Consciousness

I struggle with the idea of consciousness. It’s a duality issue, I guess. A matter of perspective. This tiny flash of life we get – how does it work? Are we like a short, sharp sound? A click of the finger? Except instead of a sound, we are a consciousness, brought into being through no volition of its own? If so, if we happen to create echoes, those echoes are the things that people find interesting, especially if they’re distorted. A short, sharp consciousness, only aware of itself, its echoes escaping it, a flawed facsimile of itself. All our actions are only a flawed re-iteration of the original mind.


The conscious mind can never directly interact with, and therefore fully comprehend, its own actions, or the actions of others, because of this. There is a disconnect between thought and action because of the divided nature of these two things. Eventually the echoes fade, and the original sound dies, leaving only a situation with no explanation.

From another perspective, are we not like stars, seen through our atmosphere? During the night, some are clear, always. People with adequate vision can all see them, recognise their colour and size, understand the significance. The majority, however, are dim, and distant, quivering through the air to our eyes. Looking at them directly often makes them invisible, removing comprehension. Looking at them indirectly causes them only to appear momentarily, jiggling from side to side. Some lack the ability to see them even in this way. And are those tiny, flickering stars even stars? Are they not clusters of billions of stars, banding together to be more visible, all in vain? On top of all that, the patterns they choose are not what others see. Whilst they choose logical spirals and discs and clouds, what people see in the sky is lines of un-associated stars forming patterns simply due to their position in a two dimensional perspective. Try as they might, these stars will always be mis-associated. Individuality will always be taken from you by the perceiver.

Whether we are heard as echoes, or seen mistakenly as a flickering member or disassociated brethren, consciousness is something that cannot be transmitted; communicated. Our mind is stuck in our head, only observable, truly, by ourselves.

But I wonder if even that is true. Even self-reflection is a method of translating the conceptual, abstract mess that is our mind into a form of language, even if you are not thinking in words. You are trying to create a typology of your own thoughts and motivations, and in so doing are perverting them to fit a framework that you think is logical. Trying to understand the internal workings of the mind is unavoidably the creation of an infinitely reflexive problem. As soon as you try to analyse the mind using logic, you must then ask “why do I think this logical framework is best, and why do I want to know about the internal workings of my mind?” To this, you must then ask “why do I doubt my own internal logic, and my motivation for wanting to know my mind?” Also: “What is my motivation for doubting my internal logic, and for wanting to know the motivation for knowing my mind?” To this, you must then ask “What is my motivation for doubting my motivation for doubting my internal logic” et cetera. It is improbable that there is a logical ‘atom’ of consciousness that cannot be reduced. It is more probable that, like actual infinity; if the number ‘one’ is the expression of a completely certain term, and zero, or a very small fraction of one is our logical starting point, then to create the certain term, we must build it through the endless decimal places that make up any number. This is impossible, as any number can be divided down infinitely.

So exists the mind. Instead of communicating concepts from their core forms, which may or may not exist, and which is impossible, we make imperfect approximations, even to ourselves. To know ourselves is, therefore, as impossible as to know another. Our true selves may, in fact, be an infinite regressive illusion.