Sublime

Consciousness was not some substance in the brain but rather emerged from the complex relationships between the subject and the world. It was part alchemy, part illusion, a collaborative effort that obliterated our standard delineations between self and other. As Brooks put it, “Intelligence is in the eye of the observer.” —

I count myself among a growing number of scientists who believe that the construction of self identity is not much better than the Lo-fi representations of other people we hold in our heads.

The person who has access to his unconscious processes and mines them without getting mired in them can try new approaches, can begin to see things in new ways, and, perhaps, can achieve mastery of his pursuits.

More than 20 years ago, two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, wrote a journal article that opened with a question: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Now, that question would seem to have an obvious answer, right? The mind stops at the head. It’s contained within the skull. But Clark and Chalmers maintained that

I want to reemphasize the miraculous existence of any form of consciousness by paraphrasing Ludwig Wittgenstein: Not how consciousness is, is mystical, but that it is.

That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation.

“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.”

Those who choose to continue to see a person as a single monolithic entity held to high standards of coherence will only ever be responding to a fraction of the World of a person.