I speak of a universal essence called time-flux. It is a velocity fluid that flows convergently, at the speed of light, into a sink-point. There it stops and so ceases to exist. There's an agglomeration of sink-points at the centre of every atom. The components of an atom are back-wash waves from time-flux entering the sink-points. I think the essence of the λόγος has the same nature and behaviour as the time-flux and may even be one and the same thing.

I have postulated that, what the Greek philosophers called the λόγος, be a funda­mental universal essence that conveys, convergently to each life-form, the active intelligence required to fulfil the above six requirements. But from where does this active intelligence, which must somehow have been deliberately modulated upon this in-flowing essence, come from? To answer this we must ask whether the λόγος be a universal [cosmic] essence or whether is be merely a local one, being present, and having jurisdiction, solely within Gaia [the Earth's biosphere].

Of course, the time-flux in my essay on Time and Space necessarily has jurisdiction throughout the cosmos. It thus seems most plausible to me that the λόγος also has jurisdiction throughout the cosmos, even though there be no tangible evidence that sentient life exists beyond Gaia. Thus, the origin of the modulations of active intelli­gence upon the λόγος could be anywhere or everywhere in the cosmos. But there exists no available means whereby we could become able to know which.

The Conscious Self

The focus of this essay is the Conscious Self: the entity within us that is aware. This is at the terminal end of the λόγος flow, namely, in the vicinity of the sink-points where the flow of the λόγος velocity fluid ceases.

I speculate that the bodily mani­festation of the Conscious Self be a resonant back-wash of standing waves created by the converging λόγος velocity fluid as it enters [or rather, ceases to flow at] its localised set of sink-points, which themselves cor­respond to structures within the physical brain. As such, the Conscious Self will be capable of holding and processing information within its complex-dynamical states.

This is loosely analogous to the way data was held dynamically as circul­ating electrical pulses in the delay-line memory of some early computers.

So long as this wave structure of the Conscious Self was sustained by the inflow of the λόγος velocity fluid, this information [memories] would be sustained. If the sink-points and the flow itself of the λόγος velocity fluid are self-sustaining after the death of the physical brain, then the essence of the Conscious Self is preserved.

This leads me to suppose that, once it has been formed within the physical brain, the structure and function of the hyper-physical self is self-sustaining: it continues to exist in its own right. Its structure and function are latched in a way that is similar to how the structure and function of an atom are latched when it is formed within its mother star. It remains intact even after its mother star has ceased to exist.

I therefore opt to assert that the human self has a continuity of existence, that can be flipped, by some external provocateur, between a conscious [awake] and an unconscious [asleep] state of being. The self must therefore exist continually — whether conscious or not. It seems to behave like a bistable [two-state] machine.

To be able to consciously view thoughts circulating within the physical brain, there must exist some kind of data-transfer mechanism connecting the Conscious Self [a hyper-physical velocity-fluid standing-wave structure] with the physical brain. It is this connection that would en­able Buddha to see his little monkeys [his thoughts] leaping into the field of view of his mind's eye and then fall back out of view again. Buddha's mind's eye — his small field of conscious vision — is his somewhat narrow viewport into his subconscious, which is able to randomly scan and select activity around the brain, thereby enabling him to consciously visualise random thoughts.

This conjures up for me a vision of the mind's eye meandering around in the brain encountering different thoughts arbitrarily. It suggests that the Conscious Self be a hyper-physical entity that is about the size of the whole brain, or at least, the size of the part that deals with conscious thoughts. But there is an alter­native vision.

Perhaps an arbitrary thought that strays into the field of view of the Mind's Eye exist as a distributed dynamic process that's in a continual state of travel around the vast neural networks of the brain. So, different thoughts are separate such processes, each travelling around the brain's networks as if on its own private virtual circuit.

It's rather like lots of independent data exchanges taking place between computers connected to a Local Area Network. Perhaps the Mind's Eye can select and view, at any time, any one of these individual data exchanges [thoughts] passing through its virtual circuit. In other words, the Mind's Eye channel-hops between them the way a Citizens Band radio scanner hops through the Citizens' Band's radio channels, list­ening in on each one in turn to whatever may be being transmitted at the time. If the Conscious Self mindfully grabs the thought with which it is presented, the scan­ning stops and the Mind's Eye focuses on the particular thought on that channel.

My personal impression of my own Mind's Eye is that it is similar in nature to my physical eyes. It has a reasonably wide general view that is some­what fuzzy, with a small central axial region of sharp focus.

