consciousness

(via pvidyasagar dot wordpress dot com)

don't need this noun.

the ego is a matter of boundaries drawn, some of them more permeable than others. it is possible to "sit back" & watch things happen, even in the innermost citadel; to disown one's voice. then what remains? the habit of description. cliches of conceptuality. the old binary pairs, starting with "inside" & "outside".

we know that perception occurs, in the beings that live & whose lives depend on being elusive. sometimes our instruments correlate, such as photometers, to the point where we can declare that "light" is something both "internal" & "external". to the instruments: photons. to the mind: brightness. but what explanations are good for, lies elsewhere. we can perfect a machine that turns light into data; we can sharpen our senses, too. what kind of story could we tell, that would make the brightness collapse into one thing, light? is it enough to measure that reaction begins before the advent of willing it? then we are (meat-) robots who believe we are free. that still leaves us wondering why we do so, how belief works, & what robots are, that they should have such pretensions.

on the other hand, as Roethke said: "Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries."