The conscious self whose centre is presence and whose periphery is narrative is the tip of an iceberg of hidden conscious life all of which is experienceable under the right circumstances, that is, experienceable from the inside, from within an identical subject of a different character. (It may be that there is also a 'cognitive unconscious' which cannot be experienced from the inside, but the knowing of it can, its objectivity being folded into a cognising subject.) So you can wonder how far down in this 'iceberg' the sense of self extends. Does it melt into a pure happening of impersonal consciousness at a level where distinctions are completely fluid? To think this way is to treat the surface self as something special, a break in form. This seems unlikely. Self then extends all the way down but its character changes in unexpected ways.

All these intricate theories are of self, are themselves 'ornaments of darkness'. But self seems a comparatively recent creation, not the original lure, that piece of filth for which you dove into desire, but an especially sweet and sticky supplement to it. There is so much complicity, that sidelong slide into gratification which never quite works out, so many 'special interests' to take care of.

Having or being a self and being conscious, or having consciousness appear to be quite different things. At least in that it is possible to be conscious in the absence of a self - although to assert this begging the question in favour of a certain kind of meaning to be given to self. There can be predictive modeling of a world and of one's interactions with that world to the point of requiring a model of the modeller, but somehow a further twist is required, a certain irreversible 'flip' for this structure to acquire the necessary descriptor as self. Presumably the details can be worked out, and in the end you get a functional prescription of being or having a self. If you ask it if it has qualia it unhesitatingly answers 'yes' - after all, every sense, both inner and outer has its own ineluctable modality. And does this 'self' feel itself to be something utterly unique, metaphysically a subject. Indeed, and with all of the attendant psychological baggage, since the twisted loop at the heart of it is paradoxical with respect to every kind of mere object. This is an account, a thought experiment, and like all thought experiments it smuggles in a background consciousness (without object relative to the thought-world) in the outermost thinker. The result, a shallowest possible self, is a singularity and inconclusive.

Experiencing is already reflexive, is already a self. Its illusion is that this is what consciousness is, rather than mere being without self or subject. It seeks the good but every good that it attains is only so because it carries the taste of non-experience, of mere being. The infinity and the zero are the same, ever shining without hindrance, or what everything is made of.

Consciousness as abstracted from experiencing is relational, that is, must always have an object. You abstract the notion of consciousness from your relatedness to objects. Such relationality is not a twoness but a threeness - you could say that the third is what distinguishes object from subject, breaks their symmetry, or you could say it is the frame in which relationality can take place, what brings the two together and keeps them apart. This line of thinking is enough to conclude that consciousness implicitly takes itself as object alongside or surrounding its definitive object. If it is just a relation without this latent reflexivity then it isn't yet what we could call consciousness. Reflexivity however invites infinite regression and it is not sufficient to say that it tricks itself into the illusion of reflexivity because the reflexivity is what enables the illusion. The alternative is that consciousness need not have an object - this being necessarily outside of all experiencing. What would consciousness without an object be 'like'? Well, certainly not like consciousness with object then deprived of object - the deprivation would then be another kind of object. At least see that consciousness without an object cannot be ruled out by any consideration of sufficient reason.

Probabilistic predictive models of the mind, such as those naturally arising from evolutionary theory retain uncertainty, or more simply doubt as a fundamental generative principle. This gives rise to a intrinsic tone or ethic in both the cognitive and moral sense. If not merely the world by the metaphysic of the world are projections of mind then this doubt is also a projection and there ought also to be a phase of the same mind in which the negative place of doubt is filed, is a positive. This would then represent a form of knowing that was utterly ineffable in relation to ordinary, that is evolutionary knowing. That evolutionary knowing is one possible resolution of mind implies that this other kind of knowing also exists as an alternative resolution - like an equation with two solutions - one 'real' and one 'imaginary'. No extension of the real solution will ever yield the imaginary one, although the reverse is possible - just as real analysis is a special case of complex analysis but not vice versa.

The experiencing that is you, vivid and alive in every way and fully present here and now. For the person next to you it is the same kind of thing, perhaps even more vibrant in some respects, but you have no direct access to it. These two worlds are two facts about the underlying world as you understand it. There could be another next to you whose experiencing was almost identical to yours, was in fact exactly what your would be if you were located in that particular spatial niche with another externally identical to you in yours. These are still two separate facts in the world. This means that nothing in your experience corresponds to what you are as ultimate subject. If you could be copied perfectly, made of the same biological stuff which we know to be replaceable piecemeal, then you could die and be replaced by a copy and none of your nearest and dearest would know the difference. If time is real then the same ought to apply to yourself shifted in time - it's just like you but isn't you, is somehow someone else. These are all simple enigmas, but they have no simple solution. At any rate it's not the ineffable 'feeling of experiencing this or that' that is in question but the 'who' of the experiencing, and the nub of this mystery that remains after unravelling the grammatical solecisms that accompany this question.

