Edralis's blog

Awareness Monism (3/11)

[This blogpost is a part of the series Awareness Monism, originally my Master’s thesis. Go to the disambiguation page here.]

1. Grasping “awareness”

1.1. Fleshing out awareness

In this chapter, first I will describe what I mean by “awareness” in my own words, and then give overviews of Dan Zahavi’s minimal self and Erich Klawonn’s I-dimension. I choose these two authors because both their accounts are richly conceptualized descriptions of seemingly the same thing I’m talking about when I discuss “awareness”. At the same time, their backgrounds, intuitions, and conclusions are not necessarily the same—for example, they both seem to be APists. There are many other authors whose accounts of self, minimal self, consciousness, awareness, or other related concepts overlap with my own to a significant degree (for example, Galen Strawson’s minimal self[1], or Wolfgang Fasching’s Advaita-informed discussions of awareness[2]); however, my point here is not to be exhaustive, but to offer a sufficiently rich and varied sketch of what I want to talk about to help the reader connect to the concept at hand.

My account

In this section, I formulate my own understanding of “awareness”—or rather, elucidate my own use of the term. What I have in mind cannot really be communicated by description. So, my aim here is to help the reader grasp my meaning by offering various metaphors and vague pointers, to help them notice what I have in mind in their own case, i.e. to notice their own awareness and how it functions. Ultimately, however, it seems like this is a matter of spontaneous intuitive insight. I elaborate later on (in chapter 3) about what I believe could ground the individual differences between people in their ability to grasp it.

* * *

For the purposes of this work, by “experience” I mean conscious, subjective, phenomenal experience, and I analyze it as a revealing of particular qualitative content (phenomenal qualities) in awareness. Any particular experience-moment[3] is a realization or manifestation of certain phenomenal qualities in awareness. For example, the taste of pineapple, the redness of a red cup, and the sadness of a loss, are different phenomenal qualities, all with their own particular “taste”, and the existence of all of them, i.e. their particular realizations as individual occurrences, is a conscious, subjective existence. That they exist just means they are experienced. They take place in and for awareness.

Awareness is the being of content (or of experience)—i.e. subjective/phenomenal being. Your awareness is that which remains the same between two different experiences. Because it is possible to have two experiences with different content (even entirely different content), the sameness cannot consist in a sameness of content (a repetition of the same content-type), but rather it must consist in something else. This “something else” is that which makes an experience yours in the first place, i.e. what gives it its immediacy, what makes it here-now—that which, for you, equally makes a particular pain hurt, a particular sweetness sweet, and a particular redness red. This something is simply the way the content is realized, i.e. its being. A content is yours if it is for you, which simply means, its existence consists in being immediately given to you. Again, it’s not that there is some content or experience and then it is given to you—there is no distinction in its being and givenness to you. The being of experience simply is givenness, presence, its appearing in the here-now. Experience existing just is experience given. For example, the being of pain just is pain.

There is no independent subject receiving or being given pain, no relation between two independently existing things (pain and subject); they are the same thing—experience (e.g. the experience of pain, or pain). The subject is inherent in pain—pain is inherent in the subject, and there is no real distinction between them, i.e. they do not exist separately, somewhat like pitch and timbre don’t exist separately, but are dimensions of the same sound[4]. There just is pain. So the you, the subject of experience that we’re talking about here—i.e. awareness—is not something to be found as existing independently in the world, apart from consciousness; and neither can it be found in consciousness, as a kind of object. It doesn’t essentially have a body, a personality, or memories, or even preferences and goals; it is certainly not a human being.

Yet, in the sense that matters for our purposes, it—awareness—is the subject of experience. It is that which experiences, or which manifests or realizes experiences, for or in which experiences exist. There are many ways we can analyze experience and there are many things which it can make sense to call “subject of experience” under some analyses and conceptualizations of experience. I am not arguing against these various conceptions, and neither am I saying that “actually, awareness is the real subject of experience”. “Subject of experience” is a name, a placeholder term, that, like all terms, holds certain implicit associations and has certain customary functions in language that make it suitable to serve as one of the names for what I want to talk about. It could also be a misleading name, if, for a particular person, its associations with personhood or objecthood are too strong; so again I should emphasize that when I call awareness the “subject of experience”, I don’t mean to say there is some kind of object like a cup or a human being that exists and contingently receives experiences. “There is experience” cannot be true, in my conceptual schema, without “there is a subject of experience” being true, and also without “there is some particular quality of experience” being true, because they comprise a single “act”—they are the same thing (an experience), even though they can be distinguished from each other conceptually. If we’re using the term “subject of experience” so that it refers to human beings or other creatures, we’re talking about subjects of experience in a sense that is not relevant for my point.

Awareness has a simultaneous width, and a successive breadth. In the same experience-moment, i.e. simultaneously in the same awareness, many qualities can be revealed (for example, looking with sadness at a broken red cup while tasting pineapple). The same awareness is also capable of “holding” many different experience-moments, i.e. many sets of distinct, simultaneously (i.e. “at the same time”) occurring qualities, which it holds or reveals to itself in succession (i.e. not “at the same time”).

To reiterate: When you look into your own present experience, at your present phenomenal landscape, you notice that there are many different things in it at the same time. There is a complex visual-auditory-tactile-kinesthetic scene, perhaps also some thoughts or feelings, and a general background mood. What all these parts of your present experience have in common is that they are here and they are now, and they exist as subjectively given to you (pain hurts). The very same awareness (your awareness) has the capacity to manifest myriad different qualities of different kinds (pain, sweetness, redness, a particular thought), and it can “hold” many of them simultaneously—it has a certain possible[5] simultaneous width. All the different, distinguishable parts of your current experience exist in the same way, as immediately given here and now to you.