Consequently, all the Mind's Eye has to do is somehow clamp on to the Local Area Network and scan the channels through which Buddha's little monkeys [thoughts] are swinging along. This allows the hyper-physical Conscious Self to be quite small — perhaps no larger than a single neuron. All thoughts, taking place throughout the whole brain, would eventually pass through this neuron. Thus, the Mind's Eye can simply sample the thoughts passing through this neuron and present them to the hyper-physical Conscious Self.

The Conscious Self and the Mind's Eye are obviously both hyper-physical entities that are separate from the physical brain. However, the "Thought Scanner" could be a built-in function of the physical brain.

NOTE: My analogy of computers passing digital data packets [thoughts] through a Local Area Network, may lead you to think that I am implying that the link between the hyper-physical Self and the physical brain be a digital process. It isn't. It can't be. The Human Brain is an analogue device comprising a network of around 86 × 10⁹ neurons, which are also strictly analogue devices. An artificial neural network program is a partial digital simulation of certain aspects of the analogue human brain.

Millennia of futile human endeavour has verified that the human self must be fund­amentally beyond the reach of human senses and instrumentation. Consequently, a human self cannot be directly examined by itself. Thus, we can never really know how the hyper-physical Conscious Self connects to the physical brain. We can only speculate about its essence, form and functionality. It is necessary to accept that some things are fundamentally unknowable.

Why Should I Care?

Current scientific thought asserts that in about 1,000 million years from now, the sun will have become so hot that it will utterly desiccate the Earth and destroy its biosphere and every living thing within it. Gaia will be no more. It will be as if hu­manity with all its heritage of culture, philosophy, art, music, literature, and science had never existed. About 4,000 million years later, the sun will expand into a red giant and swallow up the inner planets, leaving the outer ones to wander the cold reaches of interstellar space. Eventually, the entire universe will descend into a thermal death.

So why do I hunger for knowledge about science, art, music, literature and culture? What practical relevance can this have to my immediate survival? As my personal path of life has irrefutably proved, it has no economic relevance whatsoever. Why should I want to know about the universe beyond my own planet? What drives me to strive for well-being and fulfilment? What fires my determination to seek a more benign society that will dispel the present pandemic of poverty, disparity and social injustice? Indeed, why should I care whether or not I survive? Why am I curious and concerned about life after death? Why should I be interested in continuing my con­scious existence? I cannot deny that — along with most people — I have an almost desperate inherent desire that my conscious self should continue to exist forever.

Could my drive to survive, my need to know and my hunger for eternal life be imperatives that were embedded within my brain by inherited pre-programming? If so, then how and why? If it's all going to end a 1,000 million years from now, it's an awful waste of time and space. If I were not aware of my own existence, the fact that the universe is going to end would not matter. It would be irrelevant. But I am aware of my own existence.

An Intangible Singularity

My frustration is that I cannot turn round and look directly at this mysterious entity of which I am aware. Whichever way I may look, within the dim­emsions of space and time, is wrong. I can't seem to get it within my sights. I can't get a visual lock on it. I (my conscious self) can look outwards in all directions into society, the world and the universe beyond. But to be able to see my conscious self, I would need to look inwards beyond the point in time and space from which the laws of physics constrain me to observe. I would need to be able to angle my view in such a way as to be able to look inside the intangible singularity at the very centre of my personal event horizon.

But I can't. It is geometrically impossible. Suppose I could look inwards beyond the singularity of my consciousness, what should I see? Perhaps I would find myself looking outwards into my own future event horizon. This would enable me to see the future. But I can't see into my future event horizon. This, according to all known laws of physics, is an impossibility.

Notwithstanding, others can see me in my future event horizon because it overlaps their past event horizons. I can look outwards from me, but only others can look inwards at me. Yet others cannot look into my consciousness. They can never look inwards through the singularity at the centre and outwards again into my own past event horizon. If they could, they would be literally looking at the world through my eyes. They would be able to experience the world through my consciousness. Fort­unately, others can never see the world directly through my eyes. They can never experience the world through my thoughts. The very structure of space-time en­sures that my thoughts and my past event horizon are strictly my own exclusive private property.

