As a general process, waking up makes no sense. It’s never that we’ve solved our way out of sleep and the day shows up because our fully alert selves are the final brush stroke it needs. No, we always seem to wake up in the middle of something that’s already going on. We never quite figure out what that thing is, instead we just plow forward, grabbing toothbrushes and pants like this whole thing was our idea from the beginning. One quick look at a newborn though and the unfinished business of figuring out why we’re awake comes rushing back to us. These people want to know what the hell is going on. Why do we seem so calm about everything? There’s so much of it.
Pshh. I know. You’re telling me dude.
The first time we wake up, we’re screaming. It’s clearly the correct response to that situation and our mothers seem to agree with us. Something is bizarrely out of order, this waking up thing has managed to run ahead of its feet somehow and now it’s galloping out of some poor woman’s genitals. The mutual screaming is a way of catching up with something that’s already full steam ahead. What the hell is this? We screech. What do you want from me?
Now imagine going to a baseball game. The bat hits the ball. The ball flies. It seems really clear to us sitting in the stands that the batter caused the ball to fly, but that sureness is a product of where we’re sitting much more than it’s some objective description of all the forces that came together to send that ball on its way. Really the answer to the question of what caused the ball to fly all depends on who wants to know. We say the bat caused the ball to fly because we want to know about the guy who hit the home run, but didn’t the pitch cause the ball to fly just as much as the bat? Didn’t the stadium create the possibility of the game? What about the guy that bought the team and moved them to the spot the ball was thrown in? What about the city council member who had his palm greased so the stadium could be built? And so on. Our first instinct is to pshaw questions like these out of the way, but that’s because we’re in the business of focusing on a very limited chain of events, one that presupposes the answers to these questions already. We take it for granted that the stadium is there, that the salaries of the players are enough to keep them playing, that the weather didn’t rain out the game. These grants are so solid that they’re landscape the homerun can happen in. In waking life, like in a dream, the event we’re conscious of happens in the middle of a set of granted assumptions that carve out a space for it, because all conscious states have to already be happening before we can become aware in them. Consciousness is the one idea that presupposes itself into existence. Not because it’s magic, but because it’s a product of natural processes. It grows out of nature and that growth is a continuation. The arrows of ecology crash together into something with so many directions in it that one is always coming to the surface.
Looks like he really got a piece of it.
We wake up for the first time screaming in the middle of dramas that know our names before we know them ourselves. We’re there because our parents presupposed us, and they’re there because a bunch of people presupposed them. If we try to follow this chain of presupposing back as far as it’ll go, what we get isn’t one unhatched chicken laying the very first egg. What we get is a truth about consciousness itself. It’s an ecological truth, one that connects the fact that nature selects for us, to the fact that we always awake within a waiting field of options. Organisms are solutions to ecological problems, or if we want to be even less anthropomorphic than that we can say that organisms are the result of ecological collisions. In the same way that a busy intersection presupposes a certain number of car crashes, the messy screaming that first catapults us into the world is waiting in silhouette in everything from high heeled shoes to the apples of our eyes. These things do more than simply suggest sexual activity, they’re not part of some collective failure we have to confront a common core of biological meaning. Instead they’re part of an artificial habitat which ecologically manifests people as much as bees manifest the flowers they pollinate.
Let’s stick with our cultural tradition of comparing sex to hitting home runs to see if we can wave this idea in. Every time we come up with a reason why the bat and the ball connect, we’re saying something true. We can say that funding for college sports produced enough athletes to create interesting teams, or we can say that the trees the bats are made from were common in the place that baseball was first invented and on and on. We can do the same thing with any person. We can say that Jo Shmo is here because his dad’s date had the flu the day his parents met and so he asked Jo’s mom to dance instead, or we can say that Jo Shmo is here because the pilgrims were escaping religious persecution in England and so they fled to North America to begin the historical legacy his birth was a development in and on and on.
As we grab handful after handful of these true causes, the most complete truth we can find that fits them all together is that the batter who hits the ball is part of a larger ecosystem that demands the homerun as an event. He hits the ball because we want to see him hit it, because we created fields for him to practice at, coaches who wanted to see him succeed, highlight reels that taught us how to channel our thirst for triumph into cracking bats and not soccer goals or holes in one. The homerun is there because we presupposed it. He still had to hit it, like Jo’s dad still had to turn the charm on when he saw Jo’s mom waiting for a dancing partner. But a few strikeouts won’t be able to stop the homerun from appearing there in one way or another, like a few lame pick up lines won’t stop the next generation from getting here.
Yeah. Make sure to wipe your chair off when you’re done here ladies. “You are the mole hill. I am the guy that’s not allowed within fifty feet of the molehill by court order. ” It’s a miracle that sex still happens at all, but here we are.
