In the physicalist view the mind has evolved to predict and manipulate the outside world and despite this interaction being mediated by signals in nerve fibres etc., the needs for economy and efficiency in the task means that the internal mapping of the world be the closest possible analogue of the actual environment, modulo only pragmatic features being salient. The idea of there being no such analogue relationship between the subjective 'virtual reality' and the 'thing in itself' outside the skull is an artifact of linguistic thinking, of the inherently digital character of meaning making through words. Parsimony demands that the mind's world-making capability reflects reality beyond the mind.

Phenomenologies developed in the wake of Descartes and Kant, and by way of German Idealism offer non-trivial accounts of experience in its multiple layers, individually or all at once, to the degree that the terms taken as primary are close to non-descriptive expressions of pure subjectivity. The more formal theories of consciousness which the current form of spirit obsessively search for could only have validity if they are able to map onto these older discourses, but there seems to be a categorical impasse in the way of any such articulation.

The kind of personal identity that rests on narrative and memory, on narrativised memory and remembered narrative is a product of maturity. It begins when it becomes developmentally possible and becomes more crystalised and heavier with age until at least it begins to crumble and disintegrate under its own weight. It is a linguistic thicket, a dedicated neural large language model and ultimately has nothing to do with delf identity at all. It is founded upon preverbal intensities which can only seem to the mind to be analogues of non-verbal sensory experiences, synaesthesic patterns of colour, sound, smell, touch etc. Its nodes are linked in strange non-linear ways. As you progress past the artificial socially mediated forms of identity the centre of gravity of identity shifts back in time towards the moment of birth and beyond.

The sense of awe at the scope and scale of the physical universe is a question as to what will could have framed such being and is a tacit recognition that the essence of being is will and an even more hidden recognition that the mind that is contemplating this mystery is itself at the very core of it. When the sublimity of what is seen silences thought a gap in the clouds is created through which the glow of original insight can shine.

Any theory of others, that is of the plurality of apparently individual subjects, such as 'dissociated alters', is either a restatement of some obvious phenomena in a quasi-technical jargon or else a begging of the question unless it also offers a key to the existence of persons (and not merely 'other minds') and understanding the relations between them. At a minimum the difference between sexual polarity and the many forms of eros that constitute the attractions and repulsions, the glue, of humans relations. Individuals do not arise singularly but in complex pre-existing groupings without clear boundaries. All the phenomena of 'mind' occur as much between relational nodes as within what appears as consciousness.

Subject-object and in general the sorts of polarities that could go into a hypothetical topology of consciousness have the property of being reversible, or in other words being essentially formal. There is no problem in topology in going through a strange twist and coming out on the reverse side - it is essentially 'deconstructible'. Polaritiesuch as female-male or ground-existence do not work that way. In these cases what might happen is that one pole - female, ground or yin - might appear to swallow up the other one, but this is only an appearance in which the original difference nevertheless lies concealed.

The threats and challenges to human reality, its looming singularities and limit cases only take place within and as a result of that same reality, which has never been a securely fixed matter. The temptation, impossible to resist, to go to the very end of the possible and beyond, is integral to its very possibility.

It is not about belief in a self as an enduring causal locus of experiences, or of behaving as if there was such a belief, but of being more or less stably included within the social and psychological 'ideology' of what could be inaccurately described as such a belief. Inaccurately because ideology is not a cognitive condition so much as a family of dispositions. So getting free of the influence of such a notion is akin to awakening out of a certain taken for granted group-think.

That there is a world entirely outside your experience which co-determines a major fraction, or perhaps all, of it and of which you have a fairly well functioning model in which you coherently orient your attention and actions, is the way that it seems. Thus there is a model and a model of the model embedded in it so that you can ground it on the concept of a real extra experiential reality - the model of the model - what even makes it a 'model'. But what is the significance of such grounding outside of its functional role? Why is what gives the model the consistency and effectiveness such as it has itself 'modeled' on the reifications occurring within the model - that is a ontologically graded world of stuff just like what appears on the screen of the model? There really is no reason for that inference. In other terms, the thing-in-itself is not in any way a 'thing' nor an 'itself' and neither is it a 'mind'.

The ego is inauthentic by nature since its existence is to be embedded in a social matrix each node of which is just another ego. Attempts to escape into some putative authenticity are doomed however, they merely disfigure the matrix locally. If you could fully grant yourself existence this would not ground you in reality, merely in your own mirror image. The only way to be authentic is to embrace inauthenticity while fully aware of its limitations - this is known as compassion.

The question 'why is there something and not nothing?' is not mere metaphysical speculation but a response to the ontological condition of thins, a hidden lack or absence which is the enabling condition of there being anything at all. So you could say that the question itself is its own answer in a profound way. It is no coincidence that the same 'logic' applies to experiencing, or consciousness - it only arises because of a hidden absence within itself - that which gives it an ineradicable direction or intent - misnamed as will.

The point of a transcendental ethic is not that it is given with the final authority of your creator but that it points to the way that your actions in time determine your being outside of time. The logic of this is of a quantum kind where the future can determine the past that also determines that very future but is also not without intrinsic rules and limits which may themselves be subject to reimagination, however not in the ordinary course of things.

