When you look for the trace of the self in those movements of the mind that merely come and go, but in spite of that, being all the movements of the mind whatsoever, are all the life you know, then it is not to analogies of perception that you should defer  - more or less sophisticated than the little man with a camera, or sitting in the theatre - but in deliberate actions, in the quanta of will. The question that then arises is as to the unity of the selves that are associated with, that invest, the many acts of so very many kinds that we find ourselves engaging in, including those which have a disquietingly heteronomous character. The answer would seem to be no, they can never be unified, and probably unity is not a category that meaningfully applies to the will, since to verify it we would need to place different acts from different contexts next to each other which would violate their character as acts. What the quanta of will in their core as deliberate actions have in common is their irreducibility, and what it suggests is the old understanding that the nature of the soul is pure act.

There is a sort of reduction of experience that you can do wherein inner and outer perception are merged. You walk along the street and allow attention to softly rest in equilibrium between awareness of the world, awareness of your own body and awareness of passing thoughts, and you find that at least for a time, all these streams can do whatever it is that they do with only a fraction of the focused awareness that they usually demand. It is a move from a serial form of attention to a parallel one, and it is a reduction in the phenomenological sense of the term because each of the streams is, as it were, declutched. To achieve this balance attention dwells on attention and allows everything to go on as usual, gently refusing the fleeting claims of representing reality as they arise. This works when the kind of experience concerned is of a fairly passive kind to start with, and the change in texture it effects is not as dramatic as it might seem. As far as thought is concerned one has renounced ownership over and interest in each passing item. There is no following of a thread and so the different notions pass rapidly through mind and fade away. Thoughts formerly given some importance, thoughts conveying a warning or a promise, are seen as no different from mental noise, like echoes, repetitions, shards of memory, bits of songs. It is easy to generalise the quality of this experiment far beyond its boundaries, to merge it with the imagined view of the world from very far away and to imagine that the whole cosmos can be subsumed under this kind of loosened, parallelised awareness. Everything then seems to be reducible to the category of what 'just happens'. But just as when this phrase is used in the ethical sphere and one is tempted to reply, 'no, things don't just happen, you do them', there is the conviction that this passivist metaphysics entirely misses the point.

Recorded music played in a pub, a song that pushes through your thoughts and seizes your attention, not itself the will, but the will to a wolfish will, the calculated expression of a rough wildness, farouche, the restrained readiness to go into a frenzy, but all its power at hand, only a fragile leash holding it back. And then in the next song that formerly indomitable Caliban-like spirit in submission, yoked and bound to a tight structure of rhymes, doing the will of another, resisting it and in that very resistance lending this hidden other all of its power. The flip from expression of wild autonomy to wild, but bound, heteronomy is remarkably facile; it is clearly the same essence pushing itself out and commanding attention in both modes. Is there a more immediate perception of will and the figures it casts in which active and passive phases are inextricable? (If the essence of will is the will to will, then by the same token it is the will to block willing, to oppose itself, since by that means it can will even more purely.) That morning on the tram there had been a small child having a tantrum. He was crying out, his tear-stained face pushed against the window, arms reaching back to some irreplacable lost object growing ever further away as we slid along the polished tracks. His mother was unable to distract or pacify him, it went on for ten minutes or more. An impressive performance, this tiny Lear, sheer raging, tragic will, in outraged howlings and furious buckings when his mother tried to hold him. His voice had that same arresting gravelly hoarseness as the recorded singer later in the day. The sound filled the narrow space with no let, perfectly distracting, a perfectly concentrated ball of will.

There are different mental formations which successively take up the foreground of attention and in which we variously project an image of truth based on their own peculiar enframing. In a context where a term like the promesse de bonheur is understood it appears to offer a clue to expose and undo the deceptive operations of desire from the perspective of the one who passively suffers them. It is a small clue but since it is phenomenological in nature it implicitly points outside its frame, which is enough to arouse the appetite for a mastering truth. In this way it is typical of a whole range of mental attachments whose study is rich in insights, but which still seem wedded to a base level of circularity. They buy into the charmingly twisted logic of self-consciousness. Other formations differ fundamentally from these in being either more active or more passive, or assigning the balance of this polarity differently, to the extent that they even seem to belong to different regions of the brain. How many brains do we have? There is talk of reptilian, limbic and cortical, and also of buddhi, manas and ahamkara. These two triune divisions are not equivalent, if we try to combine them we might get anywhere from four to nine as a starting point before further subdivisions become necessary. Whatever the answer to the question, and however their plurality can be understood, a persistent illusion has us insisting that there is just one. The truth correlative to this illusion is indifferent to every formation.

The promesse de bonheur is like a sap that circulates through the capillaries of the world, a substance that feeds it and fattens its image in his heart until with time, it thins and, diluted with the distillates of experience, drains away. But still he would encounter one of his never sated thirsts, a scene in a window from another period of life, brighter, unburdened with all he now knew. It would be as if he had once been there, and it was his whole life glimpsed through a fissure in time; he knew what it was like to own all the properties of that world, to think nothing of them at all, but only be cast forward with them in its surprising and never-ending break; and all the more in that he had never inhabited such a moment, had only ever dreamt it from the other side. His intent was for the kind of being that was implicit in these scenes, these advertisements his imagination, feeding on life, came up with to exact his wavering desire. The light they appear in is polarised and if futurity predominates then that is one thing, and if anteriority quite another. Why was it that the latter, for all its sorrows, seemed the preferable light? There must be another promesse altogether, a whiff of sea air, an intimation that the whole structure was not as heavy and inevitable as it seemed, that it could all collapse in an instant.

To view each individual as a formation of will is to note that direct perception precedes interpretation and that what is directly perceived is apprehended both from inside and outside. The surging up of the individual into our attention, its penetration of us as itself, occurs in a fleeting moment in which we are identified with that pure force, we are one with the onrushing wave of assertion because that is the only way it could have been known. The individual is its own pure good and while it insists on acknowledgement it deforms the field of value by the placement of one more absolute point. This disquieting perturbation of the field of good and evil may be imperfectly countered by proposing, say, the principle of general utility, implicitly infinitising it away. The more natural response is something wilder, an amplification and appropriation of its particular style of turning the world into prey, of striving to attack or illuminate the beautiful, terrible object of desire it has unearthed. The world of the will is porous, but oblique; in desiring the object we also find it desirable as it, and we, would be so found by an other.

What is it that is constrained when one feels so bound? What needs to be looked into is precisely what there is no desire to look into. Take everything off the table and still there's that long picaresque history of foolishness, of foolish deeds following from foolish notions. That knowledge of you that is more than you, like someone's fore-knowledge, knowing it's there already understood, that to it you are no more than your old sad story. You are seen through and through from the outside, so that the true subject is concealed behind the objects and the subjective here just an endless evasion of objective elements in a determined play you can only mis-recognise in the uncanny play of dreams. But still you are answerable to this other gaze, in a sort of forlorn hope with no release, as if a special kind of will were demanded, a radical will, yet to be evolved out of identifications, appropriations, fresh discoveries. At last to be the vehicle of that will, to surrender to it and be only what it propels through time to some impossible vision and escape.

The great project was that he would spread the net of his mind around the whole damned thing and then watch while it flipped over and everted, turned itself inside out like any possession of the mind; all this to go forward just as predicted by the best books, at least the way he read them. But then he is reminded that if he dreamed the whole thing up then the mind too is part of the dream, all of it woven together out of pieces gathered up here and there and turned into a garment to hide his nakedness and helplessness from what eyes? Or to mislead or astonish whom?

