Have we even explored the easy parts?

For instance, we are mobile organisms, so our experience as a sequence of perceptions, that we constantly sort, order and judge, would seem to be a natural consequence of having to navigate a physical reality that we are not directly rooted into, like a plant.

What biases might that create? For one thing, we model time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Which as narrative communication, is the basis of human culture. Yet the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

So there is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform and drive it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy. Yet our entire mental process is built around this sequencing of events, rather than the underlaying processes generating them.

The process goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. As consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts and feelings go future to past.

As effect, time is like temperature, pressure, color and sound. Think frequencies and amplitudes. We use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but don’t refer to them as the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of theought.

The patterns our minds perceive are necessarily static, while the underlaying process is dynamic, so this process of perception is somewhat analogous to a motion picture. As a sequence of static images, extracted from the light bouncing around the various massive forms.

The energy generates the forms, while the forms define the energy.

As consciousness generates the thoughts, while the thoughts define consciousness.

If we want to understand consciousness, it would seem the place to look is in that raw sentience, bubbling up through biology, not so much in the logical forms with which we tend to identify.

As Nietzsche said; “I was staring into the abyss, when I realized it was staring back.”