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Saturday, 22 May 2021

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.

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