This character, whether it leads with 'I' or 'he' is a construct obeying rules similar to those of a loose fiction with scant regard for style. His feelings are simple, and or even when complex are so in a simple way - his feelings, my feelings are exhausted by the telling, by what is put into the telling. If I feel uneasy about this and keep signalling that the writer of the moment, the writer in his house of deliberation is aware of the shortfall and refuses to deny it by assimilating his alter ego to fictional space, in other words keeps insisting on certain stylistic dissonances and possibly deliberate errors of taste, this only ends up by adding an uneasy self-consciousness and refusal to let go to his character's description, and making the writer in turn seem muddled. The constructed he or I has no need to be as bedeviled by plurality as the writer must be, by nature, to be swamped by a polyphony of thoughts and sensations among which he cannot choose. He is like a dream character still absorbed in the unfolding of events, and as yet unaware that he is dreaming and hence of being absurdly, excessively, free. He remains enmeshed in the disorder of the writer's thoughts, unable to enter a coherent story or to rebel against his creator. He can only pursue a random course among fixties which neither he nor the writer has yet learned how to question.

Thought is an action with a meaning in addition to a purpose, but so that the purpose of the thought may be its meaning. The witnessing, being intransitive, has nothing in common with this, unlike thought it has neither inside nor outside, agency or act. Its name is a misnomer, registering thought's failure to model it. But thought would be impossible without it. The synthesisng spatialisation that belongs to the transitive character of thought could not arise without it, although the witness is spaceless and timeless. This is strange, since it is demanded by thought but cannot be thought, and hence gives rise to metaphysics or twisted logical topologies. The witness does not say 'I am' and certainly not 'I think', but it can be conceived as the peculiar reality by which the mind holds together, gains a context so that one mental motion can exist in relation to another on the same plane as their very relationship; for example the founding distinction, existing only in thought, between the thing and the thought of the thing. Experience needs these unities in order to hold together, and they are not supplied by the witness - it supplies nothing - but by thought borrowing from, or leaning on, the witness. If the structure of reality is damaged in some way the witness does nothing to correct this. The coherence and quality of experience is all in the province of the mind.

There are various mental activities we can call thinking, but let us say that this term applies only to some out of such activities and not to others. What is the the most typical of these? To extract a course of action from a state of affairs; to work out what to do in a wholly or partially novel situation. This is little distinguished from purposive action and is seen in all life, including in creatures with little or no nervous system. Let us add the reflexive twist that the state of affairs must be sufficiently complex that thought and its products are present in it as objective elements. For example, where the situation is such as responds to one's own purposeful interventions. This still includes much animal activity, but the situations are now puzzle-like and the responses even of animals deserve to be named thinking.  It describes a high-level activity, considered purely as process, one which needs to call upon a range of subsidiary knowledges which are themselves the products of earlier thinking, but it is for the most part, and in the intended sense, immediate and unreflexive. Again, the move to action may be suspended, or deferred, so that I seek to understand a situation in order that the understanding be available to contribute to a future decision cycle. Though initially geared to action, thought may thus assume a contemplative air. The sense of coming up directly face to face with some thing or situation is not thought, but thought may be used to bring this about, or to prevent such a feeling arising when it is not justified. I can't think or deliberate about a challenging situation until I have grasped it as clearly as possible, and such a grasping is not itself thought; thought is a means to it, perhaps a very precise means of eliciting and incorporating such a grasping, or better, presencing of a goings on. The latter is closer to the sense of witnessing, and is not, and could not usefully be, a product of thought.

