Quote:
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Originally Posted by infamous
Consciousness is the knowledge that your actions today will have consequences in the future.
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What a fascinating statement, a seed in fertile ground! If you allow me, and without any pretension, I will try to add some water and see what is going to grow…
(1) Consciousness is always consciousness of…something. Consciousness can be projected outward into the world. Consciousness can also be directed on itself. When the latter, consciousness becomes conscious of itself as being conscious. This suggests two levels of consciousness: a ‘positional consciousness’, which is projected (outward or inward) and a ‘nonpositional consciousness’, which is the foundation of consciousness. Thus, you cannot be conscious of yourself before first becoming aware of you as being conscious.
(2) By being conscious of you as being conscious, what follows is that you become conscious of you as being…in the world. You then become aware of the chair in the kitchen and the moon in the sky. With simple experimentation, you can find out that you can move the chair but not the moon. As you keep experimenting, you discover that there are things you can change, others that you want to change but cannot, and others that you don’t care to change. You have acquired knowledge. You become conscious of you has someone having possibilities (and limits) in the world.
(3) As you experiment further, you reach a point where you see more than one possibility in front of you at a time, but you understand that you cannot have them all at once: You have to choose. Let’s look at the following scenario:
(3a) Say that you are running for your life, away from a pack of wolves, and find yourself cornered on a riverside by some violent rapids. Quickly you figure out that you have only two choices: you either stay put (and yield and scream) or you jump in the rapids. You realize that there is nothing in the world that can stop you (or decide for you) to either stay put or plunge in the water. The choice is totally yours. You are absolutely free to choose either. You have become conscious of your total freedom of choice.
(3b) Freedom it may be, but in that same split second, something else hits you: depending on your choice, different consequences are likely to follow. At the moment that you select one of the two choices (stay put or plunge), the other will immediately vanish forever, and new possibilities will appear. If you stay put, you are likely to be devoured (painful but rapid death) but there is a chance that a hunter bolts from the tree line to save you. If you plunge, however, you can drown (less painful but slower death) or you have a chance to survive after being dragged down the river for miles while rocks break all your bones.
(3c) You have two chances of staying alive; still, you hesitate before making your choice. You become aware of yet another problem: you don’t know for sure what will happen. You only know what is likely to happen, the possibilities, but you have no knowledge whatsoever of the future.
Let’s see where we are now from the statement we started from.
A. “
Consciousness is the knowledge…” From (1), consciousness cannot be “knowledge”, since consciousness is “consciousness of something”. In other words, consciousness is being conscious of knowing something, not the knowledge itself.
B. “
…your actions today…” From (2) and (3a), any and all actions (or inactions) that you consciously take are the expression of your freedom of choice. You have absolute freedom to choose any options that are in the realm of your possibilities and nothing in the world can stop you or make choices for you.
C. “
…consequences in the future.” From (3b and c), every single choice you make creates new possibilities and, at the same time, annihilates others. These are the consequences of your choices. The tricky thing, however, is that you have no way to know for sure the consequences of your choices; you can only evaluate the likeliness of what may happen.
If we put A, B and C together, we get:
Consciousness is being conscious of our own total and unrestrainable freedom of creating and annihilating possibilities for ourselves (and, to a point, others) in the world.
A corollary: The greater your knowledge of possibilities (science, wisdom), the higher your consciousness.
Another one: The more we experiment with the world, the more we learn about the world, the more we develop our consciousness, the more complex (and rich?) our lives become.
Time to pass the ball to someone else who wants to add water (or fire) to this discussion.
