The Feeling of Being

July 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Consciousness, Feeling |

Sitting here in this room I am also, it appears, resident in this body which sits at the computer. It may be, of course, that I am not really resident here, but that is certainly the over-riding impression I have. I am awake, alive, and present, and these qualities show themselves to me through this embodiment and the senses that connect me to the world.

This feeling of Being might be called consciousness, or possibly individual consciousness. There may be other terms also, but consciousness will do for now.

To demonstrate that you are consciousness, take a fork and press the prongs into your skin. Apply sufficient pressure to cause some degree of pain, and maintain this pressure for several seconds, minutes, or hours. The fact that you are enduring a pain which you could, with minimal effort, remove, shows that you are a conscious being and are at that moment using human consciousness to monitor and modify behaviour which would otherwise be beyond your control.

Conversely, one can demonstrate consciousness by indulging in some activity which gives one great please: eating, drinking, fucking, masturbation, etc. and then ‘consciously’ arresting that activity. Again, the fact that you are discontinuing an activity which you could, with no effort, carry on with and this stopping is not a result of any external pressure, negative stimuli, or coercion, demonstrates that consciousness is operating in you, or on you.

In both these experiments, pain and pleasure, every fibre of your body is telling you to do one thing, stop the pain, continue the pleasure, apart from your consciousness. No other animal, no matter how smart, would be able to repeat this experiment, and even if given the most rigorous conditioning programme, no animal would accept prolonged pain as a stimulus for any kind of reward. In this sense, consciousness is partly defined, or possibly even created, through an ability to not do what comes naturally. We are the only creature that is able to perform this trick of temporarily denying the demands of our body. An animal can only be prevented from continuing with a pleasurably activity if there are immediately obvious and severe negative consequences associated with that continuing: fucking in the path of an oncoming vehicle perhaps.