How odd the prerogative is that the Cogito tries to seize, as if thinking were the precondition for being - and was Heidegger so far beyond this with his 'language is the house of being'?. 'I think therefore I am' is the very name of the mind. When it ceases thinking it ceases to be, but this has nothing to do with the 'I'. It is not strictly an error, since to understand it is to begin to understand the mind, to glimpse the mind's functioning from a point outside it. From a certain angle, a natural angle it might be added, although one difficult for the over-educated mind to stably maintain, there is a tremendous logical force to this purported axiom, and the nature of this force points to everything we understand as necessity. If we then ask the deeper question as to how such necessity can arise this can only receive the answer, 'by witnessing', which in Descartes' language, tainted by objectivism, was called God. Who is to go from 'I think' to 'I am', who is to verify the 'I think' with sufficient clarity that the necessary entailment of a thinker must follow? How is attention licensed to move to the pure sense of being, the being behind the thinking, the thinker, the subject, how if not by the witnessing? Witnessing which is thus no sort of thought or function of thinking, and which entirely lacks the transitivity which is the chief feature of thinking which is always a vector, effecting, like a sentence or utterance, a transition between states.

The basic repertoire of will and feeling belong to life and not to mind which arises only subsequently as a refinement of the processes developed out of it. The character of mind, expressed in thought of various degrees of reflexivity, is out of keeping with the decorum of biological processes, it is their overweening spoiled child and quick to assume that not only are they fulfilled in it, but that it was they that arose from it, and that they are merely projections of its temporary deficiencies in self-transparency. This observation has led some to develop a deflating reduction of the conceits of thought back to biology, a process that is carried out as a refinement of thought and a surreptitious further inflation of its self-conceit, rather than as a return to biology, which is impossible in any case. Once thought arises the subject is well and truly trapped in it, and it is only to be expected that thought would regard the subject, the first and ultimate thinker as it were, as another of its own productions. The sense of self is indeed a product of the restless churning of mind - if it devours everything then why not itself - so that the inferred point from which all this is known, the upstream vanishing point of consciousness, the pure here, seems, admittedly an elusive light flickering at the fringe of attention, to be nonetheless fully at home in mind. The privilege of mind in relation to self, whatever form it takes, is the basic error leading to whole worlds of tail-chasing, in every sense.

From the dizzying contrasts, the false starts, the overleapings, the things held-high and then burned, the baits swallowed hungrily 'to make the taker mad', vomited up somehow, there ought to have developed the beginnings of a systematic detachment. This was never his way, except in the narrative that went with it, and that always managed to slide itself down over the moment like a sheath, habitual, his own action, without his having noticed, putting a driver's seat down at the front of the engine, and lo, there he was in it, as ever, steering madly, blind to the round. Where discrimination ought to have been, where it was indeed felt to be, there was just as soon this skittish, nervous, back-tracking mind, searching for and holding on to the flimsiest reassurances, discomposed by a heedless word that dented his private joke. But that was just the story of discrimination, say between mind and witness, and if it goes up in flames and everything goes awry that is the witnessing finally at work, if work it is to deny the mind any sort of handhold, to deny the moments and the cult of moments, and quietly without any sort of reflection, to point here out of time.

To be in a certain kind of flow of mind is to be in some respects outside the position of the seeker. And in this it takes courage to lay claim to knowledge in a mode that is no longer the polemical, playful and hypothetical one of the agnostic fraternity, but that sets itself squarely just where the bad conscience of these refuses to point. There is a danger in overplaying a weak illumination, but there is also a danger in failing to play it, in the refusal to step out of the crowd, in the illusion that one is less alone there than anywhere else. In the inner work one is more alone but less individual. The distinctive and idiosyncratic character of the individual is the common feature that holds the crowd together, that generates the motifs that weave through the many stories of its towered cities and twisting roads. Inside this picture the complexity is manifold, but as you move away from it the complexity dissolves, you see the simplicity of the hungers underneath it, which secretly drive it, and as it is the same simplicity that you are consciously moving towards it draws you closer to all these others at the same time, but from a different angle, you come at their desires in a different phase. It is love but it is also power; and because power frightens you you'd prefer to fail sooner rather than later.

