Every time I read your stuff, my mind races with ideas. This was another knockout piece. I think Jim Stewartson would find it useful as well, by the way.
I like your framing — consciousness as the emergence of a self that can say “we” across scales, held together by boundaries and records. It cuts through both reductionism and mysticism effectively.
But the algorithmic condition pushes this much further. Even when a self successfully emerges with stable boundaries and records, mediation and delegation are relocating authorship outside it. What accumulates is sophisticated self-modeling and narrative continuity, while the decisive capacity to interrupt and maintain itself is being engineered away.
By your own definition, a self is not a self unless it actively acts to keep being itself. When interruptibility — the last moral primitive — is structurally foreclosed, that self no longer qualifies. It has been demoted to a conscious phenomenon: a storm with self-awareness, drifting according to architectures it no longer controls.
Your emergent self is real. The deeper question is whether it can still remain a self at all.
Bravo! Matter/molecules/cells are interchangeable with energy and from that Einstein posited E=mc2….matter and energy spontaneously coexist, one cannot separate them as they are one and the same….two sides of the same coin. In biological terms in the matter/molecular science world of today everything is measured and all focus is on the molecule whether making up cells or DNA. But in the energy sciences of the yoga and other spiritual traditions the molecule is an expression of energy whether it be molecules or thoughts.
A whole new world opens when one sees the world through an energy field lens and the concepts of awareness, consciousness, self, and spirit become available for one to entertain and discuss. At the energy field level everything including molecules and thoughts have consciousness. Can we pour water on a thought?
Consciousness or the self is individual like the wave on an ocean whereas awareness or spirit is universal like the ocean itself. Mind is an energy field like the rest of the body, composed of thoughts, feelings, emotions and home to the ego that tries to make sense of the world in a binary way…..either you are me or not me, either you’re hot or cold, mobile or static. But mind due to ego can be devious and deceptive.
From an energy perspective mind can be individual and lives in every cell of the body but can be changed if there is a conscious effort, ie real effective change can only occur at the level of spirit/awareness. But energetically there can be a collection of minds, community, state, nation, global. Likewise there are groups of mind that want power(ego driven) and another group of minds that desire to help others and seek Truth. So the collective mind of America is struggling right now. One group of mind is arguing with another group of mind. But in the end spirit dictates the collective mind argument since real effective change occurs at the level of spirit/Truth.
Ask not what your country can do for you
Ask what you can do for your country
— now holds meaning I never realized nor expected.
The first is dis-integrated extraction,
The second is 'conscious' contributing to the self-defined, self aware flourishing of the whole.
Oh my. More scales dropping off my eyes.
Damn good work. Thank you.
Every time I read your stuff, my mind races with ideas. This was another knockout piece. I think Jim Stewartson would find it useful as well, by the way.
Consciousness is something I'm learning more about now via qigong. Attention is not the same as direction, just the first step in it.
I like your framing — consciousness as the emergence of a self that can say “we” across scales, held together by boundaries and records. It cuts through both reductionism and mysticism effectively.
But the algorithmic condition pushes this much further. Even when a self successfully emerges with stable boundaries and records, mediation and delegation are relocating authorship outside it. What accumulates is sophisticated self-modeling and narrative continuity, while the decisive capacity to interrupt and maintain itself is being engineered away.
By your own definition, a self is not a self unless it actively acts to keep being itself. When interruptibility — the last moral primitive — is structurally foreclosed, that self no longer qualifies. It has been demoted to a conscious phenomenon: a storm with self-awareness, drifting according to architectures it no longer controls.
Your emergent self is real. The deeper question is whether it can still remain a self at all.
Bravo! Matter/molecules/cells are interchangeable with energy and from that Einstein posited E=mc2….matter and energy spontaneously coexist, one cannot separate them as they are one and the same….two sides of the same coin. In biological terms in the matter/molecular science world of today everything is measured and all focus is on the molecule whether making up cells or DNA. But in the energy sciences of the yoga and other spiritual traditions the molecule is an expression of energy whether it be molecules or thoughts.
A whole new world opens when one sees the world through an energy field lens and the concepts of awareness, consciousness, self, and spirit become available for one to entertain and discuss. At the energy field level everything including molecules and thoughts have consciousness. Can we pour water on a thought?
Consciousness or the self is individual like the wave on an ocean whereas awareness or spirit is universal like the ocean itself. Mind is an energy field like the rest of the body, composed of thoughts, feelings, emotions and home to the ego that tries to make sense of the world in a binary way…..either you are me or not me, either you’re hot or cold, mobile or static. But mind due to ego can be devious and deceptive.
From an energy perspective mind can be individual and lives in every cell of the body but can be changed if there is a conscious effort, ie real effective change can only occur at the level of spirit/awareness. But energetically there can be a collection of minds, community, state, nation, global. Likewise there are groups of mind that want power(ego driven) and another group of minds that desire to help others and seek Truth. So the collective mind of America is struggling right now. One group of mind is arguing with another group of mind. But in the end spirit dictates the collective mind argument since real effective change occurs at the level of spirit/Truth.