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Friday, 9 June 2017



The idea of consciousness, such as that which constitutes your experience during the hours of the day when you are nominally awake, being made up out of an assembly of infinitesimal moments of subjectivity is one that is common to such thinkers as Leibniz, Whitehead and the proponents of Orchestrated O.R. These theories are appealing, not least because they ground a sort of realism - things, objects, may not be as they seem, but are nonetheless real, as real as the subject who is observing them. The problem, of course is in the orchestration, or the pre-established harmony: how can a diversity of subjectivities be aggregated into a single subjectivity with a single "I". What is in question is not merely a functional "I" for which the start of an answer would be to point to the pervasiveness of the integration of individual units such as cells or other organisms into multicellular organisms or coherent societies, and to suggest that the same mechanism must be at work, but the "I" as metaphysical or transcendental subject, the very core of the subjectivity in question. What lies behind this question may be a false analogy between the putative atoms of subjectivity and small physical objects, tiny individual particles, like grains of sand, but granting that there is a valid question here some insight might be drawn from the quotidian experience of sleep and dreams. Could it be that in the dreaming mind there are multiple observers, or at least a relaxation of the coherence which brings about the single observer, sufficient to allow multiple strands of experience to proceed in parallel? This is not so much a speculation as a suggestion that you search in dreams for evidence of coalescence in the heart of that invisible but obdurate reality which in the waking state is taken to be the single experiencer.

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