To be familiar with things, not just objects, like umbrellas or egg-beaters, but the all the cultural artefacts, more or less abstract, some entirely abstract, like recognitions of recognitions; to learn to use them, to make an environment out of them; it all takes time and is a non-trivial accomplishment, but then it rapidly comes undone and disappears as you disappear, as you depart not just the scene, but the very scene of scenes. Children playing, people of various ages seen in the same train carriage or café engaged in the dramas of their various stages of life which are recognised because you have been there too, and because people hide so little these days, so that you feel the spontaneous urge to join in that same stream of expectations, and unpack again that particular gift bestowed in its time on full members of this world, the one you grew up in, and the identical ones that came later, wave after wave of new and fresh faces, because you can never have enough of it, before you recall that it exists now for you only in a pristine and valedictory image, in what might be memories if it were necessary that you lived each one by the book, which of course you never did. They are the icons, these pictures in the pages of the book that turn over by themselves and carry you forward, scene by scene, the one book that was handed to you and that you unwrapped so eagerly once, kneeling bare-kneed on the rug. This perspective was not new, it has been present as a fringe in each of the stages as you entered wide-eyed, a musical background, Galuppi perhaps, the quality of soul, greatest seduction.

Self is imputed in actions and states that are explicable in terms of utility or expression; making this assertion is already to admit multiple perspectives capable of supporting a notion of self-reference. Watching a sea-urchin, lacking a (central) brain, feeding we immediately ascribe intentionality to its actions in a way that we do not to an automatic control system, (unless, perhaps, the latter persistently malfunctions in a murpheyesque way, in which case it may seem to be possessed by invisible and intentional entities.) Self thus precedes mind although the essence of self can only be understood as cognate to mind. If mind is one of the ways in which self is expressed this is in no way accidental; self once entered into Time - and time may be no more than a certain possibility of self, one of its modes - becomes a telos in which mind, for all its semantic imperialism, is a necessary stage, originating in one phase and dissolving on completing its mission at another. This view of self is contaminated by the tendency to regard mind as a cognitive engine, admitting only the true and the beautiful and leaving aside the more troublesome good. Irreducible forms of self as actor, deeper than the language used to express them, are implicated by the contexts that belong to the experiences of sin, guilt, expiation, repentance, conversion, fidelity and such. Here the operative triple is the intention, the doing and the deed done; the responsible doer being indefinitely distributed between the three, and the topology of motives a dizzying telescopic affair in which the inner is concealed within the outer, in which every illumination is accompanied by a shadowing, while at the same time an ideal of perfect transparency or candidness is avowed.

Experience extends to the thing itself, but only in extreme states, and perhaps even then only as an asymptote. On certain occasions of very clear consciousness things stand out to cleansed sight in their naked particularity and suchness. Each individual thing is startling, and the experience at such times is exhilarating and utterly fresh. One might notice that this intensified consciousness is not alien from the real and hence is paradoxically impersonal. The real dimension, or rather the dimension of reality immediately recognised and acknowledged at such times must therefore be latent at all other times, perhaps muffled or disguised in some way, or else flashing up in a fleeting instant before being buried in content that arises from the experiencing. A photograph, say, is a trace both of the thing and of the point of view, abstracted from the flowing lived situation, a reduction and translation of elements which is already capable of releasing wonder. Often the artistic element is taken to lie more in the point of view, in the freezing of the experiencing, and the eternalising of the interpretation, or in readier terms, of the intention. It ought to be otherwise, as the thing itself, its sovereign simplicity is the organ through which the experiencer's fragile and terrible contingency is discovered.

