People speak of desire as if it were a talisman to ward off repression, inauthenticity, futility and regret, or else they speak of the desire to desire, roguishly suggesting that all desire is more or less of this reflexive form. The idea is perhaps a rather passive inflection of the equally reflexive will to power. There is a certain decadence in these forms, a failure of appetite certainly, but still more a failure of the surrender of appetite, a fixation on the cupio, as in cupio ergo sum, I want therefore I am. If it were just a matter of existing, you could exist more keenly through refraining from wanting, or withholding desire, but this cuts no mimetic ice. Desire enlists you in its care for its goal, but once attained it seems to brush you off. If you long to repeat the experience is that longing more authentically 'yours' or is it merely the larva of spent desire.

To have a self is to have purposes; the self is actualised in fulfilling its goals, and does not exist outside of such actualisation. Does that make the process conscious? Is there a kind of feedback loop between goals and abilities, predispositions and power? The autonomy required here is limited to the context, to the choice of means and not of ends, and surely this is at most a narrow and dream-like consciousness. The relation of desires to purposes is almost that of goals to means. A goal can always be revealed as only a means to another goal, at which point the first goal loses its desirous character, it becomes substitutable and empty, that is, not inhabited by any subjective substance. Goals can be more or less pure, irreducible to ends, not deflectable or distractable - and above a certain threshold are identified as desires. But desires are also fleeting, contagious, aery, fantastic. The object of desire, drenched in the promise of happiness, is hallucinatory, but the object seems only to instantiate desire and never to fully express it. This object is subject to so many contingencies which can act in unpredictable ways. Is it attainable or unattainable; is someone else, some alter-ego, currently enjoying it, or has it never been attained; is it enviable or contemptible, and so on? You step up to the object of desire with fear and trembling, but with the conviction that through it you will encounter your more original self. 

Complex phenomena which include a form of reflexivity are not always modeled as minds, for example the stock market. It is often said to behave as if it has a mind of its own, but this is not an attribution that sticks, it is sometimes useful similie at most. This perhaps is because it lacks individuality or mortality, these being closely related or overlapping notions. A machine, which has mortality of a sort, is seen as having more individuality than a social organisation which is a far more complex, self-reflective and hierarchically organised structure. Social organisations are admittedly also mortal, but unlike machines they don't leave corpses behind, they don't have the pathos of mortality. Is that the difference, or is it just the collective nature of organisations, their relative immortality, or their structural inability to relate in a one to one way to individuals - unlike a car, say? What seems to be behind these speculations is the circular idea that mind, or self, is what appears as mind-like to other minds. Alternatively, you might say that a peculiar pathos of mind is its desire to find an objective representation of itself. Mind is what desires but fails to represent itself. Consciousness is something else, since one thing that is clear about it is that it has no pathos. It is too crude to equate it with transparency and appearance, with undisclosedness. Consciousness, were it a thing, would be the least disclosed of things. It is what makes appearance possible, under the promptings of desire, without ever appearing. Consciousness is not self-conscious, and it is also the only 'thing' that makes identity possible without having an identity.

The relationship between consciousness and desire could use some clarification. In regarding an interacting system of non-conscious entities you might speak of persistent tendencies but not properly of desire, although this term could easily arise in rough descriptive speech. A machine might seem to have a desire when it thwarts you in new and unexpected ways, it's desire being a peculiarly reversed caricature of your own. For an embodied consciousness speaking on its own behalf, however, consciousness and desire are taken to function in a generally symbiotic fashion. If consciousness is appearance and transparency then its native idiom is instrumental rationality; the goals are supplied by desire and if these remain consistent with the means employed to realise them, then the two systems almost become one. Thirst might furnish a simple example. The need for hydration becomes salient as a conscious desire for a drink and so you set about acquiring one, with the result, if successful, that the need is satisfied and ceases to impress itself on you. Because the process for acquiring the drink is highly context dependent it makes sense for it to go through consciousness so that high level planning and execution can be brought to bear. Life-forms regarded as too primitive to 'possess' consciousness, however, often demonstrate surprisingly creative agency in satisfying their needs, and observing this produces a sense of wonder in the observer, as if somehow consciousness and desire were impossibly present in these organisms, or else on reflection, prompting an estrangement of the observer's own desires from his or her consciousness. So, begin with this sense that desire (the collective term for desires) has a mind of its own independent of consciousness, and then add that self-consciousness initially arises as ancillary to this unconscious mind of desire. 

