Why Awareness Will Never Be Found

And Why Artificial Intelligence Will Never Be Aware

The content of this article arises out of sixty-plus years, as of this writing, of contemplative practice, combined with doctoral-level training in logic, reasoning, philosophical inquiry, and thirty years in software design, including the design of automated programming systems. It offers a coherent treatment of what “awareness” is referring to, why artificial intelligence will never be aware, and why awareness will never be found.

There is an easily overlooked fault in all current ideas about what awareness and its correlate, consciousness, is. It’s obvious from the construction of those names that they are both abstract concepts of a specific hypostatized quality of lived experience. But are they independently existing things, as their names indicate? To say we are aware is not so wrong, but to say we have awareness (or consciousness) is questionable, unless we mean it in the way we mean when we say we have experiences. But if we mean we possess some identifiable thing, like a liver, then we are hopelessly lost.

Consciousness is an essential character of our lived experiences, and experiencing the world is an inviolable aspect of all sentient life. In fact, I don’t see what a life would be if it was not experienced. And I extend this to all living beings, which must be similarly aware.

That consciousness passively senses the world, is not the only possible structure underlying experience. I will describe a different active structure below, one that doesn’t suffer from an embarrassing lack of evidence. It’s a cheat to posit physical or biological mechanisms as explaining instantiations of awareness, if you can’t first explain in a linear, rather than circular fashion, what “awareness” is.

In the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen philosophical treatment of awareness, which is the culmination and perfection of earlier philosophical Buddhist thought on this subject, awareness refers to the metacognitive knowing of the nature of mind in each moment of our experiential lives. This metacognitive state is like being in a movie theatre watching a film, but rather than being completely engrossed in the film’s story, oblivious to what is going on around you, you are aware that you are in a theatre watching a film unrolling before you, and you are equally aware of the processes involved in creating and projecting the film.

The last two paragraphs present two different views on “awareness”.

Modern Science takes a shortcut to fixing a definition for awareness: it is the ability to be aware. Check.

But what is it actually?

Is it something we can identify on its own? No one has done so yet, and I will show you why. In fact, I hope to show you why awareness per se will never be found.

Here is an opening question to ponder: Is our experience fuller/more visceral/more complex than it would be, based solely upon what our senses actually provide us? Ignore for the moment that without being aware, we wouldn’t know what our senses provide us. I am asking if there are aspects of our experience that we can truly say are not derived immediately from sense data alone. I believe there are, and this leads me to further ask: How does the additional aspect(s) arise?

First, there is a distinction that can be made between the imperience of perceptions, such as the felt presence of hearing something, and the apperceived experience of the sound of a flute, for example. Beauty is found in the flute’s sound, and is an added aspect in the experience; but wonder can be found in the felt presence of hearing. These correspond to the first two definitions I listed above. The flute sound is the identified (flute) and qualified (an “A” note) content recognized in the direct imperience. The experience of that is more than just the imperienced sense perception, yet both entail directly knowing them (as opposed to someone telling us about the amazing concert they attended last night).

The imputed source of the flute notes, normally considered external to our body — because we are hearing it through our ears — is part of the experience as well. But it is not part of the imperience of hearing, which is to say, imperiences are logically prior to their apperceived experience, and it is the experience that has the full contents, including location, but only the imperience has the viscerally felt presence. A loud sound jolts sleeping people awake, though they do not know what it was or where it came from. Realizing it was a trumpet blown in your ear by some prankster doesn’t have the same visceral effect.

However, none of this identified and qualified content should be attributed to the experienced source of the sound outside of us. The source is the identified origin of the imperience of the hearing — that woman playing the flute over there — that we might embellish the experience with at the time it is apperceived, because hearing can contain aural cues that help us locate the source of sound.

But why shouldn’t we attribute the sound to the identified source? What else can we attribute it to? Because there are significant logical problems that arise when we attribute the distinguished and qualified contents of experiences to sources outside of ourselves when we are attempting to find awareness. It just confuses things.

