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It’s 2am in the morning and I’m fully conscious, while I’m not supposed to. So what better way to put myself to sleep (state of lesser consciousness) than to talk about consciousness itself? …it’s such a boring subject that I suspect its sole purpose is to put you to sleep!!

I was on the phone with my girlfriend earlier at about 1130pm. I was terribly sleepy and actually fell asleep in between our conversation. Let me describe the experience: I said something… and then I felt my consciousness slipping away - my eyes were closed, the thoughts in my mind started to dissipate, I started to lose the sense of time and then I felt like my brain was shutting down - nothing.

Next thing I knew she said I fell asleep. At that point I felt that my brain was ‘restarting’. I knew the meaning of her words, I heard them quite clearly, but aside from that I seemed to have lost all contacts with all of my remaining senses. I did the most sensible thing to do: I went to sleep!!

I had a dreamless sleep (deep sleep), I woke up because I felt like to have a piss. It was 1am. By the time I finished doing the deed, I was fully aware - which lead me to write about this silly topic.

What the hell is consciousness?

IMO, consciousness is all about experiencing existence. One is conscious if one is aware of one’s own existence. So I could say:

"I am conscious because I am aware of myself."

But herein lies the problem: if I could be aware of my own existence, it also means that I am aware that I am aware of my own existence. Which also means that, I am aware that I am aware that I am aware of my own existence.

See the problem? …infinite regress

Being conscious is like seeing your face in the mirror, the mirror is your consciousness - the image you see, is you. Without the mirror, you can’t see your own face.

However, put another mirror into the equation, and you will start to see your faces reflected back and forth, repeated over and over, between those mirrors. The number of images depends on your placement of the mirrors. If you put them perpendicular to each other and put yourself in between them, you will see 3 reflections, and so on.

This other mirror, is like other people’s consciousness. It reflects your image, back and forth. Our brains are designed to work with each other (the social brain theory). Could it be that our consciousness depends on each other? In other words, the consciousness that we know now is a collective consciousness instead of individual consciousness.

An axiom can be deduced from this analogy:

"I am aware that you are aware" -> which can be expanded to: "I am aware that you are aware that I am aware that you are aware" and so on…

…yet another infinite regress problem

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Another way of probing what consciousness is all about, is by figuring what it’s NOT all about. That is, if we know what losing consciousness is, then perhaps we will know what consciousness is.

Sleeping is one exercise where we deliberately (sometimes not) lose our consciousness. Perhaps the purpose of sleep is to keep us being conscious - because sub-consciously we are ‘reminded’ all the time about losing consciousness.

Which brings me to the conclusion of this boring topic: writing about consciousness is one of the best way to lose consciousness (it will bore you to sleep!!)