The very same awareness also holds different qualities of different kinds at different moments, in different “acts”—it has successive breadth. Each moment, I am presented with a new experiential landscape—there is, immediately given, a new set of experiential qualities for me. For example, there was an experience-moment of you waking up this morning, and now there is an experience-moment of you reading this sentence. These experience-moments are different experience-moments, and contain different qualities. They do not exist simultaneously—yet both of them exist in the same way, as immediately given, i.e. in the same awareness. They are both now, in the same now-ness, yet they are different instances of that now-ness. They are both here, they are both immediately present—but they are not present simultaneously, otherwise they wouldn’t be two different experiences (their being two and their non-simultaneity is the same thing). Awareness, then, just is the now, the here, the immediate presence of experience, the revealing, manifestation, or realization of experiential qualities.

So to recapitulate, awareness has the capacity to manifest many different qualities of many kinds; it can manifest many different qualities simultaneously (in simultaneous absence of all other possible qualities, in all other possible configurations[6]); and it can manifest many different qualities in succession.

Awareness is a space or dimension of experience. It is a phenomenal space—a place where phenomena happen—where they are manifested or realized. It is that which an auditory experience (the sound of a dog barking), a visual experience (the color-shape of a tree outside your window), a thought (“this is a thought”), and a feeling (an attack of anxiety), have in common—they are all just different qualities of experience, or contents of awareness[7].

Experiential content, however, does not “fill up” awareness in the way marbles fill up a jar—rather, it fills the awareness “where” it is realized like splotches of color fill out a shape, or like matter fills up empty space. Spatial objects are not placed “in” space, as if space and objects are two distinct things. Rather, they are states or activities of it—and so it is with phenomenal qualities and awareness.

Awareness is like a screen or canvas. It is the “neutral ground” of experience, which “holds” qualities like a projection screen or a canvas hold colors—including the white color of an empty canvas or a blank screen. However, since a screen is observed, by an external observer, the metaphor falls short. For it is the screen itsef that is the observer here—the “place of being” of the images. The images are subjectively, i.e. their being is their immediate presence; they cannot be independently of the subject for whom they are.

Awareness always manifests (realizes) some content (qualities). There is no phenomenal space without phenomenal objects, and no phenomenal objects without phenomenal space. Awareness and its contents just are experience[8]. They are not two kinds of objects that relate to each other as independently existing, but rather they are distinct only conceptually. Together, they constitute experience—experience just is some quality, some content, “present in awareness”. It just is a presence of a certain quality (some content) in some (if AP is true) or in the (if AM is true) awareness.

So awareness is here-ness, presence and immediate givenness (of some content). Take pain—a kind of experience. Pain hurts. Pain is hurting—this hurting being here, present as immediately given. An experience is simply a quality’s immediate presence or givenness. It is not a giving of something that already exists on its own—like giving someone a piece of candy. In that act (the act of giving someone a piece of candy), there is some object that already exists (viz. the candy), and the receiver of it, i.e. they both preexist their relation.

Rather, experience consists in being present and given, i.e. it is a revealing of a quality in or to awareness. To be in (or to be revealed in) awareness means simply to be present and immediately given—e.g. for pain to hurt.

Awareness is both empty and full. Awareness itself, even though it cannot actually be without manifesting some quality, is not bound to any particular quality. Two experiences might share no quality between them, yet still belong to the same awareness. So awareness is in itself devoid of all qualities, just as space, in itself, is devoid of particular objects, and is capable of manifesting any objects—even though in actuality it always contains/realizes particular objects; and so it doesn’t actually exist on its own, without objects. The emptiness of space, in this sense, is its ability to realize (any) spatial objects; the emptiness of awareness is its openness, its ability to realize (any) phenomena.

But even though awareness is in itself empty (of content), i.e. capable of displaying any content, it is also in actuality always full, i.e. realizing some content. It is essentially that which realizes content. The emptiness of awareness, i.e. its capacity to manifest any content and its lack of boundedness to any particular content, is the ground of its fullness, i.e. its manifesting some particular content. Awareness could be likened to an empty receptacle (e.g. a vase)—which is, in a sense, in itself always empty (a vase inherently “has” a space to be filled, which it creates by its own shape), but also always filled with something (even if only air), by the nature of its very being (by its shape). So in one sense, awareness is empty—in itself not bound to particular qualities. Yet in another sense, it cannot actually be empty—like an empty vase is really filled with air, and a blank canvas is really covered by whiteness.

Awareness is now-ness. It stands still, it is unchanging—yet it is also ever-changing. Awareness is, in itself, always “the same”. It is always here and now; it never moves or changes, as it is in itself quality-less. At the same time, it is ever-changing and flowing. It is the same in different experience-moments, i.e. manifesting different content. The content shifts and changes from moment to moment, but the here-now that grounds it “stands still”. It is always now—the same now, although it is also always different.[9]

This is not really a paradoxical thing, because every change presupposes a grounding identity (something that undergoes change). Every dynamism, every becoming is grounded in a stability. In two different experiences, awareness is both the same and different, in the sense that it is in different modes (realizes different content in the two different experiences), while remaining the same as their ground. It is where becoming—coming and going—take place. So we can say that awareness remains the same—it is the stable ground of modification. And we can also say that it is always different—it receives different modes, that come and go in it.

An event of change has two aspects, one dynamic and one stable; the latter grounding the event of change. It seems to me we use the verb “change” in two ways. First, in any particular event of change, we can say “the modes change”, i.e. that which comes and goes is said to “change”. Or second, we can say “the ground changes”, i.e. that which stands still in the event is said to “change”. When I change my clothes, I also change myself (by having changed my clothes). When my clothes are changed, I am also changed thereby. But in that event, I am not changed in the same sense that my clothes are changed; clothes come and go, but I remain. In an event of change that is the changing of clothes, the clothes are the modes, and E is the ground of change. The clothes connect and disconnect from their substrate (from E), i.e. they are the dynamic element, they come and go, appear and disappear, they are and are not; E remains the stable ground of this coming and going of the modes that she receives—she is throughout the event. In our customary use of the word “change”, it is correct to say that the clothes are changed, but also that she is changed. So we use the same word for the modes and for the substrate—for both aspects of an event of change. This can apparently sometimes lead to confusion and pseudoparadoxes. In an event of a change of clothes, the clothes are changed1, and E is changed2—that is, clothes come and go, and E receives them. The verb “change” can be applied both to the active (dynamic) and the passive (stable, receptive) component of the event of change.

