Views of experience which take the naturalistic or scientific worldview as their starting point or reference point and then work their way by audacious leaps to how it is from the inside seem to misguided forms of idolatry. Whatever is explained in this way remains opaque, even if there is predictive power in it. In the order of certainty the subject must come first, you must release the anchors that bind you to the objective and turn the world inside out. It is deeply implausible until you do it, and then it is clear that nothing as far as the experienced world has changed, only become more brilliant. The theorising breaks off at its obvious limit, finds its place together with all other objectivities. The limit of what you are is the limit of what you can remember - who knows how far this goes? Who.

The objective field is structured by certain impassable divisions which go deeper than the merely phenomenal. This does not, however, prove that there are corresponding metaphysical divisions, since 'being more than phenomenal' falls far short of the noumenal. You might say that the phenomenal plane is itself only phenomenal. To think of experience in phenomenal terms is an act of the imagination, and only adds a certain screen over experience in its most general sense. Every distinction in the mode of objective experience has as its correlate a certain way of limiting the subjective. In reflection the subjective only emerges by 'staining' experience with certain kinds of contingent even if effectively incorrigible distinctions, distinctions bathed in pathos. The subject is full transparency, but since it is never experienced as such, it only comes out as that it ought to be, or is the desire for such transparency. It seems necessary to displace it into the future, but that can't be true as time is only one of the modes of distinction. The transparency is perfect presence, is here and now, complete, and the idea that it is lost or in need of realisation via some process, is the just a stubborn misrecognition.

 

The dual evidence of the 'I' or self as the totality of ongoing experience and 'I' or self as the subject pole within experience can't be mapped in Euclidean space, something Escher-like or Klein bottle-ish seems to do a better job but is still imperfect because however close one gets the resulting picture merely expands the scope of the object-field and calls for a new twist in yet a higher dimension to accommodate the correlative subject. Nevertheless there are times when convergence is delightfully suspended and a sort of negative capability allows it all to seem obvious. This obviousness is itself a necessary component of any such integrated understanding. It must be obvious, blindingly and hilariously so, or it isn't right. The notion that the subject ought to vanish into a dimensionless point is a misleading one, it is not nothing and if it seems edifying to regard it as such to bring a portion of the picture into clarity, this intuition only goes so far. Better to reflect on the mysterious and unknown spontaneity of the subject. It is more like a black hole than a mathematical point, a black hole whose very blackness and emptiness 'yawns' with grace and love and universal well-being rather than horror. Origin of the world indeed!

Think of consciousness as the immediate, as that out of which, or in which, all experience if formed. Whatever you know, you know in and by consciousness - it is experience at the level of pure evidence, pure openness, hiding nothing. But what is your experience but that of a being in a world, with this-being in here and world out there; and the consciousness is what is happening in your mind which is located, or at least anchored in your body, a certain partially visible world-object. What is out there, the chair, the tree seen through the window, is not you, is not your mind. Next to the world, which is filled with physical objects, there is you, a pullulating cloud of intentional activity, and active and spontaneous upwelling of mental forms that flow out of your most mysterious and intimate centre. But of course all of this, the very shifting boundary between you and world is all in consciousness. Whatever consciousness is it is the upwelling both of the you-pole and of the world without any distinction. Consciousness paints one just as easily as the other, with the same effortlessness and with no recognition that the inside part is done any differently to the outside part. What makes the world seem separate is that it is continually surprising. Look at something that you've looked at a hundred times before and you'll always find something different, to say nothing of the bigger surprises. The world too is a spontaneous upwelling, just as free and unpredictable as the contents springing up from inside. And you have no precise intuition about what will come next in one as in the other. The distinction between the inside and outside poles amounts to ways of taking them, ways of expecting or imperfectly predicting them, and not to their common mystery - and these ways themselves are also just modes which arise of their own accord.   

If qualia are the atoms of consciousness then the question arises as to how they combine to form the rich multidimensional consciousness we know as being in the world - this is known as the binding problem. On the other hand consciousness tends to be defined in distinction from qualia by this very ability to achieve binding, the power to unify raw mental contents, and indeed this was recognised by Kant in his transcendental unity of apperception. Giving it a name, however, does no more than recognise the problem. This problem seems to arise from the treatment of consciousness as positive, as being somehow some definite thing which is decomposable into parts each of which is of essentially the same positive nature. There is also a confusion between the contents of consciousness and the fact or event of consciousness, or the simple being present which it entails. Consider that unification is wholly of the experiencer and not of the experienced or what is unified. The experienced has no power to do anything, it is merely experienced and is only what it is. Say that all of positivity is on the side of the experienced, so the experiencer is the not-positive. To avoid treating this as some subtle mode of positivity it can hardly be named, and certainly the rules governing positivity do not apply to it. If these rules are arithmetic, or set-theory then the experiencer is zero or the empty set in the sense that every positive formation is in exactly the same relation to it as any other. As if to say that only because zero plus zero is identically zero can one plus one be two. Or the radical emptiness of the experiencer is what makes the binding of positives to freely arise.

A guitar being played softly in another room. Is this 'experiencing' assembled out of qualia? If it is thought in neurological terms the answer might be yes, but that way of framing it is artificial, involving the imposition of a complex theoretical framework and then imagining variations on its basis. Or else you could deliberately listen in such a way as to focus on the constituent sensations, not only the notes and the timbre that identifies them as the plucking of guitar strings, but also the modality of the sounds relative to an aural field which sets them as originating in an adjacent room, and in a particular activity of the player - reading through a written score in this instance. By framing your perception in a certain way you can make it about a complex of pure sensory events, a web of salient and of background noticings, but this act of framing belongs to a chosen way of interpreting perceptions that is different from but parallel to the natural 'take' - a guitar in another room. You may choose to take experience as phenomenal, in which case it is decomposable in a certain way, but you cannot conclude that the individualised phenomena are prior constituents of the natural event. You might in fact say that the nature of consciousness is precisely not to be made up of qualia, and this means both that it is never what it is consciousness of, and also that however it is it is always already a synthesis, an overflowing, is more contents than its content.

In whatever world is being experienced there is no experiencing object but only and exactly one present-being-experiencing - and this is the simplest and most direct evidence that the 'I' is not-two. As against this there is the qualitative difference between experience of things, the class of I-it relations and the experience of others, the class of I-thou relations, so called. This difference contains the entire case for a plurality of distinct selves. But on closer examination it says no more than that the class of relations to things is not the paradigm for all relations to the not-self. In intimate relations with another there is something like an oscillations in self-reference between being as a subject and being as an object. The conceptual-experiential space in which you arise as virtual bearer of the experiencing is rotated on itself when the experience is of the I-thou variety. Out of respect for the peculiar energies you 'encounter' in other selves you push the evidence that there is only one present-experiencing into the background, or perhaps better stated, you 'deconstruct' it in so far as it is concretely constituted out of objectivities. If you are seized by something like a moral imperative it remains an error to take this as evidence for the existence of distinct selves, or transcendences. It is not 'otherwise than being' but is exactly what the phenomenon of being is like. And so with all the putative evidences of hermeneutic phenomenology.

Consciousness and qualia are two different ways of speaking about the same thing. When you determine experience as consciousness or as happening for/in/to a mind, then its contents are qualia, and any mode that is constitutive of consciousness, such as self-reflexivity, is so as mediated by qualia - which fact keeps them rather busy. However, it doesn't seem to be correct to say that the qualia themselves are conscious - is the blueness of the blue book-cover seen over there the consciouness of blueness? No. We speak in terms of qualia in order to arrest the process of self-reference, to break it down into simple reference, and since anything salient must have qualia of some sort there must, we conclude, be a sort of topology of qualia which enables the cognitive depth of experience to be constituted. In Samkhya terms, qualia is prakriti, in fact is probable exactly what was meant by this term, rather than matter. Qualia are distinguished from things in that they are necessarily, that is, by definition, experienced, but they do not experience themselves, are not their own experiencer. A tree falling in the forest away from any ears may produce sound waves, but gives rise to no aural qualia. So, thinking in these terms seems to bring us closer to the source of experience, but in fact leaves the mystery of the ultimate experiencer untouched. It is difficult to refrain from subtly reifying that which experiences, there is no pleasure, or valence, in it since pleasure too is objective, is prakriti. It is hard to admit just how sovereignly unthinkable, unexperiencable is that which is experiences - even though 'this' is the only 'thing' that could ever be real.

