While much of experience can go on without what we think of as consciousness, there are certain instances, not themselves self-conscious, which seem only to be possible because of it - in particular intense pleasures (jouissance?) and intense pains. These are not merely treatable as qualia but as something like a qualia overload. These break the witnessing function, analogous to the way that feedback breaks the functioning of an audio system, momentarily forcing a different kind of awareness. But sometimes everything becomes a teasing metaphor for consciousness.

The word consciousness in everyday usage inclines more towards the sense of self-consciousness, of a kind of queasy friction in action, of immaturity, of being new to a task and lacking confidence, and so refers to something it were desirable to be free from. Looking n to consciousness n this sense is looking into what you most do not want to see, you lingering unreadiness for life. As the condition or universal pre-condition for there to be any experience at all, for the 'what it's like'-ness of it consciousness is used in a technical sense, whose use depends on one's having been captured by certain thought experiments without a clear resolution. It is assumed in the discourse that everyone has encountered these and butted up against their aporias. That the same word is used in both senses is worth questioning. The zest in experiences wholly lacking in self-consciousness, experiences without literary residue, might well completely escape this terminology.

You are an I-sayer as a particular person in a world of persons who are each and all I-sayers, I-doers, and although each one and its others are deeply connected so that the things that come to their attention are not unique but shift and slide, multiply and divide between the, the "I's are completely sealed off from each other, so that each can doubt if that of his other even exists - as if the nature of such 'I's necessarily includes existence. Out of a practically innumerable host of such existing 'I's one of them is you and remains you until you, and it, die and cease to exist. And new 'I's continue to arise into existence, and how can you know whether one of these future ones without any knowledge or memory of you might happen to illuminate exactly the same void as your "i" currently fills. In other terms, if your particularity represent a certain choice over the set of all existing 'I's then its extinction goes to a void which is just as particular and which might or might not happen to be filled or negated by a new 'I', whose very wonder at its own unique and contingent being is the very same wondering as yours, at this moment. This kind of question may be inadmissible, but no available understanding of language and of the nature of reality is up to the task of proving that inadmissibility. (Instead it is assumed and the theories or lifeways puffed up to that level, like Dr Johnson's famous kicking of a stone.)

Aesthetics and morals are tributaries of judgment and evaluation, diametrically opposed although never separate or free from the influence of each other. Morality is traceable to the pragmatic concern for the fitness of the tribe and hence entails a prejudice in favour of the particular. The aesthetic is universal and aimed at truth but lacking any commensurately pure object must draw on the contents of the moral. Their mutual contamination is integral to both. Nonetheless the aesthetisation of the oral seems to produce happier results than the moralsation of the aesthetic.

Questions and speculations which carry no moral weight, no sense that their answer or development immediately implies certain values for the living, are likely to be trivial in that they arise purely out of and relative to the language in which you are attempting to think, are no more than linguistic technicalities. This is because moral issues are precisely those which are essentially human in spite of the celebrated relativity of ethics. At the same time, whatever is concerned with morals is likely to be fatuous and t point away from the essence of things. The only way that this is reconciled is through aesthetics which retains the only kind of value worth thinking about. Hence the indispensability and danger of fiction.

Intentions as causes are directly experienced in the mental and bodily realm and yet this is also the place where intentions most often fail, for example in controlling thoughts or bringing about a change in the state of mind. There is nothing surprising in either the successes or the failures and their coexistence side by side. Failed intentions are considered to result from hidden intentions, by which the self is taken to contain obscure depths. Self is taken to be the source of motives according to the presumption that identifies self, life and being, or consciousness.

Imagination determines the limits of reality by way of possible objects and their counterfactual relations and causality, but it does not determine the limits of consciousness. It is much easier to imagine strange new worlds obeying different rules, even of time and space, than to imagine let alone describe a different consciousness. This is true even after you have experienced a range of different states. There could not be a Kantian style of deduction of consciousness, to know its limits and invariant properties, it cannot be 'got hold of' in that way. It is easier for some to doubt its existence altogether. Another axiom: consciousness is not susceptible of proof.

