Still defining

What is this blog about?


This is an attempt to define the challenge of taking responsibility for my life. Usually this means things like developing one's career, taking care of one's health, eating correctly, meeting one's family commitments, etc. It does not usually include taking responsibility for the level and scope of one's consciousness. That is a task of a completely different order. Even attempting to define and describe the parameters of one's consciousness is an extremely slippery undertaking, (about 12 on a slipperiness scale of 1 – 10), but surely if one wants to take responsibility for one's consciousness, one has to start by defining it. It's slippery in two ways: First, who is doing the defining? It can only be one's consciousness that's doing the defining, so one encounters the problem of how consciousness can define consciousness. For normal everyday consciousness, this task is completely alien. Normal everyday consciousness just takes itself for granted, in other words it is completely unconscious of itself. [If I knew more philosophy, I fear that such a venture would be instantly dismissed as logically impossible, but rather than engaging in discussing its possibility or impossibility, I'll shelve the question for now, and see if I can't come up with something useful as I go on.] The second way it's slippery is that consciousness, by its very structure, has an inbuilt resistance to being pinned down to any sort of limits. You may, reader, ask how such resistance occurs, surely consciousness knows what it knows, and not knowing what it doesn't know it just isn't bothered by it. Well I say it's not that simple – consciousness has all sorts of complexes and anxieties about what it doesn't know, as well as some of the things it does know. Take the whole category of things I assume – how do you class that in my consciousness? For example I go to take my car keys from the car-key hook, but they are not there. The thought that springs to mind immediately is: Oh, Gigi (my wife) must have taken them. But when I ask her it turns out she didn't take them – I left them in the pocket of the trousers I was wearing last time I drove the car. So that was an idea that was created by consciousness for convenience sake. No grounding in reality. And that is a quite trivial example of how consciousness can be self-serving, self-deluding and sneaky.


So I'll finish this short post with the simple definition of consciousness: everything I think, feel, or am aware of through sensory perception, while pointing out that that's just the very top molecule on the Mount Everest of internal and hidden complexity which consciousness is. And the attempt to unravel and simplify some of that complexity, in a way which makes sense intuitively and logically, is a large part of what this blog will be about.