These enquiries are just expanded figures or conjugations of self-consciousness; you go out along an intention and then you come back in. It wasn't straight it was curved, it only looked straight to you, as it had to. Following the track of a new object you leave through the door, but the track curves around, the new object was another part of yourself and you return through the window, or at any rate find yourself back where you started, having got there somehow in spite all your enquirer's sincerity. You are surprised you didn't see the whole game immediately, but that was precisely the point - you wouldn't have followed the lure if it wasn't something you recognised but no longer remembered; it was the minimum necessary quantum of alienation needed to fascinate. You didn't see the game and then you saw it, there is a sort of flush of embarrassment, catching yourself in the mirror, a short-circuit of intention. It renders you absurd, and to the degree that you are absurd you are truly absurd. It's not true that this looping back on yourself is the limitation that it appears to be, it puts the game of self-referentiality into a frame and for a moment you could step out of it. There ought to be nothing easier than stepping out of it once it is seen that it is no more solid than a thought. The idea is simple, the problem is finding the witness of that idea.

Emotions can be detached from the will, from their connection to purposive action, from the need to do something about them. They can be experienced like music, only truer and stronger. You pass through emotions, or they pass through you and so you come to agree with the shallow wisdom that the truth of them lies in their passingness. But inevitable as this might be, it is the only the negative and disintegrating phase of emotion that is acknowledged. Every strong enough emotion contains a sense of necessity, they drive at something and that something has to be - you recover your own forgotten necessity in them. You are not telling yourself that these things are true, you are vividly experiencing the angle of view in which they are self-revealing as true, as carrying some irreducible quotient of your lost truth, of your lost unity and vastness; you can't doubt because they are more true than you are. Where does all the longing go? It yearns from out of a prior fulfillment, prior to the split of mind from body, a fleeting recognition of absolute being, of absolute self-possession, so that presence takes on one of the colours of absolute self-loss. As if you pass by a magnet (un aimant) that causes every intention, every dipole within you to turn towards it out or sheer recognition of kinship and come alive it flooded awareness with its spectral signature.

It is not so much that consciousness has different intensities, although that may be true additionally, but that it has different frequencies or harmonics. The implicit principle that presences experience, or functioning, has a dimension by which the scope and depth of experience is determined, most especially in determining the nature of distinctions. In this paradigm the lower frequencies produce a world of fixed and opaque distinctions and the higher frequencies a world of subtle interdependences in which distinctions are situational and catalytic. Both time and space are also determined in this way by the kinds of distinctions that they sustain. A pure first-person world can thus only arise above a certain threshold. The nature and quality of phenomenality is determined by the dominant harmonics of the observer, which leaves an opening for the operation of other subordinate harmonics suggesting a different world in counterpoint to the one in which your main story is unfolding. This idea is itself a metaphor, and hence a synthesis at a certain level of transparency. It is meant to normalise ideas such as the intertwining of the timeless and time, and of self and other. If you look closely you can see how much of your human reality is based upon these key indeterminacies, all of it really. And again you will see that the contextual and regulative ideas that form the horizon of experience on one level of experience are the natural objectivities at another level, and that they could not serve as they do if they were not real for a potential observer who also happens to be you. There is a world of conditions - perhaps this is what is meant by the causal plane. The selection of the harmonic structure of the observer is not made by the observer but by the observed, by the situation of the life that is being illuminated. The pure observer vibrates at all frequencies at the same time, selection takes place only with individualisation.

Meaning is when one structure represents another structure, and since representation seems to exist and to evolve without the need for an originating observer the way is open for considering consciousness to be an emergent out of information processing complexity, information being understood as a particularly concise and quasi-independent abstract of representation. There is certainly an exuberance associated with complexification, and not only exuberance but a spectrum of other proto-emotions that arise with the cycle of effective problem solving - encountering an obstacle which causes structures to fail and to come apart, then surprising ways in which the broken-off parts recombine into new structures in which a selection for surmounting the obstacle can be made. But consciousness emerging? What has to emerge from the system is the system's first-person point of view as grounded within itself, as independent of the system it started from, as the absolute origin of the world. If that were a natural process then it could be expected to have degrees, to be more or less, and while there are certainly degrees of the self-transparency of awareness it is not clear that there are degrees of first-personhood; a perspective either exists or not, quite apart from what fills it. Could there be a half-person point of view? Also, it could be expected that the same pattern would be found again and again in other parts of nature, since such patterns tend to be reconfigured in many different ways once they have shown any utility. Neither of these expectations is necessarily wrong. there are things we simply don't recognise at all until we have once seen them, and then we start to recognise them everywhere, right under our noses. It might be like that. Proceed as if it were true and see what you can see.