Theories of personal identity have been divided into three kinds: closed individuality which looks to an ongoing process that begins at birth and ends at death, open individuality for which there is only one 'I' and the apparent distinctions between individuals merely superimposed and virtual, and empty individuality for which personal identity is wholly contained within infinitesimal monadic instants. Closed individuality, which is roughly the common sense view founders on the issue of what it is that 'carries' identity in a world of naturalistic objectivities, and so pursuing this notion to its end leads one to either open or to empty individuality, which are both taken to be philosophically defensible. Both of these seem counterintuitive but are witnessed by certain kinds of non-ordinary experience. Open individuality in particular seems to be close to the Samkhya philosophy which pushes the self-other distinction further and further upstream of experience until all distinctions fall within the objective pole of experience. In each conscious instance however, what is experienced is experienced for a subject and objective reality only gains its incorrigible transcendence from the the consensus experience of distinct subjects. If all subjects are revealed to belong to a single 'I' then transcendence becomes reducible, is seen to be a single object of a single subject and the distinction between these two poles cannot be sustained. (An important intermediate step here is the realisation that consciousness itself falls into the objective pole.) One can glimpse here, through the breakdown of logic, that the inevitable resolution of this path is in non-duality - not-one and not-two, not-both and not-neither.
(Aside: Sartre's phenomenological ontology is also a version of Samkhya, and not only because of the bilingual pun, pour-soi = purusha!)

Even if it can be meaningfully verified that the nature of consciousness is quite other than it seems why should that detract in any way from the present moment being just what it seems? This is related to the question of suffering, or of the paradigm of fall and redemption. What if it could be known at some future time that this moment's suffering was an essential precursor, or component, of a later moment's bliss, would that make this moment's suffering any the less deplorable in an absolute sense? Here it is not a matter of the suffering of one person being the precondition for the happiness of another person or persons, but of states belonging to the same being. In the former case we might have serious doubts about the possibility of any such trade-off between negative and positive states but not in the latter. To which it might be responded that two conscious states of the 'same' being separated in time are no less different metaphysically than two states in two 'distinct' beings. These questions seem to rely upon the idea of a momentary conscious state being something complete in itself. Is it just a property of such states that they seem not to be complete, or are they essentially incomplete? This is like asking whether states can ever be redeemed, which is again a question about the deep relations of conscious states to time. Does Proust offer a paradigm of such redemption of 'lost time'? Think of the sinking of a present state into the past not as the petrification of that moment and then its falling into inaccessibility but as something more akin to a cryogenic freezing. At a future moment say that the contextual problem leading to the salience of suffering in a given moment has been solved. Then, say that the original moment could be resuscitated in its living fullness and augmented with the new understanding. We know that every conscious moment is open and incomplete, so why could not the incompleteness be of just this kind. Again, this comes down to the deep temporal structure of consciousness, beyond subjectivity.

On one side consciousness is the very touchstone of certainty not so much according to the pattern of the Cartesian cogito but in that the highest degree of certainty that might be given to any belief is underwritten by the self-certainty of the believing consciousness. Indeed the skeptic is only able to doubt everything by comparing possible beliefs with an inexplicit self-certainty - and if this extends to systematically doubting oneself it is only in reference to positional or thetic beliefs; what it is that knocks them down like nine-pins is the non-thetic self-certainty of consciousness. It follows that self-certainty is empty, which means pragmatically that the possibility that the nature, essence or reality of consciousness is entirely other than it seems cannot be ruled out. We already have enough experiences of a wholesale reframing of consciousness, of shifts in what some refer to as 'ontological qualia' that the possibility of further and yet more radical shifts is always open. That is to say that consciousness is certain of itself, but it is entirely uncertain of what it is certain of. A similar logic applies to desire - we seem to be wholly invested in our strongest desires so that they represent a transcendent truth about ourselves, but we are also aware from experience that we can be entirely mistaken about precisely what we desire - desires can be peeled back to reveal truer desires concealed within them, and so there is no reason why these 'truer' desires might not themselves be opened to yet truer forms, without end. Behind these structures of unveilings lies the intuitive recognition that there is an act taking place with a rapidity beneath notice by which we endow our ongoing experience with ideal form.

