Existence is dream-like

One of my most exhaustive essays to date. It discusses the dream-like nature of existence, clarifies some of the confusion and false intuitions on this topic, and then offers some additional insights.

Schopenhauer repeatedly makes use of this dream analogy, as it really is one of the best ways to think about consciousness in general.¹ There is no fundamental ontological difference between a dream and wakeful consciousness. Ontologically speaking, the only distinction between dreaming and wakefulness is mere verisimilitude, not ontological essence.

Dreaming has less clarity than wakefulness because there is less sensory information to work with. During sleep, the mind makes sense of dim, fleeting wisps of information as the eyes rummage around in the rapid-eye movement phase of sleep. Consciousness simply makes do with whatever material is available in order to conjure up an image.

Another source of input for our dreams are the recent events and lingering emotions which swirl in our mind in a kind of echoey form late at night. This swirling aftermath dwells in the background of consciousness, but the dream is still able to work with this nebulous material as a kind of blueprint for its narrative, which is why dreams are often a close analogy of the things which concern our real life.

When dreaming, you're convinced that you're occupying reality, regardless of its absurdity. Despite the absurdity of a dream, you fully inhabit that level of consciousness, and therefore regard it as real. And because consciousness is your primary acquaintance with reality, even the most absurd consciousness feels real so long as your mind is truly engaged at that level.

The incompleteness of the material world—its overall inexplicable quality, the big question mark which hangs above existence as a whole and torments every thinking person—is likewise an absurdity that we mostly take for granted and which does little to damage our in-born conviction that the world we see is the world as it really is.

Dreaming is less vivid than wakeful consciousness because it is a secondary and conjured-up production of the mind, as opposed to being substantiated by things that exist independently of that mind. This results in vague imagery and no solid or enduring basis for those perceptions. Wakefulness, by contrast, is stable and enduring, because the occasion for those perceptions are things which exist of their own accord, external to you and do not need to be mentally created ex nihilo. For them to appear, one need only exist within their proximity and be generally alert to the outside world.

But we should not exaggerate these differences either, because wakefulness also makes sense of incomplete information, and it too conjures up a hasty image. Dreaming is simply much vaguer and works with a far less coherent informational substrate. Drawing up a mental image during sleep involves much wilder inferential leaps, which is what makes dreams so crazy and comical.

Furthermore, even in waking consciousness, the preceding events which swirl in the mind to form a sleeping dream also play the same role in shaping our waking consciousness, which explains things like the recency bias. It also explains, for instance, the tendency to hallucinate the continuation of a quiet far-away sound (e.g. a phone ringing in the distance) even after it has ceased so long as there is a thread of audial continuity available by means of another sound. For those who are good at phenomenological introspection, you can also notice it in your vision when you have been repetitively fixated on a task for a while. Your mind tries to re-manifest that previous visual experience (both moving and stationary visuals), using any vaguely similar-looking object as a material basis for it. In general, this anchorage in precedent explains the broader features of our consciousness.

This constant infusion of expectation is also the basis of closed-minded judgements and assumptions which fit everything into a pre-existing model. It is also why as adults we are more closed-minded as compared with children—for childhood is when the mind is open to novelty, has not yet formed a model of the world, and is still naive to the full range of the world’s possibilities.

A dream is often more enjoyable than wakefulness, because the mind can navigate through this imaginary world without confrontation with reality, and this has the feeling of being loose and free. This lack of obstacles in the way allows the mind to flow forward heedlessly. Of course, there are some constraints on this mental freedom, such as physical tiredness, narrative discontinuity and the constraints imposed by your own expectations of the world which shape the dream (e.g. if you feel weak, this weakness will manifest in the dream). But even with these constraints, dreams—being created entirely by your own mind—do not contain doubtful pauses, moments of curiosity, stagnant boredom, or any kind of genuine self-questioning. They just keep unravelling, and this uninterrupted flow is quite a bit more entrancing than paying attention to the world beyond yourself which isn’t automatically conceived, doesn’t abide by your expectations, and requires a more interactive engagement.

Now consider: Does this heedless forward-momentum not also characterise the generic ignoramus in everyday life? Rather than confront reality and accept limitation, they want to mentally flow forward unhindered with their rushed view of reality, unconstrained by second thoughts and the consideration of setbacks. They refuse to be held back by self-scepticism, because this admits of self-incompleteness and it lacks an enjoyable automatic flow. In order to make their mind more fluent and make the world abide by their expectations, they create a world of their own, and impose their egoistic tunnel vision on others. Such is the life of a dull person.