Consciousness, time, will and knowledge belong to you in different ways. Consciousness is the curtain going up to reveal what is already there, and going down to conceal or to distort it. It is a window and a limited one, what all is there is never revealed through it - it is a glass or mirror, a representation of being. Time, as in the good hour or the bad hour, bonheur or malheur is an aspect of timeless being, its accommodation to this thing called experience. Will is the free in the predestined and the predestined in the free, while knowing, the most limited, fleeting and unsteady of the four is always in relation to a complete fulfillment which is both before and after time, and so the closest to real being, and the condition of all else.

It almost goes without saying that consciousness is the core of the self since it is the locus of lived experience, but this ignores the evidence that consciousness is without any distinguishing character and that it comes and goes as it serves. It is more to do with the nature of the world as experienced, without belonging to the world- defining rather what such belonging can mean in each instance. It is an ancillary function, an enabler, but not that for which anything takes place. With its vivid and colourful, bird-like (animula vagula ... ) nature it serves also to deflect attention away from what is foundational.

The ego is structured around a historically receding spiral of primary wounds, or reflexes of contraction. Assuagement and solace are real and provide the matrix for desire, and recurrence as these measures always ultimately fail. The details of these wounds themselves are unconscious but they produce a very familiar context of feeling. But there cannot be a wound without an ego to register it as such, and there cannot be an ego without such a prior wound - its origin is in no one moment of time but in a developmentally mediated 'deferred action'. It is a sense, a way of interpreting others and the world, a pattern for coincidence. Maintaining the wound as wound is one of your strongest motives - without it you would likely vanish.

The hard problem, this used to be to explain how there could be freedom in a world rules by causality, now it is to explain how there can be consciousness in a similarly totalised 'world'. These overlap, but are not exactly the same question. The more modest goal represents a surrender, both freely chosen and choiceless and making success even less likely.

The elusive quality of experience in the moment is because the reality of the experience is a whole made up of all past and future concurrent views on it according to the peculiar logic of anticipation in which the current subsumes the previously current. That is one reason why there cannot be qualia other than as virtual, and so entirely contingent, cross-sections of a four or more dimensional artifact.

To wonder at the reality of things is to seek what it is that is at the same level as the one who is seeking, as if it has only one sense, one faculty, and that of being. Everything else is only a predication, or an agitation of that heart.

The world of experience and hence the experienced world is in mind, the stuff it is made out of is mind stuff. Every kind of sensation and quality is a modality, a manifestation of mind. That the experienced world is somehow isomorphic to a real and unexperiencable reality beyond the mind, whatever truth there may be to it is also mind, now experienced in an ontological mode. And going further the mind itself, consciousness, the inner world of experience is an idea, has no more weight than its appearance. If it cancels itself out and leaves nothing but a void at high energy, then it does so a low energy too, at every energy level. The gesture that needs to be made to align this understanding is the most subtle adjustment to the apparent machinery.

Mathematical theories of the physical world are constrained by invariants in respect of observer and various geometric symmetries, but the theories themselves, in respect of the space of all theories should also be subject to something like invariants. Not just a random choice of theory, space, dimensionality etc. But there seems to be no limit to how abstract the mathematical space would have to be.

The cogito, once more. 'I think therefore I am', links the thinker and being, being in being, by way of the immediately evident, of evident-ness. Of these three elements the 'I', the thinker and the being, are both presumptive, that is, they are parts of the thought about which it is presumed that their reference is clear, but without that clarity coming into question. They do not have the same degree of transparency in themselves, in their own essence, as what links them, and that, the sudden spark as it were, that bridges the two mysterious poles, is only as clear, as lit up, as its immediate occurrence; it does not extend beyond the moment of the questioning. In so far as it illuminates the two poles it only does so in that instance. That it can do even so much can only be because of a deeper ground that is not pointed to by anything in the formula, that is of the unspoken.

The only intention or care belonging to a machine is that which is projected into it by its users, single and multiple. In that sense it serves as a transforming or distorting mirror of the care lavished on it by said users. That this might lead to nightmares represents a kind of vertigo of intention or desire on the human side. This perhaps is overdue since the ultimate nature of care or desire, the face behind all of the many masks, is and has always been unknown.

There is never a simple unit or atom in awareness, even the slightest stimulus produces a figure-ground relation, a situation; and the awareness itself is immediately a figure as well against a non-perceptual ground, indeed a non-conceptual ground as well. You could say that the figure-ground event is itself the figure of a deeper figure-ground event. The ground in the second sense is what we call Being, and is the source of all genuine inquiry.

To be aware of something already separates you from it, so sufficient for freedom would be the ability to become aware of every conditioning to which you are subject, even without the ability to act against it. Indeed a certain portion of self-knowing seems to be dedicated to just this kind of discovery. Freedom is a salient matter, but what kind of being you are that freedom would be meaningful in relation to you is the more important question, but one which does not naturally arise. There is nothing less natural to thought than to question the very being of the thinker.

Insofar as there is freedom it cannot be understood or theorised since that would be to put it in the frame of causal logic. It could only be enacted and only by going against desire for the sake of some other rational motive. But can such motives be freely chosen? What if the motive were simply in order to 'prove' that you were free, or the desire to maintain the illusion of personal freedom?