Conversations on Consciousness

There are two kinds of representations. There are theoretical representations,
like knowing about consciousness within a certain theory
that brain scientists or psychologists have made. That is one way
of gaining knowledge about consciousness and what you really are.
It is stored in books, computers, and ongoing scientific discourse.
Another way of accessing reality is through a phenomenal representation,
in the way your conscious mind, your brain, happens to depict
reality and yourself. Scientific representations of the world, and of
consciousness, aim at maximal objectivity, at being very parsimonious,
at not introducing superfluous entities, and at making good
predictions. Phenomenal representations are clever in a different way
because they had a completely different purpose: they were needed
to help our parents and grandparents and all our ancestors to survive
and copy their genes. Their target was not to generate a faithful representation
of reality or of the brain, or the way we sensorily perceive
the world; they had a completely different goal, and certain illusions
can be functionally adequate—as philosophers say of misrepresentations:
the belief in your own existence as a distinct self or, to say something
more provocative, the belief that life is actually worth living, can
be very successful in copying genes.

I think one task may be to go, with introspective attention, into the
real, deep structure of conscious experience without making theories,
without naming things, without relating them to anything in the past,
and to see whether there is anything like selfhood as such there,
independent of all descriptions or whatever beliefs or pet ideologies
we may happen to have.

But then maybe there are areas in human life where the point is not,
as in science or philosophy, to find out the true fact of the matter;
maybe there are areas of life where you should just rest in effortless
attention and dissolve in the present moment, and there is no reward
to be gotten, no message to be brought home; this could be true too.

Thomas Metzinger