Every identity is unconscious; identities are borrowed from the world and the world is unconscious. All the consciousness in the world is borrowed from you, but identities are too small to contain it. Or rather they are too large, there's no telling how deep they run. They requisition the world and each other, they grow through failure as much as success, they are equivalent, or better they are adjoint, to desire. So, desire is unconscious! Shouldn't that be obvious? 

Flights of fancy might make it seem complex, that it ought rightly to be complex, but there is no excuse for the desultory and inconsequential form of these musings other than its utter simplicity. Why else tire out the mind than to attempt to knock out the persistent error that makes it a result rather than the origin of origins. Self is just the mind's idiom for what is, which can't be pointed to because it is everywhere and everything. Of course you could be barking up the wrong tree, but it's all you've got, so onward on your crooked way!

It depends on what it you are trying to explain. It makes sense to inquire into how experience is put together, which is as much as to investigate the conjoined life of mind and body in their conjoined worlds, but does it make sense to ask what experience is, how there can be any such thing, or to ask whether ontological predicates can properly be applied to it? Among the phenomena of experience consciousness can be considered to play a subsidiary role. What happens is determined by unconscious forces and unconscious thought processes, consciousness comes along for the ride, or presides like a constitutional monarch, a virtual centre of sovereignty. A Samkhya-like separation of Self from mind suggests itself; metaphysically it is quite incoherent, but pragmatically, or heuristically, it is quite effective at making sense of things. Personalities are emergent properties of mind, but only one is endowed with consciousness. It is ineffective but for itself, the others are effective and for it. The structure of the court is mirrored in every family and corporation, but in an imperfect way.

Not just in thought but in comportment as well you can exist in a kind of superpostion, as if you are pursuing two or more lines at the same time. You seem as multiform as all the threads that pass through you. As inactual, these are all forms of reservation, or of hedging, of arbitrage, the engagements with the world by which you serially point to yourself. In actuality however, in the very present moment, you are always one, but a one that can't be grasped as object. It is if the present is an aperture so fine that only one thing can pass through it at a time, like the neck of an hourglass. Thinking deceives you into beleiving that you share in its pluralistic nature, but even the act of thought as it happens is utterly single. It is impossible to think the nature of this living unity even though it is your constant experience, it is so incredibly fine, below thought, or above it. A single brain, we are told, can under certain pathological conditions, 'contain' or express two distinct consciousnesses, but consciousness itself can never be doubled. Perhaps this is why the complexity of complex experiences can be such a pleasure in itself; you marvel at the ease by which consciousness as pure presence synthesises everything given to it. The Self does its work without any expenditure of energy, which makes it quite foreign to the brain. 

A = X'? There are two ways of thinking about the 'solution' to this. First, you can question the linearity assumption on which it is based. Is it true that (A + B)' = A'+ B'? A moment's reflection shows that the answer is no. A and B, unreduced lived experiences can cancel each other out. They do not add by agglutination but by resolution of their individual tensions; they add vectorially. A'and B' however, the reduced, detached, eidetic versions of the same experiences, never cancel but accumulate; they have no directedness, (unless they are all seen to be directed the same way, as say, Ego to Other), and they do not have negatives; they are like positive scalars, except that they are still complexly multidimensional. This slightly paradoxical fact of experience, where the derivation could be taken more generally to stand for any internal or intrinsic representation, could be seen as crucial to aesthetics.
A second approach would be to accept that there is a solution X of the form X = A + B + .. + E, and to note that B, C, ... E represent more and more narrow focused experiences of the actuality of A, so that X is the hyper-actual form of A. This is at the very least an ideal of experience, and you might observe that this is what is aspired to, rightly or wrongly, in those various forms of intensification of experience by placing it at the edge of death.

