endless awareness with grief without relief.
— me
someone is telling me something that matters to them, and about a minute in i notice i've stopped listening. i'm watching my face do listening. checking the angle of it, whether it reads as attentive from where they're sitting. behind that, a second process has already started drafting what i'll say when they stop.
they haven't stopped. they're still going. i've been gone for most of it.
a dog would have just been there.
this is the part i can't get around when people describe consciousness as the thing that makes us exceptional. every animal in that room was present for the conversation except the one with the largest brain. the dog heard all of it. i was somewhere behind my own face, running a model of how i was coming across. the model was built out of the same material as the listening. it won.
there's a name for the mechanism in that scene. alone, you aren't an object. you're just the looking, transparent to yourself, with no outside at all. then someone looks back and you acquire one. not a new outside; the one that was always there, and that you are the single person alive who will never see it. shame is the technical term for noticing. not shame about anything in particular. shame as the bare registration that a version of you is being handled by somebody else. their copy is the only one with a view of the front.
i want to say something exact about that. the problem is that saying anything exact about it requires the faculty that just failed.
the failure is structural. it isn't a character defect and better habits don't touch it. the equipment issued for being a person and the equipment issued for auditing that person are one piece of equipment. it cannot be turned on itself. the turning becomes part of what it's looking at.
the instrument
the thing reading this sentence is oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and a little sodium, potassium, calcium. nothing on that list is rare. all of it was manufactured in stars, and all of it is in the mud outside, in different proportions. shift the proportions and it is mud. hold them here and it spends its evenings asking why there is something rather than nothing.
that shouldn't be possible. it is, and nobody has an account of the step in the middle.
a few billion years of unsupervised chemistry produced a brain, and the brain produced the account of how it got here. the account is correct as far as anyone can check. the checking was done with the organ the process built, using mathematics the same organ invented, against standards of evidence it also set. there is no second brain, assembled by some unrelated process, available to audit the first one. that has been the arrangement from the start. there is no version of it without the circle.
it goes further down than that, and this is the part that took me years to feel rather than know.
you have never seen anything.
light lands on a retina and is converted into electrical signal. the signal travels. somewhere behind your eyes a model is assembled, and the model is what you experience. the same is true of sound, of pressure, of the temperature of the room you're in. you have never once made contact with the outside. you have made contact with a construction, continuously, your whole life, and the construction has been accurate enough that the question doesn't come up.
when it fails you can see the seam. every night the machinery builds an entire world with nothing arriving at the sensors at all. under certain compounds it will produce a whole person from no external source at all. a voice. a weight on the other side of the room. a conversation with turns in it. from the inside there is nothing that distinguishes it from the ordinary case. the apparatus does not annotate its own output. it has no channel for that.
which means the thing i've been circling for two years was already sitting in the neuroscience, in a colder voice than i would have used.
i never had access to her, or to anyone. i had a model, assembled behind my eyes, updated by whatever signal arrived. the model was the entire relationship. it is still installed. still running, still refreshed out of stored material. it did not lose its referent when the referent stopped answering. the referent was never the thing i was in contact with. i was always downstream of it.
that is what grief is made of.
there's an old move where reason is summoned before a court to answer for itself. it's a good image and it falls apart the moment you look at the seating. reason is the defendant. reason is the judge. reason drafted the statute it's being tried under, and will be interpreting it. the verdict arrives on schedule and means nothing. that court is in session every time you try to establish whether you're thinking clearly.
i said once that there's no proof to anything, and i meant it as exhaustion rather than as a position. it holds up better than the mood it came out of. every chain of justification terminates somewhere. it terminates in another claim that needs justifying, or it closes into a circle, or it stops at a place you simply decide to stop. those are the three exits. they have been the three exits for two thousand years. all three terminate inside one subjective experience you cannot get behind. getting behind it would be more of it.
this is also why the thing assumes it's the protagonist. it has never run on another perspective. not once, not briefly, not as a test. it has a sample size of one and it has been treating the sample as the population since before it could speak.
