"We are such things as dreams are made of"

I was listening to the radio the other day - it was a comedy  quiz show and I heard the quiz master introduce "Victoria Coren."  I immediately thought shouldn't that be Victoria Coren Mitchell and said to myself "Well I'm not surprised they've divorced - they never seemed suited". I then discovered the programme on BBC's FourExtra was made years before she was married.

What  struck me was the way my thoughts formed. Two "facts" Victoria Coren" and "Victoria Mitchell Coren" and then I constructed this narrative - they're divorced and they were never suited. Why would my brain do that?

We never get anything but "facts" - snap shots. Our senses are bombarded with images, with no history or back story. We receive billions of them. On their own they are senseless, mindless capable of literally blowing our minds. Our primitive minds had to segregate, order and edit these images to cope. There may have been many ways to have achieved that but one extremely successful way was to frame those instances within a narrative. Within a story. That narrative drive could have lead to logic.

This got me thinking about what was consciousness and the sense of self. Do you know the more I think about it the more I've come to the view that being self aware is illusionary. Consciousness is not something separate, it's not a fully formed "thing" which is separate from "out there" - the physical world. It's a process, a way of ordering instances into a structure which allows our brain to navigate the world and our physical body. This ordering into a sequenced structure or narrative gives the sense of continuity and it is this sense of continuity from one moment to the next, from one event to another that fools us into thinking we have a self. That we are self aware.

If I'm anywhere near right about this, it makes sense of the Buddhist idea of letting go, losing self which they also say is an illusion. There's that idea of the everlasting present, and being in the moment. I see both those as breaking through the narrative and concept of self. It's quite reassuring in that if this is true then dying isn't anything other than a switching off of the monitor, the images cease and that's it. There's nothing to lose except the fallacy of self.

I do, however, think it does mean having to re-evaluate all other sentient beings and how we treat them.  If I'm right then we are no different from them - we cannot claim any higher status because of our self awareness - an illusion. And who knows maybe they suffer from the same con: their brains creating a cat/dog/fish/fowl narratives which fool them into seeing themselves as separate from the world in which they live.

Without a narrative within which to frame the stream of events, connected or otherwise, existence would, I'm sure, be short and bloody. You'd be zapped by one event or another event because your brain hadn't encapsulated it in a narrative. So the fact that you and I and all the living creatures are here now does suggest that we and they successfully imagined narratives which helped us successfully to navigate the pitfalls and pratfalls of life. (That doesn't work for plants?) The penalty for that species survival is this illusion of self.

But here I am writing the post putting down thoughts, I hope, in some sort of logical manner. This is not, surely, made up of haphazard bits of time and events; it as a continuous process from a beginning to a completion.  In fact at the same time as writing this piece I'm thinking about dinner. That's fine; I see no problem with that. I'm existing in my narrative which can, in a sense unhook itself from the "out there" and cruise along fooling itself that it's a separate, independent mind. That's the tragedy of mind and self. To survive we have to constantly fool ourselves that we are a continuous existence, when in fact we're just a complicated processor of events. That's all.