If it all comes down to belief then logical categories are fundamental. That this depends on that, that this other is certain or provable, or necessary or apodictic in some sense, and that other is hypothetical and so on, such considerations would belong to the hidden scaffold of the world. The world in which I find myself and the 'Í' who finds himself in it are each phenomenal, which means that in themselves they are momentary appearances. The mode of appearance of the 'I' entails a mysterious endurance (this mysteriousness being itself phenomenal, although quite irreducible), as if it had an 'identity' that persists across the flux of appearances. Identity too may be no more than an inflexion of a phenomenon due to an associated family of appearances, those of memory. We know however that memory is unreliable and full of gaps, and is in service to belief, to the believability of the world it helps construct - again, phenomenal modalities. In waking life we have a full immersion in a world which integrates subjective and objective phenomena combined with a strong belief in the reality behind the latter, while in dreams we have something similar but with much weaker criteria for consistency. On awakening we experience the complete dissolution of dream worlds. But what we experience in dreams is imagination subjected to a need for coherence, however myopic, so that whatever strange event arises it is woven plausibly into the dream narrative at the expense of its coherence on a larger scale. In so far as we are peripherally aware of being engaged in creating the dream we also participate in the urge to keep the dream going, like a bubble of belief that we are trying to protect from bursting. This means that we must view the confidence inspired by our waking belief in a world consistently underwritten by an external persistent reality with a certain scepticism. The creative power of belief must by its nature be in excess of expectation.

"But then I wondered: I used to value Albertine more than myself; I no longer value her now because for a period of time I have ceased to see her. But my desire not to be separated from myself by death, to revive after death, was a desire unlike the desire never to be separated from Albertine, it continued to last. Was that because I believed I was more precious than she, because when I loved her, I loved myself more? No, it was because in ceasing to see her, I had ceased to love her, and because I had not ceased to love myself since my daily relationship with myself had not been interrupted as had that with Albertine. But what if the relationship with my body, and with myself, had also been interrupted? Surely the result would be the same. Our love of life is no more than an old affair that we do not know how to discontinue. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death, which interrupts it, will cure us of our desire for immortality." - Proust, The Fugitive, tr. Peter Collier

Imagine it were possible to snip out a segment of your lived experience, like a length of film or an interval in a stream of information. If you believe in a one-dimensional time (or a four-dimensional space-time. or n-dimensional?) then are you committed to believing that this is in principle possible? If it were analogous to extracting a delimited portion of a river's flow then it would be equivalent to a complete description of the state of every atom of the river and its environment at each moment of the given interval, so that you could tell exactly which successive states were predictable from prior states and which involved the additional action of unpredictable events, then you could find the perfectly minimal set of descriptors and you could use them to create a perfect simulation of the total event. In this way it could be repeated indefinitely in different media, and it would 'look' the same and 'sound' the same and 'feel' the same to the 'touch' as long as the required senses and actions were consistently simulated in the same medium. There would still remain a question of how far you needed to go, would it be enough that every macroscopically discernible eddy was duplicated, or would you insist that even the smallest shift in an energy level deep within the mass of water or in the immediate surroundings were accounted for? A level of perception would need to be defined in order to fix the meaning of duplication.
Returning to the original question we can imagine replacing the river with a brain and a body and conducting the same experiment, only now the perceptive organs (for want of a better name) are part of the same object system. Would a complete abstracted portion of your life result that could be run through again and again, in different media? And each time would it be you who was the experiencer, even long after the you in continuity with what you currently are had passed by, or passed away, literally or metaphorically, or would it be the operator of the simulation, or some artifact of the machine being used that would wake up to drinking a cup of tea or tying a shoelace, scratching an itch or thinking of a poem or rehearsing an attitude or trying to find something to say or all at once or whatever? It is hard to imagine a positive answer to either question. My experience if looked at closely, doesn't just feel like something, it only ever feels like me feeling something, and that is like nothing else - so that 'what does it feel like?' questions make no sense at all, unless in the context of asking for how something feels to the touch, rough, smooth, warm, cold etc. So it is impossible to imagine another inhabiting a portion of my life as distinct from merely sharing the same adventure, even if they are using VR apparatus. But it is also impossible to imagine being in two places at once, being in my current experience and being identically myself in the abstracted portion of my experience, played over and over again, who knows where and by who knows who.

There is an ongoing and historical project to optimise this life in which we have come to play the executive role. We assumed this role from our parents; it was partly handed to us and partly seized, but at the very outset we had no claim to it and so it can still at times seem like an imposed burden. To speak of a project is also to speak of the situation that it is a part of and to which it answers, and this situation is one of continual change and partial predictability, the perfect microcosmic evolutionary environment. We have some freedom to experiment, to adopt tactics of various kinds, attack, delay, retreat, feint, and so on and also to redefine the parameters of success and our assumed degree of responsibility for decisions. This freedom however is generally less than it appears, since the information on which our decisions are based is always already contaminated. Sometimes the only significant decision concerns the degree to which we will apply our intelligence to the current situation, clarifying our knowledge of it and the available options; the alternative, to be guided by an unreflective intuition, is always available and is not necessarily the worst, since the situation is always much larger than the segment of it accessible to us. This is a rough sketch of how it appears, you can fill in the details and make whatever changes seem necessary. The real point is the use of the subjective point of view, the 'we' language, and that this kind of recognisable scenario as what is lived exactly marks one of the doorways through which the notional self as object enters on the scene. But in this way of looking at things there is only ever process, and if there is a reified self in there it is at best the misclassification of an address. That this error has consequences is a simple fact about the process, and certainly affords no grounds for compounding it by blaming the self for the inevitable shortcomings of itself.

 

Somewhere in all the myriad things and relations of things composing the world's furniture subject is to be found. It is not an ordinary kind of thing, an object simpliciter, but nonetheless it must be there, and since the world is mapped, since it exists for us in the form of a mental map, a map we have not made, perhaps only modified, but which was bequeathed to us by our evolutionary past, and which we call reality, we must find a place in it for everything, and therefore for subject. It is not an object but it sits in the map as a kind of object, and we identify ourselves as that quasi-object, or else as precisely not it, but as a point or a bright upwelling just a little way upstream of it, depending on whether we are thinking fast or slow. Our map is not a single projection of the entire world, but the overlapping of two or more maps, the view from here and the view from there, which don't exactly mesh, but between them cover the lot. In fact subject is unmappable and isn't on any map. At best the maps are for subject; and furthermore subject is not a point, as it appears to be in every projection, but if anything more like a space: say the whole thing viewed with no distinguished point. The point subject is a peculiar amalgam of two Cartesian ideas, the self-validating 'I' and the geometric origin of co-ordinates. From the objective side it is absurd to keep positing strange objects as respositories of subjectivity, these will only be knocked over one after another, delaying the project of a fully objective theory of consciousness. It is a matter of finding a theory of ourselves that can be believed, and belief is only in objects. And at the end of it, when we are quite satisfied, someone will still pipe up with the question, 'But who believes?'

The arising of life could only be in the pristine mirror of mind and although we judge life to be extravagant, messy, cruel, as full of errors as wonders, all of this proceeds without staining it in the least. Extraordinary invention there is that seems to be teleological, so that after countless millennia a nervous system begins to develop in insects, a system which doubles and hence symbolises the homeostatic mechanisms within cells, the very process by which life asserted itself; and not that symbolisation is anything new to it but it's now further externalised and this vastly expands the range of possibilities in a context where nothing matters more than creativity. And it leads to eyes and teeth and hearts, and further doublings on itself until the mad investment in the human brain, as if mind had finally stumbled on a way to embody itself, to enter its own creation, and it went for it headlong. But as an attempt at an 'artificial intelligence', at a sort of living God, what a hasty Frankenstein's monster emerged. This mind, our mind, is cobbled together out of bits and pieces of re-purposed control mechanisms, so that it can crudely ape the creative principles of its world. In doubling and further doubling the emergent being discovers itself as subject for which it makes its own myth in which it seems as if primal mind (himself) could be darkened, could muddy itself, could sacrifice itself in order to reemerge, to re-encounter itself after a long and significant journey through separation. He stands on unsteady feet and shouts his threats and cajolings at the pale indifference of the light.

Whatever the urge is that underlies these inquiries, that has installed them in a certain current of thoughts, it is only something that arose spontaneously within this current, or mind as it calls itself. It belongs to its inveterate character, which is not entirely fit for any purpose, a fairly typical condition of such minds what with the diversity of demands to which they need to answer and the inevitable quotient of reflexive and self-engendered side-effects to their positive and even sometimes vaguely rational applications. If there is something in this that drives stubbornly towards the source it is a still small voice that only emerges at intervals, belonging to no one, but so unassertive that its lack of provenance isn't apparent. Or else it is a sort of unintended consequence drawn out of significant strands of intention which for all that they resist the great obvious streams of desire and reflection, the mind's perpetual Bloomsday, are its tributaries, inevitable consequences of its taking place in such a well-lit space, one on whom nothing is lost to the point of paranoia. What he ought to be doing, what he finds himself doing instead, the hand that grabs his collar and pulls him back into line, are all parts of the same play, identifiable characters with distinct personalities, fitted out with quirks, ingratiating or irritating as the case may be, and with motives that are perfectly transparent. That anything much will come out of this is doubtful, if there is anyone present to say so then clearly nothing has, but it does reach a point where there is as little good in stopping as in going on.