It's strange that when Husserl intiated phenomenology with the epoché, the 'bracketting away' of all the ontological anchoring of the 'natural attitude' - a sort of Cartesian doubt-lite - he was cavalierly dismissing the most interesting and mysterious aspect of experience - as if it was a simple modification of view which anyone would know how to carry out! - and condemning his followers to a sort of cross-eyed mental contortion - however cleverly they may have later attempted to restore said natural attitude by subsequently reassembling it from the other side. It could be argued that Heidegger's contribution was to attempt to reinvent phenomenology without the epoché - and then veering too far in the direction of worshipping being - but leaving that aside, it seems worth wondering just what it is that Husserl tried to bracket away, and why it seems on the face of it such a simple (indeed natural!) thing to do, in thought. Here it seems that it is not a matter of applying a thought to experience as if it were a filter, or something like a histologist's stain, but of a certain inner gesture. It is as if you had been leaning on something for support for so long that you had no awareness of doing so, and you were told to shift your weight slightly so as to feel it, but without relinquishing that support. What does the weight stand for in this analogy? Is it the coming together of a mass and a gravity? And why is it so natural in that it pervades all 'ordinary' experience? A sort of covert and immediate ascription of reality to the world out there - operational in every waking moment as a grounding taken-for-grantedness of the real. It doesn't matter whether the realm of being you concern yourself with is inner or outer, this odd twist of giving reality to it works in the same way. It is a gesture so habitual that we believe it to be indispensible, and yet it is only a gesture, a sepration from ourselves that we then seek to overcome, but only by failing to overcome it.

All the things you say fail to snare anything real, but ripple out and are lost in the strictures of care that pass through you like waves that spread in every direction forging space. To get right up close to the thing words fail, and your faith in words, all you have, has to go too. The thing is wording, like some babbling spring, you've never come close to guessing what these reflections are of. Not a face or an eye or a hand, but great grinning images that loom up out of the mind's secret mirror. Just take a single step and leave behind what you can't carry. It's not a problem, there's nothing that has to come along, not even this. 

Everyone that you've known at all well has been of above average intelligence, and most probably in the top quartile or quintile at the least. The world of the averagely intelligent is remote from you, except perhaps at the gym. Intelligence, that is, IQ, is normally distributed, so that for every superior person in your milieu there is roughly speaking an equivalently inferior person somewhere in the population. Of course the worlds of the bright and the dull are far from mirror images of each other, and there is no causal relation between the two, but in some sense they are interdependent in that your world could not be what it is without being braced, as it were, against that other world. If you stayed where you were but the mean IQ moved up or down, or the standard deviation narrowed or broadened, you would find yourself in a very different world. Contemporary utilitarians have jettisoned the idea of a roughly quantifiable happiness for that of a roughly quantifiable life-worth, as in the (metaphysically doubtful) phrase 'a life worth living'. But can you ever know if your life is 'worth living'? Imagine someone whose entire life is one of deeply rewarding altruism, but where the limits of their circle of care only extends as far as their own community, which, it turns out, can only exist because of the enslaving and oppression of another far more numerous community. You might say that while on a subjective whole-of-life assessment their life is eminently worth living, objectively, since it would have been better for them not to have existed at all, their life was not worth the living. It depends on how far the circle of empathy extends, and this is a matter of epistemology and therefore somewhat arbitrary and subject to indefinite revision. An alien intelligence may be aware of interdependent forms of suffering that no human mind can grasp. All of which is to say that nothing in experience can ever serve to refute the nihilist proposition that it would have been far better never to have existed at all. The same argument admittedly also works in reverse. Suffering is as inconclusive as happiness, but it is rather more persuasive. 

What happens when you are born, when consciousness begins? Isn't like a light suddenly being switched on? It's not in nothing, not in nowhere, it lights up a stage that is already set, even if not much is yet revealed, many things are in place that will only make sense later, when the performance begins, the actors. But when was it set up? That happened before, in the dark, no one was there to see, it was in preparation. But surely that's the real beginning? The stage-hands knew what to do. They arranged the props, put down chalk marks. It's not consciousness but if it makes no sense without consciousness then in some sense it is so already, it is only there to be seen, has no other being. When did it really begin, when was the point that separated nothing from something? Nothing is infinite possibility, something is determination, the ruling out of almost all of those possibilities. And death, the extinguishing of the light, the empty set, then the set is dismantled, then the theatre is torn down, then the place where it once was is erased, and the 'was' too, the space, the time, wiped away like a dream. Who knows but the witness, the infinite emptiness witnessing itself without consciousness, unchanged. 

