First-person, or autobiographical poetry is strangely effective despite being absurd. Present-tense declarations cast in loosely vatic diction seem to retain a trace of an imperishable discovery of self supporting whatever banal performatives are brought forth to licence the assertion of existence, as if experience conjugates being. That words merely written become a voice through the slightest inflection of form fulfills a possibility that was already inherent in perishable utterance. The stage on which they sound out is one of the earliest and most stable of acquisitions. But even without such a scene lighting and sounding the orator words fit more perfectly than what is imagined. Even if the speaker is not only absent but precisely what is in question the words are shaped to the mind more perfectly than any glove. The words are the shape and the mind is in the words, the words themselves in pure felicity mean no more than themselves and are their own commentary and unfolding. Repeat the words over and over until they decompose into sounds and then see that this takes nothing away from them except what never belonged; it is exactly what is being done.

There might be a novelistic resolution to all of this because at each moment there is some variation of the psychological predicament in play and although you have made little progress in that, through some signature combination of laziness and cowardice, defending the defensible, it has woven a few chapters of a life-story that yet might be illuminated in lucid and disenchanted retrospect, desires and presumptions undone. But instead this other mode of battering against the unyielding which makes no progress at all, and even if it did would refuse to acknowledge it, untiring renewal of the same question which remains open and as unresolved as on the first day it occurred to you to ask. It is not a history of lost illusions but can seem that way since something is driving it, some basic irritation that ought to have been seen through if it was the business of a seer or a doer, or a poor subject that could yield to the soft or not so soft cudgel of irony, could surrender its futility and solitude.

There is a latent self-reflective doubling of consciousness which quietly underlies the more obvious modes of self consciousness such as arise with the nuisance value of blowflies in Summer. The latter is content, it has colour or flavour and descends like a perfume which for all its insinuating presumption of familiarity, its vague aura of embarrassment, seems adventitious, something or someone you have accidentally run into on the street or when stepping into a train. The core of these doublings is however always located on the side of the subject and before anything else you are aware that it is something you have done. The doing is intimate but opaque, it comes up from the same seed as your good faith, it is there in exactly the same moment as you are, which is why you keep thinking of it as bad infinity like two facing mirrors. As soon as you try to touch the phenomenon its unfolds like a sinister flower because the trying and the phenomenon and the you are inseparable. It is a sleight of hand and if there is anything to be done it is to resist the misdirection, to keep your attention on the very point it is trying to distract you from.   

Naturally there is an elaborate game going on here, elaborate only because after all this time you need to weave in and out of all the times you've caught yourself playing to the image. Yes, naturally, there are agendas, secret hopes, feigning the opposite of what you would do, bouncing your priorities off those you imagine others would expect, all of that is unavoidable because once suspected then moving either forward or backward has the same result, namely none, and the suspecting is not in your control, it's the usual shabby ancestral reflexes, exactly what you set out to escape from and keep meeting at every turn. If you care about purity of motive then you are lost from the start. How could you ever purify your motives, any motives? And when you sit back and laugh at the desperate comedy of it all it's no help to know that you are laughing at yourself too, which makes it even funnier. So accept your absurdity, no need to make gestures, tearing up each day's work, just keep on without the idea of persistence. It isn't your choice and attitude, effort, earnestness are not your concern.

The application of thought experiments to moral philosophy rather than, say, physics seems oddly pernicious. You need to accept a number stages of abstraction in order to go from lived experience (the first of these abstractions) to the notion of a person in general as seen from the outside - the idea this is the right object of consideration. In trolley type problems, for example, all of this is compressed into a kind of shorthand whereby it is tacitly assumed that the objects of moral concern, are plural and can be enumerated. Both consequentialists and deontologists are assumed to agree that one other person is metaphysically different from ten other persons, and that this distinction is admissible evidence for moral deliberation, even if ultimately discounted. If you were to take a step back and think of the rule of substitutability, then it would make no difference whether you were the one or one of the ten. And stepping further back, why should the details of the relationships already existing among these twelve hypothetical personages be irrelevant? Why should you not favour, or not expect to be favoured by, those closest to you? The question is begged by the set-up of the imaginary scene. The morality of the situation, the implication that an imperative is at stake, only serves to reinforce the authority of the abstraction into a multitude of interchangeable and indistinguishable units - the belief that what you are is what you are represented to be.