For example, what part of the beauty of a flute recital derives from outside of yourself? If the beauty is in the flute playing, then why doesn’t the person next to you like this piece of music? And if the beauty is a feeling that arises within you, then how can it be said to be an aspect of something that arises outside yourself? If it arises in response to the particular sounds you heard, then, as in the previous question, how is it claimed to be an aspect of something that arises from outside yourself, rather than arising from the hearing of the sounds which is necessarily internal to your body?

I argue that sound is a mental phenomenon, normally based on extant conditions, and is not something that arises outside of one’s mind. It’s true that human hearing cannot sense frequencies of sound outside a certain range, and even over the normal range our sensitivity changes over time as we age and are subjected to environmental or accidental damage. But what our ears sense is not sound. Properly speaking, our hearing faculty senses vibrations. The issue that arises when we place the phenomenon outside of our minds is obvious once we compare different hearers’ experiences of the same sound. Most people’s hearing varies in accuracy and range. So we put the differences on them, because it’s their hearing that’s at fault. Why then don’t we put accurate sensing (within normal frequency ranges) on them as well? Sound is a mental phenomenon. Vibrations in the air, or water, and even through conductive materials are vibrations, not sound. They are the necessary condition for sound to arise in mind, but, again, are not sound. We confuse ourselves when we believe otherwise.

This brief investigation shows us that if we want to find awareness, we have to go within the mind to find clear answers. That may seem facilely true, but theories about consciousness, that place awareness anywhere but the mind, abound. And problematically, Modern Science, equates the mind with the operations of the brain, limiting potential explanations that are excluded by preemptively assuming the result you already believe to be true.

Let’s continue with another question: What would being with no duration amount to? What, for that matter, would the word “being” refer to, if its target didn’t endure for a spell? This leads to a necessary dependence upon time, because duration is clearly the one necessary attribute of anything that can be said to exist.

Does the same hold true for the awareness of an existing thing? Clearly, one cannot be aware of something that doesn’t exist. We may confuse ourselves with thoughts of imaginary things, if we fail to see that it is a thought that we are aware of, and not their imaginative contents. There is a visceral difference between the contents of a thought and the actual imperience of the thought, that gets confused during the experience of thinking, which contains both — and it is the same for all perceptual experience, in which illusions, mirages, dreams, reflections, errors in identification, hallucinations, etc., are viscerally felt even though their contents are not actually existing. Confusing a rope for a snake, or a sign posted on the side of the road for a beautiful woman when you don’t have your glasses on, has a visceral effect, even though you are mistaken. We are aware of both the imperience of the sensed, and the apperceived illusory contents. The fact of experiencing is undeniable, even though the apperceived contents are fraught with error. One cannot even assert that there is an awareness that has no content, for what would its essential character be without something to be aware of? One can also imagine that awareness could be aware of itself, but awareness is not an entity, and so this imagined experience is just a phantasm based on a misunderstanding of awareness as a hypostatized entity that we have vivisected from our lived experiences.

Even in the Dzogchen view of Buddhism, awareness is not something that stands apart, viewing the activity it is aware of from an offset. Instead, awareness is a metacognitive state that recognizes the essential nature of all mental activities. The essential nature of these activities is not directly experienced, because it is not an entity either, but is recognized in the activity which serves as the evidence of that essential nature.

Also, clearly, an awareness of something must be of a certain duration or it will not have any content. That is, if the essential quality of awareness is to be aware of something, then even if it only exists for an instant, it still has a duration, however short. To say that one can be aware for no time at all, that awareness can exist without content, is empty speech.

An appropriate question here is whether the duration of awareness of some existing thing must be coterminous with the duration of the thing. That is, must the duration of awareness of something and the duration of the existence of that thing be of the same duration? Remember that we are talking about mental events like imperiences of perceptions and apperceptions of those imperiences forming the content of the associated experiences. Obviously the duration of the perception, thought, feeling, etc., is the entire existence of the mental event. Is the awareness of that event different in duration? How would we know? So, if I assert that the awareness of a mental event and the existence of the mental event are the same duration, how could you argue against it? It will be useful to assert this.