Since it is conceivable that the content of my experience could be changed entirely, yet that there nevertheless would remain an experience for me (with entirely different content), the identity of “me” must consist in something “underneath” the changeable content—its substrate, which is awareness.

Awareness is not changed1 by realizing different content (i.e. it is not a mode), but it is changed2 by it (i.e. it is the ground). It is that which stands still and grounds (an event of) change.

What changes is, unsurprisingly, still itself—unless it changes into something else, but then the identity is found in that which encompasses the two states, i.e. both the thing that transformed, and the thing that came out of the transformation. For example, when a frog is transfigured into a bird, the stable “material” that receives the transformation is some particular clump of matter. When a frog changes color from brown to green, what is preserved (i.e. the ground) is the frog itself, which could be either brown or green. When a frog turns into a bird, the medium of change is the matter itself, which could be either a frog or a bird. What, then, is the unchanging medium of change of experience, underlying and capable of manifesting any content? Just as the medium of change in the case of the color-changing frog is that which is common to both the brown frog and the green frog, i.e. the frog itself, and the medium of change of the frog and the bird that which is common to both of them, i.e. some clump of matter, the medium of change of experience is that which different experiences have in common—which is the awareness in which they are revealed.

Notice what is here for you now—all the qualities immediately given to you (visuals, auditory qualities, tactile qualities, thoughts, feelings, mental imagery, etc.)—and watch how the qualities morph into different ones. You are fully preserved–awareness is fully preserved‒and always the same, even though the qualities change constantly. You are the ground. There is a dynamism, and there is a stability, in which that dynamism is grounded—i.e. awareness, which is always now and here. Even if your world, your body and mind were changed entirely, for example in a dream, the immediacy of that experience would remain the same, regardless of its contents.

Awareness is an imperturbable witness. Awareness cannot be hurt; it cannot be diminished; it has no desires, goals, or fears; it cannot suffer; it is a void, utterly empty in itself, but open and able to manifest any and all qualities. So it is that which manifests and is subject to all desire, fear, suffering, joy, moral feelings, etc.—while at the same time being essentially free from whatever it manifests. It witnesses all, but is affected by naught—at least not in the way that objects are affected by the changes that they undergo. Nothing that happens in awareness affects or changes awareness itself as the space of its realization. In another sense, it is affected by all (that happens in/for it), because it manifests all—for it is the being of that all. Manifesting pleasure, suffering, redness, the taste of chocolate means becoming pleasure, suffering, redness, the taste of chocolate. The experience of red exists as being red, is red being; in the same way, pain hurts “in itself”. Being becomes sweetness, or redness, or joy; a realization of a particular instance of sweetness is just Being, being sweetly—or, we could say, sweet-ing.

Notice the dual and opposite nature of awareness: it has no desires and no goals—but also, every desire and every goal belongs to it. It is always limited by what is currently present in it—but it is also all-knowing, for it knows all that is known by manifesting it[10]. It is static and unchanging—and it is dynamic, ever-moving, ever-changing, ever filled with something new. It is an infinitesimal point—and it is an infinite space. It is utterly empty, devoid of any particular thing—but it is also completely full, for it manifests everything that is manifested. It has no qualities—and it has them all. It is no-thing—and it is everything.

These statements are not really paradoxical, as half of each seeming contradiction points out a different aspect of awareness, articulating the same reality from a different angle (like two sides of the same coin), and so uses the words like “have”, “be” in a slightly different sense.

For example, “it has no qualities” points to the fact that awareness itself is not itself a quality, and is free of any particular quality inasmuch as it manifests them all (not only some of them)—which is why it also “has them all”. It is an infinitesimal point, because, being the eternal standing now, it doesn’t really have a duration—however, the now is actually vast, containing all experiences, all qualities, and in this sense is infinitely extended.

Dan Zahavi’s account: the core experiential self as for-me-ness

My account of awareness, i.e. that which the claim of AM is about, seems to be about the same “thing” as Dan Zahavi’s conception of experiential, minimal (also thin or core) self as mineness or for-me-ness. Zahavi works in a broadly phenomenological tradition, and in his understanding of self draws from Husserl, among others.

Zahavi analyzes experience as consisting of two “parts” or features: changeable experiential elements or qualities (i.e. content) and something that remains identical and constant between different experiences (i.e. awareness, using my terminology)—or an ever-dynamic “what” and a constant “how”:

“If I compare that which is given in two different acts of reflection, say a perception of birds, and a recollection of a walk, I can focus upon that which has changed, namely the intentional acts, but I can also focus upon that which remains identical, namely the subjectivity of experience.”[11] [emphasis mine]

And:

“one grasps such experiential elements as lemon-qualia and mint-qualia by appreciating what varies across such phenomenal characters, but grasps what for-me-ness is by appreciating what remains constant across them”[12]

While the particular experiences come and go for us, we, as the place of their becoming, the place of experiencing itself, remain constant. We can’t stop experiencing—experiencing ourselves.