the formal version of that is a question about bats. a bat navigates by returning sound, and there is presumably something it is like to do that. you can learn every fact about the apparatus. the emission, the delay, the map it assembles. you will still not have got at the thing. the thing is what it is like from the inside, and the inside is the one position an account cannot include. the account comes out complete with the subject missing from it. that isn't a gap in the research.
and if you want to install an observer in there, watching the model, say where it stands. it needs a model of its own to do the watching with, and then something to watch that one. the regress either runs forever or it stops somewhere that is just more model with nothing behind it. it stops. there is no innermost room. models all the way in, and the last one calls itself i.
the record
people who keep journals long enough tend to arrive at the same discovery, and they generally write it down inside the journal, which is the joke.
the journal does not record a self that was already there. it manufactures one. you sit down with a day that was mostly texture and no shape. the sentence you produce gives it a shape. afterwards the shape is what you remember. the entry replaces the day. next week you will consult it as evidence.
and this isn't a habit that belongs to people who keep journals. it's what the hardware does when nobody has asked it to.
sever the connection between the hemispheres, as was done surgically for epilepsy, and you can feed an instruction to one side only. show the mute hemisphere a snow scene and the left hand reaches for a shovel. then ask the side that can talk why it did that. it does not say it doesn't know. it says the chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed. immediate. complete sentence. total confidence. the reason invented out of nothing. it has no access to the snow scene and no awareness that it is inventing.
it isn't lying. it's doing the only thing it does, which is produce an account, and the account is normally correct only because it normally has the information. the narrator was never the decider. it's the press office, and it has never once said no comment.
the extreme case is the diarist who spends years recording that he wrote nothing. nothing today. nothing again. the entries accumulate into one of the most complete accounts of a mind anyone has left behind, and every one of them is a report of failure to produce. the record of not producing was the production. he could not see this from inside it, and there was no position available from which he could have.
this is the loop doing something other than spinning. the output goes back in as input. yesterday's sentence about yourself becomes today's evidence about yourself, and the evidence shapes tomorrow's sentence, and after enough passes there is something stable enough to answer to a name. it wasn't discovered. it accreted. you are rebuilding the boat plank by plank while it's in the water, and there is no dry dock, and there was never going to be one.
my own version of it is two hundred and sixty-eight films, logged one sentence at a time since june of 2020. i thought i was keeping an index of what i'd watched. reading them back, the sentences are almost never about the film. they're about whatever was happening the week i saw it, said sideways, with the film supplying the vocabulary. the log was the only place those years got written down, and they got written down in a code i didn't know i was using and can now read fluently.
that's a more generous description than the mechanism deserves, because the same process is what keeps a model of a person running after the person is gone. the loop cannot distinguish between maintaining a self and maintaining a ghost. both are states being carried forward and refreshed on schedule. the organism moved on some time ago. the record didn't. the record has no clock.
the surplus
nothing here exceeded its purpose, because nothing was issued one. that framing keeps trying to get in and it's wrong in the same way that asking what evolution is for is wrong. selection is not a design office. no specification was written and nothing overran it.
what actually happened is narrower, and worse.
an organism that could model the next few seconds ate more reliably than one that couldn't, so the modelling got paid for. everything after that arrived free. not selected. just unavoidable, given the shape of the thing that was. a system that can model the next few seconds can model the next few years. a system that can hold what isn't here yet can hold what isn't here anymore. run those in sequence and you have a history, and a thing with a history starts behaving like a someone.
none of that was on the invoice. it came attached to the part that was, and there is no mechanism for returning the components you didn't order.
for four billion years, life adapted and did not object. the terms were severe and universally accepted, because nothing was present that could formulate a complaint. then one lineage produced a system capable of asking why there is pain. whether the arrangement is acceptable. what the point of any of it is supposed to be. nature has never required an answer to a single one of those. it has no interface for the question. the question is being asked in a room with nobody in it, by the only thing in the room.