It's not about an "I" thought, as if it were some unwarranted supplement, but an effect of the ultimate stage of the crystallisation of the phenomenon into form and its shattering, like the shape of the final spume of spray that marks the wave's breaking on the shore. But crystallisation is exactly what never happens. Without freezing, the water's fluidity is wholly formed for the briefest interval as it stands out in the living air, in marked contrast to the push and pull of currents and eddies in which it was merged just a moment ago and to which it will return in a further moment. The heart, or hearth, of conscious thought, to slide to a new metaphor, is that compact illuminated clearing in the cave of the skull, the free play of forming powers, like the playful elements, water and fire and air. The making and breaking of form assumes a certain priority in being as if it were the telos, the final cause of the whole thing, present throughout and fully sufficient. But these qualifications are just aspects of the spume, of its excess of form, and count for nothing in themselves. It is the entire system, every gradation between formless and form, the wave and the ocean, that has been going on immemorially, without need of any focus. A perceptual metaphor entails a metaphorical perceiver engaged in a process of perception. To find that perceiver once and for all would be to escape the perils of contingency. This is the trap that everone falls into, and out of which you have built your entire story.

It's all happening in the brain, in a system fully and unceasingly engaged with itself and with its exterior environment. The system is full of models, maps and updating processes. There are two main categories of these: the sensory field and the action context, which could be called Representation and Will, each consisting of diverse parts connected by peculiar kinds of linkages, glueings, functors. It is not that different maps and models overlap each other and hence are woven together into a single fabric, each realm is built differently, evolved differently, is based on different invariants, different parameters; different parts of the mind speak different dialects, what connects them is paradoxical, is both and neither at the same time. The linkage is itself a different kind of map or model and the seams joining it to what it links, and to other linkings are not natural, they do not arise as the extension of any one part but are artificial, ingeniously and endogenously created. See this as taking place in the integration of the diverse sense worlds to form the sensory field, and in the integration of the action contexts: research, planning, execution, feedback, and most of all in the integration of sensory with action, so that actually neither one is entirely itself without major input from the other. You don't perceive without acting, you don't act without perceiving. It is these complex domain translators and integrators that require, and so define, your self as one of the invariants - the highest-order invariant, the limit invariant - so that all the parts can function together, not in perfect harmony, but brilliantly, symphonically. At some point in the development of all this the lights come on; it's brilliant and so it is 'seen'. It attracts the attention of pure inwardness. And so what is first illuminated is the system of the self, the most brilliant creative leap, the 'I', and so inwardness is identified with the self. That is the starting point. It's an error, but it's a great place to start. Worth spending an aeon celebrating.

One version of who I am (what this is) is consciousness considered as the totality of all achievable first-person content, including the reduction that swallows whole the second and third person worlds into the first, and the reduction of that reduction etc. Here all is noematic, even what is called noesis is content or event, a more subtle kind of object, and hence still falls under noema. Consciousness as the extension of all possible experience. This one is the thick version, the full-moon, pushed out as far as it can go and then some. There is also the thin version, the vanishing sliver of the new moon, that for whom all this is, that which can never be an object of any kind, so that it can't be said to exist and so that there can be no evidence for it whatsoever. The wink, the lotus sermon, you either get or you don't - and it doesn't matter in the least. Are these the same? Well, metaphysically, perhaps, whatever that might mean, but not culturally, not poetically, not stylistically. Each is the fatal error of the other. There is no term by which they can be put into relation with each other, neither identity nor negation.

