Rather Suspect

In my last post, I proposed that consciousness is a second-order entity: it’s awareness about awareness.

Second-order entities are funny things because they tend to feel quite similar to first-order entities. For example, when one dog encounters another it doesn’t know, it will often instinctively growl and bare its teeth. It feels a first-order emotion — fear — and it responds instinctively. When the other dog shows itself to be friendly, most dogs will quickly “shake it off” and the fearful emotion is fully processed.

Many humans of course feel fear when they encounter a strange dog on the street as well. But a number of humans also often experience a second-order emotion: anxiety. A human might think about having to walk past a dog park tomorrow to get to work, and they may fear the large Doberman they see there each day. However, at 9pm on a Sunday night while sitting on their couch, it isn’t that they are fearing that Doberman directly. It’s that they fear the fear they expect they are going to feel tomorrow morning. In this way, anxiety is a “second-order” emotion — it’s fear about fear.

What does this have to do with consciousness? If we consider consciousness as a second-order emotion, it’s interesting to explore what emerges simply by making this distinction.

First — awareness about awareness gives rise to a very peculiar entity: Self. Think about it this way. A dog encounters a chihuahua and, simply because it’s a strange dog, initially feels fear. We humans might do the same at first but then, when we realize the tiny stature of the chihuahua, feel embarrassed (at ourselves) for feeling that fear. Or perhaps a dog feels enjoyment at having a treat. We humans feel enjoyment in going out for a nice meal at a restaurant, and then we feel smug (and self-confident) that we earned enough money to treat ourselves to such a feast.

In the first example, that second-order feeling gave rise to self-loathing, where in the second example, it gave rise to self-confidence. In both cases, the feeling about feeling gave rise to the Self.

But there is a second emergent property in this “second-order” processing that is perhaps even more surprising. For a feeling to be a second-order feeling — and not simply a longer version of an initial feeling — there needs to be a “gap” between the two feelings. That is, there needs to be the “object” (the first feeling) that the “subject” (the second feeling) can act upon. But if those two feelings are of the same type — for example, fear about fear or enjoyment about enjoyment — then what constitutes that gap? And the answer is: it’s a gap that we create. And we name that gap Time.

And thus, what is consciousness? Nothing more than a second-order informational- (or perhaps emotional-) processing system that, because it is second-order, creates two emergent properties called Self and Time.

It becomes immediately apparent this must be the case when we examine the relationship we inherently feel between these two properties. If we become unaware of Time (as, for example, when we sleep) — we have no concept of our Self and we (intuitively) label this state as being unconscious. Alternatively, when we “lose track of time” we often describe that state as “being in the flow” — and our concept of Self tends to fade into the background when that happens.

Awareness — like fear — is a first-order feeling. But consciousness — like anxiety — is a second-order feeling, And just as anxiety “feels like” fear (but is, in fact, quite different), so too might consciousness “feel like” awareness.

And yet, not only is it not the same — it’s so different it literally is the act through which we construct Self and Time.