Let’s begin again, with what we can know for sure.

Consciousness Is.

How can we be certain of that much? I know the same way Descartes knew. Cogito, ergo sum. Something here is cogitatin’, so consciousness is, for sure, a thing.

That’s all of it, regarding the for-sure.

Sorry about that.

***

The rest of Mr. René’s formulation, I for one am willing to bet, accurately follows.

Experimentally and with a measure of daring panache, I’m labeling the cogi-tater my “self”; I’m cogitating. I’m doing consciousness, so:

It Is, and I Am.

Even more boldly, though not without a hesitant pause, I’m going to parlay that wager and assume that it’s kinda the same for you, and that thus

We are.

***

There is no universally-agreed definition for Monkey, or Rock, or Space.

Nevertheless, the evidence appears fairly incontrovertible that

We are

Monkeys, on a Rock, hurtling through Space.

Cogitatin’ away.

After comparing notes across the centuries, we’ve tentatively agreed as a conscious collective to “Know For Sure” … a few more things.

The rock is made of Particles and particles are made of Matter, and have Mass.

The hurtling is caused by a Force, and a force is a kind of Energy, and … something something Gravity.

The light of the star above us, that’s a Wave (well, usually a Wave).

Fields are nice places to sleep. What is a field? Your notes say: “The Field isn’t a real entity, but it does describe real behavior“. (Uh, okay. Let’s leave that one alone for now.)

We call all this agreed-upon Matter-Wave-Force for-sure stuff …

Physics! The Queen of the Sciences! (Wait, maybe math is the queen and physics is the god-emperor? That’s all very nice, stop with the distracting me you verdammt unruhestifter.)

We call all these highly compatible knowingstuffs … Physics! The hardest of the hard sciences, the one set of things that any Consciousness worthy of the name can and does agree upon, For SURE, because Science, and its Method, and the empirical evidence of our senses, and all that. “We hold these truths to be Self-Evident … ”

My tongue is in my cheek, yes, but I Am, at the same time, still being a Relatively serious Self, about all of that.

(I am not saying that because these things are hard, serious, and widely agreed-upon, that they are True, or accurately describe some baseline Reality–nor that they are false, or don’t, either.)

You are of course entitled, as a Consciousness, to believe any suppurating rot you want, about the myth of progress, the existence or non-existence of various gods and demons, the superiority of democracy or communism, android or windows or apple, left or right, any given country’s ‘right to exist’, the nature v. nurture debate, and who or what is to blame for homelessness, and income inequality either here or in South Africa.

But without agreeing at least generally to the core of this hard-science stuff, you can’t really expect your consciousness to be taken very seriously, and it is even possible that note-sharing and conversation will become effectively impossible for you and for I and for us; that we may find ourselves painfully limited to chatting pointlessly about the weather, or pets, or what good people we are when compared with those bad taliban hitler people, or what ‘we’ are ‘celebrating’ on This Day, of all days (yay, ice cream! woohoo, Santa! hoo-hah, coffee! Lolol!)

Dump all that shit in the alley. Come back inside. Breathe a minute. Please. I ask it humbly and as a personal favor, of you, yes, but also of myself.

Then let’s try once more, to talk, about something that matters, if only for the shocking novelty of it.

***

Something knocked me, out the trees / now I’m on my knees.

We’ve considered the nature of what-Is from the perspective of Life and how it has evolved over Time.

How in the last 5% of the last .005% of that Life Time as we imagine it, we invented ourselves a story about how We are so much better than all the other lifeforms, and how some of us are so much better than even that
’cause the bible tells me so
or the Science
or the divine right of kings
or manifest destiny
or guns germs and steel
or whatever holy Book best suits the purpose
in any given rhetorical and historical moment.

How the hardest-headed varieties of physics have proved beyond all controversy that our latest invention, call it The Enlightened Doctrine of materialism, or physicalism, or a Matter of Fact common-sense consensus trance has settled all questions, or as we progress forward into boldly going where no one has gone before, certainly WILL settle them.

How we are Righter than we have ever been and fated to grow ever righter still.

With your eyes of porcelain and of blue (my dear)

–such shocking innocence.