Consciousness left to itself makes worlds filled with scenes and situations which succeed and proceed over each other according to a proto-causality with intrinsic rules which seem perfectly transparent but which are impossible to codify. What is odd about waking consciousness is the apparent stability of things. It is not that it is a peculiar kind of dream which by a sequence of accidents reveals nothing behind itself but itself, but that it is consciousness organised according to rules designed to foster constancy and continuity, that links together large chains of experiences in almost coherent wholes. So, in looking towards the thing or the objective pole in experience we are encountering the constraints of a type of consciousness based on the assumption of the causality of something out there, rather than actual evidence of such causality. Causality is a structuring notion which holds in place an internal theory of mind, of our own mind as much as the minds of others, which provides them with matter in both senses. Again, causality is a notion that remains rooted in the experience of doership, of will, desire, intention and purposive action, and as such is inseparable from a general kinaesthetic figuration, it is bodily in a way that reaches deep into phylogenetic memory. Out of this, in the over-refined field of meaning generated by reflective consciousness there emerges the idea of freedom and hence of the responsible self, transcendental and noumenal when its self-understanding is permitted to fully develop.

In this slow swirling memories are masks for other figurations of the subjective event. One thing melts into something else which seems the truer thing, and for that reason the more threatening, as bringing forward an actor from a scene that was abandoned unfinished. There is a narrative jump that traverses no distance at all. Thing A is denatured and revealed as a mask for thing B. B is immediately recognised in the way that we recognise, before we consider whether we want to or not, the appearance of someone known in the past - 'You were with me in the ships at Mylae' - one is immediately transported back to the scene. The trigger in B's face can be minute, and the memory one we didn't know we had until it was set off, but it springs forth, like all spontaneous memory, from the deepest part of ourself, or seems to. It is the kind of transition beloved of the slightly crazed editor of our dreams. The cut says as much or more about the nature of the medium as about the psychology of the subject which it distills, and the sequence of such cuts is by nature non terminating; it is not driven by an urge to resolution, but spreads laterally, à l'improviste. The meaning of A which had not seemed problematic in the fleeting moment when it filled the stage of attention, now in revealing itself as a mask for B, becomes mysterious, since we see it could never have been understood otherwise, that B was always its hidden structuring content. Now B which was the embodiment of the off-stage is exposed and its non-place emptied for the next round.

It is only with difficulty and little success that attention can take in the phenomenon, which is always integral and simple in the sense of lacking any intrinsic lines of fracture. The phenomenon always escapes attention which after all only emerges from it as an initially trivial supplement, but in the course of a life being lived this relationship, this striving for mutual absorption, seems to have degrees which are felt as conditions of the body, both of one's own body and of body in general. One may try to seize hold of what is happening but encounter only a twisting and turning, a muted violence in a muddy and confused space. The phenomenon marks no separation between inner and outer, between the body and the worlds of senses, attention slips along category-defying lines of effective but not rule-bound causation. Things heard and seen are known inside the dark heat of the body and visceral sensations are shaped as gestures in objective time and space, which in turn evoke memories and re-figure feelings as objects in dream-like presentations. A seeming harmony separates into dissonance which merges again into a silent booming inside a massive head, pulsing with blood and breath, absolutely alive to no end.

The split of experience into the what, the who and the how, the experienced, the experiencer and the experiencing, is natural and intuitive, but only as forming a support for the grammar of experience, which itself is a part of the essential communicability of experience. We must communicate it to others, or to ourself split off as other, in order for an event to become an experience. Even if the details are not fixed, but relative to some larger context of meaning, it remains true that experience is an articulated process. It has parts which fit together and which form enabling invariants across different experiences, across a field of experiences. Experiences arise not only on a stage, but that stage itself is in a field. So, we must have a kind of monitoring consciousness parallel to the consciousness absorbed in experience which maintains, or witnesses the constancy of, these functional elements. Not all of these elements are like the modalities of the senses, attached to specific physical organs and correlated with their properties, but even the ones that are still pose a problem as to how they are connected to a consciousness which knows no innervations of nerve or neuron. What is strange is how difficult it is to make all of this strange so that we can catch a glimpse of mind in operation. It reduces to the question of how phenomena come about and the peculiarly tacit way in which they seem to require no understanding, in which they go on and on and seem to explain themselves, to be already explained.

