Watching Myself Watch Myself Watch Myself

Well, I’ve been trying all day to remember to view my self as the perceiver of body and brain sensations. I have been working at this for a while—years. Decades.

It’s not easy. If I don’t have a mechanism in place to remind me, I can go weeks without observing myself as perceiver; without, in short, recognizing my true self.

But wait. I was awake. I was watching things, hearing things, feeling things. I was aware, conscious, whatever you want to call it.

Or maybe not. From those times when I was just operating in the world and not being the observer, I have no recollection of having that fully awake feeling I get when I do identify my self as observer. Now, when I am thinking about it, I do have that feeling, and I have that feeling as I recall experiences. I am self-aware as I remember; I was not self-aware back then.

It would seem that I have two levels of awareness. I can walk around in the world, do things and feel things. I am conscious then, sentient, mentally alert. But when I reflect on myself, pay attention to myself, I step up to another level of consciousness. This may be the state William James called spiritual self-awareness. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky called it remembering oneself.

The assumption most of us make is that when we are awake, we are in this state continuously. Being able to reflect on our memories fosters this illusion, but we are just plodding around like robots most of the time. We can call up our memories and reflect on them, but even then we most likely do not feel our own awareness—and we don’t really call up that many memories anyway. We just know that we could if we wanted to, and so have convinced ourselves that we are thoughtful, self-aware beings.

Do you suppose it is possible to live an entire life and never attend to one’s own awareness? It may well be. I’ve known people who have made me wonder. When philosophers talk about a quale, which is a word for the experience of a sensation, they must be aware of the experience of self-reflection. When a philosopher avoids talking about qualia, or acts as if they don’t matter or exist, well, you have to wonder.

Without language, animals cannot ascend to self-reflection. Our favorite animals, our dogs and cats respond to us emotionally, and can be very intelligent—for dogs and cats—but all of that is quite possible without a moment of self-reflection.

I want to contend that we operate on either of two levels of consciousness. At the most common level we are observers, recorders, reactors. It is this level of consciousness that some philosophers explain in terms of brain structure and behavior. We may be self-conscious (in the sense of being anxious), or aware of the condition of our body or feelings or mind. We may be thinking about ideas, even working hard to learn something. But in this state, though we are observers, we are not necessarily aware of ourselves as observers.  

When we become aware of our own awareness we enter that more rare state of consciousness: we are here now, we remember ourselves, we live in the present. It is so easy to do, if I could just remember to do it!

Self-reference is a pretty powerful concept.  Playful examples include sentences like, “This sentence is false.” Bertrand Russell’s mathematical example was the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. (So what is the status of that set?) Kurt Gödel showed that every complete logical system contains such a statement, which is therefore true but unprovable, or false and provable. This means that no mathematical system can be entirely true and complete, which changes the way I look at the Universe I’ll tell ya. More on this paragraph next post.

And then us—sporting our self-reflective consciousness, when we remember it. That the Universe could contain such a thing is disorienting. If you don’t feel a bit disoriented by it, you haven’t been paying attention.