I do not believe that I am a disembodied spirit somehow magically tied to this admittedly well-fed ‘meat puppet’ of a body and furtively tugging at invisible strings behind some metaphysical curtain to make it dance and sing on the world stage. I do not believe that my immortal soul supernaturally inhabits this body—that I’m just renting this house from some absentee landlord, and that I will “exit the building” when I “shuffle off this mortal coil” to “move on to greener pastures” beyond this “veil of tears”. I also do not believe that this electrochemically-charged, 3-pound lump of salty fat floating inside a brine-filled box of bone supported by the calcified scaffolding and sinuous tissue sitting atop my shoulders somehow magically generates my utterly private, subjectively conscious experiences.

To me, none of these possibilities makes any sense at all. For me, these supposed ‘solutions’ to the “hard problem” of how I am conscious at all are not solutions at all. Rather, they are simply exemplars of why this problem is so hard to solve in the first place. They are simply part of the hard problem, itself.

What I do believe is that this existence, in and of itself — this rich and complex reality that is presented directly before us, within us, and all around us — along with our innate powers of reason, will provide all that we need to learn about our world, who we are, our role in it, and how it is that we have come to be consciously aware of it at all. All that we need to answer even the hardest questions is or will be available to us, without forcing us to give up and give in to the “holy ghost”, or having to defer to some supernatural miracle to explain supposed brute and groundless emergence of our subjectively conscious mind from unsensing, inanimate, and completely nonconscious physical matter. I believe that we can and will explain our consciousness and ourselves through completely natural and rational means. We just need to unshackle our minds from the rusty chains of failed ideas, to learn new ways of understanding, and to simply pay better attention to the myriad clues available to us.

We are conscious beings. We actively experience and respond to the world; we do not just mindlessly react to it. (Although it is, alas, true that we sometimes do). Being conscious is one of the distinctive qualities of being human; and while we undoubtedly share many aspects of consciousness with other animals (I am convinced that dogs and elephants and whales and dolphins are conscious, for instance), we do experience a type of conscious awareness that appears to be unique, at least upon this planet, though not necessarily throughout the universe. 

We are intentional beings who live forward in time, yet who are able to conjure the past and appreciate the immediate moment. Not only is our consciousness a unifying force that constantly seeks for pattern and meaning; but it creates a specific type of temporality that allows us to simultaneously summon the past, live immediately in the present, and project ourselves into the future. Our every conscious moment summons our memories and our historicity while synchronously considering the immediacy of current information and formulating future plans and projecting outcomes and consequences, all based upon our current thoughts and perceptions in that same unified moment. For us, experienced time really isn’t linear…it’s contemporaneous. It is only when we step back from our experiences, reflect upon them, and consider them objectively that we extrapolate the past, present, and future aspects from the various qualities of those experiences and we see the temporal vector of our life.

This specific type of temporality was rather deeply examined by Martin Heidegger in his monumental work, Being and Time. For Heidegger, we are, as a Dasein (German for ‘being there’ or ‘there being’) an active being who constantly lives in anticipation of her own future. More specifically, we are a being who considers her own existence as of personal importance and a going concern, as well as a being who considers and anticipates her own death. We are aware of, and are in anticipation of, that inevitable day when we will cease to be a Dasein. This tenebrous awareness defines our existence, quite possibly unlike any and all other beings on this planet (but not by necessity, as it is certainly possible that other animals might experience this same temporal mode of Being. Dog-sein, as it were).

That our conscious experiences unfold within this peculiar context of time, and that they exist only ‘for us’, begs the question of how and where time, itself, exists. While Newtonian physics directly references objective or ‘absolute’ time in its mathematical formulae and its classical calculations, quantum physics is filled with fundamental equations that rather completely explain the behavior of subatomic fields and particles, but without referencing time at all. In fact, the only quantum physical indicator for there actually being time, in any objective sense, is the arrow of entropy. Since entropy (simply understood as heat) always moves from lesser entropic states to greater entropic states (from higher heat energy to lower heat energy), but never the opposite or in reverse, the arrow of time appears to lead always forward where entropy/heat is involved. But entropy is also explained mathematically without referencing time at all. Time is unnecessary to describe and understand entropy within quantum formulae. Time is just an aftereffect of the relational interactions between quanta; it is not necessary for those relational interactions to occur. It would thus appear that time, itself, may be a completely relative construct of the Dasein mind, or an emergent property of the physical world, rather than a fundamental part of objective reality. It looks like Kant and Einstein may both have, indeed, “known what time it was”.

So, here we are, we human Daseins, awash in a relational sea of contemporaneous thought and phenomenality, constantly swirling within and around us in shifting flow tides of conscious experience and intentional response, along with ebb tides of unconscious sensation and spontaneous reaction. Our conscious reality is uniquely our own; yet we are somehow able to directly relate to one another and to the world around us. While we cannot directly share our consciousness with one another beyond employing some intermediary form of communication, we can nevertheless appreciate the direct relational bonds we all share with one another beyond our privately subjective experiences. 

We are each a unique part of a greater whole, all together in the same relational sea of phenomenal and protophenomenal experience. We all share a common origin, a common source. Our individual differences offer each of us the opportunity for learning and for creating meaning. And at the center of this maelstrom of intentionality, perception, and experience is consciousness. Consciousness is our foundation. Consciousness is our raison d’etre. Consciousness is where we live, our ‘wheelhouse’. It is consciousness that gives us our world. Understanding consciousness is crucial to our understanding…everything.