It would thus appear that I am the intangible singularity in between my past and future event horizons. But I am in neither. I am outside of both my past and future event-horizons. If my conscious self exists within a "space-time", then it must be a kind of "space-time" that is outside known physical dimensions. Perhaps it exists within localized closed dimensions of the kind that are postulated by String Theory. Or perhaps it exists within open dimensions to which it, itself, cannot be con­scious­ly aware. Whatever the case, it is consequently impossible for either myself or others to know "me" directly. How then can I be aware of "me"? What gives me awareness of my own existence?

The Man In The Mirror

I cannot see my own face. In fact, I cannot even see my own head. I do not know what my face or head look like directly. I can see my face reflected in a mirror or a smooth water surface. However, this has the left and right sides reversed. Besides, I can only ever look at it from one angle, namely, directly in front. I remember that, as a young child, I was intrigued and rather surprised that I looked the way I app­ear­ed in a mirror. But I soon got used to it. Throughout human history, there must have been many humans who never had sight of their reflections, and so would have no clue as to what they looked like to others.

During secondary school I remember experimenting with multiple mirrors as part of my physics course. By adjusting the angles between the mirrors, I could view my head from different angles. How strange my head appeared to me. I had had no idea it was that shape. My previously presumed image of myself was quite differ­ent. I felt rather odd. "So that's how others see me," I pondered. It was quite ego-shattering. Nevertheless, even this was not a direct view. It was not exactly as others saw me.

Practically all photographs that people have taken of me are from one angle only, namely, face-on. This is like a mirror image without the left and right sides re­versed. Such a photograph is invariably posed. It does not provide a spontaneous view of me the way others see me in day to day life. I have occasionally caught a glimpse of myself on a closed-circuit television monitor. This gives a more realistic view of me the way that I speculate that others see me. I have also seen myself on video. These are still only relatively low-definition two-dimensional versions of the real view. Nevertheless, they show me that, from the points of view of others, I do not look or move the way I would have expected.

If my preconception of my own physical appearance can be so wrong, what about my preconception of "me". How do others see "me"? I conjecture that "me", as viewed from the points of view of others, would seem to "me" even more strange than does my physical appearance. No "video system" exists that can view my con­scious self through the eyes of another consciousness. So how can I ever know how the self-aware enigmatic conscious entity I call "me" appears from the points of view of others?

I am unable to see directly the self-aware entity that is "me". I cannot see its form or shape. To me, it is a faceless, form­less mystic entity. In my imagination, I can only ever get as far as using some kind of imaginary totem to re­present it. So how can I be aware of its existence? Through what means does it convey its presence to me? The only way I can think of is that I must somehow be able to see its reflection within my own (past) social event hori­zon. It must somehow create a reflection of my conscious­ness the way a mirror reflects my physical image. The events that populate my social past event horizon are the lives of the 7,000 million other human beings that inhabit this planet. I am able to perceive my own consciousness only as it is reflected back at me by a myriad of tiny flickering human "mirrors" of thought and emotion.

I am thus aware of my conscious existence solely through the complex reactions that other members of society have to my presence. People react to my physical appearance. They react to my gender. They react to my age. They react to my social status. Above all, they react to my personality and my character.

My Personality

My personality is the way, as a conscious entity, I appear and respond to the pre­sence of others. Some aspects of my personality may be genetically determined. Other aspects may be determined by my formative family environment. However, I believe that my personality is, for the most part, a reflection of the Zeitgeist.

In other words, it is a reflection, within my own consciousness, of the spirit of the era. It is a reflection of contemporary culture. It is a reflection of the prevailing lang­uage and expression. It is a reflection of the popular art and music. It is a re­flection of the science and technology. It is a reflection of the essence of the society in which I live.

Notwithstanding, it is a very specific reflection. It is a reflection of all these things as seen and experienced by "me" from my unique location in time, space and the social order.

Human society is a complex-dynamical network of 7,000 million conscious entities. As such, it is a generator of astronomical variety. Consequently, it appears very dif­ferent from different places at different times. Each of its 7,000 million members must observe it from his own unique position in time, space and the social order. Each member's view of it must therefore be unique. Its reflection within the con­sciousness of each of us must therefore also be unique. That is why each of us has a uniquely identifiable personality.

Higher animals also seem to have individual personality. In their case it is more rudimentary because their "societies" are less complex and interactive.

My personality thus gives "me" a unique identity, which is, at least for the most part, a reflection of society within the mirror of my consciousness. However, I am trying to find what is perhaps the opposite reflection. I am trying to catch, within the mirror of the Zeitgeist, a glimpse of my own consciousness. I want to see what I am. To do this, I must first consider another aspect to my conscious existence. An aspect that I refer to as my character.

