An Aside: Stream of consciousness

Thoughts circling and circling, circling and circling. This always happens right before bed. My brain is on overdrive, too many things occupying it at once, too many things I want to do. I think this is a good moment to dump out random thoughts here and see what sticks. I'm writing this at 4 am, so I hope I don't read it in the morning and regret it.

Consciousness is hard. Hard to define, hard to understand, hard to explain, and hard to even experience. Being here and now, simply experiencing pure consciousness, it's a beautiful thing, yet like most beauties in life, is rare and difficult to capture. Especially for me. My ADHD brain is so jumbled up, and it feels so disabling sometimes. Unlike what I assume most people experience, I have multiple streams of thoughts running at the same time, competing with each other over which should take my dominant attention. And what's worse is I can't seem to control which one is dominant at any moment in time.

But back to consciousness. What does it mean to be conscious? I've been taking a course on consciousness, and it's been very confusing. So far, the main thing I understand from the course is that we still barely know what consciousness is. And no wonder! We are only able to question what consciousness is because of our consciousness. Consciousness is what allows us to make theories and scientific papers, and research into consciousness. There's been some papers we reviewed that brought up ideas of what consciousness is, or at least how it evolved to be such an important aspect of our species. One paper (Budson et al, 2022) posited that consciousness evolved from episodic memory; that is, consciousness is what allows us to perform mental time travel and understand our episodic memories to act accordingly. While the argument they made sounded quite plausible and quite convincing to me at first, my professor quite quickly pointed out many flaws with the theory and how little evidence is actually given for it.

Whenever I think of this problem of consciousness, part of me throws up my hands and thinks, what's the point of doing all this? Clearly, consciousness is too hard to define, too difficult to fully grasp. Why even bother? Why not just accept it as it is and be happy with its great benefits? But no. We wish to know. Humans wish to know everything. We only got this far because of our inquisitive nature.

Currently, I don't have the capacity to argue what I think consciousness is. It's still too ill-defined a question for me to answer. But it's a good question to think about. And I implore everyone to think about it when they get the chance, even for a bit. If not that, at least appreciate how much you have likely benefited from the fact that you are conscious. You are in control of your life, of where you wish to go. It may not always be possible to get there, but if there's a will, there's a way. I believe that's what makes humans beautiful; we seem to never give up. We fight for what we want, even if it seems impossible. And all of that is only possible because we are conscious. Because we can consciously choose to make our lives the way we want.

As Shiv from Deadlock says:

I'll carve a path.

(Cover Art credit: u/Vogelys on Reddit)