Time also seems completely dependent on something existing in order for time to have any meaning at all. We could imagine an empty universe with absolutely nothing in it, but the space of that universe would needfully exist, or it would not be space. And yet, even though space exists, how could time be based on it? Space is permanent, so time is irrelevant, and space is empty, so nothing changes, and again, time is irrelevant. But aren’t they completely different things anyway? Temporality versus Spatiality? How do we distinguish between times if nothing changes? Even the fact that time is empty of meaning if nothing exists even for just a brief spell, and yet nothing can exist without a duration, seems to undermine the existence of time, unless both time and some existent arise together as one whole.

If nothing has true existence, because there is no intrinsic self enduring through time, having a duration, because it stays for a spell, then upon what would time be based? Clearly, if nothing exists, then time is empty of meaning because there is nothing. Awareness, as understood in both mundane settings and esoteric uses such as in Dzogchen, equally depends upon the presence of time — because awareness without duration is nothing. But neither time nor awareness can be the basis for the other since neither is an entity.

Which leads to another question. I said above that in a universe that is just empty space, in which nothing exists, so that it is just an unchanging void, time is meaningless, but we can assert that time is still an aspect of that void. What would its mode of being be? I draw a blank, which fits a void well. And yet awareness is empty of meaning, if it is empty of contents, because there is nothing, or because there is no duration. Is there a connection between these two abstractions? Or is it just a one-way dependency? Hold on, what depends on what? These are just abstract conceptual phantasms. There are no independent entities here. Even in a plenum — space filled completely — time is meaningless unless there is an awareness of the presence of things changing, and because awareness is durational, they are both abstracted aspects of each other, so what need is there for both? We are just confusing ourselves.

If, on the other hand, it is not time, but awareness that is the basis of existence, since awareness is undeniable — what could deny it, if it wasn’t aware to begin with? — then what need is there for time? Can’t we just have awareness?

Clearly, we can say that time is just an abstract imputed quality of awareness, even though in our modern “objective” view, we make the awareness opaque by denying it, though we can’t, with any honesty, get rid of it if we assert that anything at all exists. But time is just a flattened and dried specimen of whatever awareness is. Awareness doesn’t flow, but somehow time does; is not divisible, yet somehow time is (leading to unsolvable paradoxes), and is the sole undeniable, and thus, unimpeachable aspect of existence — being necessarily present in all cases — among all the knowable appearances, though time seems to be questionable.

Abstracting awareness out of the appearances — the experience itself — leaves nothing lived behind, and thus empties “experience” of meaning and duration. Awareness is, in fact, the necessary and primordial aspect of all that appears — otherwise we couldn’t say that anything appears.

But awareness is not a container for the appearances to arise in, for exactly the same reason that time is not a container: awareness is not an entity. It has no intrinsic self nature because that would entail it existing within itself. If awareness is distinguished from what “it” is aware of, then “it” is nothing at all, not even an illusory appearance, because, having gotten rid of the appearances entirely, by separating them from their essential character — being known — we have nothing left but a phantasm of discursive thought: empty non-durational awareness. This formulation is just empty speech. It is an abstraction of an imputed quality of something that is already a meaningless abstraction.

Appearances have no other essential quality than to appear. To appear is to be known — remember, we are still on perceptions and mental activity. Appearing is the activity of being known, and there is no other essential character to be found. How then can the appearances be known, unless the act of knowing and the act of appearing are the same activity? If this is taken dualistically, as something observable being observed, then all is lost.

Clearly, time is just a misunderstanding of awareness projected out upon all appearances, from which awareness can never be apart. It is a phantasm of a particular view of what the character of awareness is: that it is being aware of something, like a reflection appearing in a mirror. But can one truly have a mirror without the reflection? Is a mirror something that stands apart, ready to reflect but not reflecting while waiting? What would “mirror” mean in the absence of reflections? Surely the mirror is only a mirror because of the quality of reflecting. The mirror may not be reflecting things we want to look at, but it is reflecting all the time, or it is not a mirror. The same is true of awareness. It cannot stand apart from the appearances. Both a mirror and awareness are equally devoid of meaning in the absence of their intrinsic activity.