To say that consciousness does not exist is only to another way of insisting that it not be detached from the first-person perspective. The matters that exist are things in consensus or in third-person perspective, things of which you can say 'it is'. Clearly there is such a dimension to consciousness in which it is distinguished from unconsciousness in a neurophysiological way - it corresponds to clearly defined brain functions which may or may not be correlated with certain behaviours. In this sense dream and deep-sleep are regarded as modalities of consciousness, as distinct from coma, or the state of a brain under a general anaesthetic. But again, in considering your own consciousness from the inside, since you can be aware of being conscious in addition to simply being conscious, and this additional layer seems perfectly under voluntary control (although not so much the deeper recursive layers it implies), it seems that there are objective correlatives of consciousness that are grasped only subjectively. To know you are there you must make an object of yourself, but it is a purely private object, and a fleeting one - but its readiness-to-hand provides a strong confirmation of your presence. This inner self-object, or self-objectifying process, gives rise to existents, the fleeting inner objectivities that arise must be said to exist. You might, like Hume, question whether they prove what they are naively taken as evidence for, but you won't deny their existence, even though they can't be confirmed in consensus reality. As a class they are entirely consistent with that reality, with the kind of conversation that moves seamlessly between say, external objectivities and private qualia, such as in a wine-tasting. The Humean position is essentially correct; just because these inner contents are objects of a sort they can tell us nothing about their corresponding subject. The inference that would attempt to pass to this subject fails because inference can only be between terms of the same general kind. The gap here is far more severe and unbridgeable than it looks, because we can and do know absolutely nothing about what lies on the other side; all metaphors fail including this one.

Somehow, once things start to become a little bit clear a compulsion seems to arise to develop a complete map of being and then to locate yourself and others within it - something you can call home. These maps of being, which can be structured in terms of truth or goodness or beauty, intellect, will or feeling and their various hybrids, serve a practical purpose, they endow us with persuasive force and with persuasive inertia, that is, they grant us some immunity from the persuasions of others. In this sense they are an essential component of social being, in that they provide you with a position and a means of defending that position. There are challenges that arise inwardly, from self-doubt and challenges that arise externally from the need for status, from social-doubt say, or from competition in assimilating knowledge. Some people feel these challenge more keenly than others and devote more and better energy to developing a position, these are rare ones, most cobble together something more rough and paraconsistent out of bits and pieces of well-subscribed positions. All of this is the ongoing work of the creation of culture, but in pursuing it you give yourself over to earnest abstractions and lose sight of the immediate occasion which drives this need. There is an overflowing in the heart of the moment which is almost immediately contextualised as a predicament of a self, it is personalised before there is any notion of what the person could be. This means that it is deferred out of its moment into time and space as frames of the hypothetical. This is inevitable error but if there is to be any resolution to this overflowing it can only be in the very same moment. The beauty of understanding is achieved in its self-dissolution, in the realisation that there was never any resolution, that you have never departed by one iota from the original overflowing.

You are scattered in time, there are parts of yourself that you numbed so you could go forward, or so you thought. You still carry them along but you can't reanimate them. To only have these broken-off pieces, what's remains with its hollow ring disoriented, proud, that's all you have to want with; no wonder your desires go astray. You love anything that reminds you of the integral being you once were, as if paying your respects in this way were enough, cultured, headpiece made of straw. The simple ability to hold it together through all the changes, like people at a concert thrilled by the same music they first loved. To have the entire keyboard uncovered, every note, every past within reach, press the key and feel it, and for this to be so natural and simple that the self can get itself off its chest, can fulfill its destiny like any seed and die. The thread needs to pass back through the eye of the needle look over loop, the double concerto playing in a salon, in this dream-house, just the other side when you walk in to everyone's surprise. And so it goes on, this latest perspectivisation of a self, this earnest creation of time, assumption of all the emotions and declamations that go with it, the little drama revealed, drama of another revelation inside another revelation. You make this stuff up, you are the making up of such stuff, and nothing else besides, the impurity that sets off the crystallisation, except that its all made up, exists in a moment so perfectly fine that no perspective can enter it.

The third-person world is essentially the world of appearance, which means that an impassable barrier exists between experience and being - or would so exist if being, or the noumenon, were an allowed meaning. In this vision if anything was real it could only be the entire system, but with nothing outside the system there is nothing to confirm its reality. Anything within the system is grasped in an event of recognition which is an abstraction, a way of speaking about certain arbitrarily bounded relations, and hence pure functionality without identity. The cogito is not enough; in the third-person perspective it is a kind of illusion which might be indulged out of sympathy for the weak-minded, which is as much as we can be, only optionally or ironically necessary. The same is true of the first-person perspective if it is rigorously pursued: you cannot say "I am", only "something is" or "appearance appears". The first- and third-person perspectives differ only in the accent given to appearance. In order to get to identity another subject is needed, God or an equivalent. Reality can only be anchored in transcendence, if it is to have a capital R it ought to be a proper name. Identity is a phenomenon of the second-person world. But then, how important is identity after all? Isn't it just a game, the greatest game in town admittedly, but still a game. What is concrete is the fragile particular. Isn't that all the absoluteness you've ever needed? It's pretty surely all you'll ever get.