To be young and tormented by the feeling of inauthenticity, that your newly acquired mental accouterments are not yet worn-in, that they pinch like new shoes and off-the-rack clothing, is already a triangular state, forging desire. The gift of grace or experience moves you to another vertex of the same triangle, to what calls itself unity. So much of life is lived in this movement, as if there was some ultimate significance in the distance that separates the poles. These are states, whether you have lost or found your way, are in or out of the flow. They spatialise, creating truths and distinctions that are internal to themselves. As long as you can find something that seems to reflect then you find your image within it and the way to transform it into the next. This is so clever that it doesn't occur that it is lighting fools the way. The one solid fact receives all of this without a blink, and then it too is no longer a fact or anything else you can name, the silence out which sound is formed without ceasing to be silence, or the darkness behind light.

In plain sight, not hiding except when you look for it. Can you say what a thought is, or a desire, or a feeling, or mood or state? How do these fall upon you, how do they pass away? How do you fall upon yourself? Elaborations of a life, but how or where does this life come to be? A transparency prior to clouds, a transparency prior to light. Never closer or further away, you can't look for it, it is what looks, and is mistaken for the mind, is mistaken for a mirror. What changes is known by the unchanging, whatever is known is changing, is change, but does anything change except in thought. It bears no stain, it is untouched. Just unpick that one knot, how thought, the knowing of its own object falls upon it, like water from a spring, endlessly bubbling form. No water, no spring, no form.

The tense native to ontological parsimony is of course the future anterior - 'it will have been'. This needs to encompass everything, including itself. Against this you might find yourself wishing to carry something of the past over into the future, or to import some future resolution back into the past. Or, if not wishing then its opposite, being oppressed by, negative wishing, which amounts to the same thing. Thinking that there is a way to sidestep your own foolishness, or limitedness, being past- or future-oriented, which fixes and solidifies one end of the vector, the doer or the done by. How much of the machinery of thought is dedicated to weaving this kind of scaffold in time, to weaving time itself out of recurrences of desire. The metaphysics of desire is no joke.

Time is the direction of increasing specification. Compare it to a murder mystery. At the outset only a few facts are known, the true state of things is only imperfectly specified. As the action proceeds the interdependency of things forces more events to come to light, possibilities go from open to closed, most are discarded. The process can follow many different trajectories in terms of the kinds of links that are made, but inevitably more and more about the original state comes to light. At the end, if it follows the broad generic conventions, the situation is fully specified according to the parameters of the game, the motives and actors are revealed. If it is mapped as a tree structure, then it could be seen as going from branches to root. In reading the story we accept the idea that the original events were fully specified in the author's mind and it is only our knowledge which has changed, but what if this were not the case and a principle of parsimony reigned, so that the original state only existed incompletely, was only 'filled in' where necessary? This provides a picture of time. The interdependencies of things spread like a wave-front in which the indeterminate becomes determinate. The intentional semantics with which we make sense of our situation is not a fictitious overlay on a positivistic semantics ('all that is the case') but is only a digest of a more complex version of the same thing. The many-worlds are not branching out in the future but are the nature of the present, in the form of collapsing pluralities. Intentional language, modal grammars etc. would all be irreducible, not in the sense of becoming but in that of ceasing to be. Seeing this in a melancholy light is the common mistake, a metaphysical interpretation of consciousness.

The idea of free will gives rise to a variety of metaphysical scaffoldings in attempts to give it some sense, but all that these can do is to give a ground for the feeling associated with it. The feeling by itself is taken to be insufficient for all the work we would like to get out of this idea. The feeling, may however, be entirely sufficient in that it exists independently of whether the future is determined or not, or even if that distinction is meaningful. Say that the feeling of free will is like the feeling of suspense we experience in watching a movie. This is not to say it is the same, but it is the same kind of feeling, reliably evoked by certain presentations. The feeling of suspense, which can be quite excruciating, is there despite our knowledge that the action is already fully determined, and in many cases even if we have seen the film before. This is to say that despite the irreducibility and depth of the feeling of being free, there is no intrinsic metaphysics that can be drawn out of this feeling. It's an unavoidable artifact of the way we find ourselves in the world without telling us anything about the reality behind that feeling. It's not our feeling of being free that ought to collapse, but the metaphysics that we draw out of it. It's likely that this metaphysical accompaniment is present even when it is not explicit, a sketch of the nature of space and time and of ourselves to which we impute transcendental reality before we know what we are doing. If there is anything pernicious about the belief in free will it is entirely in this inessential accompaniment, and not in the feeling, which ought to be enjoyed in just the same way as we enjoy an exciting movie. Hence, also, arguments for or against free will are completely irrelevant as they only apply to the fictitious metaphysics.

