Neal Stephenson explains the object of consciousness.

"What of our second evening's giscussion? Has Saunt Atamant anything to say about that?"

"I have been thinking about that very hard. You see, nine of his treatises are mostly about space. Only one is about time, but it is considered harder to read than the other nine put together! But if there is applicability of his work to the Hylaean Flow, it is hidden somewhere in the Tenth Treatise. I re-read it last night; this was my Lucub."

"And what did Atamant’s copper bowl tell him of time?" Lodoghir asked.

"I should tell you first that he was knowledgeable abour theorics. He knew that the laws of theorics were time-reversible, and that the only way to determine the direction of time's arrow was to measure the amount of disorder in a system. The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue — records that tell a consistent story."

"We have heard of these records before," Ignetha Foral pointed out. "They are essential to the Hemn space picture."

"Yes, Madame Secretary, but now let me add something new. It is rather well encapsulated by the thought experiment of the flies, bats, and worms. We don't give our consciousness sufficient credit for its ability to take in noisy, ambiguous, contradictory givens from the senses, and sort it out: to say 'this pattern of givens equals the copper bowl that is in front of me now and that was in front of me a moment ago,' to confer thisness on what we perceive. I know you may feel uncomfortable with religious language, but it seems miraculous that our consciousness can do this."

"But absolutely necessary from an evolutionary standpoint," Lodoghir pointed out.

"To be sure! But none the less remarkable for that. The ability of our consciousness to see - not just as a speelycaptor sees (by taking in and recording givens) but identifying things - copper bowls, melodies, faces, beauty. ideas — and making these things available to cognition — that ability, Atamant said, is the ultimate basis of all rational thought. And if consciouness can identify copper-bowlness, why can't it identify isosceles-triangleness, or Adrakhonic-theoremness?"

"What you are describing is nothing more than Pattern recognition, and then assigning names to patterns," Lodoghir said.

"So the Syntactics would say." replied Zh'vaern. "But I would say that you have it backwards. You Procians have a theory - a model — of what consciousness is, and you make all else subordinate to it. Your theory becomes the ground of all possible assertions, and the processes of consciousness are seen as mere phenomena to be explained in the terms of that theory. Atamant says that you have fallen into the error of circular reasoning. You cannot develop your grounding theory of consciousness without making use of the power consciousness has of seizing on and conferring thisness on givens, and so it is incoherent and circular for you to then employ that theory to explain the fundamental workings of consciousness."

"I understand Atamant’s point," Lodoghir said, "but by making such a move, does he not exile himself from rational theoric discourse? This power of consciousness takes on a sort of mystical status — it can't be challenged or examined, it just is."

"On the contrary, nothing could be more rational than to begin with what is given, with what we observe, and ask ourselves how we come to observe it, and investigate it in a thorough and meticulous style."

"Let me ask it this way, then: what results was Atamant able to deliver by following this program?"

"Once he made the decision to proceed in this way, he made a few false starts, went up some blind alleys. But the nub of it is this: consciousness is enacted in the physical world, on physical equipment-"

"Equipment?" Ignetha Foral asked sharply.

"Nerve tissue, or perhaps some artificial device of similar powers. The point being that it has what the Ita would call hardware. Yet Atamant’s premise is that consciousness itself, not the equipment, is the primary reality. The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time. The story is long and winding, but eventually he found a fruitful line of inquiry rooted in the polycosmic interpretation of quantum mechanics. He quite reasonably applied this premise to his favorite topic—"

"The copper bowl?" Lodoghir asked.

"The complex of consciousness-phenomena that amounted to his perception of a copper bowl," Zh'vaern corrected him, "and proceeded to explain it within that framework."

Pp. 698-700

Compare to Husserl's copper ashtray. Of course, to the avout of the Hyleaen Theoric World it's all the same polycosmos.

Here's a jeejaw with a speely of the author.




  ¶ 9:14 PM