So we come to a fork in the road, with two choices: go deeper still in search of the truth, or claim original victory in having discovered that awareness is the ability to be aware, and leave it at that. Perhaps this quick route is preferable because it opens up so many possibilities for what awareness is, all the while overlooking that they all implicitly assume awareness, so it’s already cooked in. This is the state-of-the art in modern science, which endeavors to find a foundation for awareness in the interactions of the constituents of the human brain, or the matter of the body itself, or the quantum interactions of the sub-atomic particles and fields that make up that matter — somewhere there must be constituents that make up, or interact in a manner that creates, awareness. And they will forever come up empty-handed.

The practice of this science must proceed as Einstein did his: from what is found in human experience, working back to the conditions that would make this presence possible. The normal practice today, going from a lower level and working up to observable phenomena is dualistic and lacks insight into the stochastic nature of all phenomena, which must be covered over by meaningless concepts such as “chance,” and “chaotic activity too complex to measure.” In fact, it is useful to enumerate how these meaningless concepts are used, for this is how Modern Science deals with things it can’t (currently) explain:

1. Asserting it didn’t happen.

2. Asserting it happened because of random chance.

3. Asserting it happened after a very long period of accumulating random events suddenly giving rise to a coherent result.

4. Asserting that while it is too difficult to calculate, it has to have happened “this way” and not the way it seemed to have happened.

We need to break through these nightmares of conceptual thinking. One way — that is available to everyone — is through a dedicated practice of meditation (of which modern ‘mindfulness’ occupies the first half-step only).

Fire is a destructive force that will consume whatever we give it, yet in return fire cooks our food, heats our homes, gives us light, and accompanies our reveries. Meditation is a kind of destructive force as well. Meditation helps us break the hold that our dramatic lives have on our emotions and thoughts. It also shows us the illusory nature of so much that we take to be real, that harms us, and it frees us from that suffering. Meditation breaks down the barriers that keep us constrained to just a limited corner of our otherwise powerful minds. And it allows us to find our way to our true nature.

I am telling you this because what follows is the fruit gained from such a lifelong, profound meditative practice. The arguments and definitions that follow are derived from spontaneous insights that were gained from such a practice that I have upheld for over sixty years. And here’s the kicker: as I argue in the related article, “What Is A Spiritual Insight and How Does it Occur?”:

… an insight is a recognition of some truth — not a string of words and references to conceptual ideas. An imperience of recognition must either come directly from within a state of deep absorption in the naturing of what appears, or be confirmed by it, if it is to be relied upon as a true insight.

And this recognition is exactly what we will discover is the essential character of what the concept of awareness is trying to point to.

There are two important meditative insights that are doctrinal in Buddhism, although the interpretation of these insights — their philosophical expositions — vary in the unpacking of the implications of each, within different schools of Buddhist thought. The reason I am focusing on Buddhism is that the second doctrine is only found in Buddhism and it will make this exposition much less complicated, although at the expense of gaining a more detailed understanding about what is at stake in this search for Awareness. However, I’ve already covered the details in Book 1, The Way of Unsaying.

The first doctrine is Impermanence, and the second is Emptiness. A very brief summary of each follows next.

The doctrine of Impermanence is necessarily founded upon our understanding of duration. Something must endure for a certain period, no matter how small, before we can assert that it exists, or even notice that it is actually present. Even the use of technological tools to register something so small, or so fleeting, as to be imperceptible to us, doesn’t change this fundamental principle upon which impermanence is founded — that of duration.

The Pali word for impermanence, anicca, is a compound word consisting of “a” meaning not, and “nicca” meaning “constant, continuous, permanent.” This concept appears extensively in the Pali Canon of Buddhism as one of its essential doctrines. The doctrine asserts that all that appears, without exception, are “transient, evanescent, inconstant”. Thus, all temporal things, whether they are material or mental, are in a continuous process of change, subject to decoherence and destruction. All physical and mental events come into being and then pass away. Period.

Emptiness is more difficult to grasp, as it is less a doctrine than a metaphysical fact discovered in profound states of meditative absorption. Basically, Emptiness — in its most complete exposition — means that nothing has an independent self-nature. This doesn’t mean that something doesn’t exist, it means that it doesn’t exist independently of everything else. But here is where the difficulty lies: this lack of independence doesn’t mean that “all things are connected.” It means that everything that appears has the same source, or basis, which, while intrinsic to each appearance, is not solely intrinsic to it alone. What this specifically does away with is the idea that things are manifested and then endure for some limited time (impermanence) on their own.

