Consciousness is . . .
Consciousness is possibility, a linguistic
projection.
Welcome to the Far Outpost, a substation of Of
Course It's Boring, Idiot. It has occurred to me that I need a place to write
when I just want to express some really difficult, controversial, or even
trivial item, but I don't want to post it in my regular blog. We'll be starting
with a reflection on a bizarre possibility: namely, that the possible is more
real than the actual.
What led to all this was an insight I had the other day about the nature of consciousness (which, as you know, I am wont to reflect upon). It's going to sound absurd to people who think of the universe as a kind of clock, just complicated works grinding out second after second in the history of events. But to me it sounds strangely—ah, how shall we say—possible. Anyway, the alleged insight that I had was that consciousness is the inside of a system of related possibilities.
In more words than one sentence, when I reflect on my moment to moment awareness, what I seem to always meet is a) rootedness in a describable present moment, b) capability of recalling and properly sequencing moments in my past, and c) ways to get somewhere else from where I am and do something else than I am now doing. Now, all of these things, these are ALL just possibilities. And while I am not certain about this, it seems as though it is our ability with language that allows us to conceive of and express and communicate these past, present and future possibilities.
I'm not implying for even a second that we just create our past, present and future out of nothing and just the way we want. No. All our lives we are learning about the world and its relationship to us. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail and always we are meeting new situations and people. But even given that fact, it seems that we ARE this system of possibilities, always meeting the world through the present.
Nor does it seem that there is something special or unique about the possibilities that we believed have happened or are happening to us as distinct from the possibilities we think may happen to us. For one thing, most of us (and it gets worse as you get older) are frequently discovering that what we THOUGHT happened didn't happen exactly like we though. And, there is always more happening to someone somewhere than we can possibly get a handle on or even know about.
Which brings us to this conclusion of mine: consciousness is a system of related possibilities, which define past, present and potential. For all of us it is this world of possibility that is the most real, that we have the most access to. But if this is a truth, it has other consequences for the nature of consciousness.
Consciousness can't be a thing, like a baseball is a thing. Is a possible baseball a thing? A baseball is a thing, a possible baseball is a thought. The game of baseball is not a thing, but the Cardinals playing the Astros in the 2005 playoffs, those were things, or at least complex events. Now we can understand Plato better. For Plato and maybe more and more for me, there is this world of ideas to which objects, things conform and from which they take their nature. The Game of Baseball is one of those Ideas.
But also, I am not just talking about the general forms that things take. I can imagine a very specific, possible game of baseball, hit by hit, so to speak, that will never, and indeed even can never take place, one in which Ty Cobb is on the same team with Ozzie Smith. And we could talk about it and discuss it in detail, in the possible world of our shared communication.
And here is the final point. Whatever this world of possibility is, that is the field of consciousness, is in some sense much larger than the "real world," the one that gets reported in the newspapers and argued about. For every "real" event, there are billions of similar but different possible events that never did or will happen. That's the real reality of it: there is what happens, and then there's our conscious world that knows it and intersects with it and is much bigger than it in some sense.
What led to all this was an insight I had the other day about the nature of consciousness (which, as you know, I am wont to reflect upon). It's going to sound absurd to people who think of the universe as a kind of clock, just complicated works grinding out second after second in the history of events. But to me it sounds strangely—ah, how shall we say—possible. Anyway, the alleged insight that I had was that consciousness is the inside of a system of related possibilities.
In more words than one sentence, when I reflect on my moment to moment awareness, what I seem to always meet is a) rootedness in a describable present moment, b) capability of recalling and properly sequencing moments in my past, and c) ways to get somewhere else from where I am and do something else than I am now doing. Now, all of these things, these are ALL just possibilities. And while I am not certain about this, it seems as though it is our ability with language that allows us to conceive of and express and communicate these past, present and future possibilities.
I'm not implying for even a second that we just create our past, present and future out of nothing and just the way we want. No. All our lives we are learning about the world and its relationship to us. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail and always we are meeting new situations and people. But even given that fact, it seems that we ARE this system of possibilities, always meeting the world through the present.
Nor does it seem that there is something special or unique about the possibilities that we believed have happened or are happening to us as distinct from the possibilities we think may happen to us. For one thing, most of us (and it gets worse as you get older) are frequently discovering that what we THOUGHT happened didn't happen exactly like we though. And, there is always more happening to someone somewhere than we can possibly get a handle on or even know about.
Which brings us to this conclusion of mine: consciousness is a system of related possibilities, which define past, present and potential. For all of us it is this world of possibility that is the most real, that we have the most access to. But if this is a truth, it has other consequences for the nature of consciousness.
Consciousness can't be a thing, like a baseball is a thing. Is a possible baseball a thing? A baseball is a thing, a possible baseball is a thought. The game of baseball is not a thing, but the Cardinals playing the Astros in the 2005 playoffs, those were things, or at least complex events. Now we can understand Plato better. For Plato and maybe more and more for me, there is this world of ideas to which objects, things conform and from which they take their nature. The Game of Baseball is one of those Ideas.
But also, I am not just talking about the general forms that things take. I can imagine a very specific, possible game of baseball, hit by hit, so to speak, that will never, and indeed even can never take place, one in which Ty Cobb is on the same team with Ozzie Smith. And we could talk about it and discuss it in detail, in the possible world of our shared communication.
And here is the final point. Whatever this world of possibility is, that is the field of consciousness, is in some sense much larger than the "real world," the one that gets reported in the newspapers and argued about. For every "real" event, there are billions of similar but different possible events that never did or will happen. That's the real reality of it: there is what happens, and then there's our conscious world that knows it and intersects with it and is much bigger than it in some sense.
Posted: Mon - May 22, 2006 at 05:01 PM
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Published On: Oct 22, 2008 01:32 PM
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