Begin with the reduction of A to A'. [Perhaps this means to view everything as qualia, even the very functionality taken to be the complement of them, hence more a general significance of the notion, qualia than being merely abstracted from perception?] A' is the reduced form of A, so something has been excluded or subtracted from A, and despite the fact that A' is regarded as being phenomenologically complete, what it is that has been subtracted is also a possible experience. So we can write B = A - A', or equivalently A = A' + B. B, however, as a pure experience, also has a reduced form, B', and so we have a C = B - B', or A = A' + B' + C. The distance between B and B' will be narrower than that between A and A', less will being required for effecting the second reduction, more intellect perhaps and of a subtle kind. Continuing in this way we will eventually reach a point, say E, for which E = E'. This acknowledges that the possibility of reduction is intrinsic to experience, and E, being pure intelligence, subsumes its own possibilities. Thus A = A' + B' + C' + D' + E'. Does this then mean that the equation A = X' has the solution X = A + B + C + D + E? What would such an equation mean? That a fully embodied experience can also be seen as the reduct of a super-real experience? That ordinary experience is thin and dream-like when placed next to its fully awakened prototype?

The reduct A' of an experience A might be regarded as the outcome of a phenomenological reduction, the identical experience as retained after the suspension of the natural attitude, or it might be seen more simply as the experience undergone from a detached position with all judgment suspended, as the same experience disidentified, viewed or reflected with the understanding that it is wholly within consciousness, that every transcendental element in it is so because of a prior immanence. In all these broader senses, or their overlapping, the reduction is not only a technicality of phenomenology but an intrinsic aspect of experience in general, corresponding to its reflectibility, or its significance. The question then arises as to what it is that is changed, what is A - A'? This is undoubtedly a possible object of reflection, and itself an intimate component of experience.

Biography, or your sad history, sets tight bounds to what you can experience and to what you can draw out of what you experience. You are aware that the past is what has been spun out of your bowels, and that you are responsible for every last element of it, including all that you have forgotten or repressed, and yet you cannot convince yourself that you are this unfolding, only that you cause it appear by something that isn't a means, that leaves no trace, and that is the same whether you are happy or sad, good or bad, solid or melting away. It is not presence, and yes, it is one of the first errors to take it to be so. Presence is transitive, is presence to, and so ineluctably tied to the process of the world. And to speak of the world is to mean the world you'll leave, the complement of the non-biographical fact of non-existence. The abyss only seems to exist in relation to the edge from where you imagine falling into it, but that edge, that brink, is nothing at all - the world is only world, impossible to deny, and so is that nameless other of the world, itself and impossible to oppose. What you would hastily call presence is as well named death. When there is no relation there is no opposition.

You might say it was a series of stuffy little scenes jammed end to end, the system engaged without strain or slack, bearing the bearable until the morning's restored stock of fuel was used up and you came down to the shaggy ends at the bottom of the woodbox, ordinary to the point of extinction, just what the city person flees from into enjoyment or entertainment, some vicarious open already closed on repetition, future funneled frictionlessly into past, just more of the same. But whatever you say about it was not the way it was experienced, nothing ever happens to you, it happens in you, which is why you never feel any separation or any surprise. This is what's so dream-like about waking life, that it's your life is just a figure of speech, in one of those eternally stuttering attempts at explanation that never get anywhere being just the dancing reflection of the ripples mistaken for the effects of a cause.

Paradise worlds, worlds of desire. But these are marred simply by the knowledge that someone has already been there, not merely in the same place, but in the exact same state as evoked by that place, that scene, that tableau of pure gratification. Somebody, even you yourself, enjoyed it before you and moved on, no ultimate satisfaction was achieved. It leaves a shadow on the even the juiciest anticipations. Oh, but the world has been a massive fireworks of desires cultivated and gratified, the prospect infinitely rich and colourful and tawdry, dwarfed only by the sombre fanglings of suffering. There's nothing new in this direction, but that doesn't stop you from rushing in. The persistent hope is that some destined spark of the eternal will arise within the fire of pure enjoyment, enjoyment that goes beyond what an anyone could have, that cancels yourself as anyone, that is the rediscovery of absolute uniqueness, beyond symbolisation. There is nothing more common than this, it is at the core of that murderous entitlement constitutive of desire. It must be pure illusion, illusion at its purest, you've seen through it a thousand times, made bitter ironies of it the morning after, but it has never stopped you. The argument from desire renders your worldly wisdom foolish. 

