People are patterns. Let’s start there. Built into us we find a biological imperative, a drive to copy ourselves, but that drive is blind and aimless aside for it’s singular goal of fitness, but fitness can never be achieved with any sort of permanence, and so it drives on and on, go, go, go, with no end in sight for the process, though all it does is spit out carnage as it churns along.
We are the talking apes that can give expression to it, contemplate it in different ways, and ultimately do nothing at all about it. We’re just observers, participants in a much larger process, but to us it presents an experience that seems subjective. I am a participant in it, and I can observe it, and I have some notion that I am sort of directing a small part of it.
Consciousness, one process among many others; the process that sees itself as the most important, but the heart beats, and the lungs draw breath, all on autopilot, and the urges play out and drive us to sexual relations, which generates progeny, and few stop and think about it while they are doing it.
The interface itself generates all sorts of clever devices that conceal the real price of the process until it is too late. The Will to Life acts through us, and the neocortex cannot keep up.
In between that hard concrete world of representations, of campfires and peaches and bullets and Chinese food, and a person’s subjective experience of that world, his feelings of coziness or uncertainty or of saddness, his or her real feelings about it, and also how it seems so tailored as we observe it, so personal. We say, something must be there, something not easily explained, and in that gap we see a hard problem, but it has never much troubled me.
The lizard, the monkey, and the neocortex, the particular way our brains are evolved, like engines, the earliest and most ancient main work-generating center, then the newer fancier stuff like bonding and crying and celebrating, then the last-evolved fanciest stuff like Chess and Stoicism. The interplay of these things, the recursion, results in consciousness as an emergent, not intentional phenomenon, and is a bi-product of the same blind and messy process that is the Will to life, the biological imperative. Oops. Neocortex. Yeah, you. You deal with it.