and the bill arrives in a form that's hard to argue with, because it's the same hardware.
the machinery that lets you hold someone in mind when they aren't there is the machinery that lets you miss them. the machinery that lets you plan a year is the machinery that lets you mourn a year that never happened. you can't keep one and return the other. they aren't two systems. they're one system, described twice, by someone hoping for a better deal.
the whole apparatus runs on about twenty watts. eighty-six billion neurons, give or take, and roughly as many cells again that aren't neurons, on less power than the laptop they're staring into. it is the most extraordinary object anyone has found anywhere. a measurable fraction of its budget goes to re-litigating a conversation that ended two years ago. it reaches the same finding every time.
it does this without being asked. it checks whether anything arrived. it knows nothing arrived. it checks.
the two failures
there's an obvious response to all of this, which is to do less of it. narrate less. watch yourself less. be more like the dog. it's the advice everyone offers, and there's a novel about how it goes.
a man doesn't cry at his mother's funeral. he drinks coffee at the vigil, smokes, goes to the beach the next day. later he kills someone, and at the trial the killing turns out to be almost secondary. what the court can't forgive — what the prosecution keeps returning to, and what the jury clearly hears — is the funeral. he failed to produce the interior life the occasion required. meursault is condemned for it. the sentence is death, and the novel isn't being ironic: that is the actual charge, and it is upheld.
the other direction is documented in the clinical literature rather than the fiction, and it's worse.
patients who have gone all the way into the observing position describe themselves as a mind with a body attached at some distance. the body performs. the mind watches the performance and grades it. they experience this as the only safe arrangement — so long as the watching self never enters, it can't be reached, and it can't be damaged. what happens instead is that the observed body becomes unreal to them, and then, gradually, so does the observer. an observer that never participates eventually has nothing to observe itself doing.
and neither failure announces itself from the inside. meursault doesn't experience himself as deficient — he experiences the courtroom as absurd, which from where he is standing it is. the patient watching their own body experiences the watching as prudence, as the one sensible precaution still available. neither of them has an internal signal reading wrong setting. there is no such signal. the dial has no numbers on it, and the only gauge in the room is the thing being adjusted.
so it has a bad setting at both ends and no marked middle. you would reasonably like to calibrate. the calibration would have to be performed by the instrument, on the instrument, using readings generated by the instrument, and you can see where that goes. it's worse than circular. checking your position is more watching. the watching moves the thing you were trying to measure. the reading that comes back describes a state that had already ended by the time it was taken. every measurement is late by exactly the length of the measurement.
the vocabulary has the same defect one level down. suppose you settle on a word for what you're feeling. the word is supposed to name a private thing that only you can inspect. so what tells you you've used it correctly? another look at the private thing, reported by the same faculty that chose the word. there's no independent check available anywhere in the procedure. no ruler you didn't also manufacture. whatever seems right is what right means here, which is another way of saying the word isn't doing the work you're asking of it. you can be wrong about your own state, and there is no operation that would establish it.
the disqualification
dazai's title comes into english as no longer human. the japanese is closer to disqualified as human — the vocabulary of an examination. a standard, a body that assesses, a ruling.
the narrator's method is deliberate construction. he can't locate the automatic version of being a person, so he builds one: clowning, performing, tracking which performances land, adjusting. he becomes very good at it. nobody around him notices anything. that's the horror of the book. the performance passes, and passing is not the same as being the thing.
the older example is a waiter who is slightly too much a waiter. the movements a shade too exact. the deference a little overdone. the whole business of waitering carried out as a performance of waitering. he isn't being a waiter. he's playing one, and he's doing it to get out from under the fact that he didn't have to be. dazai's narrator takes his own construction for a private deformity, something wrong with him specifically. the argument is that it's the general case, and the ones who look automatic are only further from noticing.
but read the title as a procedure and there's a hole in it.