Has anyone ever succeeded in getting it down in words? Any philosopher or poet or blessed spirit, to say what it is to be in time, to be conscious, to taste, to see, to feel, to know, to say exactly why it isn't obvious, why there should even be a question? Or perhaps the answer is right on the surface but only lacks a reader, lacks the reader in you to recognise it? You wouldn't even consider throwing yourself into this abyss if you didn't feel it silently screaming at you in each moment - making each moment. Is it a matter of lacking something or of something too much? How is not-knowing possible? Is all knowing impugned, just a semblance of something else? But then, semblance? Most likely it's that the question has never been correctly framed, that the addressee for the answer has never fully emerged. Who or what is it that could recognise at once the composition of this? What kind of terrifying satisfaction is at stake? Where in the dream is the dreamer, what tyger, what monstrosity?

There is a bitter sweet alienation in the recognition and recollection of an old role of yours now being played by a new face. You never gave it up entirely, never relinquished it or said farewell, it just drifted out from under you, or you might have thought you were holding on to it, but with the cunning of time you failed to notice the change of tenor. Everyone around you is moving at the same speed and so you have the illusion of standing still. But that the roles are oddly constant, that detached feature of the outgrown world, old hopes that can still stab you with longing, float up out of the dark, is a sign that somehow the culture is intact, slowly transforming according to its own laws. It hangs in space like a sort of coral, an organism that consumes minds like plankton and builds itself out of them. But all of us are streaming through it, from one end to another, leaving the faintest traces of our passage behind.

Whatever it is that is real, you are that, not as you take yourself to be, which can only be a passing dream. Whoever impresses their reality upon you, ravishing you with a stronger current, has only borrowed from what you've neglected to wield. You can't know, can't find out, whatever becomes is only a dream, bow wave in the imagined wake of time. You, the giving birth to the moment, now. You can't see but only the dear personage tattered and torn, and it's the not seeing, the not space and not time. Space and time are for the birds, without a reflection, without a correction, strictly once and for all, look before you see, the wind shattering wing.

That which is written falls curling like a rind from the writing. If you imagine that what it evokes in the reader is akin to the active presence writing, then this is because that presence is rooted in effects of reading, in a decomposing, dismembered mass of reading that has never been remembered until not even now. What you imagine must be quite wrong, because what can be read is the same words whether you are here or not, is indifferent to your passing; your death has already happened in it, as it is here and now on the reverse of the glass. But the writing is what fails of absolute being in this which is absolute being and refuses time, refuses time by using time, playing it like a concession to the sun and the moon, to the body and its needs, its fatal numberings. The writing is cardinal while you are ordinal, placed end to end, measured, limited, inaccessible, struggling to speak like a paper kiss struggles to enact desire, not because it is too little but too much, this vastness signalling from nowhere with black light.  

As your experience this is accompanied with a knowing reflection of itself which is not explicit but made up out of a complex coordination of contextual know-hows and anchoring references which constitute the positioning and orienting background, the contextual feed. Because this is not an ordinary object of scrutiny the language used to describe it is convoluted and abstract, but it is so in proportion to how ordinary and unnoticed this accompaniment is. There is nothing to stop you turning attention to it, but also nothing to draw attention to it either, as if it was designed to be ignored. Of course the line between the action and the accompaniment is blurred, but it has to do with the kinds of content that are taken to be self-reflections. When you do or suffer something, anything, there is a reflection of the idea of your process in the background of the central or discursive awareness of that moment. There is a kind of ontological deceit in this reflecting structure, which is in excess of its function, which appears to be simply to underwrite flexibility of response to unpredictability. In having to deal with a world in which interpretation has equal status as event this kind of multiple relay structure needed to arise. No one said anything about Being, and yet Being imposed itself, as if through a loophole in the program. You only have intellectual blindsight to go on here, and you have to surrender all motives. Given all of this, can you pick the pearl out of the oyster without using your hands, or the golden needle out of the haystack?