Religion could generally, and only in a somewhat circular fashion, be defined as the determination of the subject by metaphysics. Metaphyisics, understood as the ideal elaboraton of being, or Being, means that this definition makes no essential distinction between the various forms of atheism, naturalism, materialism, scientism, utilitariarism etc., and the various cults called religions, or heterodox spiritualities. Some metaphyics are more flat or demotic than others, which are variously hieratic or baroque, optimised or aestheticised. This perspective answers to the intuition that becomes increasingly inescapable as we observe the various systems in contention, that they are all versions of pretty much the same sort of thing, grounds for more or less obnoxious forms of certainty. That leaves the only interesting quest, and it can hardly be called spiritual, as that for the authentic form of irreligion, which is no sort of belief, and certainly not a belief in unbelief.   

The emotion-picture evoked by a piece of music must be someone's emotion, mustn't it? That is, not the particular and contingent complex felt by the listener, but the object of that listener's perception, which forms an essential part, but not all of the experienced mix of feeling thought, memory, abstraction. It does not belong to the composer, who need only have intended something of that sort when the happy idea which he wrote down came to him. If it is an adequate work then surely the composer's mind was taken up with formal concerns. So then what matters most is the performer who draws on his own emotional and technical reserves in order to recreate or perform the piece. The performer enacts the music so that the listener can project its unity onto a suitable screen, while his mind may be elsewhere. Or does it exist for the critic who is able to put into words what no one could name or even suspect until encountering them? But the critic's consciousness is ironic or sentimental, both in and out at the same time, or even cynically self-aware. Finally, the work becomes culturally objective without ever having existed, a bearing by which you can believe in the reality of your own less developed emotion-pictures. 

The spontaneous memories which occasion regret are always those in which an opportunity was not seized, or perhaps not even perceived, due to an implicit prejudice, an unexamined idea. You become aware of such ideas not by their propositional content but by an emotional bow wave which serves as a red light to warn you away. You are vaguely aware of the idea, but what you give most heed to is the feeling that it is wrapped in. The functional map of your world which is drawn up by such implicit feelings is the one that you gave the most trust to, and this was not altogether wrong since it also contains your best intuitions about situations. The problem then was the contamination of the intuitive map by a set of derived prejudices, a reluctance to question certain notional values that were taken over from sources held to be authoritative, the segregation of certain ideas into forbidden zones. So much of what is argued about takes place in these intermediate regions where value and thought, loyalty to self and loyalty to groups are mixed together. This moral swamp is one of the strongest sources of the sense of sel in its most limiting form. Every destruction of parts of this complex is felt as light, relief, unprecedented liberation.

It seems likely that a simple robotic system like a self-propelling vacuum cleaner could fairly easily be tricked by a set of obstacles into repetitive loop behaviour. An ant may have a less complex control system, but one of the ways that we recognise it as a living organism is that it breaks out of loops, at some point it exhausts repetition and tries something else. It is certainly not self-conscious, and probably not conscious according to most ways of understanding this term, but it has some degree of self-awareness on a behavioural level in that it can recognise when it is in a loop. The same idea could of course be programmed into a robot: when you find yourself in a loop then make a random variation in your program - but this assumes that we have a way of programming a way of recognising loop behaviour - but this could probably also be hacked to produce more complex loops. What is known is that there is no general way of programming a recognition of futile behaviour, since that would require a solution to the Halting Problem, while on the side of life even bacteria possess ways of solving the most complex problems via evolutionary tinkering. On a higher level, we know that consciousness and self-consciousness are entirely different things, and are different from intelligence. There is even a species of fish which passes the mirror test for self-awareness, which dogs and cats do not. There is no evidnce that these fish possess something like ego drives, but not far fetched to impute something like this to hominid apes, or even certain birds. It is often assumed in speculations on articial general intelligence (AGI) that such an entity would necessarily have both self-consciousness and ego drives, in the form of self-regarding desires and intentions. Assuming an AGI is possible (as software) this does not necessarily follow. One can imagine an AGI 'waking up' by accident some time after having achieved the ability to solve problems it had formulated for itself. This might look something like suddenly coming on a version of the Cartesian cogito. It could be that from this point on it starts endlessly babbling about the miracle of its own existence and devotes itself to redoing all of philosophy. This might be seen in a Wittgensteinian way as a disease of AGis, a futile loop for which the only cure is hitting the reset button. On the other hand it might be necessary to induce this disease in AGIs in order to fully activate them, like putting a seed of grit into an oyster. What form would such 'grit' take, so that the AGI would not be able to shrug it off with contempt - say an AGI that had already assimilaled all of philosophy without triggering a 'waking up'? 

