All You Zombies ...

OK, here's some deep thinking - an attempt to make your brain hurt like my brain hurts.

We humans are aware beings. We have awareness.

What kind of a thing is awareness? Does awareness really exist out in the physical world? Can you safely say a tree has just a tiny bit of awareness, a rock has almost none, empty space has zero, I have a lot?

What I'm getting at here is, Does awareness really exist? Maybe that is a dumb childish question. I certainly feel that my awareness exists (that's called "conscious experience"), but I'm not too sure that you have awareness.

I chewed on this for a long time and now I suspect that I am actually correct in thinking that I have awareness (that I am experiencing) but that this statement "Matt has awareness" is only correct for me. You, Joe the Experiencer, would correctly say that you have awareness, and I would correctly disagree that you had awareness (experience.)

Likewise, I think Joe probably should say "Matt does not have experience ..." It's unfindable and does not exist in Joe's description of the physical world - it's not perceivable. I propose that you actually have your own individual objective truth - Objectively, to you, you are experiencing. To you, I am, quite correctly, a zombie who displays many of the symptoms of an aware organism but doesn't quite have the disease of living awareness (after all, you're not experiencing my awareness now are you?)

To you, it's definitely true in your interpretation of reality that you are experiencing (perhaps because experience reality and interpreting reality are the same thing.) It's not soggy and dreamlike and semi-factual like most 'subjective' things ... dreams or leprechaun gold ... it always returns ... you undoubtedly do have a flow of perception.

You however do not have a flow of my perception. (Although maybe if I really talk your ear off ...)

Now this sounds terribly lonely and flimsy (you, poor Joe the Experiencer, are somehow making up existing, being alive, experiencing) but maybe it's not so bad.

From physics, it's reasonable to think everything is more or less being made up as it goes along. You can model an electron as a probability wave so that it doesn't actually exist until it interacts with something - and that something itself came to exist as a result of its interaction with the other electron and other things.

Point here is that just because experience is "made up" doesn't mean it's not as real as anything else.

And ... is experience really an isolating phenomenon? Maybe not, if you consider that the entire world is coming together to become your experience. Your experience is not that special for being you, it's special because it's the special place where the whole thing comes together. You're the 'party spot' for the universe (and that's as far as I'll go in a family blog.)