The 'everything is a simulation' idea (ES for short) functions best as a thought experiment or stalking horse. The main argument for it is the probability one, which is flawed since it leads to an infinite regress. The argument from parsimony is more interesting but works just as well for idealism of the roughly Vedantic kind, it is like saying that what distinguishes reality (as maya) from a dream is that its fabulations are more persistent - and this persistence is nothing metaphysical, only the consequence of a multiple perspective, or what is sometimes called 'consensus reality'. ES casts an interesting light on monotheism. For example, to say that the merit of a simulation is that it not be boring raises the question of how we can know what its creator might regard as boring. The answer of course is that we can't; the creator's intention is inscrutable. If however our conscious understanding of who and what we are is of any significance to it then we would expect that some clues would be left lying around, and given the principle of parsimony this would be more likely to resemble revealed religion or mythology than direct intuition into its level of understanding. This again raises the question of what the significance of our understandings could be to such a creator. Are they in some sense the 'readouts'? Can the creator access anyone's experience via some sort of FPV? Or is it only looking at the progress of global parameters? ES would seem to require that the creator is subject to time in more or less the same form as we are. You can write down some simple equations or rules, quite transparent in formal space, but you don't know what results they can produce until you 'run' them and watch the results unfold. The God of theism is outside of time and hence omniscient, while the knowing of the ES creator is in time and hence limited, even if it is perspicuous relative to the current state of its world. Again, God is equally close to every created soul, while the ES creator, having a single perspective, can presumable only 'inhabit' one subjective 'read-out' at a time. That is, unless all minds in the simulation are unified on some higher level inaccessible to them individually. ES raises the question of a consciousness transcendent to our own but not Divine. Is that possible? Surely this possibility is one that haunts us in an essential way, as in the persistence of attempts to bring about 'global' consciousness.   

In some respects there is very little difference between the belief found among some of the science-oriented that 'we inhabit a vast simulation' and the belief in a creator God. The former has two sorts of arguments behind it, one sort are purely probabilistic, based on the projected inevitability of simulations of sufficient complexity (the minimum possible complexity required to bring about all we can know about our universe, given that we ourselves are included etc.) being possible and then their comparatively low cost and hence likely multiplicity. This kind of argument, which falls short of a proof, is basically metaphysical and thus akin to the Prime Mover argument of Aristotle. It kicks in just when the latter is ruled out. The second kind of argument is from oddly discovered parsimonies in 'reality' which would include all sorts of coincidences, anthropomorphic principles and such like - these arguments taking the place of arguments from design. The simulation idea has an interesting consequence which illuminates something about monotheism. What is the only imperative of a simulation? Striving for the Good doesn't amount to much, what is more important is 'don't be boring!' - because if you are then who- or whatever is responsible for the simulation will wipe it out and start again. Extending this idea, you could say that in monotheisms, while the striving for righteousness has a place it is only to be desired in order to restrain the 'wrath' of God so that He doesn't wipe out the world and start again. Thus, in either case, the mainspring of morality is to avoid existential risk, and not the moral intuition based in ideas of radical substitutability - such as lies at the base of both the deontological (e.g. Kantian) and the consequentialist (Utilitarian) positions. Instead it is, admittedly, a kind of consequentialism, but an inscrutable, or at most aesthetic kind. Many interesting consequences follow...

If the noösphere is a mirror it is like Caliban's mirror - gazing into it enrages us but we can't decide whether this because we see ourselves or fail to see ourselves there. Or to put it another way, it is like a Cambrian explosion of memeplexes, a wild fecundity of monstrosities, a vital and grotesque vitality of possibilities that volatilises and consumes all historical footholds. What gives it such vitality but the elusive hint of realisation or awakening - an image that haunts the language in which the parts name themselves - that shimmers in each of the fragmented and fragmenting forms of identification that are offered. To disengage and yet affirm all of it at once would be madness if the elements did not destroy themselves more quickly than their collisions would do. They do not understand themselves as forms of seeking, but through sheer speed, through the melting away of all restraints to speed, they embody the paradox of an open commitment in which the openness becomes radicalised as the demand for commitment grows more urgent. 

You can accept that your perception of the world is framed by hidden assumptions, and that this is true even beyond what you can accept in the normal way of openness. There are ways that you can experience this and narratives that illustrate the eye-opening, or 'mind-expanding' effects of the discovery of hidden assumptions. This expansion of perspective is perhaps the typical message of anti-romantic novels. In this sense it becomes not too far fetched to say hyperbolically that the world seen is the mirror of the seer. It is much more difficult to take on the idea that your perception of yourself is also bounded and framed by hidden assumptions. This partly because you have no perception of yourself at all, such as it is it is a virtual and reflex process, a latent inference. The ideas that structure this virtuality are subtle and highly volatile, they operate in a realm where thinking is very fast, too fast for easy translation into distinct thoughts. The idea that the world seen is a perfect reflection of the seer is useful in this context. If you take this idea on and see how complete you can make it, you might be rewarded by some inkling of a shift of ground in the system of automatic reflex thoughts that stabilise the working function of your 'self', or rather of 'your' self.

It is an artifact of self as an expression of life, and of the myriad forms it assumes that it is taken to be its own principle. In this egoity it demonstrates its immaturity. But what the self expresses in such a charmingly infantile way is only the extraordinary attainment of life, like a new sort of blossom giving itself up for sake of its fruit, the self that death has schooled. It's not the principle but the process, and all the errors and deformities that it acquires signify nothing but themselves. Take it to be the first experiments in reflection, the venture that it take itself as object, and all the extraordinary consequences that follow from that startling discovery to the point of initiating a whole new stream of evolution on top of the first. It glimpses the unattainable thought of principle and is haunted by it while it stutters out a sort of language that it confuses with the thing, inventing being so it can babble be be be.

Mimetic desire, like having an opinion, points to a fundamental flaw in this type of consciousness. They seem innocent and even necessary at inception, yielding a syntonic kind of pleasure, activating and bracing the whole system, but at the same time determining their sequels in a deadly manner, like a game that becomes all too real. They are both symmetric form of according reality to the other and the self. You can start from either end, imagining that these are opposed, but then find that you are played to the same central impasse. Is there a kind of desire that is not at core mimetic, is there are kind of knowing that is not at core the taking of a position? 

It is exactly what can't be a state to be given or taken, inflicted or graced. What a relief to let go of states! You can't point to it or trade it. It's what no-one wants because everyone already has it in full measure; it is not an object and can't be desired. It has no value, but value is nothing beside it. You can't think it out, or fence it in, it is not a distinction, it is not beautiful or ugly, you don't grasp it or recoil from it. You don't know it, it passes right through your knowing and leaves it marvelously unchanged. You never get closer to it or further away. You think about it all the time without knowing that that is what you are doing. Thoughts stream out from it and never return, if you were a thought you would too! You bang your fist on the table for the sheer joy of hearing.

If you become aware of the weave, of the stuff woven, the weaving, you find that the stuff is something like question, as if question was not what someone does but the stuff out of which someone is knitted and taken apart again to maintain the knitting. It hasn't yet been formulated, but form can only arise out of this stuff and to become that look in everyone's eyes, gazing out into the open, that questioning of reality in which we identify life, or just call it sentience. It's not only to feel but a desire to resolve, that in us becomes a desire for response, for knowledge, for acknowledgment, or to be the one that acknowledges finally what is being held back, because you wouldn't ask if you didn't already know. And here is where your inventions get the best of you, because you displace this into a seeking in the imagined world, which means that you go looking exactly where you can be sure of not finding, which takes a lot of doing. The more you can narrow down the displacement the richer it becomes, but don't stop there, be ready to take the final leap, which is not final and not a leap, into here. 

To see it as broken or knotted or founded on an absence from which it can never recover, to see it as some sort of topological monster, is to take the point of view that would be that of consciousness if there were or could ever be such a thing. If you bear down on it with all your force you'll inevitably fall into some such notion and it will prevent you from noticing that this is just a way of affirming a seeking subject - for which there is no other evidence. Bear down by all means but do it lightly, the mereset feather touch slyly going in underneath the assumptions, or rather underneath where they would be supposed to be if there were even anyone to make such assumptions. It is not a matter of deconstructing the self but of undressing it gently as if it were a lover. It is a very different gesture from that of thought, entering into a dance that has always been going on and in which everything takes part.

Such a dizzy thing, teetering back on your heels and falling into the endless tunnel of every thought that comes along, and then whoop! off in another direction. It really should be impossible to be bored because you have no boundaries in time or in space or in that other dimension that runs dead through the centre of everything like a golden string, like the ultimate elastic and laughing nerve. How can you possibly fall into the belief that you are that little grey box in a little grey world when it all sits inside of this crazy leaping mass of never before and never again, the image of again tied neatly in a knot, so there, so there! and even the thoughts are full of holes, great wide avenues to fall through? Boredom, no, endlessly boring, a tale told by an atom, by an eye, by a ticking here it comes! signifying everything. Oh, all it takes.