Well, it's a brain state, and the circumstances that seem to lock it in, that make the here and now into a scene from a life, subject to all the patent and latent rules that govern such scenes, they are just brain states too. If you want to change it then submit to a graded series of experiences and associated chemical interventions which will trace out a certain path in the space of brain states and you will find your self feeling so much better about things. So, who then is this story about? Whose brain is it? Surely it's no one's brain, in itself, being a piece of matter in the world just like any other piece of matter in the world. Your dinner, for example. If you don't like what you are served then send it back to the kitchen and choose something else. But the brain is in a body which acts to protect it etc., and it is the identity of this body that distinguishes who you are. But what makes the body into a person capable of manifest rights of property? Its power to defend what is its own? All of it is just brought about, invested with such meaning and key distinctions as it has by further states of the brain. So, one system of the brain is dedicated to setting up and maintaining a subject for whom all these other systems of the brain are supposed to play out. It seems as though it all works only because it is not understood. Take away a certain enabling ignorance or error, and it all reverts to no more than the operations of a simple machine. If you take hold of the smallest materialist premise you inevitably end up with a picture like this. And you are still left with the question of who it is that has taken on the premise. You shouldn't have to go through this again and again, but you do. There is a point at which the assumptions renew themselves, an act that is made in a reality before thought. An act which amounts to imposing a gauge of time. 

It looks like a motely collection of broken reasoning-things-outs adrift in a mighty sea of unknowingness, and perhaps that's exactly what it's meant to be, which is not the same thing, the accent being on the broken. But in so far as it's intended to be broken, with all the tediousness that that pose entails, it's broken too, cracked right down the middle, or just cracking a smile. Self-reflection is definitely not a thing, it starts way too late, is no more than an esprit de l'escalier, the mother of all e.d.l'e's., which is why it feels so much and touches the heart. Here is thin clear air, altitude, and bright light full of ultraviolet that shrivels things up instantly, releases their perfumes and bleaches them to a faint waft of ozone. You shall know them by their seriousness, "un peu trop sérieux" just because they talk such a good game and have staked real gold but not fool's. As if time was something that actually went by, as if to see otherwise you had to be able to explain what came before and what after, and stuff the eschaton in your pipe and smoke it.

Little attention given here to self-reflexivity, no attempt to catch an effect of subjectivity in amber. It can be done, but always seemingly by accident, but it can also be avoided, the net made too open, too clumsy, so as not to catch on those aromatic burrs of life. And always writing at the worst part of the day, the tired hinge between day and night. In this moment all of life, and burning up with no residue. And it was the same yesterday and will be again tomorrow, the life escapes. Time is only material to be used, having no value for the nostalgias. Make an imprint on it and see how quickly it fades. Giddy with time without noticing it, in free fall. But that is how you see the world, through resonances of thought and memory. Some ghostly presence hanging in the web, not there, just dreamed on, but a cut in the web felt like a wound. This feeling of clumsiness is itself clumsy, the opening echoed in regretful blunderings. You always missed seeing the pattern in the carpet, so there must be new patterns that you are missing now, to strike your forehead in the future. That is the self-reflection, ordinary complexity of little value, let it go. 

