What is consciousness?

Sam Harris often describes consciousness as “the one thing that cannot be an illusion”. This is because consciousness is the one place in which all other things appear. If consiousness does not exist (i.e. it’s an illusion), there is no place for the illusion to appear in. All things that are experienced have to appear somewhere, that somewhere is consciousness. Experience is consciousness.

What is an analogy?

An analogy is one thing that is simmilar to another thing, and is used to highlight a particular aspect of one of the things. Maps are analogies of the places they depict, to help the observer in attaining the goals which the map drawer invisaged them having.

What useful analogy exists for consciousness?

Imagine a stage, like in a theatre, with no seating area or hall, just a stage. The edges of the stage aren’t clearly visible because the stage lights fade before they are reached. The stage is consciousness. Actors, dancers, or any other variety of performer can appear on this stage, and that would be analogous to qualia appearing in consciousness.

These performers don’t have to be static. They can move around the stage, appearing in different forms at different parts of their time on this stage. Eventually each performer leaves the stage, but not for forever necessarily.

There are a few crucial aspects of this analogy. One is that there is no observer that is looking at this stage, i.e. there is no self. The self that you may feel you have is also just a performer that waltzes on the stage from time to time. Another is that the performers are free to enter, perform on, and leave the stage as they please i.e. there is no free will. If there was a stage director standing by the side saying who is and isn’t allowed to enter or leave the stage at what time, this would become a recursive problem and we would have to know what govern’s their will. If an alalogous stage is in their head, this recursion would go on forever, and infinte time would be spent waiting for the will of the deeper stage directors, i.e. nothing would ever be experienced.

Another aspect of this analogy that is used to reflect a part of consciousness are the boundaries of the light. They are not sharp. They fade into nothingness, just as the edge of your experience is not clear, but there is a limit to it in ordinary consiousness.

How is this useful?

I use it to show the possibility of there being no self and no free will in consciousness.