Purposive frames compete for priority of control in planning and execution of actions, and each such system comes with a first-person story by which it justifies its centrality. Since there are multiple frames all pulling in different directions there is a kind of mediation between them which is itself an I-story but on a higher level. Any frame can be disengaged so that it can be weighed against other frames, which means that the capability of being detached from any "I" is intrinsic to its functional nature. What an "I" is is not just a role you can step into and run with, but also a role you can step out of in response to another kind of message, one that can only come from a more primary "I". Frames pivot on this I-point, because not only does it lend them ultimate permission through its apparent freedom or sovereignty, but it also connects them to all the other "I"s. To disidentify is also to renounce the illusion of autonomy, but doing so is the action of a higher autonomy. You can act with identification, without any explicit awareness of the limits of the current enactment, or you can carry out the same actions in a detached way, with the centre of the "I" held further away from the situation at hand in a more overarching and authoritative frame. The advantage is genuine, but seems largely strategic. The further back the selves go in this sovereign hierarchy the more immune they seem to disidentification. But none of them is. The problem is, what is the point of the whole structure if every self in it, every centre, is only a function with no ontological weight, if they all just melt away?

The "I" is the protagonist of purposeful action, but as purposeful action is woven out of diverse strands and is indefinitely hierarchical and multi-layered, so is the "I". You go for a walk to a favourite café in order to sit for a while and enjoy a cup of good coffee. As you walk along, and the walking is itself a highly complex articulated action, your mind drifts to various things, playing with ideas of experience, with prospects, memories, rehearsals, alternative scripts, etc., all of which can be in some sense exhausted in their meaning by the frame of a polymorphous functionality. But when you are seated before a hot and fragrant brew and you reach out and lift it to your lips what takes over for just a moment is a pure experience of qualia, in which there is no longer an "I" since there is no longer any purpose but just sensory enjoyment, pure relish without judgment. Sometimes it is like this, and when it is it is always a surprise, almost as if you had never tasted coffee before, but not always. To speak of qualia in an authentic sense is not to merely speak off-handedly about the sensory 'feel' of an experience, but to point to something rare and arresting. Isn't something like this implicitly acknowledged in the contemporary obsession with gastronomy, where it sometimes seems as if cuisine has replaced art as the vehicle for transcendence? If this is so then it is necessary to add that connoisseurship, while paying homage to this, is not its proper expression, but in some ways expresses the failed attempt to enlist the experience of qualia as purpose. Consider again what it is that is so intensely pleasurable about hearing a great performance of a musical work. In a mediocre performance you are aware of the notes being played, of their timbre and tone and of how they don't quite attain to sublation into musical form. In a good performance timbre and tone are integrated into the musical form. But in a truly great performance you enter so totally into the musical form that you can re-experience the physical and particular tone of the sound, its pure contingency, on the other side of the music. It need only happen at a few isolated moments, but it produces something like bliss, absolute freedom from the self. This ought to be what is meant by qualia, not this side of the ideal, but beyond it.

There is something comical yet also quite sad about the sight of philosophers and scientists fighting it out about whether the 'hard problem' is even a problem at all. Each side is defending something they cherish against a death blow that would be delivered to it by their opponents: the collapsing of subjectivity, of the first-person perspective, as if that were a real possibility for a subject, or else the collapse of the ultimate verity of a super-human theory. They uphold or dismiss inner experience for the sake of a certain inner experience of their own, their place in a comprehensive world-picture. The sides talk past each other, in each case what is asserted ought to be blindingly obvious but somehow falls short. Those who dismiss the problem seem like those eunuch priests who castrated themselves out of love for their idol, and it is easy to fear for the debasement of a world that would accept their vision of being. Still, there is a kind of non-dual rigour to the anti position. Inner experience is always the experience of someone, and that someone, the local autobiographical self, is elusive, is never to be found at the point from which it was just looking. In the pure patency of being the sense of experience as a subjective something melts away just as surely as it does in the rigorously absolutised third-person perspective. Nevertheless the proponents of the latter retain a priestly relationship to their vaunted reality while the non-dualist merges with it in seamless equanimity.

The notions of truth and of freedom may not be identical but are intimately related. Truth as correspondence demands as an ideal that the system of understanding have as many degrees of freedom as its object. Mind is the name for that subsystem of life that can contain a high degree of freedom in a coherent fashion; freedom that can be deployed as required to model, and thus formulate responses to, challenges of unknown form, innovations in experience, in being. Individual objects, physical objects including the body, have comparatively few degrees of freedom but they exist in a space that has an immense number. The mind as object to itself is less free than the mind as subject; the "I" is far less free than the unknown subject. In fact the mind is daunted by reality, it has less freedom, it fails to respond truly to what it meets, but its truth is not in correspondence but in the ability to acknowledge its own limitations and develop a response in spite of them. The degrees of freedom are not numerical, since some space is reserved for knowing you don't know. As if the degrees of freedom extend into unknown dimensions. Meeting what you don't know how to respond to does not mark a limit but a point at which the mind turns on itself, seeing its limitations allows it to open a new dimension which grows from reflexivity (the sense of an "I') to objectivity (the dissolution of that "I'), you stretch the scope of your knowledge further out, you become more true to the reality in which you find yourself. Mind imposes no limitation on this process and this constitutes its freedom. Whether this is metaphysical or not is beside he point, it is enacted freedom. This is also the process of evolution. It doesn't matter what forms of causality are accepted in theorising this process, only that it can never stop uncovering its own limitations. The mind, which cannot see itself, recognises itself in this process wherever it is encountered.

The first-, second- and third-person perspectives on the world seem to be mutually irreducible, but also locked into a kind of battle for dominance. If that is the case then the third-person perspective would have to be the clear favourite, with the potential of mopping-up or absorbing both of its rivals, which it can barely distinguish from each other. Appearances may be deceptive, however. The third-person perspective, also known as the view from nowhere, is the consensus view, the view from the synergistic group mind, as it were, and so is arguably no view at all. In place of a subject it has an incoherent mob whose main virtue is power, the ability to shout down any opposition without actually being able to hear or respond to the points ventured against it. Its power is undoubtedly real, however, and demands respect, respect which can only be offered by the other two. Strictly held, the third-person perspective is incapable of respect - it deconstructs the "re". The second-person perspective, or personalism, is associated with certain religions, particularly Christianity, and is perhaps the quietest and least insistent of the three. It is actually the only one which can offer some sort of consistent theory of the other two, which appear as two different unbalanced reductions of it, but real possibilities latent within it. Compared to the others, the first-person perspective seems the least mature, the most emotional, seeming to have at its core a certain irreducible protest against reality. It might be equated with a kind of atheistic religiosity, or strand of humanism, but it is not systematically elaborated. It exists more as a pervasive tone in art and culture at all levels from high to low. It contains the tragic view of life and exacts inexplicit allegiance. As against all of these one might propose a fourth perspective, the zeroth-person perspective, corresponding to transcendental subjectivity in Husserl, or to no-mind in Buddhism. The main rival of this position is the second-person perspective, and the battle between these two subtle giants might be the most interesting of all to watch.

Locating the essence of consciousness in the possession of qualia is a wrong track even though it rightly entails that inwardness and first-person perspective are fundamental. It asks too little, however. What if the qualia had no meaning, or if they had no realisable connection to anything real, to anything that conditioned their own possibility? This might represent a kind of raw or wild subjectivity, but it would be truly epiphenomenal - an inessential addition to whatever is really going on. Prioritising qualia as the key to consciousness begs the question of a bottom-up approach, where the higher function of understanding would be one more fragile emergent built on top of another. What if consciousness is more integral to understanding, that is to a concrete relationship to what is, and subjective feeling were an abstraction of that? Say that understanding were the true epiphenomenon, something added on to a blind but open-endedly versatile process of accommodation. Even in this case it would seem that the space of understanding, its entire repertoire of possible moves would be delimited by the current state of the process. There would be no possibility that understanding could bear an original relation to the truth, to the very openness of that open-ended process. Here the process of accommodation would be like the elaboration of an axiom system, one that was forced to grow through concrete and contingent encounters with its own limitations in which understanding played no role. This might be the case, but doesn't seem to be. Understanding has its own processes of self-elaboration and these seem to lead the embodied process rather than lagging behind it - or at the least would be coextensive with it. What drives understanding is a sort of intellectual thirst which is far in excess of its requirements. So again, understanding might be an abstraction or reduction of a kind of pure intelligence which we occasionally encounter in a mode we can only call super-conscious. The question might be rephrased as asking how deep into its ground the roots of consciousness extend. If you stretch the evolutionary paradigm far enough does it eventually become identical to the emanationist one?