Consciousness is nothing but a symptom... A symptom of what? Well, obviously of consciousness! What else could it be?

You can get a sense of what dissociation of consciousness, its partition into centres which can only communicate externally, is like, but it is less easy, perhaps to gain an understanding of its opposite, of combination. An example might be by way of the diverse faculties working together, or of the separate contributions of the minds belonging to the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This points to the way that you cannot judge by way of the feeling that your consciousness is a unity whether it is of necessity a unity, transcendental or otherwise, or whether your inner voice is more like a solo than a choir. The seams are not such as would appear in any self-representation because the structure of consciousness is far from transparent. For a panpsychist the combination problem is therefore not insurmountable. There is however some intuitive access to the invariant categories that underlie consciousness, although the translation of this into concepts is imperfect; there is some kind of binary, subject-object, inside-outside, perception-cognition, will-representation, etc. That the contingency of this meta-structure can also be somehow known or experienced is the only pointer to the ineffable.

While far from being dissociated, rather the reverse, there are a few distinct personages that occupy the 'cockpit' or 'driver's seat' of experiencing (whether the controls actually do anything is a different question); at the very least there is the daytime waking self, the worried seer of 4 a.m. vigils and that troublesome bearer of gifts, the horny self. (The dreamer is not distinct from these but a sort of wavering reflection of them all as in a dirty puddle.) All of these take their turns on the same stream of experiential events which they openly share and which can be 'presenced' by only one at a time. Hence the conclusion that the unity of experience is a function of the body, whatever the body might happen to be, whether under naturalism or idealism. If the body is then like a bubble on a soapy stream arising out of nowhere and finally popping - experience being like the rainbow patterns on its surface - then it makes no sense to ask whether the 'same' bubble can arise twice. What is the same is the fluid out of which the bubbles form, but there need be nothing intrinsically bubble-like about this fluid which might concede some existential dignity to an individual bubble. This is a colourful way of bringing up the question of whether any relation could exist between an experiencing and its ultimately real substrate, and whether there could be any way, any evidencing in the broadest sense, of answering this question.

There is the situation or experiential world and there is you who are in that world. The two never being in perfect mutual attunement, there is also that quality identified as thrownness. If attention is turned almost entirely onto the situation it is nonetheless punctuated more or less frequently by rapid scans in the dimension of self. This latter consists mainly of a digest of the state of the body, like a pilot monitoring the dials that register the vessel's interior functioning. There is also something like a state of the abstract self, but this is mostly a particular and efficient way of interpreting the body, consisting of mood and attitude, something like an 'intentional stance'. Whether there is also a deeper existential report of the self, where more is asked to be known than the condition of the body, is not clear. From this perspective you can ask how you know that you are a single subject? There are no grounds for that assumption, it is merely a useful hypothesis. Say that there were two subjects and each in turn carried out a self-scan. In either case the return would be 'present'. There is no case in which two selves are each aware of the other's presence; the nature of the body does not allow it (unless it is damaged in some way). Having a self confers a costly advantage; it requires so many ancillary assumptions that it greatly reduces the degrees of freedom of your response any fresh situation.

What sort of 'thing' is your experiential world? Is it made by something which is not an experiential world? Other people have their own experiential worlds even as they appear within your and you in theirs, with a noisy and lossy communication between them. Apparently two or more experiential worlds can share the same brain as substrate, at least taking turns at it, but cases in which two selves share the same experiential world are at most rare and momentary. Since it seems to be something parametrised space, can you imagine two almost identical copies of the same world, but still experienced separately? In that case nothing in that world, the whole algebra of its qualia is what actually makes it yours. The lights can go off, it can be withdrawn in deep sleep or death and then could it come back, yes in the former case, no in the latter? Doesn't there seem to be a superspace in which these experiential worlds arise? And is there some property of that superspace which underwrites identity in the deepest sense? The experiential world feels as if it is the inner layer of the 'real' world, fitting tightly over it. But then what happens when you are deeply affected by a piece or music or art? It seems to open inwards in a strange way, and such modifications of experience, like dreams, seem to be essential to its maintenance.