What is identified here is a minimal self that is distinct from more “thick” conceptions of self, like the narrative self constituted in social relations. It is the “how”, the mineness, for-me-ness, or first-personal givenness of experience that reveals it as one’s own, and is a constant feature of experience. It is not an object or specific content (like redness, the taste of chocolate, etc.) or a sum of such content, nor is it a property or relation between such contents. Neither is it something that exists independently of or opposed to its content (“A consciousness without content but only for-me-ness is impossible.”[13]). Rather, it is the “constitutive manner of experiencing”: the “ubiquitous first-personal character of experience”, the “experiential perspectivalness of phenomenal consciousness”, or the “ineliminable subjective and perspectival givenness of consciousness”. It is the “invariant dimension of phenomenal character”, and so inherent to all experience—the “pervasive feature of experiential life as such”. It amounts to the “very subjectivity of experience”[14].

The field of first-personal givenness is distinguishable, even though not separable from the experiences themselves:

“Distinguishability is not the same as separability.We are not dealing with a pure or empty field of experiencing upon which the concrete experiences subsequently make their entry. The field of experiencing is nothing apart from the concrete experiences. Nevertheless, the moment we expand the focus to include more than a single experience it becomes not only legitimate but also highly appropriate to distinguish the strict singularity of the field of first-personal givenness from the plurality of changing experiences.”[15]

This, the first-personal givenness of experience, its self-manifestation, is the subject of experience that Zahavi describes as “the most basic form of egocentricity”[16]—an ego that is a structural part of the stream of consciousness, as opposed to something that stands outside of it, that has it. It is a minimal and core self, presupposed in all experience.

It is also a “pre-reflective self-consciousness”—the self-presentational or self-manifesting character of experience[17]. To be conscious of an experience “from within”, i.e. in the first-personal mode, is to be conscious of oneself. This inherent self-awareness or self-consciousness of experience, however, is to be distinguished from reflective self-consciousness as a kind of higher-order representation, a turning of consciousness towards itself (i.e. consciousness being its own object). Mineness or first-personal givenness is a permanent and basic feature of all conscious experience, not a product of its being its own intentional object. It is the intrinsic “what-it-is-likeness” of an experience.

However, Zahavi seems to be an APist, i.e. he seems to believe (implicitly, rather than explicitly) in a plurality of such for-me-nesses. For example, referring to two perceptions of the same chair (one for Zahavi, another for the reader), he says that

“[...] the moment we take the first-person perspective seriously, it is obvious that there is a vital difference between the two perceptions [viz. Zahavi’s and the reader’s]. Only one of them is given in a first-personal mode of presentation for me. To acknowledge this is to acknowledge that experiential phenomena are as such characterized by a basic level of ipseity.”[18] [emphasis mine]

But maybe, rather than betraying his implicit AP, what Zahavi is describing here is the fact that from the point of view of a particular experience, i.e. while “in” that experience, only that particular experience or point of view is experienced in the first-personal mode, whereas all other experiences are “not there”. Even if AM is true, the experience of the human being that you are is not currently, in this E’s experience, here—because it is a different experience. It is currently available only in an indirect sense—e.g. I can infer you’re sad from the frown on your face, but when looking at your face, I do not feel your sadness. So there is a difference between the experiences, when we consider them from the point of view of a particular experience; however, there is no distinction between them in their givenness. Both are revealed in the same givenness, but when one is revealed, the other is hidden.

Erich Klawonn’s account: the I-dimension

Like Zahavi (and me, and many others), Erich Klawonn analyzes experience as consisting of two distinguishable but actually indivisible “parts”: the invariable element of givenness/consciousness and the variable experiential content. Consciousness, in this sense, i.e. presence or givenness, is a way of being of phenomena, of experiential (mental) content.

Klawonn distinguishes between presence (or givenness) which is a feature of all experience, and primary presence (or givenness), which only pertains to one’s own experience (whereas all other experiences are only “secondarily given”). It is that which makes any particular experience mine, i.e. it accounts for its mineness. This mineness is a pre-reflective kind of consciousness which is presupposed in all reflective forms of consciousness: “the ‘ownership-relation’ follows from the first-person nature of consciousness”[19]. That is, there is no necessity for the phenomenal content to be of any particular kind (for example, to contain some particular memories) for an experience to be mine, it suffices that it is given to me as internally experienced[20]. What all my experiences have in common is that they are the “states of the same field of primary givenness or ‘mineness’”[21], i.e. they have the same first-person mode of existence.

The presence of experience is a self-presence: the phenomenal sphere or mental life is present only to itself, i.e. it is ontologically subjective and private, “ontologically self-immanent” and “the scene of its own existence”[22], existing only for and in itself. It is “objectively non-existent”[23].

Klawonn recognizes the binary nature of the presence of some content: either an experience is mine or not; either it is primarily given or not. In this sense, there are no degrees of consciousness[24].

The (Cartesian) I-substance is “an entity consisting in the unity of consciousness or primary givenness (or mineness) and experiential content”[25]. The “I”, “I-substance”, or self in an “ontological” sense is thus a “system of changing experiences with a common feature of primary givenness”[26]. It is essentially characterized by its mineness. It is a carrier of properties—a mental “ground”, logically preceding the particular mental states[27] it manifests (or “has”), and which are accidental to it[28]. The faculty of thinking[29] is the defining, essential characteristic of such a mental substance (an I-substance). And the I in this sense (or self, or mental substance, or soul) is thus “a field of varying experiences ‘kept together’ by pre-reflective consciousness/mineness”[30]. It is a unity of phenomenal states, which “take place” in the same mineness, i.e. the unity of a (primary) givenness and its content.

Klawonn also describes the I-substance as a (subjective, phenomenal) dimension, analogizing it to the objective dimension of physical objects (i.e. space-time). In the same way that the objective dimension is ontologically prior to any objects contained therein, the I is ontologically prior to any content it manifests. It is only contingently bound to it—it has “incarnational contingency”. The Iin this sense is absolutely single and indivisible, and so indestructible—at least in the sense of indecomposable, precisely because it has no parts[31].

