Where am I on the Landscape of Consciousness (my “toothbrush”)
By Michael Striem

🌱   Let me become free here for a moment. After having a nice lunch with hamburgers and wine at my son’s home, I feel very blessed. My youngest grandson, who is over a year old, is expressing happiness with seeing me, stretches out his arms to come to me from his mother, my heart explodes with joy [no AI will ever experience this feeling]. My eyes catch the smiles of all around, the richness of the food on the table (with the smell of the smoke from the grill outside), I feel very comfortable in my chair (next to another older grandson). The taste of the wine, which we made ourselves, with freshly cut vegetables, salads and bakery. This moment of awareness is worth a lifetime. Yet, we repeatedly have these moments, in very different situations. My father and mother are mentioned from time to time, as source of reference to “lifting eyebrows” or keeping things nicely clean and appetizing. Great-grandchildren grow into these stories [no AI will ever experience this feeling]. On the sofa outside on the balcony, with glasses of wine (and cigarette) I listen to my son’s “report” on his weekly work meetings. A life full of colors and stories. Let it just stay this way and improve.

🔍 ​​ My apologies for not having the talent of literature authors. After all, I am just a farmer with some degrees in agriculture, genetics, and molecular DNA markers and transformations. Nonetheless, my conscious daily lifestyle is helping me focus on happy threads pulling me forward. I may not witness any “collapse of waves” or entanglement of particles, yet my conscious experience is not missing a beat. This is just to emphasize full awareness of the overall span of my life (not in every moment specifically).

In order to convey a precise and comprehensive array of feelings, more than one sentences is needed. Probably a whole page or more.

🔥 I find my conscious awareness to have many layers:

• First comes my inner voice – which never stops talking to me. I wish to know how to calm it down and fall asleep in the early hours. Unfortunately, this inner voice is accompanied by a high pitch tinnitus, which gives me no rest of complete quite silence.

• Second comes in my thoughts which trigger emotions. Among those are love, joy, satisfaction, curiosity, gratitude, pride, envy, jealousy, anger, frustration, sadness, fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, hesitation, anticipation. These include drafts for greetings, discussions and arguments. These may sometimes seem to run in loops in my mind, where I hear myself telling them: “STOP! I’ve heard this more than once already”.

• Third, is my body sensation. hunger, thirst, bladder fullness, heartbeat, breathing rhythm, fatigue, warmth or cold, muscle tension, nausea, sexual arousal, pain (acute or chronic), comfort or relaxation, and so on. In many cases I feel very proud of myself for getting a pretty good handle on those, to find relief with simple attention.

• It is not possible to ignore external sensory input and perception. Vision - light, color, movement, faces, Hearing - voices, music, background noise, Touch - pressure, texture, temperature, Smell, Taste. These form a sensory landscape surrounding the internal experience. Influence with almost no way I can control, probably only try to avoid or accept with love and humility. Recently I came up with the sense that maybe some electromagnetic fields, at various wavelengths, also penetrate our body. Thay may come from mechanical devices or biological sources.

• Now 72 years old, some memories have accumulated. There are episodic memories (events in my life), semantic memory (facts about me and my life), emotional memory (some are spirit lifting and some can be depressing), procedural memory (skills, I have several of those). Often my memories appear triggered by emotion or perception. For example: when I listen to classical music, I remember fondly my father setting up his portable gramophone / record-player, in his study on Saturdays.

• Another layer of consciousness is ‘attention’. It goes across other parts of awareness. It determines what becomes dominant in consciousness at a specific moment. It acts like a spotlight selecting part of the field. For example: I may simultaneously have background music, a full bladder, a call to plan tomorrow’s schedule. Paying attention highlights only one or two at a time.

• Intuition / Gut Feeling: These are fast, non-verbal evaluations produced by unconscious processing. For examples: sense that something is wrong, feeling of trust toward someone, creative insight, sudden clarity. Some excellent ideas came to me through this important part of my conscious life.

• Agency (feeling of choosing) is often related to the sense of self. For me it also brings autobiographical continuity, I feel like a lucky descendant of my parents and grandparents who survived WWII. This also strengthened my feeling of identity, as an observer who had the opportunity to fulfill a life of those which came before. This gives me a special feeling of been me, the one combing traits of my ancestors, and transferring them to my offsprings, with the whole package of skills, faith and luck.

• Consciousness always has a temporal structure. I build upon my experience with the anticipation of the future, today, tomorrow, and beyond. This gives my conscious awareness a sense of time. From episode to episode. From lesson to homework. From experiment to conclusion. From ‘First Grade’ to ‘Post-Doc’. I am aware of the moment, I respect the process, yet I build upon my past to anticipate my future.

• With this in mind it is here probably the best place to refer to the nature of living organisms to die. It is not something I am afraid of and on the other side I am not trying to die soon. The food-chain of material in nature will take care of the body. The mind, however, is separate. As my ancestral generation continues to live through me, I have the opportunity to create as many reminders as I can to be left for the future. With full conscious attention I flourish this thread.​

⚡ So, here is my take on my conscious experience. Definitely not one sentence. Probably no simple way to apply a category label. Philosophers call this type a biological-embodied view of consciousness. Consciousness is not merely information processing, but a lived, subjective, organism-level phenomenon emerging from a self-maintaining biological system.

⭐  The map of the landscape of consciousness was clearly presented by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, creator and host of the renowned documentary series "Closer to Truth". He has undertaken the monumental task of mapping 325+ scientific theories of consciousness, organizing them into ten categories, from materialist accounts to quantum approaches, from Integrated Information Theory to panpsychism and all different forms of idealisms, amongst which, Analytic Idealism.