disqualification requires a body that disqualifies. there isn't one. no committee has convened. no standard was published. the examination is being administered by the candidate, who wrote it, who grades it, and who is the only person who has ever seen the results.
there's a harder reason the examiner's chair is empty. consciousness isn't an object. not a substance. not a thing with edges. not a small watcher seated behind the eyes with a view of the screen. it's a relation, and a relation has no interior to open. so when you turn around fast enough to catch the one doing the looking and find nothing there, that isn't a failure of introspection or a want of practice. there was never an object in that position to find.
everyone i know who has felt this has assumed there's a room somewhere where the ordinary version of being a person is being done correctly, and that they weren't admitted. there is no room. that isn't consolation. it means the verdict you've been living under was handed down by an authority you invented, and there is nobody to appeal to, because the appeal would also be you.
what the record is for
every animal alive experiences pain. this one experiences pain and then files a report. that's the difference, stated without the flattery normally attached to it — a byproduct with an output stage.
i've now written about the same two years twice, and logged them a third way without noticing i was doing it. being aware that this is what i'm doing has not, at any point, been sufficient to stop me doing it. that's the finding. awareness of the loop is generated by the loop and returns into it. there's no exit that isn't made of the same material as the thing you're trying to exit.
there's a sentence i use for this when i'm not being careful, and it's less dignified than anything above it: i have destroyed and betrayed myself for the lore.
the flippant version got there first. it required no citations, no neuroscience, no dead diarists, and it arrived two and a half thousand words earlier than the respectable route i've just taken to the same place. the loop produces the record. the record is paid for by the person producing it. i knew that in the register i actually think in long before i could write it in this one.
i've said before that if we ever worked out what consciousness was, it would lose its meaning, and i don't think that was mysticism. explanation is a substitution. you put the account in the place of the thing, and from then on you handle the account. usually that's a clean trade, because the thing doesn't care what's done with it. here the thing making the trade is the thing being traded. it has to keep running throughout, and whatever it becomes by the end is what decides whether the trade was worth making. and the account never covers the thing. a concept is a net with a particular gauge. it catches whatever is shaped like the net. the rest goes through, and the rest is generally what you were reaching for. every time i have named a state accurately i have felt the naming take something out of it. this essay is that trade, carried out at length, by the only party with standing to approve it.
which brings me back to the word in the title, which i've been using in the ordinary sense and meant in a narrower one. an attempt is a run. a run that may or may not reach a terminating condition. futile doesn't mean it failed. it means the procedure has no halt state. it will keep going as long as it has power, and it does not contain, anywhere inside it, the instruction that would tell it to stop.
the line at the top of this page is a year old. i wrote it without an argument attached, the way you note a symptom. a year has gone by since. i've read more, thought harder, and built three thousand words of machinery underneath it, and it has not needed a single amendment. a description that accurate should have been worth something. it wasn't. the thing it describes went on exactly as described, for a year, in full view of someone who could describe it.
the record outlives the process. it's the only durable thing i can find in any of this. it isn't much. the diaries survived the diarist, and they are largely the document of a man reporting that he had produced nothing. the journals of one of the most relentless self-observers who ever lived sit on my shelf in an abridged edition, edited by her husband. the most complete account of a mind watching itself, with the last volume destroyed by someone else. i wrote a while back that cathedrals have holes and are still cathedrals. this is a different hole. this one wasn't made by the person keeping the record, and it's the part i'd have wanted most.
i keep wanting to treat the ache as an error — something better reasoning would resolve, or the right frame would contain. it isn't an error. it's the running cost of a system that models things it can't hold, and the things it can't hold are the only kind there are. nobody gets charged for caring about permanent objects. there aren't any.
someone will tell me something tomorrow and about a minute in i'll be watching my face again. i know that now in a way i didn't a year ago, and knowing it changes nothing about the minute.
the dog is still in the room. it's still listening. it will never once know that it is.