Consciousness = "Selfward Existence"
Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2025 3:55 am
Fundamentally, all entities at every scale of nature physically exist to other entities.
Self-evidently, entities with a sufficiently high degree of structural layering (like us, and all other complex organisms whose survival involves active environmental navigation) also physically exist to themselves. Such an entity can be provisionally regarded as a "self".
Like all entities, the way in which a self is distinct from nature is somewhat analogous to the way in which a wave is distinct from the ocean.
The phenomenon commonly known as "consciousness" is nothing more than the "selfward existence" of a self, and is instantiated as an intermittent portion of the physical activity occurring at the structural core of each self.
Simply by virtue of the fact that one IS oneself and IS NOT any other self one may observe, the consciousness of another self is observed to be "objective neurodynamics", even while one's own consciousness seems to be "subjective experience".
This appears to be the most extreme example of a "perspectival asymmetry" in all of nature.
Because of this (along with the fact that objectivity is evidently always present before, during, and after every episode of subjectivity), it erroneously seems as though experience is generated by neurodynamics.
The so-called "hard problem of consciousness" is so hard (or really, unsolvable) because we are attempting to explain how and why this falsehood occurs, not recognising that both objective neurodynamics and subjective experience are actually the very same selfward existence naturally exhibited by all sufficiently layered entities, without any deeper reason why.
Self-evidently, entities with a sufficiently high degree of structural layering (like us, and all other complex organisms whose survival involves active environmental navigation) also physically exist to themselves. Such an entity can be provisionally regarded as a "self".
Like all entities, the way in which a self is distinct from nature is somewhat analogous to the way in which a wave is distinct from the ocean.
The phenomenon commonly known as "consciousness" is nothing more than the "selfward existence" of a self, and is instantiated as an intermittent portion of the physical activity occurring at the structural core of each self.
Simply by virtue of the fact that one IS oneself and IS NOT any other self one may observe, the consciousness of another self is observed to be "objective neurodynamics", even while one's own consciousness seems to be "subjective experience".
This appears to be the most extreme example of a "perspectival asymmetry" in all of nature.
Because of this (along with the fact that objectivity is evidently always present before, during, and after every episode of subjectivity), it erroneously seems as though experience is generated by neurodynamics.
The so-called "hard problem of consciousness" is so hard (or really, unsolvable) because we are attempting to explain how and why this falsehood occurs, not recognising that both objective neurodynamics and subjective experience are actually the very same selfward existence naturally exhibited by all sufficiently layered entities, without any deeper reason why.