- #1
Sikz
- 245
- 0
Something taken for granted, it seems, is that people are conscious in the first place. How can you possibly know that you are conscious? Consciousness, presumably, is a thing of the present- not the past or the future. I am not conscious tomorrow and I am not conscious yesterday, but rather I am conscious now. However, any information I analyze to discover if I am cinscious becomes outdated; by the time I can think of it it has already passed into memory and the past and is no longer a present reality.
What's more, the present can be seen quite clearly to not exist at all! If the present existed (exist, in this case, is defined in a rather abstract way. If time were a line, anything that exists can be measured as a distance on this line between two points- since geometric points are known to be only specifications of points on a place's perimeter and not existent things in themselves), we would have to pass through it. The future would become the present and then the past, as it does now, but it would have to be the present for an amount of time, meaning that more than one event in the future would pass into the present and exist there at the same time. What's more, it cannot be "present for an amount of time" becasuse that would imply that time is passing through the present and therefore time periods could be measured off within it. If time periods can be measured within the present, then obviously the present has been divided into past and future.
So apperently there is no present- it is like a border between countries, only an abstraction that separates two things that, in actuality, touch (in this case past and future, in the case of our metaphor the two countries). If consciousness exists in the present, and the present does not exist, then it follows that consciousness does not exist either.
In the case that consciousness exists in the past, we are conscious of events that have already happened. While it is true that we have memory of them, we are not consciously experiencing them, but only drawing on them for data. The very fact that we recognize them as in the past proves this (in fact, the past may not exist either- for surely you cannot prove that an event in the past actually exists? But that is for another discussion...). In the case that it exists in the future, the same principle can be applied. Since we can imagine the future while knowing that our imaginings are not true (rather, are most likely untrue), and that they have not "yet happened", we must not be conscious in the future. It is impossible to know that the future has not yet occurred unless we have something to check it against, and the fact that we do have something to check it against proves that we have experienced that thing. To experience something you must be conscious during its occurence, and thus we cannot be conscious in the future.
According to our argument, then, we are neither conscious in the past nor the future, but rather in the present. We have also established that the present does not exist. It would appear, then, that we are not conscious. Unless someone would care to prove all of this wrong?
What's more, the present can be seen quite clearly to not exist at all! If the present existed (exist, in this case, is defined in a rather abstract way. If time were a line, anything that exists can be measured as a distance on this line between two points- since geometric points are known to be only specifications of points on a place's perimeter and not existent things in themselves), we would have to pass through it. The future would become the present and then the past, as it does now, but it would have to be the present for an amount of time, meaning that more than one event in the future would pass into the present and exist there at the same time. What's more, it cannot be "present for an amount of time" becasuse that would imply that time is passing through the present and therefore time periods could be measured off within it. If time periods can be measured within the present, then obviously the present has been divided into past and future.
So apperently there is no present- it is like a border between countries, only an abstraction that separates two things that, in actuality, touch (in this case past and future, in the case of our metaphor the two countries). If consciousness exists in the present, and the present does not exist, then it follows that consciousness does not exist either.
In the case that consciousness exists in the past, we are conscious of events that have already happened. While it is true that we have memory of them, we are not consciously experiencing them, but only drawing on them for data. The very fact that we recognize them as in the past proves this (in fact, the past may not exist either- for surely you cannot prove that an event in the past actually exists? But that is for another discussion...). In the case that it exists in the future, the same principle can be applied. Since we can imagine the future while knowing that our imaginings are not true (rather, are most likely untrue), and that they have not "yet happened", we must not be conscious in the future. It is impossible to know that the future has not yet occurred unless we have something to check it against, and the fact that we do have something to check it against proves that we have experienced that thing. To experience something you must be conscious during its occurence, and thus we cannot be conscious in the future.
According to our argument, then, we are neither conscious in the past nor the future, but rather in the present. We have also established that the present does not exist. It would appear, then, that we are not conscious. Unless someone would care to prove all of this wrong?