Instead, all things are manifested in a co-dependent fashion so that each thing depends on other things as conditions for its own existence, and they for their own existence. But it is misleading to use the word manifested here, as it is an ongoing process, not a fait accompli, so “manifesting” is a better way to put it.

So all things aren’t really things at all because they are empty of a self-nature, and thus aren’t independent entities. They do not stand on their own. Even you and I, are empty of an independent self-nature. Even Emptiness — the metaphysical reality — is empty of a self-nature. So while things appear, and seem to endure for a bit, they are little more than the action on the movie screen I mentioned earlier. It’s not that they don’t exist in any sense, it’s that they appear to be independently existing entities, but that is an illusion.

So, emptiness of self means there is no independent self-nature. In the absence of duration nothing can be said to exist, as I’ve shown. So it is not that it is an illusion, it is that it never appears at all. What appears must endure, if only for an infinitesimal period. And more importantly, each appearance is a form. It is not just random unorganized chaos. Thus, each appearance has a formal nature, and while that nature ‘arises from within’, in the same way that a human embryo develops from insemination onwards, the basis of this naturing is not contained within the formal appearance.

Getting back to our key question, what character does awareness have? It also is not an entity and thus has no intrinsic self either, for if it did then Emptiness would be undermined and all illusory things would be real and firmly established simply upon the awareness of them — as those who hold to a physical reality insist is the case — although they bolster their argument by insisting that it must be objective awareness, and not an individual’s subjective awareness. I am not arguing against their idea of objectivity; I am just pointing out that it is empty of meaning if there are no entities.

And I should point out that one small piece of dirty laundry in the world of philosophy and science is that no one has ever given a concrete answer of what the essential nature of a self is, and thus what an entity is exactly. This total lack of independent self-natures is a deep insight that only Buddhism has come to grips with. It’s been confirmed and reconfirmed over thousands of years, so I don’t have to disprove the unfounded assertions of physicalists.

An appearance must appear, therefore, at least for some small duration, for it to even be impermanent. Buddhists rarely focus on that when speaking of impermanence, because the focus is on the decay and dissolution or death of each appearance, rather than its coming into being and staying for a spell, or as the Buddhists say: arising, so this is an important point to mention.

So what are the repercussions of these rather obvious points once we bother to note them? What is duration, and what is the necessary quality of enduring? Is it only a matter of clock time?

We may think that duration is just some count of homogeneous units of time — one year, or 10 nanoseconds, for example — but the duration of something differs from that. Duration has, or is, a coherent continuity. This means that over time, though a thing changes, the change is not destructive of the thing’s nature. A tree can exist for hundreds or thousands of years as a living tree, but it no longer endures when it is cutdown and its wood used to construct a table, or cladding for a house; nor does a plant endure when it is harvested and its grains are milled into flour for bread. And of course, plants and trees are subject to a natural death at the end of their lifespan, or death by drought, fire, or other external adverse conditions. But plants and trees and humans endure, even as they change, developing and decaying naturally over time, as do all complex life forms, so what is it that endures? What is the essence of a nature?

However, coherent continuity cannot be some quantity of time, as time is normally defined, since each unit of time differs completely from both the previous unit, and the subsequent unit, of time. If these units of time, these moments of time, could be the same, then time looses its cognitive meaning. It no longer flows continuously.

Continuity itself is not a character of any thing, particularly in the Buddhist understanding which is more developed and illustrative of what continuity entails, since all phenomena are understood to be without an independent self-nature — so that there are no things, just ‘dharmas’. What does this word mean?

The root of the word dharma is “dhri” which means “to support, hold, or bear”. It is that which regulates the course of change by not taking part in change, but by being the principle which remains constant. So rather than the thing itself — rather than how we perceive the thing — this undefined “that” which does not take part in change, but regulates it, or is the source of it, must be an active principle of the thing, and this cannot be clock time as I’ve already shown. Time is not a principle of anything, as commonly understood. It is that in which things exist, develop, and decay only — and we no longer need that abstraction.

