Welcome to your consciousness.
This is the first part of our series, and we start with a simple working model about consciousness. It helps us dive into the complexity of how we can come to understand consciousness at all. But first, we must talk about something we mostly take for granted: our language, our main tool for communicating and understanding. A hidden trap in using language might lead us down the wrong path if we don’t keep it in mind.
Let’s talk about talking
The stool, the bird, my hunger, peace ... By giving everything a name, language contributes to the illusion that all things are separate: there are things we can take apart and look at separately. It’s not only the table and the stool; it’s peace and love, neighbors and races and hate and rage, enemies and beloved ones, the inner and outer. Everything comes into its separate existence only through language.
But this separation is an illusion. Take our body as an example. Where does it start? Where does it end? And is it really our body? Bacteria, fungi and viruses populate us; the so-called ‘microbiome’. They can be found almost everywhere: on the skin, mammary glands, seminal fluid, uterus, ovarian follicles, lung, saliva, oral mucosa, conjunctiva, biliary tract and gastrointestinal tract. And those nonhuman organisms that inhabit us represent more than half of the living cells of one’s body. So more than half of ‘me’ or ‘you’ is not ‘me’ or ‘you’ but something else. And this something else is in an extended exchange with the rest of the world, an exchange without which we would not exist. And it’s not only the body; on every scale of our living, from the atom to the entire planet, it’s always the same experience: from a distance, there are sharp distinctions. But if you get closer, everything gets blurry and undividable.1
So separation is an illusion, but an illusion we can’t get rid of; there’s no way around it. We would never find our way home if we didn’t differentiate between one bus route and the other. So we must find a way to work with it, a way that keeps in mind that using language this way greatly harms life and its wholeness. “We don’t see interconnectedness, and therefore, we break it,” as Mary Catherine Bateson said.2 We build our cultures and societies on this illusion; we can trace it back to the core paradigm we live by: we are separated from nature, and that’s why we can exploit it without harming ourselves.
So, when discussing different aspects of consciousness, functions, or structures, we must remember that this approach does not reflect reality; it is only an insufficient model.
With this in mind, let’s start simple
From a simple point of view, consciousness is form, function, and content—inseparable and always dynamic.
The functional perspective says that consciousness is the ability of an organism to perceive itself in its context, process information, store it, and act on it to make purposeful decisions. Consciousness guides us in maintaining our lives.
The biological foundation says that consciousness is embodied—this is the aspect of form. Consciousness is part of an organism; it has a form that shapes its function; it expresses itself through this form and is always perceiving and acting.
Our consciousness and mind are inescapably individual, shaped by their basis, the body, and individually by the context of our lives.
The neuroscientist António Damasio defines three elements of consciousness: sensing, minding, and feeling3. Each element is connected to a physical ability that shapes it. Let’s take ‘sensing’ as one example: our body has an orientation, which defines how we sense and what we sense. Our eyes have a direction, allowing us to focus on certain things and, at the same time, ignore others. What’s in front is in focus; what’s behind is what we can’t see. If you reflect on words like ‘up’ and ‘down’ or ‘in front’ and ‘behind,’ you will see that our body shape influences our language and, by this, how we construe our understanding of our world.
So, we can see that form and function already define the content of our consciousness.
However, we have to take more into account if we talk about the content of our consciousness. More sources feed it. Let’s stick to the example of language. Just think about how you would be if you had been raised in a different country with a different language. Each language contains different thinking, philosophy, understanding, and ways of dealing with the world. And we could––if we would like to––take that even further: every family has its own culture and way of understanding the world, and all of this defines consciousness (we will cover this in a later issue). For now, we only need to know that the content of the consciousness is derived, on the one hand, from its form: the body that enables and shapes it and from the context one lives in. The result is that every consciousness contains a world, and is itself a world (Gregory Bateson), and when a human being dies, the world it carries dies, too.
We should stay with this for a few moments because it brings down one of the pillars of modern society: our science and its belief in objectivity.
Why? Objectivity isn’t possible. Our consciousness and mind are inescapably individual, shaped by their basis, the body, and individually by the context of our lives. They are always individual in expressing themselves through thoughts, language, actions and emotions.
What do we not know?
We must remember: although we have a word for it,
‘consciousness’ as a phenomenon is intangible. We can’t be sure that it is a phenomenon at all, as this phenomenon only exists in and through language and communication. Consciousness is dynamic and in flux, and when we try to perceive it, the perception of the phenomenon itself changes the phenomenon. It is only partly observable, if observable at all. We have something at our service that we can’t grasp fully, so we can’t fully understand its purpose and how it works.
What we understand as consciousness is only a description of the parts we have direct or indirect access to, like perception, memory, experience, metaphors and language. But consciousness is more: it is energy and resonance. It’s in flux, not always living up to its potential––think of how you feel in a moment of anger or during your daily rhythms and mood changes. And it is something that we do not even know exists.
That’s the limitation of our thinking and speaking through language, as I was saying at the beginning: we think something like ‘gravity’ exists. But in fact, ‘gravity’ is only a container, a social agreement on a description for something that has results that we can observe (apple is falling) but what we can’t directly observe (the force itself). Life is and will be mysterious in most aspects; our understanding of it is a helpful illusion that allows us to live our daily lives.
Let’s leave it behind
Having a model of something can be very helpful. It can lead us inside. It’s like a point that emphasizes what might be important. And like a spotlight on the stage, it leads your eyes in one direction, to the person in the story’s center. And it allows you to ignore all the rest, the chaos, the mess that’s around. But the mess, that’s life. So, as good as it is to have a model, it’s equally good to let it go. And open ourselves up to something different ––more on this next week.
Thank you for your precious being.
Warmly,
Gabriel
If you want to know more about this, I recommend Neil Theise's short book on complexity: Theise, N. (2023) Notes on Complexity: Life, Consciousness, and Meaning in a Self-Organizing Universe.
Bateson, N. (2010) An Ecology Of Mind – A Daughter’s portrait of Gregory Bateson.
Damasio, A. (2021) Feeling & knowing: making minds conscious. New York.