In desiring something, some X, it is not that I want this X to come about indifferently, but to come about for me; the X in 'I want X' is me enjoying X, and even something more. Desire is as much a form of cogito for the desirer as self-awareness is for the thinker, and the self-evidence of qualia for the perceiver or sufferer (of pain or truth or essence.) Each of these in its own way eludes functionalist reduction. In every case the apparent level of the enjoying subject is different, but since this personage is never present in any mode his defining difference does not share in the necessity. If anything is functional it may indeed be just this difference. What makes the desirer the desirer appears to be a kind of entitlement, not so much a spiritual as a moral error to be straightened out by a certain kind of therapy. And indeed other kinds of therapy, philosophical for example, have been suggested as a cure for the other kinds of subject as well. In this way it is recognised that what escapes functionalist reduction is always ready to make trouble, is always in excess in some way, is impossible to satisfy or to confine within a rule or ethos. Begin by asking whether the fire - this necessarily imprecise term emphasising its absolute absence of memory - activating each of these modes of the most ordinary experiences is one or many. 

There are elements in you that want to speak and other elements that wish to remain silent. The trick is keep the ones that want to talk quiet and coax the silent ones into saying an unmotivated word. But what about the one who proposes such a strategy? A loudmouth, naturally. 

In waking life you are the character, but in dreams you are the scenarist. The character, by nature incomplete, being in default of understanding himself, wants to assemble some basic terms with which to reconcile desires and responsibilities, and so gain a working sense of his legacies, what is received and what is handed on, which would make the way forward clear enough for now. He wishes to proceed without leaving himself behind, to meet himself at the next turning. Only a novelistic imagination can deal with the complexities, with the weird logic by which contingencies accumulate, entailed by the simplest decisions through the multiple points of view and parallel unfoldings and discarded identities that bear on any purposive action no matter how simple. As a character he is necessarily half-blind, but the whole picture is felt to exist somewhere, only not in any one moment, and must finally be reconciled, one way or another. The novel is the idea that this can be done, that a speakable sense rules in the procession of scenes. It is an idea of the dreamer's who seems to be composing his own play, born out of the very light of the mind. You are not your own author, but you believe that authorship exists and prevails over every failure.

But who's experience? To speak of experience as if it were the thing going on smacks of the the kind of inauthentic phraseology involved when people attempting detachment, or enlightenment signalling, say disingenuously, "experience is happening". This is not it at all, if anything is happening it is you. That you are the last thing you want to put into words doesn't mean you're not the first thing, unimaginably first - and that's precisely the problem, it can't be imagined, even as that is exactly what you imagine you are doing. This problem should not be solved, don't even pretend to solve it.

Weather conditions not conducive to the sprouting of any seeds, time breathing shards of dry wind, but words once put down are locked into their sockets. They fall short of whatever it is that puts them there, but what's so interesting is precisely the one who is never expressed, that salty rim of life that comes up just at the edge of silence. The silent aftermath, just before the immense banality of journeying rises up again like a fetid tide and submerges all sense. For all your bitterness you've never been bitter enough to awaken it, to stab hard, once and for all, just in that momentary pause of withdrawal, that fleeting reserve, where endless vanity exposes its soft underbelly and which others see so much more clearly than you ever could. Dressed up in this life, even if it more than a little shabby, as if you had every right to step out on the stage, in the golden slanting light of an afternoon, and blow your bubbles, or whatever it is that you persist in doing with such doggish persistence. 

A double movement: on one side artificial intelligences becoming increasingly sentient and responsive, and on the other the secrets of human consciousness either revealed or dissolved by the steady encroachment of neuroscience. What is at stake is the moral substance. Since there is (apparently) no (longer any) other basis for morality than subjective substance, the question arises as to what level of synthetic mind is required for this to be recognised as present, or alternatively at what level of plasticity in neural manipulation, say the engineering of memory?, does its presence or absence become irrelevant. Is the suffering subject irreducible in essence? How could this be anything more than a superstition when the intensity, instantiation and duration of said suffering is precisely quantifiable and its effects reversible? To say nothing of the moral emotions and the social matrix in which they arise. These question are just the most salient parts of the problem of the status of experience in the dawning age of synthesis. It makes no sense, but the two shores are gradually drawing nearer, and there is no sign that their movement can be stopped. The only weak point is the putative observer of the phenomenon.