Natural ecosystems do the same thing with the biologically essential moments of all conscious creature’s lives. All births and deaths, all fucking and eating and sleeping. I
Consciousness is the act of taking itself for granted. To open your eyes is to presuppose that there are things that can be seen. The home run analogy is a useful illustration here, because it personalizes the way that many forces spread out all over different times and spaces can still reliably come together to recreate a very specific event, which is individually alive as a personal accomplishment at the same time that it’s been totally, ecologically presupposed. Here, the presupposition doesn’t prevent the event from being a personal accomplishment, in fact it’s just the opposite. It’s by presupposing baseball as a game that we create the openings inside it where accomplishments can come to life.
Nature is a field. Like the fields where we come up with sports, as it becomes populated with rules and boundaries it becomes populated with certain openings where a chain of events can either reach or not reach its goal. Our lives are these openings. We always wake up in the middle of our own stories, because there’s a pre-existing ecological problem with our name on it that brings us into existence. Nature has put us at bat. There are only a handful of things that usually happen; kids, love, loss, cancer, dancing, yadyada. Swing. Miss. Hey batta batta. But at the same time we’re alive inside of larger ideas like global warming, overpopulation, nuclear disasters etc., things with the potential to collapse the team or destroy the entire stadium.
There’s no right place to begin, because it’s damage control from day one. Not because something has gone wrong per say, because if it were going “right” there’d be no consciousness at all. The conscious grows out of the unconscious, which grows out of nature itself. This growth isn’t some simple switch that gets flicked on when habitats are healthy. It’s part of a field of relationships which are so simultaneously interdependent that they collectively summon one another into the world. Before we step up to the plate, there’s a feeling. It takes a whole culture to create that feeling. People in the stands, runners on base. It’s a feeling we can only have in that spot, at that time. If we don’t stand there, someone else will, and different people will create different meanings. Yet the feeling of standing there in a real game with real stakes, is an animal all its own. It’s an animal created by the simultaneous interdependence of our cultural collective, one that’s the result of historical accident as much as it’s the result of our deliberate striving in the moment the bat toggles in the air.
You are the next thing that happens.
Consciousness is an event that causes itself, and that’s why it pops out of nature as an entity in its own right. If it were just an effect of its causes, it would be indistinguishable from the landscape of things it takes for granted. We recognize life automatically because we’re always looking at the world and rating the things we see on a scale of how self caused they are, and that scale is a product of our own presupposedness. We see that a tree is more self caused than a rock, a rabbit more than a tree, a person more than animal, etc. Nobody has to tell us to recognize motion, or to understand things as essentially different based on the speed they change with if we leave them completely alone. We’re born recognizing the independence of causes, because our recognizing is itself an opening in the field of nature, one where our personal striving completes a larger ecological portrait that paints itself into the world with the colors of our days. Got the blues? Don’t worry. I’m red hot.
There are a few soundbyte facts that everybody knows about the brain, with probably the simplest one being just how much of it is dedicated to memory. We’re given neat little illustrations that drive the point home. The wrinkly, raisin look of the brain is created by our outer layer of tissue, which is mostly dedicated to memory, folding over on itself. Pull this tissue out into a flattened sheet and it’d be roughly the size of a full leaf of newspaper. It sounds like a simple size comparison, but under the surface we’re clearly comparing the information storage abilities of the brain to the other ways we’ve figured out how to store information. In that way it’s a more accurate comparison than we might realize. A newspaper can’t exist without a wealth of information for it to report and our brains can’t exist without the bustling ecosystems that they report on. A newspaper presupposes a state of affairs, like our brains presuppose the information our sense organs pump into them.
Hey look, it’s looking.
It’s a comparison we can follow all the way down into the psychological structure of what waking up is. Consciousness is the presupposition that there’s a world we can wake up into. We wake up in the middle of something that’s well under way, not because there’s some piece of understanding we’ve failed to catch up with, but because our position in reality is presupposed by the circumstances we complete. We’re part of an ecosystem, a society. We are the development of natural and artificial histories. Development is a continuation, and continuing a process that’s much longer and larger than any one person means that waking up is the process of presupposing ourselves.
If we want to go all the way down the bunny hole here, we can see a truth inside the absurd abruptness of waking up that’s relevant to the nature of existence itself. After all, we’ve all played the big bang game at least once in our minds. Everyone wants to know where everything came from and we all hit the same wall. The problem of wanting to know what the first cause of all things was, is like trying to pick one reason why the homerun happened. Truly total explanations are always going to describe interdependent systems of causes that can’t be pinned to a single place. The problem here is in the question we’re asking, which presupposes that the world is some assembly line of causes and then events, which of course it isn’t. It’s much more blended than that and much of wanting to know what is a cause and what is an effect is determined by our asking, which nature has no inherent reverence for.
Let’s be crystal clear here. Guy A smacks Guy B in the face. Guy A is the cause of Guy B’s face pain. We can know that no problem, and what we know is a cause and effect truth. Causes precede effects, they generate effects. Duh. But again this only works because we’ve hit the ground running. There just are two guys, we take it for granted that one hasn’t threatened the other and so on. Cause and effect presuppose things which can cause and effect one another. So what we’re talking about here is the unfinished business of totally explaining something that was staring at us before we were born. Not just why we always wake up in the middle of our own stories, but why the concept of beginning itself becomes problematic once we bring it to scale. To truly find a single beginning cause of everything would be to put reality to sleep. It would create a limit that’s the opposite of the waking reality we know. Consciousness is unfinished because reality itself is unfinished. The simultaneous interdependence of all truly total descriptions of cause and effect creates the sense of simultaneity that we identify with the final reality that’s always in front of us.