My Character

I see my character as the motive behind the way I act in response to opportunities that spontaneously appear and to situations created by others. It is what det­er­mines how I react to what I perceive, experience and suffer.

At the most fundamental level, the motive behind any action I take is that of survival and self-preservation. This default motive is part of the natural instinct that is pre-installed by hereditary programming built into the cells of my body. It is designed to protect myself and my extended self (my family, my community, my nation, my species and so on). This instinctive motive is essentially ego-centric, confrontational and manipulative. It is not conducive to the building of benign relationships.

I (my conscious self) can observe my mind formulating and executing reactions to experiences according to the dictates of my natural instinct. However, by taking con­scious thought, I (my conscious self) have the power of volition to intervene and alter or augment the motive dict­ated by my natural instinct.

One way in which I can alter the motive driving my re­actions to events is to accentuate or diminish the various dictates of my natural instinct. For example, I can con­sciously make myself more or less selfish than I naturally would be. On the other hand, I can alter my natural reac­tions according to the dictates of a more advanced source of motivation, namely my conscience. By so doing, I can consciously modify the programming of my instinct to make it more relationship-oriented.

Every time I make a conscious intervention to accentuate the dictates of my nat­ural instinct, I create or reinforce a more austere behaviour than that with which nature originally equipped me. Every time I make a conscious intervention to ele­vate the dictates of my natural instinct according to the advice of my conscience, I create a more egalitarian behaviour than that with which nature originally equipped me.

My instinct thus contains what may be thought of as my moral character. If I habit­ually accentuate the dictates of my natural instinct, I develop a more egoistic char­acter. I become more and more confrontational and adversarial. If I habitually make the conscious effort to act according to the advice of my moral conscience, I deve­lop an egalitarian character. I become more and more able to relate with others.

My moral consciousness gives me the ability to abstract symbolic models of my social universe, render moral judgements about it and communicate these to other human beings through symbolic language. Moral consciousness — or conscience — not only gives me a sense of what human society is, but also a conviction as to what human society ought to be.

As my personality gives me a unique identity that I can perceive through the re­actions of others, so too my character gives me a unique mode of behaviour that I can perceive through my relationships with others.

Glimpse of Consciousness

Thus, for me, my consciousness seems to be an intangible singularity that joins my past and future event-horizons. It stands in my imagination like a gleaming sentinel in a narrow doorway. It faces my past with its back to my future. From its exposure to humanity, it forms within itself a unique personality as the film in a camera forms upon itself the image of a scene. It contains a default character (or inherent mode of behaviour) which is pre-programmed into it by nature to protect and preserve it.

It also possesses faculties of moral conscience and conscious volition. These give it the power to take control of the mind it inhabits. With these it can modify its in­herent behaviour. It can choose how it will behave. It can accentuate its self pro­tection far beyond necessity to the point of harming others. Or it can gradually con­struct within itself an inherent mode of behaviour that is constructive yet univers­ally benign. It can thereby become a conscious being that is able to form egalit­arian relationships with other like-minded conscious beings.

Frustratingly, this fleeting glimpse of what I see myself to be is nothing more than a faint reflection in the mirror of the society in which I live, namely, the people with whom I interact. As a result, my consciousness (the real "me") is viewable directly neither by other members of society nor by "me" myself. It can only ever be sensed indirectly in terms of society's response to its presence. But how true a picture does this faint reflection provide of the form and nature of my conscious self?

Through A Glass, Darkly

Unfortunately, the picture it provides is not very accurate at all. It is fraught with insurmountable distortions and errors. For "me" to be able to know and understand precisely what "I am", my brain would have to construct, within itself, a complete neural simulation of "me". This would have to include neural sub-models of my outside world, my body, my brain, my mind and, above all, that intangible con­scious entity I know of as "me". In other words, my brain would have to construct a neural model of my entire past event horizon, including the fuzzy singularity at its very centre.

My brain, as complex as it is, simply does not have the capacity to accommodate such a model. Besides, nothing can simulate a universe that includes itself. In at­tempting to do so, it would encounter the problem of infinite regression. It would also have to simulate, within a physical medium, what appears to be a hyper-physical entity. And this has to be, by definition, physically impossible.

