I think consciousness (the fact that there is experience) is the most profound question of all. It is perhaps the only question that matters. Everything else matters because this matters.
Interestingly (for me), there’s not that many that are intrigued by this question or problem. Or at least they have never talked openly about it. So this is my attempt to:
One thing that I want to avoid in this post is to be philosophical. While this question often ends up being philosophical, it arises from the realization or the reality that “there appears to be something”.
There are many ways to see the what is being discussed here. The most common and relatable one is probably dream.
It might be tempting to consider these questions religious, but they are really not. Again, all you need to explore these ideas is a mind or if you have any internal self that exists.
Some people dream and never realize it. This is not true of everyone because there are people that somehow knows that they are dreaming. If this is you, then this won’t work.
Dreams provide a glimpse into the mind’s ability to create convincing realities. What we feel in a dream can seem just as real as waking life – until we wake up. This raises a question: if the mind can construct a dream so vivid, how do we know waking life isn’t similarly constructed?
For those that fully captured by their dreams, I would like to simply point out that as a matter of experience, there is no way to tell that you are dreaming now.
When something awful happens in a dream, we experience it as “something awful happens” withou the qualifier “in a dream”. It is interesting to realize here that what is real is purely a construction of the mind. Whether or not you actually fall off a building is not a matter of your physical body actually falling from 100ft; is it whether your mind thinks that you are falling off.
If you feel that you are falling, then you simply are.
i think the question of “who are you” is surprisingly deep. Yes, for practical purposes, I am Hanif, but this have a completely different meaning when you dig deeper into what it means.
There are several techniques to explore this idea and they approach the problems from different angles. One technique is to find this “observer” or “subject”.
The basic idea is that when we think of ourselves, there’s always a subject/object relationship. The technique works by stripping away layers and layers of objects until we are left with the true subject that are trying to find.
If we keep asking what is the subject/object, we should eventually arrive at something that is the subject. The instruction boils down to the fact that I (the subject) can be aware of the object.
Everything up until 4 is perhaps obvious, I think most people agree that this is the case. If you don’t agree with this, I would be interested to know your perspective.
Number 5 is a bit hard to see. I think the problem here is that it is so easy to identify with thoughts. For the most time, we consider ourselves “doing” the thinking. We are controlling the machinery of thinking. For example, if I am tasked to find the square root of 1764, I will have the experience of: