What’s your stream of consciousness and free will feel like?

Do you hear a conversation in your head or just a listener and a speaker?

What’s your experience of control like?: is it your head, your heart, what the voice says or what the listener chooses?

These are fascinating questions which lack a scientific answer except for the pseudoscientific tripe of psychiatry.

My experience is conversation and community if not consensus. It’s definitely not unitary or singular. Some times I have no control and will becomes almost automatic rather than choice or free will.

Where does your will come from? My idea is the corpus callosum which connects the two hemispheres of the brain is part of the seat of consciousness, the Cartesian theatre perhaps? But there’s also something else beyond the organic biology. There’s god/s influence too.

The most ethical website

I started on this thought process over five years ago. It started simply as an attempt to come up with a website to set the world record for the most ethical website. Then I just kept going for ages till I finally struck gold.

It’s a surprisingly simple thing:

• it would be written in the most basic HTML so anyone with any device could read it
• it would be written with the fewest characters to reduce data transmission loads and barriers of poor bandwidth
• it would have a black background with red text because this uses the least energy for a given display technology with backlit panels offering the least benefit and pretty much everything else would have varying levels of benefit up to a cathode ray tube screen where the energy saving would be most significant
• it would be written so it  can be easily translated and understood by people all around the world
• the message would be perfect

It’s this last condition which took me months and years to figure out. I thought the message would be limited to one or two words of simple English but there were so many options.

After some deliberation and a lot of brainstorming I settled on “we” for these reasons

• it means many things but the interpretations are what I would generally consider laudable. It is the English first person plural pronoun but it can mean unity, togetherness, solidarity, community or anything else to those who choose to consider it further than a quick glance
• it is as non-prescriptive a message while still communicating something as I could think of. Those who don’t get it just see the pronoun. Those who want to understand it will find their own personal meaning.
• it only uses two characters
• it is very easy to translate the text into any language using online translators but it is also an English word a lot of non-anglophones would be likely to know or know someone who does

The last bit of this idea is perhaps difficult to understand.

I want you to imagine what this website looks like in your mind. In the centre of a black screen there is one short word in red text. It says we.

Got it in your mind’s eye? Good. It’s the only place you’ll see it. You see, a property of perfection is it doesn’t exist.

Huh?

This all harks back to a conversation I had at school about the existence of god. Back then I was a naive but ardent atheist who also loved to learn about religion. I’d read lots of religious mythology by this time – from stories of Norse Gods to Hindu classics – and even had a GCSE in Religious Studies.

A physics teacher who also had a passing interest in philosophy (Dr Thoniman was his name I think) demonstrated an argument for the existence of god. It starts with accepting the concept that god is perfect and, as far as I was concerned, the idea religions had of god was that it was a perfect being. So I accepted that as true and he moved on to his next step.

There are many qualities of perfection as we all might agree. Perfect sight and foresight. Perfect knowledge. Perfect compassion and love. So, again, I agreed with him.

“Aha!” he cried for I’d fallen into  his philosophical trap. “A quality of perfection must, of course, be existence” and with that thought I went away baffled. To me it was a brilliant technique of argument and weeks went by without me cracking it.

Eventually another student (Jaime?) who was actually studying philosophy under this teacher ended my misery. He explained simply that the last step of this trick of words and concepts was false and specious.

“Huh?” was my reaction if I remember right and so he explained. Existence is not necessarily a quality of perfection or the perfect being. In fact, it’s more likely that what is truly perfect does not exist except in the mind or our imagination. After all, if you think about it we dream about what is perfect and live with what we get, what’s imperfect and real.

This small philosophical journey many years ago is why I never published the website and this is the first time I’m even publishing the concept. It could never be published itself if it was perfect and this is why I asked you to imagine it: that’s the canvas for imagining what is perfect.

I hope I’ve not tried to be too clever in this post. Things just happened as they did. In fact, adding the last bit of detail – where I ask you to imagine the website – just came to me today as I wrote this. I really hope you’ve enjoyed this exploration into abstract concepts and ideas which have happened through things in my life.

The story and the concepts don’t end here but this is enough for one day. Trust me – the rest is worth waiting for.