No narration or representation can ever capture a single conscious moment in its entirety. The moment is never reduced to definiteness by either internal or external reflection, if you include, as you must, the semi-conscious fringe of that living moment. As against this it might be argued that a work of art which appears to be a sort of representation of a lived moment (as some but not all works are) is effectively a description of that moment, and while admittedly not mapping to a uniquely defined experience, also contains an inexhaustible fringe of latent meanings. A good interpreter can unfold reams of content in a reading of a work so that we do not feel they are making things up but pointing to things we knew but did not know we knew. This kind of exposition creates intellectual pleasure akin to that of a well-turned essay in phenomenology. Be that as it may, it is a case of linking, by way of elucidation in the most general sense, of one kind of experience to another of a quite different kind, both equally unfathomable. Again, it might be urged that the core of the experience is in a few very simple and under-determined elements and that all the infinite richness ascribed to the subjective instantiation of those elements is a sort of fabulation, after the fact, which is put together precisely in order to support this folk-psychological theory of the ineffability of subjective experience. This is probably correct, but the fabulation cannot be viewed as either necessarily false and misleading or as completely separate from the simply determined event of inner and/or outer perception. It is another way of talking about interior and implicit commentary, which is the same as what was previously called the fringe of the experience. The experience, always my experience, is neither the perceptual event nor the commentary, but something that hovers between them. Behind the attempt to make this clear is the difference between what for you is the unsatisfactory identification with the protagonist in a movie and the almost satisfactory identification with the protagonist in a novel - and then applying these two paradigms to self-reflection.

It is strange that inner identity poses a problem while the identity of objects in the world apparently does not. The world of experience is held together, or synthesised, by some sort of ideal structure because the contents of experience are exclusively ideal entities, subjective components, and so what connects them must also be ideal, and hence potentially transparent. A feeling, a thought, even a pain are representations of some kind, they are objects of a consciousness. The pain may be insistent and overwhelming, but it can be momentarily forgotten when something else fills attention, or it can be damped and grow distant after a drug is administered - it all happens to you. Put in the crudest terms, experience is what fills the mind, and what fills the mind are ideas. You can't directly experience a stone, the stone itself is, as they say, noumenal. It comes to you via your senses which require a certain distance from their objects. Unlike things in the world, which are woven into a complex web of interrelations, which allows them to underpin each other, ideas are self-contained. Ideas link together loosely according to logical or associational categories, but first they need to be co-present to the same synthetic gaze. How it comes about that these ideal components of experience can be together in a shared field of experience is not obvious at all, and the fact they belong to the same physical brain and hence can share in the natural self-identity of physical things does not solve the problem. To take this line would be to surreptitiously dissolve the division between substrate and emergent, to use that jargon. Still, this question is very hard to formulate, the language is slippery and circles back on itself, is inherently question-begging. Is it a real question or not? The simplest way to resolve it is to do away with consciousness altogether. Bring down the Cartesian theatre and watch all the rest crumble, the famous qualia melt into air and so on and so on. Until a little voice asks, "for whom did you perform these feats? to whom does it matter?" and the whole thing starts over again.    

A past event retained in long-term memory needs a process of recall, it needs to be indexed in some way. When it is hard to remember a certain name, say one that goes with the face of a certain cinema actor, you are aware of lodging a request with the librarian of memory, you pay for this request by making efforts to bring up any associations you can find with the idea of the name, and then after a certain time the name itself is delivered to you - as if it were like a book that was stored off-site. All long-term personal memory seems to be subject to a similar process of retrieval and possibly what you receive back from the librarian is not a recording of the event but only a text, a script which enables you to activate the memory as if it were a scene to be played, and you are naturally vague about parts of the setting and need to make further requests if there is a need to clarify them. Such memories are distinct from spontaneous or Proustian memories, which may be more vivid and integrated, but in the normal course of things it is only the ownership and indexing of these memories that is spontaneous - which means that they are already incorporated in your self-system. Most of this self-system is unconscious; if parts of it are broken off, as can doubtless happen for various reasons, you are likely to not notice until you go looking for them. It is as if certain rarely-visited wings in your mental mansion have been sealed off. The possession of yourself in short-term memories seems to be different, these are parts of your current workspace. Consider the difference between listening to an unfamiliar and complex musical work when you are tired and when you are refreshed. You know that it can be construed but in the former case you are aware of your want of power to do so, you lack the abundance of self that enables you to retain a direct connection to the immediate past, as if this connection were made out of still living but attenuated versions of yourself, ontological reverberations. What is you generates ripples in the stuff of mind, and that stuff can vary in quality from moment to moment.