Just as when you push the question of consciousness hard enough in an anti-reductionist but physicalist framework you end with some variant of panpsychism, including within that even a seemingly remote variant like enactivism, so, if you start from idealism where the question is now the objective world, you end up with some sort of pan-objectivism, or pan-physicalism. Kant's thing-in-itself may be taken to an example of the latter, a term being needed to underwrite the inescapable world transcendent, or transcendental, to experience. The positions are mirror images of each other and the trouble in either case is at the interface. If what then is at stake is meaning then you need something like freedom, in the sense of a match between the degrees of freedom on either side. Consciousness may not be able to know reality but it must be able to freely comport itself in relation to it. If, say, consciousness has fewer degrees of freedom than the reality that it is faced with then you might argue that it is part of a larger system which does. In that case consciousness would be a substitutable part of that larger system, but against that one may take non-substitutability as an axiom of consciousness. The solution to this dilemma is something like Indra's Net, an idea, or model, that often arises in discussions of this question. Indra's Net however is also a model of infinity, where a subset is in perfect correspondence to the whole set. This may be taken as an inescapable argument against finitism.

Experience is not all that is and its nature is revealed in its relations to what is wholly other than experience. Then experience is the relation to what is not experience. It makes no sense for the relation to be between what is not experience and the relation to what is not experience. (And if it were how would experience locate what it is not in order to be its relation to it?) So it must be that experience is the relation of one thing that is not experience to another thing that is not experience, being as if were the interface between the two. As for those two others, their relation to each other precedes experience, or they have no such relation being undifferentiated and experience marks their separation out of this undifferentiatedness. How could this breach be effected? Not by what is not experience since it knows no difference, but only out of a sort of usurpation by experience, a catastrophe in the heart of the undifferentiated, the realisation of a wholly heterogenous potentiality. This notion answers to the two great unknowns of experience, what it is that witnesses and what it is that is witnessed.

This way of pondering over things, of different ways to use doubt, of guarded acceptance, might well be the wrong track, simply a confusion of signposts somewhere in the wastelands of mind, but it seems that at every fork you took the direction that was marked out for you. In this sense you are not the traveler but the way itself. As if the working of this variant had to be seen, and you witness that fulfills it.

An emotional and ideational state is like a problem to be resolved - as distinct from solved - that is, to go quietly against the grain of the mood in order to see that it arises from the same background consciousness as ay other state. The hint you are given is the enhanced salience of the object-like sense of self, which although turbulent has an unusual constancy. You go under the turbulence to whatever it is that maintains this appearance of constancy. To do so however you need to draw some force from the mood's own urgency, to bend it towards a working. This has a slightly violent quality since it is carried out blindly and is therefore somewhat frightening. The fear is a mark of hitting something relatively in your inner world - there is no movement without a corresponding fear.

There seems to be nothing more alive than this fierce crystalline light of the pure presence, the sole vertex of existence. In another sense however it is nothing but a contingent interpretation of Time, and is far from exhausting time's potentialities. It is even possible to imagine being separated from it, seeing it 'over there' - 'you are that' now said ironically. It is the property of a protagonist of a way a story unfolds, an ineluctable story perhaps but still story. In spite of being the veritable hero of the cogito it is entirely lacking in foundation, as if you have walked the edge of a high cliff for the sake of the intensity of feeling on looking down. It is an experience and thus irrelevant. Where then do you look at it from? Some kind of thick temporalisation behind the screen of form, a peculiar intimacy that does not 'scan' as a subject.

Metaphysics is the presumption that there is an absolute frame of reference for experience without any presumption as to what the 'space' of all possible experiences may be. As such it is irrelevant since if there were such a frame it would have no effect upon the experiences that were enabled by it. Worse than that however is that the idea of such a frame gives rise to a distortion of the ideas that can locally order experience from within. Apply this to the notion of existence as it arises in relation to whatever it is that distinguishes the immediate presence of the now, that which differs from all possible qualities. You are tempted to ask whether this sense of existence penetrates all the way through experience to being, but the question is asked as if you already know what is being. This question ought to be directed at, or oriented to, the mysterious 'already know' and not at the 'being'.

