Schrödinger Says

(i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature.

(ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I forsee the effects that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.

The only possible inference from these two facts is that I—I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’—am the person, if any who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature.

—Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

The Junkyard

I spent the day trying to vocalize all of my thoughts—just to see how my mind works. And . . .

I became very aware of my endless inane observations.

They were often followed by commentary like, “Jeez, my mind is full of inane crap.”

Which was sometimes followed by commentary like, “Don’t judge it, just watch it.”

Which was sometimes followed by commentary like, “Who’s watching? Don’t watch. Don’t analyze. Just say it.”

At other times I said, “I wouldn’t have had those thoughts about my thoughts if I were not vocalizing my thoughts.”

Or, “I am remembering all my thoughts much more than I would if I were not vocalizing.”

Sometimes I thought I should stop all these metathoughts about my thoughts and vocalizations. I didn’t always vocalize these thoughts.

I liked to read words out loud every time I saw them.

I noticed more smells, textures and colors than usual.

Sometimes when my mind was silent, I tried to think of something to say and only said “Why is it so difficult and tiring to speak all my thoughts?”

Sometimes when my mind was silent, I said something like, “Was that one of those moments between thoughts which the meditators claim are the moments when your true self is present?” Actually, I was more likely to just think that than to say it.

Sometimes the vocalization of the thought lasted too long, and I had already moved on to a new thought while still vocalizing the old one.

Often I spoke the thought out loud only after I had already spoken it to myself in my mind.

Other times the vocalization was my first awareness of the thought.

Some vocalizations, such as “Ouch” and “Fuck!” came with no real thought attached to them, just a sensation.

When I started thinking about something I wanted to tell somebody or planning what I would do later, I started a long internal monologue but usually forgot to vocalize it.

When I made an effort to vocalize such monologues, I lost interest quickly.

I sometimes thought about how I would write this list. I rarely vocalized those thoughts.

Sometimes I laughed and said, “Sheez, my brain is a random mess.”

I wondered, sometimes aloud and sometimes not, what kinds of thought processes were going on that I still wasn’t aware of.

Death and Consciousness

What happens to our ideas, memories, hopes and attachments when we die? In short, what happens to our consciousness?

The body no longer transforms energy into heat and motion, it no longer continues process of self-replication. Over a period of time, it undergoes chemical transformation. The body may disappear, but the parts that make it up do not. Its primary components just dissipate and rearrange themselves, and become part of other entities.

Does our consciousness also transform? Or does it just disappear after the intake of energy stops, leaving not a trace and contributing to no other entity? Here are some possibilities:

1. Consciousness is entirely a product of material conditions, and can be reduced to material processes. When those material conditions change, consciousness just disappears. This is the predominant assumption of scientists, who claim to be realists about it. But in many ways, it is also the most mystical. This is an argument that material processess can create something that is clearly not material. Yet this something can still cause change in outside material conditions and influence other non-material consciousnesses. And then this active, causal entity just entirely disappears, leaving not even a trace of energy, heat or motion.

2. Like the body, consciousness transforms. Perhaps it disaggregates like the body, with its component parts joining other entities and becoming unrecognizable. This is like Buddhism, in that there is no inherent self, however much we may imagine there is. We are just a temporary confluence of disjointed mental and physical functions.

3. Or perhaps the process of transformation goes the other way: Consciousness was already disaggregated when trapped in our bodies. After death consciousness is liberated, becoming part of a larger, more complex system. Our self is a temporal effect, just like a song.

4. Consciousness does not change at all. Our consciousness is always part of a broader entity that transcends our individual minds, and which we usually can not perceive because of the limitations of our bodies. When the body dies, consciousness itself is not affected. Our self is an aspect of something much more transcendent, the atman.

5. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. This means that it is grounded in material conditions, but it has attained a new level of organization that follows patterns and laws that are different than and not reducible to those of its component parts. Like #1, this may also disappear when we die. But we cannot be certain, because this does not preclude that 2 or 3 may also be true. What it asserts is that there is an intimate but indeterminate relation between the basic components of consciousness and consciousness in and of itself. This leaves open the possibility that consciousness can create and influence matter just as much as matter creates and influences consciousness—i.e. it is a two-way street, not the one-way street of option #1. So perhaps it is the transformation of consciousness that causes the body to disappear, rather than the other way around.

I find #5 to be most likely—in part because it is the most open-ended and holistic. But lets face it, I have no good reason to think so. It just seems to best fit my emotional predilections and ideas presented in books that I like. Which means I am choosing on the basis of arbitrariness and authority. . . . . But so is everybody else. We have no idea, regardless of how committed we are to one vision or another.

Consciousness

As any meditator can tell you, the chattering mind is hard to keep quiet. Try it. Try to focus on nothing. Or, to start a bit easier, try to just sit and watch your thoughts. Watch your thoughts grasp at any straw and weave it into a randomly expanding chain. Soon you can no longer watch the thoughts. You become sucked into their gusts and currents, swept along helplessly, seeing the world only from inside them, losing sight of how they are constructed, of the serpentine trails they leave, and of the things they shut out.

These chattering thoughts are precisely the kind of analytic engagement that most people would call consciousness or self-awareness. And yet the more we become lost in this awareness, the less we are self-aware.