We can describe dullness as follows: to be dull is to be unaware of your mental limitations, and thus oblivious to the inadequacy of your perspective, such that your consciousness seems qualitatively complete and in no need of fundamental rectifying.

In order words, it believes there is no higher reality or broader perspective to “wake up” to. Improvement, in that case, is seen as a mere quantitative addition to their consciousness, not a qualitative overhaul. They unquestioningly assume that their consciousness is a transparent window unto the world as it really is, which means they don’t anticipate or seek out a higher perspective. As a result, they pursue life with excessive worldliness and conceit.

Although not an argument, I invite the reader to simply look at people in the world going about their business. You’ll often arrive at a clear vision of this solipsism just by looking at people from a neutral distance—how self-consumed their behaviour is, how unaligned their consciousness is with the bigger picture around them, and thus how manifest it is that they’re are stuck inside their own dream, locked inside their own head (and before we get arrogant, just remember that this very image of them is in fact your own consciousness, as you are not outside of yourself either).

They don’t really live outside of themselves. Strictly speaking, this is true of everyone, although there is something of a distinction when it comes to lucid people, who exhibit in their eyes and mannerisms a greater openness to the world and a certain emotional disengagement as they observe it.

Enlightenment, as opposed to dullness, is akin to those rare dreams where you attain awareness of the fact that you are dreaming. It’s an additional layer of awareness on top of the dream. In both dreaming and wakefulness, this awareness—if it is attained—sits somewhere in the background of consciousness, and thus doesn’t completely dominate everyday experience. Still, it is sufficiently present in consciousness to feel a certain distance from the world and all its unnecessary commotion and self-oblivious conviviality. It is a scepticism of humanity; a birds-eye view of mankind’s self-absorption.

Only at the moment of death does a true waking up occur, whereupon it becomes clear that we were pursuing this life with the same comical seriousness as one does while dreaming.² It reveals to us that we were caught up in a laughably small-minded affair our entire life. And yet it felt so real at the time. It didn’t fully occur to us that there was a higher perspective.

Many people will recoil in doubt at such a statement, because for them the material world seems like a complete account of reality, internally consistent and self-explanatory. They are content with physical descriptions, e.g. existence is made of generic physical stuff, which exploded into existence at some arbitrary point in the timeline of eternity, prior to which it was waiting around in unchanging eternity in a pent-up singularity (until it randomly interrupted this eternity and thus violated its own pre-temporal properties). These people also tend to overlook the “hard problem” of consciousness, because human consciousness (which presents a thoroughly mediated replica of the world) presents an image of lifeless external objects with no inner essence other than their surface properties and their effects on other such entities, and this is a sufficient account of the world for their worldly needs.

These materialists fail to step back and identify as their very own consciousness as whole. They can’t quite escape the default view that they are looking through a pair of clear binoculars into the real world, and that they are not—as they actually are—a kind of floating bubble of awareness which cannot be pointed out as an object.

If we recall once more the recently-mentioned characteristics of a dullard, we will see the materialist matches this description:

• Their consciousness seems qualitatively complete and in no need of fundamental rectifying;

• They believe there is no higher reality or broader perspective to “wake up” to;

• Improvement is seen as a mere quantitative addition to their consciousness, not a qualitative overhaul;

• They unquestioningly assume that their consciousness is a transparent window unto the world as it really is;

• They pursue life with excessive worldliness and conceit, confident in their understanding of the world.

To quote Schopenhauer:

“The man who has not mastered [transcendental idealism], whatever else he may have studied, is, so to speak, in a state of innocence; … he has remained in the grasp of that natural and childlike realism in which we are all born.”³

However, before we get too arrogant, we should fairly acknowledge that the difference between sleeping dreams (which avail themselves of baseless information as its substrate) and wakeful consciousness of the external world (which uses stable information based on something independent of its own mind) is not at all a trivial distinction, and cannot skipped over. The dream analogy, like all analogies, has its explanatory limits, so I will now try to clarify some points of confusion, and then address other objections to idealism.

The materialist’s denial of the dream-like nature of existence is often a straw-man association with the claim that existence is—as with a sleeping dream or a hallucination—an entirely detached and conjured-up image of existence, a mere confabulation, a pure solipsism. This erroneous conception describes a sleeping dream whereby we are limited exclusively to our own mind’s contents. Here is where we must clarify ourselves. A sleeping dream/hallucination is not the original phenomenon of which wakefulness is an analogy; rather, dreaming, is the offspring of wakefulness. The dreaming analogy is just a helpful resort which clearly illustrates the essence of idealism and reminds us that we are essentially an imagination, eine Vorstellung. The concept of idealism does not contain, as an essential attribute, the necessity of existence being baseless and detached. This straw-man characterises only the detached dream/hallucination.

