Consciousness has no object, it illuminates mind ad mind naturally has n object, or rather it has many objects, a system of objects. Mind simulates consciousness by way of objects and their contexts. The space-like quality of consciousness is divided in this into a foreground and background, or centre and periphery, or subject and residue. It is the capture of this apparent background of consciousness by the contextual aspect of mind, its so-called unconscious, that makes for the thick and turbulent quality of identification. It seems as though the spatiality of consciousness, its open sky, is contracted into a narrow and enclosed 'ceiling'. All of this is laid over consciousness due to its confusion with its own simulation in mind. To fully accomplish the simulation is to be free of this confusion.

What makes experiencing consciousness is that it is not just what it is but how it is, it is both focus (what) and frame (how). You don't see the how because the what resists, is carved in opacity, while the how is perfectly transparent and extends infinitely like the sky. It seems as though consciousness is fighting for its light, is of a knowledge steeped in doubt is of the nature of science. If you put the how and the what together and see that is what is called consciousness, the science, the struggle for knowing dissolves in a strange oneness, where the dark shines lighter than the light.

Is it thinkable? No! And saying that this is because it is prior to thought is only device to render it thinkable in a back-handed way. And saying that you have to bang your head repeatedly on its unthinkability when you know it's right in front of your nose is another such device. And yet, and yet... (smashes fist on table) there it is! Ha!

Qualia are abstractions from feelings, sensations and perceptions, but none of these are what would be called qualia because they are signals, signs, representations or quasi-representations. For example, if an ant has qualia they are indistinguishable from directives. What makes the qualia abstraction possible is the massive and complex referential loops of mind. It's loops within loops within loops etc., mirrors facing mirrors. Noe of this, however, detached or not, can account for identity, since they are essentially formal. Loops are the best way the mind has to point at identity, and without success because that would paralyse its operations. The failure of formally determining identity does not disprove identity, but the contrary since such failure would be meaningless if identity was not already in place. It isn't formal, but what makes formalism possible.

Stream of thoughts is a stream of motives, hence its discontinuous nature. Motives need a way in and a way out, to be taken up or dropped according to the priorities of the moment, which are themselves motives of a stickier and less optional kind. The taking up and dropping gives the field of motives an algebraic nature, it brings with it the idea of the negative, the inverse. A motive is also a kind of identity, and in each case there is an identity associated with the dropping of a motive. Identity, like motive is relative, is context dependent, but the cancelling of a motive, less so. Hence the idea of an ultimate identity that is relative to the detachment from all motives, all context, to nothingness or death.

Scent is signal and at the same time it is pure quality and the door to memory and imagination. Everything needed for representation is already here without the split into subject and object. In the pleasure that dogs draw from interesting smells there is already the seeds of the aesthetic. It is like a reentry to experience, a wormhole in the space of possible and actual experiences. It is possible that even identity is just a variation of experience, a kind of experiencing.

The distinction of the being of 'there is' and its unsubstitutable beyond is the ethical difference which underlies all systems no matter how ostensively materialist, in particular utilitarianism. It is seen in their attraction for extreme and paradoxical demands. As such it is treated as another form of 'there is'. Perhaps that is what the ethical is, at least in this era, a sort of return of the repressed, an immanentising putting to work of the outside.