Debbie Foster

We could gape in fascination at the beauty of being, revealing itself in its endless forms and variations; we could step in and actively participate, like dancers with indefatigable legs, moved and moving according to a logic of wonder and appreciation—entrained by the harmonies and pulsations of full existential realization.

I mean, look at it this way. You have been put in charge of an entire life’s worth of human conscious experience: your own. This human life is at the mercy of your dictatorial powers during every waking hour of its existence. What an absolutely fearsome responsibility you have!

Everything I’ve read about consciousness for this book describes it as inherently subjective; even if a self isn’t a prerequisite, a subjective perspective is required. The first-person point of view is supposedly what made consciousness intractable to objective third-person science. So what becomes of our understanding of consciousness if there

Rather than protect us from suffering, the fiction of a permanent self opens us up to it by giving us something we feel the need to defend.

I asked Ricard if there is any sense in which the self is real. He described two: There is an elementary self—the “I” that wakes in the morning and experiences reality from moment to moment—and there is the “conventional” self that is designated by our names and useful in our social lives.

… this is precisely the role that Proust assigns to the artist—to translate, or decode, other people’s inner books of unknown signs in order to reveal what he calls “the qualitative difference in the ways we perceive the world, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain the eternal secret of each individual.”

Carlos Montemayor is a philosopher at San Francisco State University who has written about familiarity, which he believes is central to consciousness. “What you gain when you have consciousness,” he said, “is familiarity with the world and your relationship to it.” Familiarity, he believes, will forever elude machines.

This process of repurposing the past in service to the present and future, Levin has suggested, may be an essential function of consciousness. He asks us to think of the self not as a thing but as a process of sensemaking, continually rewriting the story of its past in order to equip itself for life in the present and future.

Levin calls this process “mnemonic improvisation” and believes it is widespread in life. Memory helps constitute a self, but at the same time, selves are constantly hacking their memories in order to better adapt to changing conditions. Never set in stone, memory is malleable clay that the self reworks as new circumstances demand. Forgetting helps