Say that an atom of experience contains, or is made out of intentionalities. To borrow some terminology, say that there are anterior and posterior intentionalities, corresponding to noesis or subject-pole and noema or object-pole. In addition there are other kinds of intentionality which fill the function previously assigned to horizon. These allow significant moments to combine into larger unities and also express the relation of each moment to its fundamental ground. What all these kinds of intentionality have in common is that they bear some amount of (usually latent) content, and that they cannot subsist by themselves. They exist as components of the smallest possible unities or atoms of experience. Why would you want to propose such an analysis? Only in order to respond to the mysterious fact that my experience at every now is vivid and seems entirely filled up, seems complete in itself, but is immediately superceded by another quite different but equally self-contained and totalised moment, is pushed off stage as soon as it appears. Every moment by itself is so bright, so present, so entire that it seems as if it is the final culmination of Time, and yet every moment instantly passes, passes before I have been able to take full possession of it. There is the impression of having been duped by time, that it has played a mirror game with me, that when I reach out to grasp its gift it turns out to be only a reflection, but I can't stop believing in the gift, can't stop trusting time. If there are atoms of experience then oughtn't experience to be granular? The standard answer to this is to point to the cinematic image, not merely the impression of smoothness produced by the frame-rate, but also the effectiveness of good editing in concealing the jump-cuts, or revealing them, but only in a way that is subsumed in a greater unity. A deeper answer is to point to the fact that the putative observer of such granularity would be itself granular in just the same way and so can't witness granularity. Relations between atoms of experience produce the generalised experiences of time, space, embodiment and logical or semantic relatedness depending on the kinds of molecular or narrative experiences they constitute, but out of all of these the temporal relation is most fundamental. Moments succeed each other in internal time and yet join together to produce the conventional experience of thinking, feeling and willing. The question is how this synthesis is possible, how it produces the experience of an undivided subject. Two successive moments of hearing a sound, say that of a passing car, are held together in their original order as part of the retentional intentionality of a third moment, where as freshly experienced (in short-term memory) they can be reinhabited, are known to be able to be reinhabited, which means that their anterior intentionalities are identified while their posterior intentionalities inevitably diverge. What is mysterious is this peculiar identity of the anterior components - perhaps this is the famous Kantian 'transcendental unity of apperception' which here seems to be transcendental in precisely the sense that it cannot be engendered by any ways of cleverly combining posterior intentionalities.

Moods and states seem all too easy to explain on the basis of brain chemistry - you feel this way because of low or high dopamine, for example, but these explanations evade the issue even if they can prescribe effective actions. Is it possible to give a purely internal account of how these local but pervasive conditions operate? That is, an account good enough to actually bring about a desirable change in mood or state. You might try to talk someone you know out of their depression or anxiety, because you see no objective reason for these feelings, because you think you can provide an alternative point of view in which your friend appears in a better light than that with which they view themselves. You think, if they trusted you they might take on the perspective you are offering, just as in a discussion about a more disinterested subject perspectives can be shared and modified. This rarely works. You can't persuade anyone, you can't even persuade yourself, even if you rehearse earnestly some event in your own history where you seem once to have made such a change. All such attempts dissolve into the relationship which then reinforces the state. Without understanding what states are, they at least seem to be powerful attractors which hold their integrity in spite of a plethora of new contents in the stream of experience. Moods and states don't fit easily into the intentional paradigm of noesis, noema and horizon. They seem to be rooted in the ways you have learned to internally hold your body, staying upright, toilet training, refraining from vomiting, crying, yelling, drooling, leering etc., self-respect, decorum - they draw on the non-negotiability of these basic foundations. To shift a mood often seems to require the intervention of a moment when you are released from the body, in sleep, or sex or extreme effort - opportunities to reconfigure the way in which you inhabit the body, in certain energetic figures difficult to name. Moods often linger on past the time when their somatic underpinnings have changed, and then some chance event, something heard or seen with unexpected clarity, suddenly crystallises a massive change in subjectivity.

The consciousness in dreamless sleep is not intentional, since it has no content, intentionality and content being coextensive, unless we admit that its content is no-content. If there is a desire to find a pure intentional consciousness prior to content it resolves into the problem of understanding how changes in content take place moment to moment within what is manifestly the same subjectivity. If a moment of consciousness is the activation of a unity in division of seer, seeing and seen, or of noesis, noema and horizon, it would seem as if all the hooks in the momentary structure are fully occupied and therefore it is not clear how the next moment of awareness can bring a new content to the same seer, or to a different but somehow equivalent seer. (And in that case how is the equivalence accomplished? How is it proposed, accepted, certified?) The obvious answer is that the prior moment is included in the horizon of the succeeding one. If this is not just begging the question then each moment of consciousness must include its own objectification, must be its own implicit other, since how else could it be identified with the fading memory of itself. Mostly it seems as if there are two kinds of intentionality, a normal non-reflexive kind that serves its turn and immediately falls into oblivion as when we carry on without explicit awareness of ourselves, and a special reflexive kind in which the noema is augmented with an awareness of the act, as when we are functioning 'mindfully'. This may be a matter of degree of salience, as if we are always mindful but only consider it in this way when the augmented component is above a certain threshold. Another approach is to consider that just as there are atoms of consciousness there are also molecules, in which intentional moments are chained together in various ways, as for example, tail to tail, or head to tail. It is hard to escape the conclusion that every moment of consciousness is very much more than itself, as if it includes the totality, but curled up in hidden dimensions.

 

It is exactly the same consciousness in waking, dreaming and in deep sleep - there is a switch deep in the brain that points to each in turn - but they congeal so differently into what seems a coherent pattern in each case. Think of the three as different resonances excited by the same wave, at any time all three are activated but only one predominates while the other two recede into the wings. In dream there is an awareness of being both character in and author of the play, of stagings created in response to a continually changing pattern of stresses; thinking is fast and effortless, events are light and pivot instantly, while in waking reality there is a sense of being trapped in one slowly evolving predicament, you are often pitted against your own mind and its flaws, you face impossibilities and are hopelessly determined, yet here the volitional joystick is placed in your hands and most of your energy goes into trying to manage it. In dreamless sleep the burden of selfhood is lifted and the state of being is immensely refreshing, all is dark and sweet, value itself is realised, and you part from this mode with some regret, there is no choice as to when it ends. Now imagine that these three are simultaneous, that you never leave one for another but merely shift focus. You can only do this exercise in the waking state, it is the only state where there is a knowledge of all three and some freedom in relation to them. Doesn't this describe what you have always known? Doesn't it answer to the peculiar unfathomability of waking moments, their endless non-coincidence with whatever descriptions you can give of them?  

As to the question of whether an AI can have desires as distinct from specifically provisioned goals or a persistent tendency to certain cantankerous behaviours that might lead us to use intentional language in relation to it, it seems that this ought to belong with the 'hard problem': to desire something, properly speaking, ought to entail at least the same degree of inwardness as to have 'what if feels like' to experience something. The two overlap: it makes sense to speak of what it feels like to have a certain desire - so much so that we might distinguish really having that desire from merely thinking, imagining or just claiming to have that desire, to say nothing of distinguishing intensities of desire, in terms of how they feel - and conversely a desire is often expressed as a wish to feel what a certain experience is like - so it is at least valid to ask whether gratifying that desire in some sort of virtual reality is 'as good as' gratifying it in 'real life'. This is also why it is certainly questionable whether very young infants have desires rather than just some kind of very outwardly signalled need, but since observing the convulsions of a dissatisfied infant produces for us the most emphatic image of what we identify as desire it is natural that an account is called for of how this monumental state of auto-affection is destined to give rise to self-conscious desire in all its deeply non-linear forms. Desire then, stands with 'qualia' as a definite sort of 'thing' which seems to be produced by our embodied minds or brains, although not at first sight assimilable to other objective processes. If not explained away then it needs to be explained, but then it is a phenomenon which can't be pulled apart from the experiencer of that phenomenon. This is where the difficulty lies, to form a theory of the experiencer, or  more broadly of the observer. To say it is an illusion is massively begging the question; the observer is already latent in the term 'theory' and there is nothing to say that this theorising observer is in any way separate from the observer implied in the the term 'qualia' or indeed in 'desire'.