To overcome this confusion, I try to emphasise the Schopenhauerian term ‘the dream-like’ (traumartig) nature of our existence—which is to say, the shared ontological foundation between both waking and sleeping consciousness. Both are pure experience, both are ideational.

The external world is indeed deserving of the title real. The contents of our consciousness have a genuine basis in—and real connection to—an overall existence. But the real essence of that existence is not objects (multiplied by their total number), as this image of reality is an artefact of that crude objectified model which is default to our own consciousness. Rather, the true rudiment of existence is primary in-itself being, not something represented secondarily in addition to the original thing-in-itself.

Our existence as consciousness is in fact our direct apprehension of that in-itself being. It is that fundamental modality which has the very character of existence itself—it is what it is like to have presence in the universe. It is not a secondary objectified replica or a representation of something other than itself; it simply is itself. It is what it is like to be.

The mere fact that our sleeping-dreams are wild, baseless and incoherent does not mean that a wakeful dream cannot have content which is coherent and interconnected with an exogenous informational structure which itself has an in-itself quality that is not representable in objectified representation.

One of the more instinctive objections to idealism is the solidity and stability of the material world. Its starkness communicates a kind of substantiality and brute fact of reality. If the world has some kind of etherial essence, then why does matter have such a contrary appearance? Can’t we be satisfied with the normal image of the material world, where matter is just a quantum of existence which occupies a space, about which there is nothing otherworldly or inexplicable? Samuel Johnson famously demonstrated his reactionary common sense by kicking a rock. This lazily brushes aside all of the gigantic insoluble flaws of naive materialism on the macro-scale, and collapses in on micro-scale common sense—common sense, by the way, being precisely the instinct which has held humanity back on every intellectual front.⁴ The fact is, the material world is inexplicable. Yes, the appearance of an object does not throw us into a state of confusion and call for a grand inquiry into the nature of existence, but the really big questions like the concept of eternity and the fact of consciousness really do dumbfound us and throw everything into question.

But putting all that aside, even if we do address this contemptuous response, this “substantiality” does not have some grand metaphysical import. It does not inflict the slightest wound on idealism. In the rawest possible sense, it is the simple manifestation of the law of non-contradiction: two distinct things cannot occupy the same position. And if you sink to the quantum level, this principle stops applying anyway (more on that in a moment). Our own particular existence operates in agreement with a bounded and specific form (as opposed to being boundless and universal), and so we are naturally in confrontation with a world of distinct boundaries. The world which communicates itself via the mediation of our boundary will likewise present a world of boundaries (i.e. objects). Donald Hoffman uses the helpful analogy of desktop icons—they’re not the thing-in-itself. They are a mere surface phenomenon.

Perhaps we can forgive Samuel Johnson who lived in the age of Newton, but today there is less excuse to collapse on common sense as a crutch, for it is well known by now that there are some really quite bizarre and unexpected physical phenomena which force us to be, at the very least, more open-minded about the true nature of existence. The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics present an image of the world which is radically disruptive to an intuitive material understanding of the world. In fact, when these theories were first developed, one of the main arguments against them was prima facie—that is, their surface-level implausibility.

In both of these physical models, we find that the universe behaves unexpectedly—almost resembling a video game glitch—just to keep the laws of physics consistent for every individual observer. It’s genuinely strange, for example, that, in order for the speed of light to remain constant for every observer, time has to change its pace, but it does so in such a way that the observer itself doesn’t suffer any distortion. There is also spatial distortion in the form of length contraction. All of this is observer-dependent. And although it doesn’t call upon metaphysical idealism as a philosophical rescue net, it wreaks havoc on the instinctive intuition of an external world in a stationary and universal frame of reference. Gravity, too, if I understand it correctly, seems to be an artefact of geometry bordering on illusion.

Moving our attention to quantum mechanics, we find that matter at the unitary level is a kind of all-at-once indeterminate probability, but will immediately resume the appearance of a normal, definitely-located object whenever observation intervenes. For a naive intuitive physicalist, this itself gives the world a bizarre and one might say almost non-physical quality. Matter is not such a definite substance as materialists once imagined.