To say that something was or will be only makes sense in reference to content, not to the dimension itself. That is, it only applies to the “things” contained in the I-dimension (in the field of mineness). This temporal “ontological declination” is what accounts for the changeability of the I-dimension.

But the I-dimension itself (and anything contained therein) is always now: “the actual present in which I exist right now is the very same present as the one in which I was born and the one in which I am going to die. But particular states of affairs come and go ‘in it’”[32].

Klawonn is also apparently an APist, considering the fact that he distinguishes between primary presence and presence in general (between my experiences and the experiences of others). A field of givenness “only includes certain phenomena as opposed to others which belong to other such fields”[33]. A plurality of I-substances amounts to AP.

More explicitly, he states the following:

“[…] an own-sphere has an essential and individuating property – its internal primary presence which provides it with a clear demarcation. It is, in other words, necessarily so that any existing field of givenness only includes certain phenomena as opposed to others which belong to other such fields. Assuming (as I do) that other sentient beings exist, it must therefore be taken for granted that there exists a plurality of well-demarcated individual I-fields or ‘own-spheres’ – one in the case of each sentient being.”[34]

The individual I-fields contain experiences or contents which share the same mineness (the same primary presence). This means that if there is more than one I-field, there are more than one “mineness-es”. Whereas, if AM is true, there is only one field of mineness—and so only one I-field (one I-substance).

However, I don’t see how the existence of other sentient beings necessarily entails the existence of other I-substances (of other I-fields, and so of other mineness-es). Even though each sentient being (for example a particular human being) corresponds to certain experiences which share certain content—which are phenomenally centered around a particular body-mind, i.e. offer a view of the world from a perspective of a particular creature in it—this doesn’t mean that these experiences must have a different mineness than experiences of other creatures. They might very well have the same mineness, be realized in the same field, and be distinct only in their content.

1.2. Content vs. awareness: the human being that I am vs. the I

Only if what “you” are is something that, in itself, is actually in some sense no-thing, no-body, can it be conceivable that you could be anybody (not just the particular human being[35] that you actually are). It is awareness that is this “I” that could be anybody[36].

There are two ways of demonstrating, by means of thought experiments, the contingent nature of your (as awareness) being the particular creature (human being) that you are, and thereby isolating (your) awareness from (your) content. The first way is to keep the awareness fixed and change the content, i.e. to change what conscious creature the empty subject that you are experiences—this shows the conceivability of your being someone else. The second way is to assign a different awareness to the content (the creature) in question, to imagine a different subject experiencing it—demonstrating the conceivability of the particular human being that you are not being you.

The aim of the following thought experiments is to help the reader get a better grasp of this distinction, and thereby a better intuitive understanding of awareness and of the meaning of the claim of AM.

Conceivability of not being the human being that you are / Conceivability of being someone else

Why are you the human being that you are, as opposed to someone else? Why were you born as this particular human being, at this particular time—why aren’t you experiencing some other life, some other conscious being, but this particular one, out of all conscious beings that ever were, are, and will exist? Why is this particular creature, this particular body-mind, “live”[37] to you, as opposed to all the others? In order for this question to even make sense, and not be just a confused statement of a pseudoproblem of why something is identical to itself (“why is this apple this apple?”), our conception of ourselves has to be such that we are only contingently the human being that we actually are. In order for the question “why am I this human being?” to even be meaningfully asked—in order for scenarios where this isn’t the case to be conceivable—“I” and “the human being that I am” have to be distinct, only contingently found together.

What is that which is meaningfully “I”, and which could meaningfully be some other human being, instead of (or in addition to) this human being?

In the same way that what is immediately given to me is the body-mind, the life, the POV, the experience of E, I could be given any body-mind, life, POV, experience. That is, “I could be anybody” means “any body-mind/life/POV/experience could be immediately present”. So the “I” that could “be” anybody is awareness, the dimension where these things are, that which is their being, which realizes or manifests them. To be E is to be directly acquainted with the experience of the world from E’s point of view, i.e. to be that perspective.

So (my) “I” is something that actually, currently is E (in some sense, but not that of a simple identity)—but it could be someone else. What I am (what is here picked out by the term “I”) is only contingently bound to E, i.e. I am E only contingently (because I could have been someone else). Instead of my experiencing the life of E (for yourself, substitute the human being that you are), seeing the world through her eyes, instead of her experience, the experience centered around her, being given and immediately present to me (being live to me), experiences from a different point of view, centered around a different being, could be present. That is, the content of my experiences could be different. I could have been born as someone else—which just means that experiences of a different human being, different content could be present in the awareness that is actually manifesting the experiences with the content centered around E. So affirming that “I could have been born Queen Victoria” simply amounts to the statement of the possibility or conceivability that the experiences of Queen Victoria, instead of the experiences of E, could be immediately given or present (live) in the same way that the experiences of E actually are.

As Klawonn[38] puts it, “what makes the mental life in question mine is its mode of being and not the specific nature of its phenomenal content”. This means that “any kind of experiential content could be present in the I-dimension” and  “my being the person that I am and nobody else, is not logically implied by any set of data about the person whose mental life happens to be present ‘in’ the I−dimension”[39]. These are features he refers to as, respectively, incarnational tolerance and incarnational contingency.

Benj Hellie points out the same conceivability by raising his “vertiginous question”:

“One of the many subjects of experience—soul pellets—is me. It is easy to pick it out uniquely by description: it ‘drives around’ the human being whose visage matches a photo on a driver’s license bearing the name ‘Benjamin Hellie’; it has the experience of writing these words on the 29th of January 2012. We will call this the ‘Hellie-subject’. (The reader is asked to substitute examples concerning her or himself for examples I have phrased as concerning myself.)

