alt Hacker News"There is a kind of consciousness that lives not in thought but in presence."
Yes, and I believe the strong association we often make between the most advanced cognitive functions and consciousness are misleading us into believing that consciousness is somehow the result of those functions, while I suspect we (conscious selves) are just witnessing those functions like we are witnessing anything, "from the outside". It's of course the most amazing part of the show, but should not be confused for it. Consciousness is not made of thinking but of observing, we just spend a lot of time observing how we think.
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> I suspect we (conscious selves) are just witnessing those functions like we are witnessing anything, "from the outside"
Do you imagine the self being split into an "actor" who makes all the decisions, and an "observer" who can see what's going on but can't influence the actor?
That can not be the case, because the "actor" can catch the "observer" in the "act" of "observing". You can introspect, and you can speak about your introspections, or write them down, which means there is a feedback loop between the acting part and the observing part.
We're not simply observing "from the outside".
There's no such thing as an individual conscious self that persists over time - it is always a misconception and an illusion. Consciousness is just something that living beings do, not something that they "are". It's an impersonal phenomenon (as far as it goes - there's of course plenty of things, mental states, thoughts etc. that are genuinely personal about our individual lives!) not a state of being.