All of these discoveries in the last century or so have done lasting damage to our faith in common sense. It is for this reason that many intelligent, formerly-committed materialists have found their way to metaphysical idealism through 20th century physics, and have become convinced of interpretations (such as the many-worlds hypothesis) which comfortably co-exist with metaphysical idealism. In fact, they are surprisingly natural companions. As soon as a person admits of the possibility of a “many-worlds” hypothesis, they have loosened their intuitions of a concrete and definite world, and thus opened themselves to the possibility of a world which is far more ethereal, non-concrete, amorphous and metaphysically fungible/fluid.

The more recent idea that the world is a computer simulation also deserves passing mention here. Even though I don’t find Nick Bostrom’s argument serious, its relative prominence in philosophical discourse does speak to a certain open-mindedness which wasn’t anywhere near as prevalent among analytic philosophers in the early-20th century, and this is largely due to the digital-information revolution (arguably video games in particular) forcing us to consider that existence can have an abstract and purely informational basis.

Modern cognitive science and artificial intelligence have also provided quasi-metaphysical insights, and their study of the human mind often skims that very narrow boundary between physics and metaphysics. In noticing the fundamental role that expectation and probability plays in constructing the world, this has led cognitive scientists such as Anil Seth to call our experience of the world “a controlled hallucination”.⁵

I also suspect that the 1960s fascination with hallucinogenics initiated a new fascination with consciousness, and thereby opened people’s minds to the primacy of consciousness. LSD has such a wild and distortive effect on consciousness that the intelligible world is thrown into a haze, and you are left only with the fact of consciousness itself, thus revealing its primacy. It is like looking into the reflection of a still lake, not realising you’re looking at a reflected image until a stone drops into the water and creates ripples, whereupon you realise you were seeing a secondary image, not unmediated reality.

A further reason for materialism, related to the earlier-mentioned discussion of matter’s brute simplicity, is the sheer overwhelming quantity of dull insensate matter in the observable universe. Almost like reading the results of a plebiscite, we surrender our feelings of self-importance in the face of such a massive crowd. This observation was a rude awakening for those early astronomers who initially thought that all of those lights in the night sky were etherial heavenly bodies. On first examining the moon in detail, an almost blasphemously mundane rocky surface appeared. It thus turns out that our planet is not enveloped in an ethereal background with ghostly orbs, but is instead a rock, outnumbered by so many trillions of others, lifelessly following a bland and easily-predicted physical course which does not involve a deity’s personal input. How, then, can we give consciousness a primary ontological status in the world when lifelessness and insentience is by far and away the norm? This I will now address.

Let me begin by discussing our own sense of materiality; of what it feels like to be matter. Our body—which is our only real ontological communion with what we call matter—is a kind of dull ambience (unless its preferred form is noticeably disturbed or misshapen, in which case our attention is drawn to this intensity, which we call a sensation). In itself it doesn’t carry sense; it is just a kind of sensation we carry around, which, if it has any altering effect on our consciousness at all, serves to distract away from higher sentience. This is why, if all but the most essential parts of our material body were eliminated, we don’t lose sentience. Our consciousness is not cut in half if our body is cut in half.

Given that the material world is directly perceived in this manner, it is not a stretch to claim that the vast plurality of the material world and the enormous quantities which impress us are likewise just that vague ambience—a self-absorbed, unto-itself being, without any meaningful magnitude as far as higher consciousness and true sentience is concerned.

If, to put it crudely, more consciousness = more existence, then the vast lifeless quantities of the material world, and the celestial bodies in their obscene numbers, are really just lifeless and irrelevant waste, occupying the extreme lower-end of existence, and don’t come together to comprise an entity which eclipses consciousness and subtracts from its superior existential status. They are dull and barely amount to anything in terms of consciousness. Their plurality and quantity do not occupy a large share in reality—in fact, this senseless assembly of masses sort of befits their role, as one would expect in a hierarchical pyramid.

Just as the majority of a sound is its subsequent repetitive echoes, increasingly devoid of meaning and sense as they spread, instantiated via dull thoughtless mass over increasing distances, so too is the plurality of the universe the subtraction of originality into increasingly spread-out mass. It is like the aerosol spray breaking down into increasingly separated droplets (which, purely as an aside, is also a convenient analogy of the red shift expansion of the universe). Matter is a kind of thoughtless, heedless dying—a senseless self-consumption, following a blank and repetitive modality, which has detached itself from its undegenerated origin and pursues a sort of entropic infinity instead.

