But Who Is the Builder

"The mind," "thoughts," and "consciousness" are all ideas we learn about how to conceive what we are and what we can do. Scientific inquiry has taught us that much of this happens in the brain, or at least has brain activity as central to it. But even before we learn these ideas, there is something in us that is what will learn them.

In our infancy, we seem to quickly become aware, if we are healthy, of how to look around, move, eat, and drink. Our cognitive and motor skills development concern themselves with building abilities in us, as being alive brings perception or at least reaction according to needs and desires. Until we can read, or even understand speech, we guide ourselves through an amazing amount of development using our own senses and desires as we develop their use. We do this without instruction.

Sometimes our development seems "normal" to the communicating, consensual organisms who gave birth to us and raise us to become part of their community. Sometimes it seems anomalous. We may or may not grow and develop to be their kind. And we may grow to talk about "the mind," "thoughts," and "consciousness," and be understood. But what we are, organisms that first set out to do these deeds, these feats of development, existed and responded to needs or desires to develop this way before our skills with language and symbolic ideas developed. Maybe even in the womb, our brains and ears worked well enough to take what we could hear and think and make vital building blocks out of them. As with our first few years of life outside of the womb, memories do not get formed that last into adulthood the way later childhood memories will do. Still, we make those building blocks that help us think of self, and of being conscious creatures, and of thinking.

But who is the builder?

A Desire to Exist?

Today, my wife and I had dinner with a friend. He follows me on Facebook and enjoys talking with me about the sort of topics that arouse my "philosophical" interest: consciousness, the mind, etc. He asked me about some of the subjects I've dealt with in recent posts, trying to get his mind wrapped around just what it was that I was asking, particularly when I was talking about the question "Why did there have to be ME?"

I could tell that, even when focusing in on that specific question, we might have been, in some significant ways, talking at cross purposes. It was as if we were both looking at maps, but I couldn't tell whether when I said "Croatia" he knew what I meant, or whether his map had the same projection on it, or was a relief map or a political map. He felt he saw what I was getting at, and he answered my question with certainty, but to be honest - and my apologies to him for this, by the way - it sounded to me like he still didn't quite, didn't precisely, didn't exactly get what I was saying in what I was asking.

That's okay. For all I know, my thoughts about mind and me and consciousness may come from a place that *seems* clear to me, but that really is not. That's a troublesome feature, possibly not even of my own muddled thought processes, but of the linguistic difficulties of dealing with mind and consciousness and self at all. Speaking with symbols - which we do whenever we speak - is fraught with some very real dangers when what we are talking and thinking about is the same creature that is doing the talking and thinking.

But an idea came to me within the last half hour, now that my wife and I are home and the pets are fed. It's not a strictly philosophical notion, and so it's in good company with what I posted before, except that these new thoughts jump out of the frame of even "folk psychology" and land squarely in the realm of Mysterian thought, to borrow once again a term from people who say "cognitive studies" for a living.

My idea is this: Imagine a nascent spark of consciousness that has not yet come to realize it resides in a body. Whether or not it actually resides in a body is not something I am addressing with this idea. The consciousness exists in some basic form, in a somehow first form. Does it require a brain or a body yet? What do I even mean by "yet"? Neither of these will I claim to know. Let us say they are yet undefined.

What is defined in this primal consciousness is a primal state of being conscious: a primal mode of thinking and being a thinker, as it were, one that does not yet answer the question of whether it is in, or has to be in, a brain - quite yet - in order to be. But also present in its primal mode of thinking is something that, when and if the consciousness will find a body and brain to inhabit, assuming it does not already do so, it will manifest as desire or will.

Will acts to set the primal consciousness in motion. Will moves it in the direction of becoming an actual conscious being, of becoming a self. And there is a possible answer to my question - it may indeed even have been the answer my friend was trying to give me, but I wasn't ready to make his thoughts into my thoughts yet. There is this germ of a self, inside or outside a physical body I don't know, inside or outside of time and space I don't know - AND THAT LACK OF KNOWLEDGE somehow makes this seem possible to me - the germ of a self desires, not only to move in ways that will make it the consciousness of a sentient creature someday. No, this germ of a self desires TO BE ME. It will do what it can to move in the ways it wills to move. And one of its primal desires that we could even dare to give the name of "goal" to, is to become ME. It is, in fact, the earliest form of ME, wanting to become, and continue to be, who I am, in its most basic form.

I hope the me that I have become, and am still becoming, has not dishonored the germ of want-to-be-ME-ness that blossomed, or formed, into what I am now, wherever and whenever and whatever it came from.

And now those strange orbs, born of strange creatures, in the eighth episode of the new Twin Peaks seem to make sense, but not just in the fictional way they were used to create backgrounds for story characters. They created a mythology - and I realize it is only that - for the notion of germs of individual consciousness, of essence, to come to be.

Maybe this answers nothing. Maybe it answers everything. I know the Philosophy of the Mind is quite stringent as to when something has been properly established or quite soundly refuted, and I know that in my metaphysical rambling here I have done neither of those things.

But this is an interesting place at which to arrive in this journey. And now I want to do some more reading and listen to some more lectures. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and Marianne Talbot, please indulge this fellow's wayward, untutored curiosity just a bit longer. I thank you for your information and inspiration, and for being such important voices in this field, in this day and age.