Having settled this, a vertiginous question is right around the corner. The Hellie-subject: why is it me? Why is it the one whose pains are ‘live’, whose volitions are mine, about whom self-interested concern makes sense? That thing there in the objective world: what is so special about it? Why doesn’t some other subject of experience there in the objective world ‘go live’ in this way: for instance, the ‘Chalmers-subject’ out there driving around in the human being whose visage matches a photo on a certain driver’s license bearing the name ‘David Chalmers’—why not instead it?”[40]

In other words: Why am [I, the subject], [the subject experiencing this human being]? Why am I not the subject experiencing someone else? The fact that this question can be meaningfully asked reveals something important about this subject—about me, about that which could be someone else, i.e. awareness. It reveals the contingency of the fact that I am this human being. Things could conceivably be otherwise—I could have been someone else—some other human being could be experienced by me.[41]

Another, more specific variant of the conceivability realization is the Tabula Rasa Reincarnation (TRR) thought experiment: it is conceivable that I am “reincarnated tabula rasa”. “Reincarnation” here simply means assuming a new experiential center—a new perspective on the world, centered around a new body-mind. That is, it is conceivable that after E (substitute the human being that you are) dies, I will go on to experience the life of some other human being, with no connection to the life of E (that is, without any psychological or material continuity). Since this is conceivable, again, “I” cannot refer to some particular content (personality, memories, etc.). When I imagine such a scenario, what I imagine is that the human being that I  currently am will die and I will later find myself living a life of some totally unrelated future human being. I imagine myself experiencing the content centered around some other human being, with no memory of previously having been E. So, whatever “I”—i.e. that which is imagined to be “reincarnated”—is, it is free of any particular content. Else it couldn’t be imagined to be reincarnated!

What is that which could remain the same between E and this hypothetical reincarnation of me, even though there is no psychological or material continuity between them? Again, the answer is awareness. That which manifests the experience centered around E could be the same that manifests the experience centered around any other being. It could manifest any content at all—it could be any creature at all—for it is that which manifests, which realizes content. It is that which assumes a view of the world, which “looks out through” a body-mind, but is in itself undefined as regards any such particular content. It is the here-now; it is the space, the canvas, the screen where experiences are.

Note that the conceivability of my being someone else, or the human being that I am not being me[42], is a realization of a further fact about reality, that is only obvious “from inside”—a subjective, objectively inaccessible kind of fact. A complete physical or objective description of the world, of all facts about its physical constituents, including of the human being that I am, do not account for the fact that it is me who is this human being—who finds myself as this human being—or that I exist at all. No physical feature or set of physical features, in itself, amounts to me being those features. Nagel[43] formulates this point thus:

“[…] consider everything that can be said about the world without employing any token-reflexive expressions. This will include the description of all its physical contents and their states, activities and attributes. It will also include a description of all the persons in the world and their histories, memories, thoughts, sensations, perceptions, intentions, and so forth. I can thus describe without token-reflexives the entire world and everything that is happening in it—and this will include a description of Thomas Nagel and what he is thinking and feeling. But there seems to remain one thing which I cannot say in this fashion—namely, which of the various person in the world I am. Even when everything that can be said in the specified manner has been said, and the world has in a sense been completely described, there seems to remain one fact which has not been expressed, and that is the fact that I am Thomas Nagel. […] the fact that I am the subject of these experiences; this body is my body; the subject or center of my world is this person, Thomas Nagel.”

Also Klawonn[44] talks about the objective non-existence of the “being me”. Even though being me is real, it isn’t to be found in the world laying around like an apple: it does not exist objectively, it cannot be grasped “from the outside”.

Yet another way we could point out the conceivability of being someone else is by considering dreams. Maybe you have at some point in your life found yourself in a dream where you were somebody very different from the human being that you are at waking—with a different body, no memories of being your waking self, and having goals and acting in ways that do not reflect the human being that you are in reality. So in dreams, we sometimes actually find ourselves being someone else, forgetting everything about the human being who we “really” are, disconnected from their memories, and instead assume a new identity, a new body and personality. Even if we can remember the dream once we wake up, in the dream itself we are oblivious of our waking selves. (That is not to say all dreams are like this, but rather that such dreams are possible.) So we already know what it means to be ourselves, while also not being the human being that we currently are. My experiences are not always experiences of the human being that I currently am! What is this core self that is the experiencer of the life of our waking selves, as well as our dream selves? The answer, again, is awareness itself.

You could also imagine a virtual reality life simulation game—you are plugged into a machine, your memories are wiped or made inaccessible, you are connected to a database of memories of some other human being, and a live feed of computer-generated data immersing you in a world from the perspective of this new human being.[45] Your experience is centered around a different body, you have different memories, and you have a new personality. Yet, you remain yourself. What is that which is preserved between your actual experiences, and the experiences of the simulated human being that is also you? It is that in which the experiences “take place”, i.e. awareness. As long as the experiences centered around the simulated human being are immediately given in the same way the current experience of E writing this sentence is, i.e. as long as they exist in the same awareness, regardless of their content, they are in some important sense my experiences. As long as those simulated experiences are present and immediately given in the same way this experience, centered around the body-mind of the human being that is reading this sentence, is given, they are in an important sense your experiences.

* * *

If you disagree with these points, i.e. you do not find it conceivable that you could have been some other human being, it means you are using the word “I” in a way that makes it impossible. But it’s not really important that we agree on our terminology here—what is important, for the purposes of my being able to communicate what I intend to communicate in this work, is that the meanings, the referents of the terms used in this work are (sufficiently) clear. It doesn’t matter what we call that which I want to talk about—even though it occurs to me that awareness is always at least an important aspect of what people mean when they use the word “I”. What matters is that you, the reader, have a good grasp on what it is that I am talking about, not what term we use to refer to it.