Being in the world with its overlapping streams of interested absorption is seamless despite a continuous internal distance, a non-coincidence of intention and attainment. As you move about within it world moves with you, as if you are just world doing itself. It seems to be content all the way through and consciousness  merely added on, a way of taking its inner displacement, a way of thinking about thinking. But at the same time it all goes on as if inside consciousness, so, like a ship in a bottle, you wonder how all that matter could have passed through such a small hole, how intrinsic emptiness could be so cluttered with earnest entitlements.

Reflection on immediate experience seems to be about as certain as you can get. You may not quite know what is was but that it was and how it was are clear in immediate objectivation. Where some room for doubt remains is in the sense that the certainty does not quite coincide with what it is certain of but belongs to a new moment of reflection, a reflection inflected slightly towards the possibility of things being quite other than they currently are. There is a kind of intuitive architecture of time which tells you where to look for the immediate past. The invariance of this home structure is only contingent, it is given to you, and you habitually take it as given and as it seems to have been for a long time. It is possible to rotate the frame slightly, to stretch it and deform it imaginatively, in other words to practise variations on it, aided by memories if available, or poetic evocations or metaphoric injunctions, of altered states. This the natural way in which subjective ontological structures are tested and if nothing else points to the fact that all such structures are no more than products of imagination. Crystallised imagination is unreflectively taken to be reality, but every such crystallisation can be melted if the temperature of imagination is raised sufficiently. Openings of this kind are never entirely forgotten, and adumbrations of them are valued highly. The verity lies not in any structure but in the banked fires of of what in its downstream form is called imagination.

Arguments against 'free will' based on the causal completeness of the physical world only point to the inadequacies of the concepts used to frame them. In one sense free-will is not a purported property of something but a mode of relation between an organism and its environment. If the degrees of freedom in the repertoire of responses matches or exceeds the degrees of freedom of the environmental stimuli then there is practical freedom even without the need of invoking a will. The behaviour of an individual ant is limited and stereotyped, and can easily be exhausted by unfamiliar obstacles, but that of a colony shows a startling ability to respond to many different kinds of challenge. On a higher level the limitations of an individual species are transcended by the evolution of new species with unpredictable new abilities in meeting new obstacles. In this sense life is free in relation to all the possible changes in its environment as long as these permit it to exist. Additionally, freedom lies not merely in the unpredictability of the responses but in their appropriateness, as if there is an open-ended conversation or game being played between agent and situation. To invoke a 'will' as the kernel of such freedom is not to bring in a metaphysical mystery but to transpose the context into human reality where the relation called freedom becomes the relation of consciousness and world, the ability to meaningfully respond to every different kind of perceived situation - even if the response is to refrain from acting. Indeed, freedom is the ability to refrain from any given conditioned behaviour from purely 'internal' motives - like the Underground Man's refutation of any utopia. So it is impossible to disprove 'freedom of the will' until you can fully account for consciousness. In practice the whole argument is less metaphysical than ideological, and it would be enough to show that a belief in free will is positively correlated with a larger repertoire of responses to life-challenges.

All of experience is life is always and everywhere I. It bursts out of pure dark inwardness and blossoms like a firework making a majestic arc to fall back into inwardness, into pure presence. All of this is entirely in the open, is apparance without a shadow. But at the same time through a small deviation in the current of desire, which descends into love, decays into a subtle holding on, a retraction, there arises the peculiar idea of separation, that the falling away exceeds a boundary, falls over the edge of a well and crosses over into a not-self, into an infinite inaccessibility, into a place we've heard so much about, only ever heard about and come to believe, objective reality or the third-person world, the common world that belongs to no one. What an extraordinary idea, that what this is is our being thrown into such a nightmare world that is more real than we are. It sends us off balance and in trying to reassert our intuitively known priority in this alien element the struggling and heroic self is born whose adventures are an inexhaustibly fascinating and tarnished dream.

If you think about consciousness you think about something, some thing that is always about something, even itself. However close a view you take of it it always has an object and even if the object is barely a thing it is in the overlap between idea and feeling, between concept and percept. As for the subject of consciousness there is not even such clarity. You cannot directly connect consciousness with that congeries of notions and events that you take for yourself, so you are tempted to think of a chimerical impersonal consciousness, a web of 'prehensions' that factitiously acquires the idea of a self, that allows itself to be seduced by an 'I-thought'. Imagine this swarm of elemental consciousness arising like a miasma from out of the unfolding of cosmic law - take it as far as you can and it only begs the question - in so far as it means consciousness it is already your consciousness. You are inescapable, are everywhere but in that congeries of notions and events, that fading thought. Consciousness is I more radically than any self, than anything known or knowable.