For the metaphysical idealist, this has real intuitive force when properly grasped. Matter is less-existence for the metaphysical idealist. To be taken in by vast external masses is genuinely comparable to the non-introspective person who follows a large human crowd and misses sight of their real first-person perspective. They fail to notice that their genuine existence comes from within themselves. For a metaphysical idealist who finds himself stupefied at the enormity of the material cosmos, it is always sufficient to be reminded of consciousness as the true bearer of reality.

In a sense, the purely physicalist understanding of the universe agrees that all of this insane plurality comes from a single unified source—they just say it was a material source (namely, the initial singularity preceding the big bang). The metaphysical idealist offers a slight albeit important modification of this view, and says that the parental source of existence is not some all-containing physical blob from the past, but rather an infinite, universal, in-itself being (i.e. conscious) which never degenerates into plurality and differentiation but remains transcendent, universal, unspecified, undivided and unossified. It is an all-encompassing ideational source, a permanent and undying origin, from which we are fallen, and of which we are a species. We are its differentiated offshoots. Materiality is a kind of negative pole, descending into increasingly dimmer degrees of sentience, falling further from its original status.

Consciousness is the spotlight of existence. It is its real shining locus, the only real presence amidst the dark mindless background, such that consciousness can be regarded as practically synonymous with existence itself. It is this being-ness in its rawest and most immediate sense, especially light (arguably its rawest modality and manner of self-revelation), which has has an ideational essence, a dream-like quality. It is what it is like to exist, as opposed to the material objects as they appear for us, which are blank replicated representations. However, in and of themselves, these objects also share in the overall ideational fabric, but in a way that is dull, self-absorbed and self-extricated from the bigger exogenous picture. Humans also suffer from these defects because our existence abides by a bounded objectified form, but we also have a degree of transcendence over dull, self-absorbed matter, and thus we exist in a fundamentally higher grade of reality than generic matter does.

Now, before concluding this essay, I want to briefly highlight another dream-like aspect of our existence, which begins with the following observation: notice how a dream spontaneously spawns you into the most miscellaneous scenarios. We simply find ourselves landed in these situations out of nowhere.

I merely add: This is really not too different from our real wakeful existence, which, in an ultimate sense, likewise spawned quite arbitrarily into our own life, our own era, our particular body, our own specific conditions, and so forth—hence we are often nagged by the question “why me?”—and not simply as an empty expression of anger or sadness, but in a spirit of genuine contemplation. How did the spotlight of existence land here?

As said at the beginning of this essay, the material substrate of a dream is a flux of information, out of which consciousness makes some kind of sense, and accordingly forms a picture. The informational basis of that image can be extremely tenuous, but with enough power of imagination, consciousness somehow makes do with what little it has, and thus a dream is born. Vague, chaotic and nonsensical, but fully engaging as a temporary reality.

Wakeful existence, although different for all the reasons mentioned earlier, operates on a similar basis. The subterranean, informational haze is our body in constant interaction with the external world. Out of this haze, consciousness also finds a compatible image. Consciousness therefore always lands in a situation which, a priori, makes superficial sense.⁶

In the case of wakefulness, this informational substrate, which accounts for our body and—by proxy—the material world as a whole, is a real property of existence. It does not arise out of some isolated consciousness. Instead, it has its basis in the real overall mainstream of existence, without need of being conjured-up or imagined. This underworld of entropy is downstream from the original source of being, and it entropically pursues every possible route as a kind of inherent longing for inertial self-extension. This roughly corresponds to the Schopenhauerian concept of ‘will’. We do not follow that entropic course all the way; we, as consciousness at our grade, are inherently resistant to collapsing in on that purely entropic course, and it is this elevated resistance which makes us matter-transcendent, i.e. not collapsed, not ossifying, not dead.⁷

This conscious-compatible world will necessarily be coherent, causally consistent and inordinately detailed. Like the analogy of lightning, there must be an a priori mutually compatible ground connection in order to meet with earth. This netherworld of entropy is not a particularly welcome home for an orderly consciousness, which itself is in essential contrast with the mindless degeneration of matter. But just as there is a place where lightning finds a compatible ground connection, so too must consciousness have its point of connection: a watery place which permits fluidity of form and transmissibility of circumstance (as opposed to desiccated stagnation and ossification); a temperate region which neither freezes the world into inactivity nor plunges it into a furnace of frenzied incoherence; and so on.

