Consciousness appears unique.
Nations can be doubted.
Money can be questioned.
Corporations can be analysed.
Algorithms can be reinterpreted.
But consciousness seems different.
Everything else might become uncertain.
Yet experience itself appears unavoidable.
Colours appear.
Sounds appear.
Thoughts appear.
Feelings appear.
Something is happening.
And so a peculiar question emerges:
Where exactly is consciousness?
The question initially appears straightforward.
One points toward the brain.
Neural activity.
Patterns of information.
Mental states.
Inner experience.
Yet difficulties quickly begin appearing.
Because none of these seem identical with consciousness itself.
Neural activity can be measured.
Electrical patterns can be described.
Brain regions can be mapped.
Yet experience itself seems strangely elusive.
The object again begins slipping away.
The object trap
Object-thinking attempts its familiar rescue.
Perhaps consciousness simply is:
- the brain
- neural activity
- information processing
- subjective experience
- an inner self
Yet every possibility generates new problems.
If consciousness simply is neural activity, where does experience itself appear?
If consciousness is an inner self, where exactly is this self located?
If consciousness is information, what transforms information into experience?
The object repeatedly withdraws.
The more closely one searches for the thing itself, the more elusive it becomes.
The monster appears
Now consciousness begins behaving very strangely indeed.
It appears to contain a world.
It appears unified despite continual change.
It persists through changing experiences.
It can turn toward itself.
It can think about itself.
Worse still, consciousness appears to investigate itself using consciousness.
The observer and the observed begin folding into one another.
The monster is no longer somewhere in the cave.
The monster is holding the torch.
Object-thinking begins becoming deeply uncomfortable.
Because where exactly does one stand outside consciousness in order to examine it?
The relational turn
Suppose once again the difficulty begins elsewhere.
Suppose the problem comes from assuming that consciousness must exist as a hidden object inside a person.
Then the puzzle reorganises.
Consciousness no longer appears as a mysterious substance concealed behind experience.
Nor as a thing located somewhere inside the skull.
Instead consciousness begins appearing as an ongoing organisation of relations.
Biological activity.
Perception.
Action.
Memory.
Language.
Social interaction.
Symbolic systems.
Construal.
None alone constitutes consciousness.
Yet through their continuing organisation, experience emerges.
Consciousness exists.
But it exists differently.
Not hidden beneath experience.
Within ongoing patterns of experience.
The revelation
And now the deepest assumption begins revealing itself.
Object-thinking quietly expected:
if experience exists, there must be an experiencer hiding inside it.
But perhaps the experiencer itself emerges within ongoing organisation.
Perhaps the self looking through your eyes was never a hidden object observing reality from behind a window.
The monster was not consciousness.
The strange assumption was:
reality requires a little observer hidden inside the observer.
And now something curious happens.
Because the cave itself begins changing.
The monsters no longer look quite so monstrous.
Perhaps they never were.
Perhaps object-thinking was the strange thing all along.
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