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.