If there is no such principle, as described above, then there is no autogenous change, and thus no development of complex forms. Change then means merely destructive interaction. Time becomes meaningless, or at least boring, if nothing ever changes; but the change that comes about in the absence of an active principle is necessarily accidental, arising from collisions, friction, and adhering with/to other things, happening ‘over time’, yet without any coherency. And if this is asserted to be the origin of ‘order’, it leaves a gaping hole as to how coherent development of the form over its lifespan occurs. ‘Random interactions’ does not explain it.

So, the formal principle of an apparent thing cannot be a part of the thing, nor separate from it. It must therefore be ‘otherwise than’ the form, and yet, inseparable from it — neither the principle, nor what manifests, can be considered without the other. The formal cognitive principle in action making the form appear is all there is. Neither the action, nor the formal appearance is an entity, as there are no entities. Period. And to point out what may not be obvious, time cannot be other than this cognitive principle in action, as I will explain.

If there is such a principle, in order for it to regulate change, such change must either be inherent to the thing, which in the Buddhist understanding is impossible, or the principle must be cognizant of the actual state of the form and its possible subsequent states — and actualize one. That being what this activity consists of — and this is what ‘awareness’ seeks to point to, but gets lost in its hall of mirrors, phantasms, and distortions.

Thus, duration is not of some quantity of homogeneous moments of time, but is, rather, cognizance — i.e., awareness. And this cognizance must be durational, or it is not the principle that we seek, because it will just be some cognitively meaningless “awareness without duration.”

But now we are in a loop, since awareness must be durational, and duration is what we are trying to define!

The answer to this quandary is simple and elegant: duration is cognitively active. It is the principle of development we seek, because this principle is aware of the state and subsequent possibility of each thing — thus the duration of each thing is its formal principle. And please note, that this means that we are talking about forms of duration.

The continuity that we infer for any phenomenon is the product of the principle of its formal ontogenesis — which is durational.

Can we truly assert that this duration is anything other than awareness? What difference is there between knowing a thing and the thing’s existence? Remember, we are talking here about sense perceptions and other mental phenomena.

So, I will use the expression “coherent continuity” instead of the abstract “awareness” because this unfamiliar expression is not an abstraction. It is, rather, an indication of the essential character of what it is I am talking about.

Continuity refers to the continuum-like nature of our experiential lives, including our metacognitive states, but unlike a continuum in which each moment is not perceptively different, although the endpoints can be radically different, or in which each moment is just minutely different over a coherent whole of some period, I use “continuity” to focus on the actual moment.

I do this because the coherency I want you to focus on is not found between moments, which after all, are only abstractions (actually vivisections) from a hypostatized whole called “my life” that can never be fully known in the moment, so a “moment” is never other than a conceptualization resulting from ratiocination, rather than direct experience.

Rather, coherency is the character of the lived present called Now. The coherency known in the Now is exactly what “awareness” abstracts. If coherency is not found in the Now, but only between moments along a continuum, then the continuum — again — results from ratiocination, and not one’s lived present. Thus, our experiential life would not be lived, it would be calculated.

The coherency found within our lived experiences is not the result of a calculation; nor a comparison to what was or what comes next; it is, rather, a recognition: intuitively knowing or feeling an already encountered presence in each Now (lived moment) of our life. To denote this recognition, I use the term “kNow”, meaning the known Now (it’s pronounced like “now”).

Note that this recognition is not like that of recognizing someone you meet on your way somewhere, nor the recognition of some place you have already been. It is more like an unimportant déjà vu, where the feeling of recognition arises logically first, before the cause is specifically attended to — that is, before discrimination occurs. Thus, it is inseparable from the imperience of what is occurring kNow.

It is also like the sense of “flow” in some activity that you are involved in. This is not a reflection back upon what happened ‘before’, rather, it is the intuitive feeling of what you are doing.

This is important to say, because we are so invested in our dualistic understanding of everything, we easily fall into thinking within the dualistic view of hypostatized things performing actions we are only observing — even those that we ourselves are doing (even after a lengthy discourse on how that’s all empty of meaning).

