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OK. Using your metaphor, think of consciousness as the carrier with its fundamental frequency and amplitude (autaptic-cell activity around the perspectival origin of the self-locus, I!). The volumetric plenum of the conscious carrier is spatio-temporally modulated by input from our preconscious sensory modalities to give us the rich informational content of our phenomenal world.

There’s no introspective way to settle this question. So the dilemma faced by Self Realists is one of substantiating their case outside appeals to introspective intuition.

According to the Self Antirealist, you are simply a brain that congenitally misrecognizes itself for something far, far simpler, viz., a ‘self.’ And indeed, when we crack open the brain, all we find is brain and more brain, lot’s of ‘what’ with nary a ‘who’ to be seen.

Their case, it seems to me, is by far the far stronger one. It just happens, like so much else in science, to be counterintuitive. Whoville has always been empty.

Of course, if you go through such state, record it, and the recall it, you could interprete those memories, in the appropriate mind frame. While you are in that state, you are not even you.

If I may insist in my metaphore, you need to modulate a carrier to transmit information. The carrier could represent your fundamental state, but in your case you cannot even extract the amplitude and frequency (minimum info provided by the carrier).

This thread leads directly to the need of “intentionality” (aboutness) as a precondition for consciousness. To me, if there is no knowledge, no information involved, there is no real operational consciousness. But your primordial state could be a first step, a ramp up phase.

I was quite positive that consciousness was an all or nothing condition, an on-off function, but now I am suspecting there could be intermediate planes, like the state you refer to, that maybe accounts for the proto-consciousness that evolutive biology looks for.

Anyway, I am aware that it is very difficult to reconcile a strict materialistic approach, with any other kind of approach.

Simply *being here* is cashed out in the 3rd-person objective aspect as an activated retinoid space with no perceptual content. And, as you know, the neuronal structure and dynamics of our brain’s retinoid system is conceptually complex. From the 1st-person subjective aspect, a pure “being here” is the simplest conscious experience one can have, even though it is normally the briefest experience one has. Something like the very brief life of some fundamental particles created in the super-collider. In my theory of consciousness, the “canvas” (activated retinoid space) and the “image” (subjective experience) are indeed the same thing in the real world beyond human access.

I don’t know… the “IT” is a common position, from Russel to the “aggregates” notion of Buddhism…

From an introspective point of view, there is an “instrospective point of view” wich makes difficult to deny that there is some kind of “thoughts owner”. The “I WAS” relating to time lagging due to memory effects?

It would differ in trying to grasp the absolute introspective present and denying the self except for its history. Both maintain thought as the guarantee of existence.

I stand by Descartes (like Damasio)

a conscious being would have a sense of being here

“being here” is already an extremely complex concept and feeling to fit into the fundamental state you propose. The state seems to be a sort of “simple harmonic” feeling of unknown frequency and amplitude, no here, no nothing, just some sort of ineffable homogeneous monochromatic feeling refered to no self. There is no information at all.

This is one of the problems about consciousness, how to differentiate between the fabric of consciousness (if any) and its contents, the canvas and the image are the same thing.

I agree that there is no pure phenomenal experience of space-time. The phenomenal experience of space-time must be something in relation to the core self, the perspectival origin of space-time.

That’s Kant’s answer to Hume. TUA, baby!

Here’s a puzzle for you Vicente. Consider a Nietzchean/Sartrean version of the Cartesian cogito:

IT THINKS, THEREFORE ‘I’ WAS

Now how, in introspective qualitative terms, would this differ from the classical ‘I think therefore I am’ cogito, were it true?