Say that consciousness has a use, a functional value it provides for the mind, then there would be phases where its work would be taken over by automatic processes that no longer required its contribution, and isn't this just what is see in many everyday activities, but also in particular in so called 'flow states' in which self-consciousness is 'off-line'. You could speculate the the ultimate flow state would be so frictionless as to be entirely unconscious - except for a background of a diffuse contentment. This might better approximate the inner state of a p-zombie, who might understand what is meant by consciousness as regard it as the sign of an inferior kind of functioning. So much for consciousness as a theatre of qualia, including thought-qualia, but the other function of consciousness, providing an irreducible distinction, a singular and independent point of application remains untouched.

Everything that is in consciousness (including you) belongs to you and so is unreal (as real as you are), a sort of persistent mirage which plays hard, while consciousness itself, which by some grace is glimpsed at rare times, belongs to being, to the universe and so is real in the direct way that you cannot utter.

Certain passages in some of the great novels of the late 19th and early 20th century are seen as anticipating psychoanalysis but more accurately they anticipate an entirely different understanding of the psyche that was forever closed off by the appearance of psychoanalysis. There are many analogous cases of survivor bias or the baleful influence of the future anterior.

You might experience that we are all one consciousness but that doesn't mean you have company or are any the less alone. It seems quite the opposite, as if the illusion that you are not alone is what keeps you from seeing the oneness.

Experience lies cradled in an ontological framework whose fictions refer to nothing outside of itself and neither do they claim to. Nothing needs to change, there is no error involved. They are not equipped to point to or away from reality and never presume to do so. The perfection of reality would be on a different plane altogether and untouched, untouchable, if it were about planes, which of course it ain't.

What only occurs within consciousness is less real than consciousness but appears to be more so. Why this is is a question worth asking. Consciousness veils its overarching reality, it makes way for the world, it is the self-effacing host of all that happens. And consciousness too is a kind of guest, it draws its light, its power from something else, more silent still, and much more real.

The senses, including thought and inner feeling, are separate inputs to consciousness but are not the same as consciousness. In the same way the faculty which integrates the various senses consiliently with the 'theory' of an outer and inner word is not the same as consciousness although the two appear to be closely interdependent. If a sense were lost or if a new sense were added this does not change consciousness in its essence, these changes would be taken in stride. This invariance points to the self for which experience is enacted without its being in any way affected a d out of this the desire arises to realise this self.

Causality is never directly perceived, and cannot be, as Hume noted, differing in principle from the ordered behaviour of things according to so-called 'laws', and so is the instance in which the mind's construction of the world is most salient. This fact is masked by the degree to which we inhabit a technological world built by exploiting the laws governing, that is the reliable correlations of, things, and also by the contrary fact that causality in its subjective form is the only thing we directly experience, from so close in that again we are at a loss to say what it is.

The idea that inner experience is made up out of qualia, a dance or kaleidoscope of changing qualia suggests that a theory of consciousness could identify a core language of symbolic equivalents for these atomic particles of experience, but the relation of experience to language is a necessarily oblique one. A direct mapping would fail through objectification, whereas what we observe is that experience is best evoked through metaphor and situation, through the very element in art that is the least formal and yet the most seemingly natural, but also though what defies expectation in the most intelligent, least mechanical way. Experience is not made of qualia, they are merely something that boils off it, is fractionated out of it.

The world making that must precede a world is an achievement of mind but only in service to consciousness, so that we recognise that our everyday subjective consciousness is deeply akin to the transcendental consciousness that installs the rules by which the world gains objective form. This is because even if such rules were dictated by an external reality they could not e 'read' unless the abstract structure of such rules in general were there to receive them. Only consciousness can give the rules to consciousness, but this upstream face of it apparently has no self. Self is rather one f the transcendental conditions of world. But every consciousness corresponds to something like a self, and in this case that is known as being. Not the emptiest of all concepts, but a minute window into a wholly other dimension of experience.

For every thing that is there must already be a place or a context in which it is, in which the alternative is or is not can be rooted. So, if consciousness develops of the complexity in some non-conscious structures, then, before it is reognised and acknowledged by a self and since such a self is only some further refinement of the content of consciousness enabling it to reflect itself, there would be a stage of unreflected, unowned, merely happening, consciousness, such as we might imagine in an ant or an even simpler creature. That the thing is means that there is a place where it is, but in the case of a consciousness, even without a self, that place or space would still be a self, being the exclusive condition of its being at all.

The concept that goes by the name consciousness is perhaps a natural on for Eastern religions with their technics of meditation but in the West it only emerges out of soul around Descartes with the attempt to extend the categories of natural science to experience, and hence to postulate a mind stuff, or abstract and essentially impersonal general quality of experience-ness. The problem of consciousness then arises in reconciling this abstract quality with other more unequivocal generalities of substance, time, space motion, impenetrability, change etc. Perhaps the true 'hard problem' is with that aspect of soul that has been suppressed, its personal-ness. Now it is believed that this can be transcended through 'ego-death' or some such event, but even then, a having-been remains, as well as the fact the even such an event only has any sense within someone's personal experience.

Feeling, thought and will are not in themselves conscious, rather they elicit cnsciousness to varying degrees, ad in a sense, they serve consciousness somewhat blindly so that it can in return maintain them in their peculiar ongoing relations. That is why these faculties are without much insight into themselves - thoughts do not know where they come from, feelings are always being surprised by their own turnings, and will being the least conscious of all does its work in spite of the interference of the other two. The division of experience into these parts is not an intrinsic slicing-up, but an artefact of the level of understanding that has been gained.

If there were to be a true theory of consciousness what would it look like, what sorts of things could it make possible, how could it be validated? Would it produce a complete mathematical schema of a conscious state? Would it show how such a state was brought about and how it dissolved? Or would it merely add qualia colourings to a description of mental states? Would it necessarily entail the solution to all conundrums of metaphysics without itself depending on metaphysical assumptions about time and being? Or could it only be validated internally, like a key that unlocked and unfolded all of experience into self-transparency? What of the boundaries, what of the prior states, what nature could it ascribe to them?

Fictions, even the simplest, are engaging because they evoke, in some fashion, an image or simulation of the subjective state of their protagonists. This extends to the way in which we do not coincide with our own subjective states, the way that experience is always subject to a parallax with respect to the experiencing. The play on this, which opens further than one might have expected, is what makes for the more interesting kind of fiction. The fictional evocation of this parallax of consciousness is, however, entirely different from its reality in a subject appreciating the effects of such an evocation. In the one case it is representable, has a point of origin indirectly pointed towards in the other it does not and cannot because there is simply no such point - parallax without an eye.

If you make a distinction between self, or pure consciousness and mind or 'applied' consciousness, then you see that while there is no limit to the forms in which consciousness reveals itself to itself, none of these encroach upon the fundamentally unitary and unmanifested nature of pure consciousness. The analogy is made with light which only appears when it strikes something it an object or a retina, and a similar analogy could be made with electricity which brings about so many diverse actions and manifestations but is, apart from what it does, devoid of any nature. There are derived theories however, explaining the nature of light or of electricity in terms of the action of yet more fundamental elements. In the same way, pure consciousness, may be the action, the 'mind' of a somewhat yet more unitary and unrevealed.

Every gesture or practice you do on behalf of life is also made inversely on behalf of death. Life and death are inseparable, but the light of life next to that of death is dazzlingly bright and renders the other invisible and unknowing.

The idea that consciousness is primarily initiated by symmetries and relationships underlying experience and that the phenomenal world is a secondary phenomenon or fabulation of this, is akin both to computational models and to Platonism - the two being closer in spirit than one might think - provides some insight into phenomena that are already largely relational, but does little for those that lean more on pure qualia, like colour and smell. The so-called secondary standing out as more primary than the primary ones.