And It. Is. Outta here!
The problem here is in how we have to typically approach knowing things. There are differences in kinds of knowledge, where what we know is shaped significantly by the structure of the group of people we have to use that knowledge in. So knowing something in court is very different from knowing something in a church. One of these assemblies is combative, the other is cooperative, so the things we can know in each can still be explosive in their own ways, but they’re foundationally different forms of knowing that are imputed into us by the foundations of the groups that surround us while we know them. We can shout “hallelujah” and we can say “not guilty” and each time we can be saying something true, but neither truth can be brought to the other assembly and still work. Guilty or not guilty, people are still welcome in a church, and the spiritual truths that underwrite bursts of hallelujah don’t tell us whose finger prints are whose. We want to know different kinds of things in each situation, because the simultaneity of each assembly is the result of different kinds of arrows crashing together. In one, people are trying to figure out how to love each other. In another, people are trying to figure out who was hurt and how much. Conscious states like prayer and interrogation are extensions of those collective projects, which we individually experience by entering the ecological openings specific to each group of people. Each thing is true, and it’s as true as the place we know it in is real.
True.
True.
So when we come up with reason one thousand and one why the ball flies through the air, it seems a little like we’re trying to shove all previous explanations out of the way, like someone from some other kind of group wants to plant their flag in the thing we’re understanding. It’s not that these reasons haven’t located a real truth of some kind, it’s just that normally the only reason to name any one of them is to try and take some credit for making the home run happen. Our first reaction is to shoo them away, because at the very least it seems like we’re going to have to hand off some of our baseball money to whoever comes tottling up to us with these bits and pieces of cause. But if we can agree to leave our checkbooks where they are while we think about this, we can gain some real insight about what consciousness is, and not just consciousness, but the world of causes and effects we look at with it.
We have a tendency to oversimplify things. Oversimplify might even be too harsh a characterization, because most of the time, we’re not going over the line at all. Cigarettes cause cancer. Parents cause children. Why? Because get your checkbook out that’s why. You were there, then you did X, then the thing happened. So sell it to the tourists deadbeat. We need to get this under control. We can step back into more complete portraits of responsibility of course, things like smoking ads on television, or the access to birth control. But we can only do that by touching these more ecological brushes of control. Who gets to say what ideas we’ll all know enough about to debate with each other? Who decides whether we’re allowed to use these kinds of tools on ourselves? To totally cause ourselves, we have to ecologically control ourselves, and that means consciously creating the rules that open up the at bats around us.
So there’s the kind of knowledge we can take to the bank, because it’s at the expense of someone else, and then there’s the kind of knowledge that requires the knower’s participation to be true, psychological truth, artistic truth, religious truth. We have to voluntarily introspect, to grant an artistic audience, to deliberately commit to acts of faith. The difference in each kind of knowledge is a product of the combative and/or cooperative structure of the group we know it in, but at the same time each truth is a position in what is finally an ecologically manifested reality of meaning. Knowledge is a conscious reality, and what these kinds of knowing evidence in virtue of their foundational difference is an encounter with a fundamental truth about the nature of being itself, where obviously there are real chains of causation that happen in very linear ways, and yet at the same time we never get to oversimplify the world into simple one way streets of cause and effect. It’s a hard world, and love is how we make it through. Each truth is a part of the other, not a subtraction from it, and we won’t know either completely until we understand how it depends on the other kinds of truth that surround it.
What I’d like to offer here as a genuinely useful idea, is the fact that we can follow the intellectual trick of mapping interdependent systems of cause into very complete versions of understanding, which we can carry back to our groups to create more totally awake openings for those who step into our shoes after we’re gone. The point is that we have a funny attitude when it comes to totally explaining things. Someone will bring up a subject like consciousness or the big bang, and we’ll instantly step back into a very breathy tone of voice and put a kind of glazed look on our faces. The signal is clear. Finally explaining things and not actually explaining them are the same thing. But awe and ignorance are not the same thing. We want to feel like life is this big mystery and consciousness is this ineffable thing, and sure they are, but our want to feel that way is also a temptation to throw up our hands and stop thinking in a serious way about these things that are very real, very powerful aspects of the human experience. Ideas like consciousness and the origin of the universe remain impenetrable to understanding only to the extent that we refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of total causation as the final layer of reality, the one that accounts not just for the thing, but for its surrounding participatory position in the scheme of reality as a whole that doesn’t care where and when we decide to start measuring it. There’s a big picture, and then there’s a total picture. There’s no right place to start looking at it, because that’s not what looking at a picture is.
“No, we never got to the forest. There were too many trees.”
Princess Fantastic 