What is referred to as qualia if they mean anything at all are only in the immediate subjective present, are the root of the tree of everything understood as qualia. What is that root? It can't be a concept because the whole point was to empty out the conceptual contents, and it seems it cannot also be a quale because how is it then distinguished from the representatives of qualia which form the tree, or the essence of any particular quale. It's an old philosophical conundrum, distinguishing say essence from existence. Is there something in experience that irreducibly marks existence or being? It is in other words the question of being, the ontological distinction in fact, but wrapped up in all sorts of cognitivist blankets. It makes more sense to accept that the distinction itself, the very seed or root of that distinction contaminates all our thinking, and marks a wrong turning in the history of metaphysics, and so cannot be 'cured' by any further thinking along received lines.

To hear a note or see a coloured shape, the note has its place in a piece of music or is perhaps a birdsong, the coloured shape in a picture or a certain vista, but apart from their function is being part of some larger synthesis which is already more than half-way to being an idea, they also have a individual character, infinitely particular. That infinite particularity is such through its evocative potentialities, through the hints of character that it evokes, which can be felt as simultaneously personal and general, at least for those whose culture overlaps with yours. these evocative associations are structured say in a tree-like way, this association giving rise to that one etc., and spreading out in a synesthesia. in other words they can be resolved into 'tasting notes'. You could say that what makes a quale what it is is its tasting notes. So then is the quale anything more than those tasting notes? If not then doesn't it reduce to something which is ultimately not made of qualia at all. The tasting notes are a tree every node of which is a quale; the root of the tree is in immediate presence but the note are in re-presentation but otherwise they are not different. So you only need the tree and the immediacy of the root, which is itself a kind of quale, but of an existential kind, neutral to sense.

It's fully in line with the evolutionary origin of mind that it is always asking 'what is this?' - that is, classifying each new event according to its pre-existing schemes and modifying the latter whenever the degree of novelty exceeds some variable threshold. Further, such a mind at a sufficient level of sophistication has itself as an element in its schemes and hence experiences the event of its own awareness, the schemes always seeking as a matter of epistemological parsimony to draw out their internal implications as far as possible. Hence even a p-zombie would question its own existence in a self-conscious way. For example it would be subject to the effect of 'when I don't think about how I'm doing it (e.g. riding a bike) all is fine, but the minute I think about it, put attention onto how I am actually doing it, I can no longer do it as well, or at all.' This would be enough to make an experiential event of the mind's own experiencing. The p-zombie would presumably do all of this without any qualia, but it might speak of or think in terms of qualia just so as to have an appropriate language for taking this as a theme. Hence in a world of p-zombies we would find active philosophical discussion of qualia. How then could we tell that they 'really' didn't have them? How can we tell that we really do have them, outside of merely thinking about them?

Consciousness names the background by which every thing is as it is, what then is the background by which consciousness is as it is, or is able to do what it does? Call this the grounding problem. It is a blank or void in experience and just because of that it can become saturated with noetic value. This seems to a short circuit of knowing and being, but properly belongs only to knowing for which it represents new dimension requiring exploration.

Awareness of awareness is entirely dependent on a subordinate distinction made within awareness, therefore it is impossible. The only way you could be aware of awareness is through the direct and overwhelming conviction that you were not and could never be so aware.

The notion of causality is subject to a fourfold factoring: physical causality or the evolution of a dynamic system in time under deterministic rules; stimulus and response or the behaviour of vegetative life; goal-seeking motivation or behaviour of independently mobile creatures; and finally reasoned action, that is action responding to a comparative modeling of possible motives and outcomes. These are also levels of 'emergence'. Considering actions of all kinds as computations we might say that each level represents a higher Turing degree (in the sense of Degree Theory), that is it takes as primitive the outcomes of all computations of a complete class of computations at the lower level. What appears as the elusive phenomenon of freedom (of will) is the projection of the Turing 'jump'. Thus the current gropings towards the next level in trying to subsume the outcomes of all possible narrative frames, or motivations at the 'human' level. This would present an inceptional take on what is often seen as a collapse or ending of meanings, or a 'meaning crisis'.

While the objective is in space and time and the timeless, the subjective is only in time. While these two aspects of reality are interdependent their relation is such that the objective is in the subjective - even insofar as the subjective is also in the objective, as with intersubjectivity and reflexive intersubjectivity, this is for the subjective - which is strange because space and time seems to be far more complex than time by itself. There is no co-presence of the subjective which means that self-understanding by way of subjective structures never attains enough solidity to move beyond the fleeting present. The only counter for subjectivity is to build complex momentary experiences, which at most seem real or enduring. There needs to be a purely temporal route to thickening time, rather than just by mirroring spatial configuration.