The Project of Consciousness

Lately I've been struggling with the fact that there are so many dedicated thinkers on the forum, and yet so much energy seems to get consumed in somewhat fruitless repartee, endless quibbling, angels on a pin. All the while, what is being talked about refers back to the nature of consciousness, because it is a product of consciousness. So even if the original thinkers themselves are unaware of it, every time they "enact" (say and do) something uniquely conscious, that gets written in the book of memories. That cultural residue accrues.

If my thought is alive now, then I read a book, all that living thought that I was becomes interlinked with the ideas in that book, whatever I am able to make of those ideas, and becomes my past, and also history. So now, having that different past than if I had not read that book, I myself am different than I might otherwise have been. In other words, being different, I become capable now of having different experiences than I would otherwise have had. Specifically, experiences that relate in some way to changes brought about by those specific past experiences. And so on.

I had an idea that consciousness is, in some sense equivalent with the idea of consciousness, the experience of consciousness, as it has evolved historically through culture. So the evolution of individual conscious awareness is linked with the evolution of the concept of consciousness. To the extent that consciousness succeeds in writing itself in the book of history, there it is. I thought it would be an interesting bridge between individual and collective thought.

And, if you think about it really hard, what are any of us at all but a tapestry of overlapping memories? Whatever the living moment is now, a second from now, it is gone. But if you and I are sitting together in a room, then that immediate past is a shared memory of the experience which you and I had together of the room, neither entirely mine, nor entirely yours. And we carry these shared objectivities around with us, and as we interact with other and different shared objectivities (people-histories), those bits and bits of conscious-existence get woven together, entwined in a memory which grows wider and deeper. And when that tapestry becomes rich and substantial enough, when the commonality of our shared history becomes a deep part of who we are, then we are a culture. And a cultural mind.

And it is this cultural mind that shapes, from beginning to end, the form and nature of our individual minds. And our individual thoughts. Because all of our meaning, whether of object or subject or neither, derives from and can only be expressed in the elements written into the cultural mind. That is thought. Individual and collective. That moment when Descartes actually conceived the thought "Cogito ergo sum" reverberates around now in the head of anyone who ever encountered it. Along with all the other great ideas that make us who we are, and make thought what it is.

Just so now and here, we are taking what is most urgently real, everything we have ever bothered to make ourselves, all of our most valued experiences brought to life in our living thought now in order to be able to "get that experience for which we are looking," the next great moment of thought.... We all bring our best to the table, I think.