Essays in Idleness

The “hard problem of consciousness,” as it is called, like our consciousness of other hard problems, must advance very slowly, and will never get anywhere. This is because our consciousness itself precedes space and time, not only in ourselves but in everything.

Of course, I cannot speak for you, who may not share my views on what is fundamental; but neither can you, to be strict about it.

“Cogito ergo sum” is a misleading theorem. This was because you were, before you specifically thought about it. You could not know how you were limiting the field of your knowledge, even before you accepted that it was limited. Your “basic Johnsonian” — to kick a rock down the street and say you have refuted Berkeley thus — involves no confirmation of space and time, either, only that they present a very simplified picture of reality which you probably need to avoid stumbling foolishly. You can accept this “for purpose,” without relying on it to explain anything.

Indeed, nothing can be refuted, including the notion that even rocks have feelings — though this is a truth that must be secondary, and would have to be externally supplied. God, we believe, or should I say “I believe,” is the formative external supplier, and there are surprising facts of geology, such that occasionally the rocks speak. But having a peculiarly human form of consciousness, we are, “in His image,” at least partially divine.

(If we exist at all.)

I also take this with the proposition that consciousness “precedes” — is more fundamental than — any physical reality, both in ourselves and in the broad, echoing universe. It precludes every one of our inquiries into how things started, and leaves “In the beginning” as a gloriously perfect, absolutely irrefutable fact.

And death is just an evasion.

The truth is, it is easier to explain the Why? than the How? of our existence, from the simple clues we find deposited in our human “operating machine.”