From time to time you come across startling theories of the subject, of consciousness as it is now, which throw light onto hitherto unnoticed or only vaguely discerned aspects of functioning. As theories however they are nothing more than maps drawn from a position somewhat outside of this functioning, and this automatically limits the kind of illuminations they can produce. The subjective functioning is unlimitedly illuminable in this sense, there are endless fresh lights that can be directed onto it, a kaleidoscope of brilliant insights which each seem for a time to leave no more mystery but for the tiny frustration of that slight displacement that marks the inner limit of motivated knowing. You could say that the subject is the reflecting of itself, but in doing so you attenuate the sense of reflection to a meaning, to a neutral tool of understanding. If real insight could be expressed in words then every word or concept would name a living being, and not any sort of being but a wild fire-breathing dragon powered by the explosive energy at the heart of being. The intelligence in a theory is a measure of energy and most of the time the energies that engage and fascinate you are merely the echoes of forces incomparably greater.

The notion, or meta-notion since it is not explicit but structures so many other more patent life-comportments, that you are a passenger travelling through time is easily seen to be false but remains effective because you cannot formulate the alternative. All of your thinking is complicit with it. There is consciousness of passing but the presumption is that something concrete is passing, so that the reality of what you are is aligned along the axis of time. If your present being is incomplete it is because the fullness of being is awaiting you up ahead. It's true that you open onto the future but the projection of the missing part onto the future is false. This ought to be clear because of your indifference to your past. The past may make for good stories to tell, but they are always at least slightly comic because of the absurdity of the notion that your present open and incomplete being could ever complete them. This peculiar temporal spell, so hard to break from, is why novels are so amusing but devoid of significance, other than to hint enigmatically at the nature of the illusion. The reflex to seize the verity of the present moment is what propels you into these fantasms of completion, by time, by desire, by assertion.

Think of it instead as for-itself or as Dasein, that for which its own being is in question. As world-making being its self-transcendence devolves into attitudes, comportments or dispositions. Of these some are more closely imbued with this essential questioning; this being a matter of a certain ek-static structure more so than anything propositionally equivalent to a question. Desire, temporality, valuation might serve as prime examples. Put simply these are things which you would not expect an AI to be endowed with unless it had somehow transcended its condition and, as they might say, 'awakened'. If we are informed by experts that artistic creativity and empathy are two things we might expect to find in near-future AI well short of consciousness, then we know that these do not belong in this rare class of question-bearing comportments. Rather we see that cultural discourses endless circle about this latter class without actually naming it or being concerned to emphasis their self-revelatory self-concealing character. People would rather fight over them, which is itself a kind of revelation. You might also think of the class of such comportments that we readily ascribe to animals.  Do animals desire? Or if we admit that they do is their desire of the same ontological significance, is their being in question in it? The answer is probably no. There is a particular kind of openness in the members of this class, which also endows them with religious significance. The pathways may be indirect, but it is through these that irreducible metaphysical questions persistently recur.

To target or expose some state of affairs an instrument is needed as well as a theory with which to understand the observed indications. The more sensitive the instrument the deeper you can penetrate into the phenomenon. This applies to the study of physical phenomena and probably also to psychic, that is mental, phenomena, but does it also apply to the investigation of consciousness by consciousness, where phenomenon and instrument are identical? It is perhaps natural to think so, from which it follows that the cultivation of meditative practises is what ought to be pursued. This approach instrumentalises the mind and deflects attention onto methods and goal and other such objectivities. But it is only through the frustration and failure of methods and goals that you are brought back to the original situation, the situation at the very outset of any searching, which all along is the only situation that there is. There is a huge variety of possible mental states, some quite wonderful, many quite awful, but consciousness is precisely what remains unaffected in the midst of these.

