Awareness always is (?) 🔅

Lots of philosophers have talked about this throughout history, but I always find the idea of matter without awareness a strange one. To consider anything at all, awareness must be present for the considering. As soon as you imagine a universe with no awareness, it’s occurring inside of you. (You are aware, right?)

As far as any I is concerned, everything that could ever possibly be known is (at least) experientially entangled with the I. Even the unknown is entangled, when someone considers it. Given this, how could we ever prove that consciousness can be explained by something outside of it?

This using awareness to point at itself applies to claims we can make about awareness too. I can’t make an ontological claim that awareness is final or ultimate or even that it always is, just that we could never know if it isn’t. For us to ever be aware, awareness is. But that doesn’t make awareness claims invalid. They’re like breaking the fourth wall in a movie; both part of the story and inviting something more. 

I can make claims that it’s upstream of other claims though, like ideas of falsifiability. To say “this pointing to itself makes it unfalsifiable” asks us to step inside a frame of objective thinking via logic, and then forget stepping inside it (imposing the rules of logic via our subjectivity onto unmediated experience), which is the point I’m making. We’re left with our undeniable experience, maybe nothing else, and gratefully that is everything.

I want to pause to acknowledge that scientific materialism is incredible. We built rockets that go to the moon because it's so useful to set aside questions of consciousness and assume an objective point of view! I just don’t want to forget that we are phenomenologically bracketing subjectivity when we do that; we are making a reasonable choice to ignore an experientially indivisible aspect of reality for a little while in order to focus our attention on just one subsection. But materialist assumptions basically can say nothing about the epistemic realm, which is where most of what humans actually care about resides. We want to go to the moon because of what we feel, value, experience, desire. Even basic needs like food, shelter and health matter because of people’s experiences, not as ends in themselves.

With love, Jordan