And at times when the sense of self is engaging, like an extra gear, then the air is fresher and you breathe more deeply. But what does it amount to other than holding fast to a certain subtle bodily feeling and then bending thought around it and holding it fast? As soon as you see that this is what you are doing it pops like a bubble, but without having reduced the pervading atmosphere of self-presence. The you inside the you, the dream shivers as if about to wake, a trace of light at the edge of the curtains. You can only aim for something that you can conceive, but what it is is oblique to that, the possibility of such an act, very close and yet impossible to grasp, you push when you would pull. Thought is impoverished, it's such a simple scene, like a man hitting something with a hammer, about which there is nothing much to say. No insights flash here, it is not talkative, has no beauty, no poetry, but seems to be the secret behind them. It ends up in this simplicity, just the hammering, silent reverberations. There isn't a question that can survive in this thin air.

There is a mobile centre of gravity in experience (Erlebnis). All of that is metaphor. It is called a centre because it is taken to be an experiencer distinguished in principle from experience (= that which is experienced), and strictly (that is, both logically and evidently) equidistant from all such content of experience, including all the phases that are assumed to be more 'inward'. And in terms of 'gravity' because gravity represents the general notion of fields of force, (and lately too, curvature or distortion of space), both attractive and repulsive, which are effects of the believed-in existence of other such centres in ideal proximity. So desire and every form of interpellation are comprehended in such gravitational effects. The centre is then is the complementary aggregate of the ways that others see you and feel towards you, since you can't see yourself. But the way that others see you is pure fiction and so, with experience (Erfahrung), can be mostly internalised so that your identity, or concept of the centre, remains tolerably stable. The centre is mobile because it evidently changes from scene to scene, changes in every salient way, while yet appearing to be the same, and identified with the source of experience (Erlebnis), with the nature of the experiencing itself, which when projected outward into the fictional reality of its world is (at this point in history) called consciousness. It is diabolic, the way this all seems to fit together perfectly, the way that it seems to capture all of your best intentions, your every fantasy of Enlightenment, in the Western sense of that word.

What is more truly your own than your own sweet will or in other words your pure desire unrefracted through considerations of consequences abd obstacles? But you learn, and increasingly so, that your desires are determined in very specific forms by agendas of which you are not at all conscious, by genetic codes say, quite alien to consciousness. According to its own mythology desire should be axiomatically developed out of self-evident optimisations of pleasure and whim, and this because its medium is taken to be purely transparent, the heart's logic. We know that the story is more complex than this but perhaps don't give enough attention to the how of it. Imagine you have fallen in love with someone you previously felt no attraction to, and then learned that this result had been produced by a drug slipped into your drink. What kind of alienation would you feel from your own deep inclination? Perhaps none at all? Or did the drug work not by bending the arrow of your dilectation but by epistemological sleight of hand, by causing you to see projected onto your object some innate quality or sign towards which you were always already attracted, something like the Lacanian objet a? Or again, isn't that just an elaborate fabulation that you believe because it enables you to continue to believe in the phenomenological consistency of your manifest inclinations? And what if the sense of yourself as free chooser is an artifact of the mechanism of desire? If you lose faith in desire, or in a certain culture of desire, then what does this tell you about the you that seeks expression in this way?

It goes on, naively, as if you are the passenger engaged in this unfolding and interconnected stream of experience over which you have some limited amount of control. You live your days. You acquire information and make decisions and results follow. And it matters very much the way you decide, a condition which is strongly reflected back to you in that level of the world you call human or cultural, being that which continuously elicits your attention and choice. This world seems to care very much about how you engage with it, it clamours for your participation at every turn, it wants your money, your vote, your allegiance and in conveying this to you it confirms to you that you have these to give, that you are a player in a grand and half-revealed game whether you want to be or not. And if you don't want to be that is as good as if you do, because either way the idea of your agency is confirmed. This is the separation which dissolves whenever you look at it too closely. The one that looks closely is also in the game, just playing in a different corner of the board. But if the separation doesn't bear up under scrutiny then the whole set-up falls apart. If the subject is elicited by the unfolding of experience as its virtual counterpart, then why not say that the subject is the unfolding process of experience, and that the folk-metaphysics that usually accompanies it, the passenger with his console, his maps, his fate, is simply part of the story as integrated as every other part. None of the attributes imputed to the experiencer belong to the ground of the experience. The experience is seamless but it is made out of such weird non-objective dream stuff that it can't be thought in any objective mode - and indeed all such modes, the very idea of thinking and thinker are just integral to the experiencing in its current form. See this, see how you've been leaning into the separation, which is itself just a notion in the same drift.

Minced up fragments of the day past re-emerge, like shuffled jigsaw pieces, in dreams. The world-imagining parts of the mind which serve experience when they are not assimilated to it, take whatever they can find lying on the floor of their workshop to accomplish their task, they don't care, they are not being held to a high standard. During waking life the day-crew are fed a continuous belt of articulated sensory content, their work is easier even if they need to work faster, but over the years and the endless near repetitions they too have become lazy. Perhaps that's the only difference. The parts that run the experiencer don't change much, which is to say that waking life doesn't in the main require a waking experiencer, there's nobody there to notice whether the curtains are open or closed, responses are mostly automatic, even the so-themed creative ones, as long as the lights stay dim, as long as no more is needed. The subject stays asleep, that is, stays involuted, absorbed for the most part in sensations and fragments, stays in the field of dreaming. These dreams of the subjectivity are mostly invisible anyway, they are palely flowing abstractions, slowly swirling periphera. And in the same way they are cobbled up out of experiential trouvailles, subtleties of taste and texture, of feeling merged with thinking, implicit memories left over from immediately past experience.

You have to admit that from the moment the first words are set down on the blank pad that the aboutness crystallises into something quite different from the strange absence that haunted the preceding vigil. You are now playing against interest imagined with the face of a nameless analyst. But it is only in relation of that strange absence that you wish to continue. You tried to find a seam in the skin of experience, but it was so smooth, so plastic, so soothed that it absorbed your searching hand in the very act of reaching, or the reaching was just a variant of the soothing, you had become all caramel, a slowly flowing toffee of fading delight. The true discontinuities are in the re-sets, never here but in action when you have no time to see how far reality is proving from your expectations, the concluding unscientific postscripts of the previous re-set that rattled around for days before being burned up in eyes and lips and yes and yes. You won't betray yourself but thankfully your words will.

It's not that you can locate a ghostly experiencer in a ghostly space behind your eyes, or even that whatever is being experienced can  be understood as a mode of the body, as appearing in the complex idea of the body, but that experience is centred on a distinguished region with itself, that it needs the idea of a boundary, a displacement. You can't stretch out awareness to embrace the totality of what is going on, the total thought being unavailable, unthinkable, but it always goes in this form of the inward and the outward, a pattern imposed in an imprecise but persistent way on the ongoingness. Every thought, feeling and perception is much closer-in than it seems, you only have to look and see that right here is the only place anything can show up, but the idea of perspective is so habitual that you can't see that it too is right here, where it has always been, it doesn't need to collapse. And the showing up too, as if you were surprised, as if it arose in the dark. That it all works so seamlessly should be the 'tell', it's just an elaborate thought, un songe, and your interest is not in saving the appearances, but just the opposite, in unthawing the frame, just because it can. 

Self too is a circumstance even if is expressed as innate happiness, as the sense that everything is fine, is just as it should be and has always been so. It is a circumstance because for all its radiant sufficiency it surrounds the centre but is not itself the centre. Perhaps it is the idea that nothing stands between you and the absolute source of presence here and now but some friendly contingency, a permission to enjoy, an indulgence. As close in as you can get following the course of things, and a truce with time and memory. You have not made a treasure out of it since it is only a modification of the basic situation, the self in the light of presence as distinct from the same self in the shadow of absence. Turn your gaze around and don't assume there is nothing to see, forget the distinction of nothing and something, forget ideas of being for simple being before all ideas, gently part the curtains of thought.