Furthermore, my conscious self has access to the universe only via my mind (the software of my brain) which receives all its inputs via my 5 limited human senses from a single fuzzy point in time and space. My perception of the outside world is therefore, of necessity, extremely fallible. Consequently, my brain's neural model of the outside world can supply my consciousness with nothing more than a crude and limited view of reality.

Since my physical human senses can in no way sense anything beyond the physical realm, they can sense nothing of the conscious entity that is the heart of my being. Consequently, my consciousness can never be part of the crude and limited model of reality that my mind constructs within the neural networks of my brain. This is a fundamental barrier to my ever gaining a clear and direct vision of myself.

Thus my consciousness — the fuzzy singularity at the very centre of my past event horizon — does not have a clear and unhindered view of the outside world. It is en­cased within two concentric shells that impede, atten­uate and distort its view. The inner shell is my brain's crude neural model of my past event horizon built from the somewhat erroneous information supplied to it by my fallible human senses (the outer shell). If I could look inwards, beyond the singularity, I would behold another concentric uni­verse. This is my future event-horizon, which the laws of physics decree that I can never per­ceive. Only others can see my future when it becomes their past.

My physical brain has very limited capacity. This limits the detail with which it can model its outside world. My 5 physical senses are not perfect conveyors of inform­ation about the outside world. My perception of it is therefore fallible. This, how­ever, does not necessarily imply that my consciousness must also be imperfect. Given perfect sensory inputs to a perfect simulation, my consciousness could be perfectly capable of perfect perception.

Perhaps, one day, in the distant future, my consciousness will be able to see the whole of reality directly and clearly, by-passing the limitations of space and time and the fallibility of physical human perception. This may have been (in principle, though in a different context) what St. Paul was expressing when he said:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:
now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
1 Corinthians 13:12

If there exists a divine creator, why should he allow me no more than a primitive propensity for speculating about what could lie beyond this life? Simple. If I now knew with detailed certainty that great and better things lay beyond my death, I would have little or no motive for continuing the painful struggle of this present life. On the contrary, I would have every reason to end my life immediately in order to arrive at that better state of being. I would thereby fail to learn necessary lessons that this life has been designed to teach me. I would fail to evolve, as a conscious being, to the degree necessary to take on that better state of being.

Consequence of Consciousness

As a human being, I see consciousness as my most precious possession. It enables me to deliberately stand back and observe what is going on in my mind. It also be­stows upon me the faculty of volition. This gives me the power to override the dictates of my mind's resident instincts and direct it to act according to my con­sidered will. Such intervention, if sustained, will lead to the positive evolution of my personal character. I can use it to determine what I will become. Consciousness also gives me the power of imagination. With this, I explore beyond the reality of experience to create new ideas, which give me the potential to create new realities.

My human conscience empowers — and thereby qualifies me unconditionally — to analyse, question and criticize what I observe, experience and suffer from the world outside, including the socio-economic system within which I am constrained to live. I do not need a university degree. I do not need to be a member of some excl­usive academic authority. I do not need to hold government office. My necessary and sufficient qualification to express a valid opinion about the state of humanity is that I observe, think and heed my conscience. My opinion is unavoidably based on fal­lible input. But then equally, so is everybody else's, whoever they may be.

To me, most people seem to be in one of two camps. There are those who have a cherished religious belief that there is a higher reality beyond our view and that each person's inner "me" is a hyper-physical soul that is separate and distinct from the material brain on which it depends to perceive and interact with the physical world. Consequently, all their endeavours are biased towards proving their beliefs. But there are also those of the materialist school who have an equally fanatical quest to prove that the inner "me" has an exclusively physical constitution.

I, like all of them, have an insatiable curiosity to find out what "I" really am and whether or not there be a hyper-physical reality beyond what I am able to observe and experience. But I fundamentally cannot examine what "I" [my conscious self] am when the only resource I have with which to do it is "me" [my conscious self]. I cannot use my conscious self to get a view of my conscious self from outside of my conscious self. To attempt to do so is like trying to lift myself off the ground by pulling upwards on my own shoelaces.

Consequently, I accept that the nature of what "I" am — whether a hyper-physical soul, a complex dynamical mêlée within a vast network of firing neurons or a reflection of the society in which I live — is one area that is fundamentally off limits. But I know it is there because "I am". So I am happy just to call it "X" [a neatly demarcated part of the unknowable]. I thus render it powerless to thwart my enquiries into adjacent areas of reality that can be readily examined by observation and cogent thought experiments.

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Parent Page | Written 17 March - 10 August 2009 by Robert John Morton