This tenuous compatibility with the material world manifests in that terrible spectacle of animal life struggling for its survival. The continuous line of connection between matter and animate life can be seen in the many gradations which exist along that scale, from undeniably animate beings to beings which are almost indistinguishable from mere matter. These differing gradations are the possible connections consciousness had available to it. Matter itself, when objectified, also demonstrates kinship with the animate world. It has the life-analagous “desire” to endure as its self and replicate its crystalline form. When under pressure, it “evolves” according to circumstance and finds a new form. In the case of a lipid, e.g. a bar of soap, the way it escapes your grasp even resembles an evasive animal, like a mouse escaping from an enclosed fist.

We land arbitrarily in this strange mess because the connection between unossified consciousness and stagnant materiality simply had to be a priori compatible. This was not built from ground-zero up. Rather, the material world sort of falls into being. Only at the grade of humanity does objectified consciousness find it odd, wrong and in need of explanation/rectifying. Even so, the overall inexplicability of our existence isn’t quite felt by most people, and thus they remain unphilosophical.⁸

In the end, we wake up from a dream to a more compelling and complete perception which doesn’t require making tenuous sense of incomplete information, but instead is a more effortless and primary acquaintance with the real world outside of oneself. When we wake up from our current predicament, this same type of transition occurs. Its clarity, completeness and no-longer-tenuous image then brings with it the buoyant sense of being in a higher grade of reality.

The exact material basis of the dream was inessential. It was immaterial. It was not the concrete thing you imagined. You are rather the enduring essence under which matter subsisted (but was not itself the essence of you) and through whose changes you persist all-the-same and nevertheless.

1. Schopenhauer’s writings on this topic have inspired me to such a degree that I cannot help but repeat his insights from time to time, and I therefore encourage anyone interested in this theme to read Schopenhauer as well. The first chapter in Volume II of E.F.J. Payne’s translation of The World as Will and Representation is a notable example of where he uses the dream analogy.

2. Regarding NDEs: before delving into the metaphysics of it, I refer anyone who is open-minded on this subject to read the works of the Dutch cardiologist Dr. Pim van Lommel, the American professor of psychology Dr. Kenneth Ring, and the American philosopher and psychiatrist Dr. Raymond Moody. They approach this topic in a strictly academic format without letting their imaginations get carried away by speculation. There are many excellent authors on this subject, but I am most familiar with these three authors and therefore confident in recommending them in particular. In general, the taboo on researching NDEs is finally being overcome, and there are many qualified people researching this subject.

3. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, E.F.J. Payne’s translation (1966), ‘Preface to the Second Edition’.

4. Notice, by the way, that as superstition and religiosity declined in the developed world, it was the most vulgar people who seamlessly transitioned into materialistic atheism; in fact, they barely even noticed this revolution took place. It was wholly compatible with their vulgarity and required of them no serious software change. By contrast, thoughtful and intelligent people, despite abandoning religion, retained existential curiosity and awe, and are restlessly pursuing answers to these big questions. Nearly all great thinkers of the last century and a half—atheist and non-atheist alike— speak of the death of God as one of the great crises of modern humanity. Nietzsche, who more or less announced the arrival of this epoch, dedicated his life to this question. Not all such people are metaphysical idealists of course, but they are acutely aware of existence as an unsolved problem.

5. We shouldn’t credit modern cognitive scientists with this discovery. It was plenty recognised, for example, in Schopenhauer’s On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and by many others before him.

6. Consciousness is the sense-maker, so this is almost a tautology. There’s never an obvious hole in consciousness’s image which forces it to admit a major flaw in itself. A dream never presents that aspect of itself which would undermine its believability. Consciousness ignores defects and makes sense what what it’s got. If there’s a blind spot, it somehow just ignores it up or covers it up—it literally does precisely this in the case of vision.

7. This resistance to collapse has a funny manifestation, namely our laughter, which is when our body is tempted to collapse and exhale. Our consciousness retains its command of the body and resists this full collapse of the diaphragm, resulting in struggle for control between entropic collapse and self-command.

“Ossification” (a rather loose term, not to be taken in a literal biological sense) is a recurring term in this essay, so here is a quick, scrappy clarification of what I mean by that concept: Ossification = incapable of refreshment from source of renewal = fossilisation = closed system = contains nothing but itself = stuck with its limited initial conditions = no new input = unoriginal = abandoned to mindless entropy = fading into past = dying.

8. I feel compelled here to insert an excerpt from Schopenhauer’s essay On Thinking for Oneself: