Meditations on Consciousness

The Architectural Principles of the Philosophy of Mind

Prelude

You know what it is like to be you.

A voice in your head, commenting, narrating, allowing you to think and imagine. Concepts that carve the world into objects, causes, goals. Pain that warns you, pleasure that draws you, emotions that colour everything. Other minds everywhere: faces that see you, respond to you, make you someone. People that you know and love; people that you work with; people that you see once and never again. Other minds everywhere.  A body that hungers and thirsts and tires, organizing your days around its demands. Language inherited from generations before you, rich with words for things no one has ever seen: justice, infinity, tomorrow. The intricacies of a social structure carved by millennia of social evolution that you are born into, and know nothing else.

All of this runs constantly, layered, woven together. This is what it is like to be you. We associate this with living, with consciousness, with 'what it is like' to be human. But consider: none of this follows necessarily from consciousness alone. They are contingent on unbridled, pure luck.

You experience the world through language. Language allows communication. It allows thinking. It allows imagining, reflecting, sharing. It almost feels like an inevitable consequence of a conscious mind, some aspect of life that is almost unimaginable without. But you could have been born before any of this existed, tens of thousands of years ago, before language. The mind still would have been there. But what would it be like to be this person, to experience a world that cannot be described, recalled, or thought about?

You carve the world with concepts: cause, time, justice, self. They feel like discoveries. But you inherited every one, given to you through years of immersion in a system you did not build. Someone born ten thousand years ago had none of them. What would it be like to experience a world without "cause"? Without "self"?

Pain stops you, reorganizes everything, demands response. But some people are born without it. They break bones and do not notice. What would it be like to move through a world where nothing has that urgency, that intrinsic badness?

You experience through human senses. But a shark feels electric fields. Certain people do not hear, do not see, do not move. There are entire dimensions of experience your biology closes off. What is it like to perceive through senses you do not have? You cannot know. But you cannot doubt their consciousness.

You have never been alone. From birth, faces responded to you. You exist in their perception. But you could have, in an absurd but not impossible scenario, been the only one: a cruel science experiment, say. A child raised in isolation. No other minds, ever, anywhere. What would it be like to have no mirror? Would there be a self at all?

What it is like to be you, to be us, now, in this century, in this place, is not guaranteed by our biology, by our brains. We could have been any of these people listed above. Only time and luck separate you from the human without language, without concepts, without pain, without others.

These are not absurd thought experiments. These are lives that were lived, or could have been.

Before the meditations begin, let us sit with this: the space of possible minds is vast, and yours is one point within it. Nothing about your consciousness was inevitable. You could have been otherwise. And that otherwise would have felt, from the inside, like the only way to be.