The fact that we are aware of our selves and our experiences is not an easy one to come to terms with. Curiously, however, the harder question is how there can be experience in the first place. For millennia, beautiful narratives have been spun to explain the place of consciousness in the [[Domain of the Known, Range of the Unknown]], but such narratives have not stood up to hard, mechanical, skeptical, scientific inquiry. They have been getting closer, though. Eventually I will put more of a history on how people have thought about this stuff, but for now I'm just going to put down a few things that I think are true of consciousness. - To be conscious involves having the capacity for subjective experience. - Consciousness does not necessarily include self-awareness or self-consciousness, although this is something we observe in humans, and debatably in some of the higher animals. - Consciousness is probably simply what it is like to 'be' something. Under this presumption, it is coherent to say that my chair is capable of experience. This makes sense too, once you think about it for a little bit. There probably is *something* that it is like to be my chair, though the chair isn't complex enough to explain it, realize it, or feel it. Humans have the privilege of being able to register their experience and express its contents to those with the capacity to understand it. --- #Philosophy/Mind #2021/8 *August 6, 2021*