Experience of beauty is entirely inward, the beautiful object prompts the momentary recognition of something always known, always possessed but forgotten behind the flow of reveries. Knowledge and love are self alienated, scattered amongst the debris of a shattered world. What shatters it but thoughts and feelings out of place, hopelessly tangled up in each other. Every feeling unjudged, unclassified, is pure feeling and pure feeling is always beauty, you don't need it to be handed back to you to see that, only that you expect it to be, tincturing it with longing, expecting music to arise from silence. Every feeling is unanticipated beauty, and you come lumbering after asking for a second chance, delayed in shadows, the sharp words. Your theories are all false, it was complete before you even thought of asking and there is no circle, nothing to show. And even your theories are beautiful, you muddlehead, and the music is the silence, the silence the music.

In principle it is pure autonomy but it sure doesn't feel that way. The doubling, the internal separation goes right down as far as you can see, and it accounts for this slipperiness where there ought to be foundations, for this stubborn recurrence of all the dreamed-over predicaments. Everything is mediated by forms and the forms themselves only protrude a finger's breadth into light but extend back in anamorphic shadows, bouncing reflections back and forth into the very heart of nausea. The premises weigh down on you until all that is left is this strangled little nub of intention. And all of this vast heteronomy is the complete equation of liberty having yielded itself up over and over to facts and evasions of facts, like a headache that won't go away. Forms feed on forms and gradually become exhausted, unable to resolve or digest the least of them. Lose your innocence and it is endless diagnosis, all dia and no gnosis - time for a break.

Is it possible to draw a clear line between mimetic, secondary or mediated desire and primary, spontaneous and unmediated desire? If there is such a distinction then, as Girard notes, it is the former which has all the Sturm und Drang, to which all the intensities, the dramas, the romance, belong. Consider that all phantoms of desire that are aroused by music would necessarily be of this class. Therefore their very form is that exacerbated form of identity-discovery found in musical tastes - from "her life was saved by rock'n roll" to "Tristan". The problem is that the subject, the "I", is itself mediated, is an "experiencing as" more than an "experiencing of" and hence cannot make this distinction. All of this is further complicated by the fact that the distinction between primary and secondary desire is itself a feature of the culture of secondary desire, which is the culture of spilt romanticism that we inhabit.

Seeing animals engaging in the often quite elaborate performances of mating behaviour, and considering that this is not modeled by imitation but somehow innately programmed or 'instinctive' behaviour, we tend to downplay the role of desire-pleasure, as we understand it, in non-human creatures. That is, the term desire refers to something almost rational, as if it is the expression of the ideal-motive to maximise satisfaction. If you could ask a dog why it was fucking what would it answer? Most likely 'I don't know I have to do this' - its face expresses less happiness than it does when getting a belly rub, or playing. For us 'I do it because it feels good' requires no further justification, and the vicissitudes of human desire arise from the lived elusiveness of the triggers for satisfaction. It is therefore redundant to say that you are programmed to seek satisfaction, no, rather satisfaction is what it is you seek, and so even if it looks to someone on the outside that what you are aiming at is anything but satisfying, that is only because the true satisfaction is unconscious, or concealed even from yourself. In some cases it might be a memory of a past state of fulfillment. So that would imply that you evaluate your present state as unstably unsatisfying and so you naturally try to bring about a situation analogous to the one you remember in which you felt so much better. Thus you have a sort of constantly active internal meter of satisfaction, generally hovering somewhere in the middle of its range, and a radar which detects prospects for change in satisfaction in your immediate environment, and a continuously evolving situation map, and you try steer a course that brings positive changes closer and keeps negative changes further away. Experience renders the cues hopelessly complicated so that much of the human drama concerns the misadventures of a subject in search of satisfaction, especially in its sublated form as 'happiness'. This is necessarily a rough sketch but what it is aiming at is the peculiar ontological status of satisfaction as the unitary principle underlying the confusion of motives and objects. What is it that you are trying to bring about, what is the substance of satisfaction, this irreducible sense of being more real, more complete, of not needing?

You profess to have reasons for things, to be a set of propositional attitudes on the way to consistency, if only the ground didn't keep shifting, when really it is all a made up out of affinities, which are feelings, desires, celebrations in anticipation of yourself. You love the world as the place of deferred reunions, call it love, this odd searching through the grandly slow exploding chaos of things for the heart, the reversal of the exile you payed into, the unavowable egoism provisionally suspended. It made perfect sense in feeling but came out silly, no other word for it, endlessly grotesquely silly, your projects, and you had to pull up short, straighten your back and try to look adult, a game that forgot itself and became this random history that you keep on trying to explain, without words or breath, the one who falls and rises each time from sleep, with every new how and what do you know.