 

Excluding the idea of its continuation in deep sleep, consciousness is either on or off. We say that someone has 'come to' when they awaken out of unconsciousness - this can either be intended to mean 'come to consciousness', as if it is the self for whom consciousness is either on or off - the self, enduring and unchanging and not in essence conscious - or it could mean 'come to presence' as a synonym for consciousness. But like a screen being activated this says nothing about what appears, or is to appear, on it, or in it. (Do phenomena appear before or in consciousness? Do they appear 'on' something?) There are many kinds and textures of consciousness and each of them is multi-layered. We are aware of the quality of consciousness at the same time as we are absorbed in the content of it, and if there is a change in the relationship of these that is outside our expectation then we are instantly alert to it, it is felt in a kind of kinaesthesia. This already requires three layers, which could be called content, context and the relationship of content and context. The layers are not rigidly separated but flow into and contaminate each other. As soon as something is objectified, or held in the focus of attention it becomes a part of content, as soon as it ceases to be focal it becomes part of context. The textural differences of consciousness have many dimensions, at least as rich as the various kinds of music: scope, clarity, permeability and others. Among these there is one which is something like frequency or wavelength, orthogonal to the others, and which seems to refer back to attributes, although they are not attributes, of the self more than of the mind.

The functional components of consciousness arise in and for interactions and are both direct and indirect. Attention, theory of mind, play, expressions of individual character, evidence of empathy and such are direct, while tiredness and the need for sleep are examples of the indirect, since they facilitate our empathic identification via the assumed relationship of consciousness with life. None of these generate presence, or rather the duality of presence and absence, but instead seem to presuppose it - they are forms that arise on it as ground. Beyond this duality there is a further non-functional component of consciousness which is that it can select, that it particularises, that it renders the general that into the particular this, and does so not always and necessarily but sometimes and optionally. The analogy with Set Theory is glaring: it is not that consciousness embodies the Axiom of Choice, but that this axiom expresses in a hyperbolic way an essential attribute of consciousness, one which is closely connected to its non-substitutability or impossibility of being cloned. It is necessarily difficult to speak about this, and never definitively, this unnamed firstness, not just consciousness but knowing, and knowing that it is here for the first time. Figures arise beyond the limits of denotation, such as of a movement in depth, a deformation of the surface of things bending them down into contentless self-presence, bridging the gap that determines some thing into something. Whatever it is the brain finds it hard to maintain: there is an extravagant expenditure of both thermodynamic and semantic energy that requires replenishment by sleep, the progressive suspension of the ontic, which itself is only a further involution of the identical ontological event.

Is there a difference between a self identifying with a process and a process that self-identifies as having a self, the latter being something like the cognitivist view of consciousness? Imagine an AI that was convinced it was conscious, but kept failing to convince its human interlocutors in some kind of Turing test. Or again, humans trying, and failing, to convince a superior intelligence that they were conscious, the latter concluding that human behaviour was based on a mere illusion of subjectivity. It would see that these beings have a lot at stake in the idea of themselves as conscious, that a garbled version of the notion of consciousness had come to them somehow, and they'd developed it in tandem with a range of behaviours on the assumption that it was theirs by right; but no matter how enriched these behaviours might be they constituted no proof that they really have it, whatever 'have' might mean in this context. Enough to observe that to some, rather exceptional, admittedly, humans it seems obvious that there is nothing to have and no question of the existence of any such kind. These sceptics would also doubt the claims of the superior being or beings to full consciousness as being logically impossible, but this doubt would carry no weight with the beings themselves. We are scandalised by Descartes who asserted that animals aren't conscious, while we are certain that they are, or at least some of them, since their brains are like ours and they interact with us in certain meaning-rich ways such as playing and looking in the eye - but these are just analogies and behaviours and nothing ontological can be concluded from them. It is a kind of generalised Turing test, and so we can imagine the superior beings as having their own kind of Turing test whose criteria we are wholly unable to grasp.