There is the getting around in a world, this goes on more or less well by way of a familiar doubling of things and the mental representations of things - with the mental here standing for a naturally double-sided class of things. The notion of thinghood, or better of matters, res, does its work as the fulcrum of this process and carries with it a lot of unprovable metaphysical presumption about the being of these objectives. Actually it doesn't have to go as far as metaphysics, these things could be real or ideal or something else without impairing the effectiveness of ongoing internal relations, without challenge to certain much broader logical assumptions such as the law of identity, A = A. The logic would be confirmed under any given view of what is real, as the constraints on any possible metaphysics, and indeed replacing the need for any metaphysics at all. In all of this however the status of the subject, or consciousness, or the experiencer, remains mysterious. It does not conform to the constraints that define matters or events, or whatever is taken to be primary. (It) appears therefore as a mystery to be solved even though it is strikingly insoluble in any such terms. The possibility remains of 'flipping the script' - take the subject or experiencer or consciousness, not under any name, to be basic reality and see the objective as the mystery. This requires an intense 'escape velocity' of imagination. It goes against the grain of the mental, but the initial result, that the objective is utterly enigmatic and that the general constraints that define metaphysics are groundless fantasms, is not so hard to reach.

It's not like a book, you don't go deeper into it, your perspective doesn't slowly alter as the forms reveal themselves. Forms, perspectives, desires, these are just temporary fictions that attain some salience and then melt back again; the basic situation never changes and doesn't yield. If it is transparency then it is so on behalf of a hidden opacity, and if it is an opacity or a history or a soul then this is only ironic, is exposed in order to be immediately denied in the fresh transparency of the present. To know it would be irrelevant, would belong to a minor order, but the urge to know is the only way to speak of it, as if there could be one thing said that would answer for it, would be the words at the limits of saying; the sentences only words, the words only sounds, the sounds only significations, only gestures. Every utterance like every picture being only a locality, a region, a kind of weather in the trees and the sky, in the way the air is to breathe, to be the gratitude for breath, gratitude for the zero that iterates in its own silence.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, in what eye is the beholder? All the furniture of the waking world looks back at you, contributes to the circles by which some thing like you is posited in the world, is in the world in a thing-like way. Objects in regard to which there is a strong emotional effect, beautiful objects, objects of desire, horrific objects, do this less so than neutral objects, than the merely supporting cast of things. When there is such a strong effect then you are reflectively aware of upwelling of feeling that creates it and of its internal source, so that such objects are experienced as more dream-like, more hallucinatory. The centre of gravity in such confrontations is closer to the self, or more accurately to the gut, or the liver. Oddly though there is less sense of autonomy in these cases; you are passive to the emotions which rise up from the unknown insides, and are more hostage to the associated objects. Hostage because something is required of you, something alienating, even though or precisely because the source of the attachment is felt as arising from within. If the purpose in desire was to prove something then there would be an illusion involved which could be dispelled by exposing its false logic. But the nature of desire is exactly what persists in the face of every unveiling, of every exposure. You know what the error is but you still desire, as much or even more than before. Desire does away with purpose.

Phenomenologising is is a last refinement of the Copernican turn and as such it opens onto an open self-transcending and to exposure of the always renewed always inadequate procession of consciousness towards it own negation and completion. This becomes synonymous with human reality as it is experienced in every one of the bundled strategies that is a life - these in their situationally authoritative decentredness all come down to the play of the same core structure, the operation of self. Consider that this too in its seeming totality may be the way of appearing of something else of an entirely heterogenous nature, consider a second Copernican turn on top of the first, in which the negation or in other terms the topological twistedness, that brings about the all the consequential transcendences, that negation which is the very heart of consciousness, is itself immanentised but on behalf of something that is prior to consciousness. The whole thing worked because it always pointed outside and to an outside that was believed in, the only outside that could be believed in, more abstract and deeper than the outside that was dissolved in the first turning. But if you focus on this one it goes too; there is no outside, never was, can't be. Consciousness can discover the one object of attention which cannot be attended to by consciousness, the pivot, the impossible point.

This is what it is, always, whether there is attention on it or not. Nothing ever comes from outside because that's where it goes, to the outside, that's all that outside is - the going; it's here first and then it escapes or seems to, at any rate you let it go; it's no longer and you cease to care. You are only this again and again, whether you think to think of it or not, the taste is the same. The idea of it as a process, that you are a process, that you can change it by changing experience is the most delightful of ideas, but doesn't mean you have to believe it, put your heart in it, as if that was the thing you could do. Just another cloud that passes, that shapes a day for what doesn't coincide. The semi-colon always truer than the comma is all you know and ever need to know.