On the eternity of I
Or why we exist in the realm of “Forms”
I have been thinking a lot about what I would call the experience of “Iness” sometimes it is referred to as “Beingness”. The philosopher Thomas Nagel put it in his seminal paper, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ — “how does it feel to be someone?” David Chalmers famously refers to this as the “hard problem’ of consciousness.” The subject of consciousness is of course much broader and probably ill defined, since it deals not only with this “Iness” but also self-awareness, memory, and other rational processes.
According to neuroscientists Anil Seth and Tim Baynes in the 2020 review paper “Theories of consciousness”, the current leading contenders for a theory of consciousness can be categorized into generally four types of theories. These are as follows: Higher Order Theories, Global Workspace Theories, Re-entry and Predictive Processing Theories, and Integrated Information Theory. These four approaches assume a purely informational flow accounting for the immediate cause of the experience of consciousness and thus the experience of “being” or “Iness” which we all have. Some have argued that a consequence of these theories is that the experience of beingness is a type of illusion. Let’s put aside the fact that on its surface the idea that the experience of being could be an illusion is logically problematic, and accept…
