Essay 23-Consciousness

Prologue to the English Version

It is no philosophical material that motivates this prologue, rather the spiritual experience of despair and darkness due to the immense difficulty this essay has brought me. As such I wish to declare that the English version of this essay will be heavily watered down and be a simplified form of the Indonesian version. Expansion essays detailing on concepts will be released in the future, but for now it is possible that English only readers will obtain less information than bilingual or Indonesian readers.

Introduction

Throughout the first essays, we have mostly dealt with concepts of ontology and objects, but there is one concept which is highly significant for the proof of such concepts and yet we have not discussed it exclusively. This concept is of course consciousness or conscious experience. This essay will explain briefly the fundaments of consciousness and conscious experience, focused solely upon those 2 subjects.

Fundaments of Conscious Experience

It is previously covered that conscious experience is the totality of human conscious experience which includes thought, idea, emotion, imagination, sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, and all other similar events which consider to be experience. This is a fine definition but does not capture the true essence of conscious experience. As we have proven that all conscious experience is a window to an independent object of reality, then conscious experience is by essence the encounter of an objective object in reality with consciousness.

In other words, it is when consciousness interacts with an object or when an object enters the sphere of consciousness that conscious experience happens. Of course, this is a blatant simplification of the actual phenomenon. As the Indonesian version has explained in great depth, the ascribing of temporal properties to objects means it is never the objects moving but it is the consciousness itself. As such conscious experience is when the sphere of conscious experience moves through time and space if present, and reaches many different objects and leaves such objects.

Categories of Conscious Experience

The conscious experience can be categorized based on several aspects; this subtopic will briefly explain the divisions but it is not meant to be a total discussion for each category but simply a brief introduction. First, we may divide conscious experience into actual and non-actual experience. In short, actual experience is when we experience the totality of an object along with all of its properties. Non-actual experience is when we experience only the surface of an object.

Let us imagine a warm red apple. If we are to have the red apple in our hands right now, we would feel its warmth and see its redness directly, there we have actual experience. However, when we only imagine the red apple, then we do not actually experience its warmth or its redness. We do experience the red apple, but only to a minimal intensity or through the representation of language. That is what is called non-actual experience.

Next there is the classical division between sensation and thought or mental experience. Sensation is often associated with actual experience and mental experience with non-actual experience. It is true that non-actual experience is exclusively mental but not all mental experiences are non-actual. All sensation are actual experiences but not all actual experiences are sensations. Experiences of completely abstract objects which have no place in the corporeal world must then be completely mental while being actual.

The final category is between objective experience and moral experience. Objective experience is the experience of reality as it is without taking into account its moral value. Moral experience is the moral experience of reality which manifests itself in the moral emotions which are either happiness and its variations or suffering and its variations. Moral experience is not an experience which happens alone but acts as an extension to objective experience.

Consciousness or Conscious Beings

Consciousness or conscious beings refer to the same thing. Beings which are conscious are consciousness, in Indonesian I describe it as makhluk which actually refers to “creature”. It is rather difficult to define what consciousness actually is, but we may say that it is the collection of conscious experience into a coherent object which is the object of consciousness. With the collection of experience, there are some necessarily identifiable differences between the 2 objects.

Conscious experience is simply the individual experience of an object, and as such is like a single instance of change, whereas the consciousness is analogous to the entire stream of change. In fact, consciousness can be defined from 2 collections of experiences, that is the historical stream of consciousness and the perspective of consciousness. The stream refers to the collection in time, and perspective refers to the collection in a single point of time.

The stream of consciousness means that a conscious being or a consciousness is defined by every experience that consciousness has went through. For example, a human consciousness would be defined by their life experiences from birth up until death, though further subtopics will show that it is more than that. Now this stream is recorded objectively so memory loss does not mean the information is lost, it simply means that the consciousness lost access to its own history.

The perspective of consciousness refers to the limits a conscious being has on what objects it can experience within a single point of time. As the consciousness moves through time with its limits, it obtains different experiences and creates the stream of consciousness. The perspective may also refer to what conscious experience the consciousness has in a constant manner such that it is present at all times. For example, as a human we would feel the experience of being human constantly while we are still human.

The stream and the perspective go hand in hand, and are used together to identify a conscious being, but the most important element is indeed the stream. Two conscious beings which has the same perspective but different streams are two different conscious beings for sure. Two beings with different perspective will of course result in different streams such that they become different conscious beings.

Eternity of Consciousness

As an object of reality, consciousness is by nature eternal in existence, but what I mean is the stream of consciousness which is eternal. The stream and thus the conscious being is uncreated and indestructible. Memory loss is no evidence for arguing that the consciousness was created and ceases to be, rather it is only evidence of itself that is memory loss. The proof is presented in the basic subjective perspective of consciousness.

Time in consciousness only happens when we experience reality, when we as a conscious being is active. At the moment the experience ceases in totality, time too ceases to be for a consciousness. What this means is that any period of time where the consciousness is inactive will feel like an instantaneous amount of time. This is true for dreamless or visionless sleep, passing out, and comas.

As such this is applicable both forwards and backwards in time. There can be no beginning in consciousness as it must be a continuation from an earlier experience, we simply forget our past prior to birth. However, in truth the stream from the perspective of consciousness is a continuation of a prior experience, there must be consciousness still in the past before the time of deactivation. This is true even more so at the end, any period of inactivity of consciousness will not matter for the stream and it must jump and result in another experience.

By that principle, and prior knowledge, we know that consciousness acts like a spirit. I do not say that it is the spirit, as the spirit supposedly is computational, but that like a spirit which is independent of any bodies, consciousness is like that as well. It moves through time spiritually, but also moves between bodies and is such not attached to anybody. This may happen as reincarnation or as another phenomenon where the consciousness leaves the body for another realm.

Closing

We have discussed the fundaments of conscious experience, the categories of experience, the consciousness, and the eternity of consciousness. In summary we can say that the consciousness is like a spirit which has a certain limit to its experience and produces a history of itself thus defining itself and separating it from other conscious beings. There are still many questions about this elusive object, but it is for other times. Now this essay is declared to be done.