So if you disagree that “you” could have been somebody else, simply play along and assume, for the time being, that there is something (not really some thing, but rather simply something that we can talk about) that I’m referring to by the term “I” (among other terms), that for some people of a certain disposition makes sense to refer to using the term “I”, something which could have been or could also be, in some existentially important (not just trivially verbal) sense, a different human being. In this work, I call it “awareness”—but I have also called it “the subject of experience” in my previous work[46]; and there are many other synonyms that are used to refer to it, including in the present work[47], accentuating different aspects of it based on which side it is approached from, or rather, in what conceptual framework it is placed. But if you feel uncomfortable referring to awareness as “me” or “self”, because you have a more content-oriented self-conception (for example, you disagree that it is possible that you could lose all memories of who you are and yet continue existing), my point is not to argue about which use of the term is “correct”.

There are people for whom it makes perfect intuitive sense to see themselves at an essential level not as the human being that they are, but rather as awareness, i.e. as that which experiences that human being—but there are also people for whom this is intuitively nonsense[48].

This seeing oneself as awareness is possible because “awarenesss” associates terms and concepts such as “subjectivity”, “self”, “I”. However, some people use these words to refer to something more defined—they associate them with content. I am not arguing against these uses. The purpose of the thought experiments is to help induce a grasp of awareness in those people who on some level already intuitively possess it. But if your concepts don’t allow you to imagine yourself as someone else, because this is by definition impossible given how you use the word, i.e. given your self-conceptualization, the thought experiments are unlikely to be helpful[49].

Conceivability of the human being that you are not being you

It is possible to imagine there being a human being who is an exact copy of the human being that you are but who is not you; or, to imagine the world exactly as it is, with the human being that you are in it, but without you experiencing that world. You could also just imagine having the mind of the human being that you are copied and fed as input into some other brain, virtual reality game-style. Again, “you” has to be referring to something deeper than some particular experienced content, because that experienced content is in these scenarios present, but you are not. It is conceivable there are experiences of the exact same type as the experiences that are actually yours, that are identical in their content—yet which are not your experiences.

Joe Kern uses the term “Perfect Doppelgänger” to refer to this possible version of the human being that you are that is not you. That which he refers to as “your existence” in this excerpt seems to be the exact same “thing” I call “awareness”:

“Imagine someone that is not you but that is exactly like you in every possible way, not just in DNA, but in every physical structure. And imagine this person in a present in which you don’t exist. Finally, imagine this person occupying the exact same location in space and time as you do now, doing exactly what you are doing now, and thinking exactly the thoughts you are now, including having all of the same memories you have now. You don’t exist, but this person does, exactly like you in every possible way, doing and thinking just what you are doing and thinking now. Just erase yourself from existence, and put this other person who is not you in your place. […]

I call this person who just took your place your perfect doppelgänger. This person performs a very important function for you: he or she clarifies what you are actually referring to when you say “I exist”. The thing you are referring to, the thing you are pointing to with those words, is the sole difference throughout the universe between actual reality and the alternate possibility in which your perfect doppelgänger exists in your stead. In other words, your existence, what you are referring to when you say “I exist”, is the one thing that exists in the actual universe but not the alternate universe. Absolutely everything else that exists in our actual universe exists in the alternate universe as well.”[50] (Emphasis mine.)

The conceivability of such a scenario, and its significance for the nature of “I”, is alluded to also by Fasching:

“[t]here seems to be a strange contingency about the fact that (one must express this in the first-person form) it is me who is this particular person. It seems that this very person could as well have existed, with all his objective properties, doing what I do, experiencing what I experience, without this person being me of all things—he would also be “an I” then, of course, but this I would not be me. This is quite puzzling: What is this difference? Objectively, everything would be the same ‒ none of the physical or mental facts would be different –, but for me (from the first-person perspective), the difference would evidently be quite striking.”[51]

And Erich Klawonn considers the same: he finds it possible

“[…] to imagine that Erich Klawonn […] remains unaltered both physically and mentally without excluding that I may cease being identical with him. The person remains himself, but he is no longer myself. This indicates the existence of a difference or a gap between the ‘himself’ (i.e. the person seen from a third-person perspective) and the ‘myself’ (i.e. the first-person perspective).”[52]

Of course and importantly, if AM is true, this scenario is not actually possible. In order for it to be possible, there would have to be more than one awareness.

* * *

You are grasping that which the claim of this thesis is about, if:

Grasping the distinction between one’s own awareness and its content seems necessary for grasping AM. For it is only this empty subject about which it is even possible to make the claim of AM, i.e. the claim that there is only one of it. Awareness admits of any content in principle—being empty, it is absolutely open. Anything more defined or narrow (in the sense of essentially bound to some particular content) is by definition incapable of such a feat.

We could also say: only if you are nothing/no one can you be everything/everyone. In other words—as a canvas, you can be any painting at all (as a screen, you can be any movie at all; as a dimension, you can contain any objects at all)—but once you identify with particular smudges of color on the canvas, this no longer holds.

[1] Strawson 2011

[2] for example, Fasching 2009

[3] An experience of e.g. drinking a cup of coffee has a temporal extension, and is reducible to a series of experience-moments. An experience-moment, consisting of many co-present phenomenal qualities, has no temporal extension. It happens strictly simultaneously, i.e. “in the same now”. An experience-moment is an experience sensu stricto.

[4] However, awareness and content are not two types or dimensions of phenomenal qualities, like timbre and pitch are. Awareness is not a phenomenal quality, but that which realizes phenomenal qualities.

[5] Experiences can be wider or narrower—more or less focused, and realize more or fewer qualities. Compare the experience of watching a movie, and the experience of concentrating on the sensations of movement of belly in the ānāpānasati meditation; or the experiences of ecstatic joy and slipping out of consciousness when falling asleep.

