Consciousness

 

Puck and the fairies in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', production in 2019

We can lose a lot of sleep over consciousness. We lie awake wondering what consciousness is, why we have it while other entities in our universe don’t. We moon over why some say the universe itself has consciousness, one reason being we have consciousness just by saying we have consciousness. This line of thought does not answer all our questions and leads to eventually falling asleep. Sleep itself is presumed to be essential to consciousness, even though we are not conspicuously conscious at the time. Inside sleep is dream, an often inexplicable play-within-a-play that concentrates waking time peculiarly. One way of explaining waking consciousness is the global workspace theory (Bernard Baars, born 1946) which likens consciousness to a working theatre. Reading about this when awake sets up a model for consciousness, a common framework, that here in this short life of ours we can play with, script, concentrate our attention upon, improvise. Most of the neural activity in our experience takes place behind the scenes. Lighting, costumes, make-up and prima donna’s tears are conspicuously absent. Their life on the stage only occurs when they present themselves this side of the walk-on line. What is the play that will capture the consciousness of our daily awakening? Are we witnessing something by Peter Quince or William Shakespeare (1564-1616), or both? Have we stepped out of a dream where everything is ludicrously beautiful and new, or are we simply living our best life, as the fitful expression in the script would have it? Even at rest we are aware of being in motion. Even with the most baroque poetry we catch a meaning or two, strutting along with our worthily wordy interlocutor. Even as we entwine with the most lovely of amours we live out the facts of our singularity. Even as we pretend not to hear the spoken truth of our play-within-the-play, we are hanging on every word. Will’s soliloquies are theatricalised odes and eclogues, plays within the play, the voice breaking through to the essence of the situation. We are original in our own way, also. Until, before long, and we must keep our audience’s attention, the show must go on, we return to the main narrative, thence curtains, thence exits from the Globe into the consciousness of living with everyone else’s consciousness, out in the deliberate streets. What neural pathways shall we wander? What new theories of consciousness discover at the post-play party, or first night review, even? Our perceptions, sensations, thoughts, actions, emotions, (Oxford comma) and memories continue to foreground certain priorities, even as other priorities turn supernumerary, for now. How Will may have said this in languages other than his own is cause for thought. There are a lot of languages to choose from, for all of us, as we know and are conscious of.