Perhaps the most fascinating thing about being human is realising your own existence. The foundation of knowledge glimpsed between our toes, as we move forward to build upon it, never fails to send our imaginations into delight. Our minds, our brains, and our lives spiral in some intoxicated dance as we try to formulate what makes an ‘I’ or a Self in these whirlwinds of metaphysics.

This question is central to Douglas R. Hofstadter in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. ‘What is self, and how can a self arise out of inanimate matter?’ is the question and the winding path, twisted and leading back to itself like the many Escher lithographs within its beautiful pages. Hofstadter describes (in his introduction to the 20th anniversary edition) our brains, then ourselves, as:

Certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in a hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts.

The most stunning realisation is not to lay beneath the miasma of reductionist explanations! To take a deep breath and plunge beneath the eliminativist views that explain our emotions, our loves, our reasons for behaviour as neurochemical reactions. But then to rise and take a breath a fresh air of realisation that, despite the inanimate matter which constitutes us as individuals, the Self floats on the surface. It is the reflection you dive into and whose surface is broken, briefly, as you plunge into the waters of self-conception.

So what if we are brains and nothing else? I have spoken before of living life in the teeth of rainbows and I urge that now. Just as we can continue to explain things by physically testable means in some cases, it does not relinquish our hold on what makes us special.

Hofstadter attempts, in his beautiful Pulitzer-Prize winning book, to show that it is not that the inanimate matter constitutes us (we do not doubt this), but rather the patterns they create which results in us. It is their pattern and not their constitution which dissolves and reforms the shape of a smiling face on the surface.

It is for this reason that I urge us to not be weary of death. One of the explanations for life, for existence itself, is the continuing patterns that gives rise to our everyday experience. Patterns make us individuals and patterns are what we seek elsewhere. Intro- and projection. This is one of many ways to shorten the answer to Hofstadter’s question; Indeed, he answers it as such himself. It is the way things occur within us, with varying patterns of neurochemical actions (see Abhishek’s beautiful post), various cognitive behaviourist reinforcements – all combining in the whirlwind comprising a Self. We have been described, by Steve Grand, as more like moving sand dunes than machines. I can think of no more beautiful explanation: Every part of you flowing and dancing to some inherent musical pattern called a Self, conscious when it considers consciousness, a Self when it thinks of itself.

How then can we be afraid of it ending? We have no concept of what that is like, though perhaps I may be proven wrong at some point. However, I view it as something akin to what Susan Blackmore calls the ‘grand illusion theory’.

With vision you can always look again, and every time you look you see a rich visual world. So you assume that it is always there. You can try to snatch a glimpse of something, but you can never see what it is like when you are not looking. It is like trying to open the fridge very quickly to see if the light is always on; you can never catch the light being off.

Many parts of consciousness needs to be abandoned before we can begin to truly appreciate the bizarre pattern which sings beneath the surface of our subjective experience. The surface may shudder, jerk and send our reflections rippling out, but it nonetheless can still be said: This is mine, this is me! This fact I find very beautiful and also reassuring.

Blackmore states we must rid ourselves of two popular misconceptions: Firstly, that experiences happen to someone; or that there is a static experiencer of the experience. As I stated, we are not fixed but ever in flux, dancing in harmony to the song of our patterns, given voice by the nature of the inanimate objects that constitute us.

The second misconception is that experience is something flowing and the ‘conscious mind [is] a stream of ideas, feelings, images and perceptions.’ Some of our thoughts are conscious whilst others are not. Yet, what Blackmore leaves us with is no more reassuring:

So we start with a new beginning. That starting point this time is quite different. We start with the simplest possible observation. Whenever I ask myself ‘Am I conscious now?’, the answer will always be ‘Yes’ … But what about the rest of the time? The funny thing is that we cannot know.

Here we can see the relation to the ‘grand illusion theory’ I mentioned above. (Notice Blacmore’s retraction to the foundation, to “Cogito Ergo Sum”.)

Yet, our ignorance is not a reason for uncertainty; it is not a reason for despair. We attempt to understand the basics of what we are everyday. What we love, what we hate; We attempt to understand the workings of those we love, those we hate; We have passions, hobbies, irritating tics and shuddering habits which gets under the skin of those who in turn are trying to understand us.

Why then in celebration of everyday consciousness, in an attempt to make you grasp your patterns as beautiful songs of life that make and are life – why then do I turn my finger toward the face of death? A single drop of Self-reflection remains on our fingers as we close them in placidity, beneath the shadow of oncoming finality. It seems that it is no fault that two coins are placed on our eyes, blinded as we are to Unlife. No amount of payment, of life, of self, of I, of me, can shine a light into a place where light is meaningless. Yet, I ask you not to despair: That is yet another place, a place we can not know. I ask you to not care about what you can not experience now. I ask you to grasp your bundles of patterns in a fist of passion, raise it above your head and shout: ‘This is me, I am alive!’

Whilst your voice rings out, our own deaths are meaningless. We have life and we must cherish it. Even now it must echo with the rising valley, bifurcating the mountain of birth on our one side and death on the other. We are all somewhere in the middle, moving forward, one tiny step at a time. So keep shouting because I already have.