[6] So that a particular experience is defined not only by the presence of particular qualities, but also by the absence of all the others. And it appears to me there is a further thing yet, which I won’t attempt to explore here: because the same type of experience can be realized many times in the same awareness (i.e. in many tokens), there is also a simple, unanalysable distinction between experiences in their haecceity (a difference that doesn’t consist in anything else). For example, consider the idea of eternal recurrence. So I disagree with Leibniz’s identity of indiscernibles, unless we understand haecceity to be a kind of property (which would make the identity of indiscernibles trivially, analytically (and uninterestingly) true).

[7] I use “(experiential/phenomenal) content” and “(experiential/phenomenal) qualities” synonymously.

[8] Thus, awareness is self-revealing—in revealing some qualities, it also reveals itself to itself.

[9] Cf. Husserl (2006, 201 f., as quoted in Fasching 2021): “[T]he standing and abiding I is not […] in the same sense something persisting as something temporal persists, but is […] the standing and abiding now in the change of its acts”. Also cf. William James (1950, p. 630): “Like a rainbow on a waterfall the self stands permanent, with a quality which is unchanged by the events that stream through it.”

[10] Which simply means: all that is experienced is experienced by it. Every experience is here and now. That doesn’t mean that everything is revealed in the same act.

[11] Zahavi 2000

[12] Zahavi & Kriegel 2015

[13] ibid.

[14] ibid. It is (in Husserl’s words) a “transcendence in immanence”.

[15] Zahavi 2003

[16] Zahavi 2000

[17] Zahavi 2017

[18] Zahavi 2000

[19] Klawonn 1998

[20] ibid.

[21] ibid.        

[22] Klawonn 2009, p. 52

[23] ibid., p. 77

[24] ibid., p. 44

[25] Klawonn 1998

[26] ibid

[27] “Thoughts” in a very broad sense, which includes sensations and feelings.

[28] Klawonn 2009, p. 37-8

[29] Again, in a broad sense—mental faculty, i.e. consciousness.

[30] ibid., p. 63

[31] ibid., p. 129-130. “Being objectively non-existing an own-sphere has no spatial extension and hence no parts that it can be dissolved into, which in itself seems to make it immune to decomposition.”

[32] ibid., p. 118

[33] ibid., p. 59

[34] ibid., p. 58-59

[35] “Human being” is in use usually synonymous with “person”; however, I prefer to use the former, as it occurs to me the connotations (of stronger corporeality, animal-hood, object-hood) make it less confusing for my purposes; and also because Daniel Kolak, as I explain in part two, actually identifies a “person” with awareness. I switch to using the term “person” in the chapter dedicated to the exploration of the problem of personal identity (chapter 5 of part 1), as that is the customary use. Note that people’s intuitions on whether it is the case that “I could be some other person” could be different from their intuitions on whether it is the case that “I could be some other human being”.

[36] Or even anything, as long as it is conscious, i.e. as long as it corresponds to a set of experiences. “Corresponds” here means either that it is the phenomenal center of those experiences, i.e. that there are experiences of the world from that point of view; and/or that it (or its parts, e.g. its brain) causes those experiences. (Not all experiences of a creature are phenomenally centered around it, e.g. in dreams.)

[37] An apt epithet that I first encountered in Hellie, 2013.

[38] Klawonn 2009, p. 94

[39] ibid., p. 80-81

[40] Hellie 2013

[41] The same realization of contingency can be found in Fasching (2010): “This ‘who’ of experiencing is an additional fact with regard to the experience and its phenomenal character: No facts whatsoever about an experience or its ‘what-it-feels-like-ness’ can ever imply its being experienced by me (except, precisely, that it is I who experiences it). It appears to be perfectly conceivable that this very experience with all its relations to other experiences of the same stream of consciousness, to this body and to the rest of the world, could have existed without the ‘I’ which experiences it being me. This seems to be a contingent […] fact […]”

[42] Note that the meaning of “to be” is not the same in the phrases “I am E” and “E is me”, or “I could be someone else” and “E could be someone else”. “I” here refers to awareness (that functions as a substance), i.e. that which realizes E-content; whereas E is a type of content (that functions as the mode of the substance). (Cf. “I am happy.”) So “I am E” means “I realize E-content” and “I could be someone else” means “I could realize some other content instead”. But “E is me” does not mean “E realizes me-content”—there is no me-content, since “me” in this schema is awareness; and E is not the kind of entity that can realize anything, since it’s not awareness. Rather, it means “E is realized by me”—and so “E could be someone else” means “E could be realized by some other awareness”.

[43] Nagel 1965, p. 354-355

[44] Klawonn 2009, p. 76-77

[45] This narrative device has been used widely in fiction; an example that fits our thought experiment closely is the virtual reality life simulator “Roy: A Life Well Lived” in the episode “Mortynight Run” (2015) in the second season of the animated series Rick and Morty.

[46] e.g. Edralis 2019

[47] For example: self, now(ness), liveness, givenness, emptiness, being, God, Brahman, consciousness, etc.

[48] I explore why this might be the case in Chapter 3.

[49] In which case: perhaps it might be possible for you to imagine your awareness (instead of you) being someone else?

[50] Kern 2020, p. 23

[51] Fasching 2016. Note that “quite striking” here cannot refer to actual feelings of shock. If I was not in the world, I couldn’t experience shock over not being in the world! Same if I was someone else, e.g. Queen Victoria. The striking difference consists in there being different things for me under those circumstances, or there being no things for me at all—regardless of whether I actually realize and am shocked by the fact that these things could be different. If I was Queen Victoria, or if I didn’t exist, my world and being would be different from what is actually going on—strikingly different!‒‒regardless of whether I was aware of it or not. My subjective being would be different—and so reality would be different (my subjective being is a part of reality), even though there would be no objective, intersubjectively available difference in the world. There would still be E, and the experience of E. There just wouldn’t be me. But for me, whether and how I exist makes all the difference in the world!

[52] Klawonn 2009, p. 78-79