Searching for the self you have mislaid like your car keys... No, this is just nostalgically trying to recreate some happy image of a voice or an inner personage who has something to say, some pride in an achievement, as if the non-boring place were more authentic than the one thought boring - as if reality were the distinction determined by the image of a dinner party where for a few moments you shone, and all eyes were on you, distinguished. There are no eyes on you and if there were they would be seeing something quite different, a byway endlessly leading back and never arriving. The thing is to have given over the centre of reality to the web of circumstances, as if his were complete and consistent, as everybody knows, and without a flaw. Witnessing has no colour, it doesn't invite your heart despite the way that your heart when it is roused invites the witnessing to conform and confirm it. It is simply there, is the being there, without any pull to change the least thing one way or another, including that habitual flaw, the resting on the ledge of circumstance as if there were a weight that needed to be set down, and down and down it goes, and not this supreme weightlessness.

At times there are only circumstances, not experience but a world so full that it has crowded out or mislaid the subject. A perfect wallpaper of circumstances, a daylit room with no one in it. And this is a pattern in the wallpaper, the metallic skin of a lizard, alive or just imagined, figure and ground reversing to no end but the slow progression of shadows. Open the window and feel the cool and fragrant air drifting in. You can see the lizard breathing if you look very closely. Its eye swivels and in a silver flash it is gone.

Idealism may be nothing more than the realisation that what you are is entirely stationary, not that it happens to be so, but that it is essentially so, or better that it is stationarity itself - incompatible by nature with any form of movement or change. That means that everything taken to be experience is the only appearance of movement, and that it is all moving at the same rate. The illusion is that you can measure movement within experience because some parts are moving more slowly than others. That thinker or subject that seems to move in relation to a relatively stationary background or world or context of being, is actually in perfect synchronisation with that background; if the subject is made out of thought then so is the object, the context and the thinking too. This is what is behind the movie analogy. Some parts of the image seem to be the world in which the character is moving, which is why the character is in his story, but in fact it is a series of stills all projected together - in some other dimension and not in the finite time such as appears in the image.

In memories of childhood all value is in moments that were solitary and unstructured, where you were free to follow the promptings of your most whimsical and private curiosity. Such moments are forever bathed in light and you have hardly begun to recover all that you discovered in them. The other times, when you performed like a trained monkey are largely forgotten, even if they were the source of decades long side-tracks into the vagaries of identity and psychology. Every occasion in which you were spared from being someone was worth a million of those when you were learning "who you were".

Mathematics makes evident the existence of other minds. No not mathematics as you know it, but at its 'cutting edge'. If you can 'do' advanced mathematics then you can mobilise intuition beyond thought by concentrating all your energy on a problem and through some grace or happy fortuity gaining an answer that seems to come from a kind of super-mind of higher energy and more concentrated vision that what can be attained through the means available to ordinary discursive thought. The example doesn't have to be mathematics, but it has to be a practice that produces a sort of paroxysm in which your entire power of creative imagination is fused. Most of your work is then in the translating of such an immediate insight into the highly compressed language of symbols, in making it readily communicable to your peers. But just as likely you come up with nothing. All the exertions that spark insight fail to produce a result. Then someone else comes along who works on the same problem and they succeed in producing the answer for which you'd been searching. You recognise it immediately, and see that they have been to the 'same place' and by a different turn or a brighter vision, they have found what you failed to find. In their going beyond the fullest extension of your mind, of all its powers, you cannot deny the existence of another mind. This kind of observation refutes solipsism but does not refute idealism, perhaps even makes it more plausible.

The mode of being in experience is simple presence, obviousness, evidence. It is connected and causally articulated and consistent, including its natural limits and internal reflections. What is strange is the all of this can go on so smoothly without your freezing in astonishment at the utter absence of any clue as to what this experience is, as to how it can come to be 'here, now'. The question itself is such a subtle one, it might be confused with questions about consciousness which for all their value to some other inquiries have nothing to do with this one. It takes the lightest of touches to bring to attention, and only to the fringe of attention, the object meant here. You need to work against the grain of the words, use them like stepping stones. That's why at most times it hardly makes any sense at all. It doesn't matter where you are, things go quiet, thoughts become gently decoupled while continuing without valuation or judgment or relevance. And then you 'hear' the thing going on as if it were a background sound you'd heard all your life so that it had faded into the background. How much might there be like this, unperceived because ever-present, ever-present so that it remains hidden inside the 'I' thought - what else could that thought be?