The lived coherency of our experiences is the character of the very arising of what we are doing (dancing, painting, talking, writing, shaping wood, watching a film, etc.). An experience of déjà vu, as normally considered, is just this feeling, but of something phenomenal — that is, remarkable, or exceptional, in some personally meaningful way. But the quality of a déjà vu is exactly like that which I am calling coherent continuity. It happens in every kNow of our lives, whether or not we realize it.

And it needs to be pointed out that this coherency is the reason the ‘present moment’ is not some measure of duration, but is the very phenomenon of duration, which informs the present vignette, rather than an abstract conceptual and calculated ‘moment’ framing our vivisected experience. Thus, duration is the present moment, not a collection of moments, and not something between moments.

And this is and forever will be the fundamental difference between natural and constructed (artificial) intelligent things. A constructed thing will never have access to the coherency of the present vignette, but will only be able to construct a calculated continuum of abstract moments after the fact. There will never be a constructed thing that has lived experience. It will forever be limited to a calculated representation of the continuum of calculated operations of the machine.

From the outside, such a construction may one day seem to be perfectly indistinct from the living being it replaces, but what will be missing is the spiritual presence — and the spiritual opportunity inherent in lived experience — that the living being is a perfect manifestation of and the construction can never attain.

Coherence also, and importantly, coincides with life, arising as part of the genesis and birth of a living being, during which coherent continuity is already the key character — the formal genesis of the organism — which ends with death, which is the name we give to the decoherence of a once living form.

So recapping: awareness is an abstract conceptualization of the character we are trying to point to in our lived experiences. The word “awareness” is not even a name for that character though, it’s the name for the abstraction, which is not even a part of a lived experience, but is, rather, some quality that has been hypostatized as something real.

This abstraction is not even in the realm of lived experience, but lies in the body of ideas we possess. The abstraction process is invalid because, unlike extracting the seeds from a passion fruit, we cannot validly separate the formal lived character from the experience. With the seeds, we have something we can eat, and if we plant one, we’ll have (with luck) another fruit producing plant. In the case of the character of lived experience we have only a stillborn misunderstanding that doesn’t even help us point to what we are trying to say. Where is awareness? What is awareness? Those being the perennial questions that have spawned an entire industry dedicated to talking about it, writing about it, and looking for it. But of course, there is no it. That’s the problem.

Continuity points to the necessary presence in each vignette of lived experience — each kNow. This word, “continuity” is used rather than the word “continuum,” because a continuum is an imputed wholeness of the totality of some range of abstracted moments of lived experience. It is therefore an abstraction, which fails in the same way that “awareness” does.

And finally, coherence is the necessary character of lived experience, that we confusingly abstract out and call “awareness,” as if we can be aware of something not present in the coherency of the vignette of kNow.

Losing track of the necessarily coherent character of our lived experience releases us from the restrants of ‘seemliness’ in our conceptual wandering, allowing us to give birth to all manner of golems of conceptual imagination. The imagined kinds being furiously chased by those who search for life in all the wrong places. But none of it removes the fact of lived experience, nor does it add anything to it. And as Einstein pointed out, we must start from that and not some theoretical realm.

‘Awareness’ is a golem that exists only in our abstract conceptual thinking. You will never actually find it because it is inseparable from the looking. It’s like it’s sitting on the top of your detective hat, and no matter where you look, it’s not there. But if you enter a state of profound meditative absorption in the kNow, it’s all there is.

And this brings us to the last piece of this puzzle: if “awareness” is the déjà vu-like recognition of the manifestation of what appears in the kNow, then isn’t that just awareness, since you are aware of the recognition? Boy, if that’s all it is, I’ve really taken you on a wild ride to nowhere!

But I have to ask: did you note my statement that the formal cognitive principle is all there is? And that it must be cognizant of the current inner state of all the formal appearances and each one’s possible subsequent ontogenetic states — and actualize one? And, further, that this means that duration is this cognitive activity? This is not awareness as it is dualistically defined. It is not the ability to be aware, it is the ability to manifest what appears.

This is not even mind as commonly understood either. It is the omnintrinsic — that is, universally intrinsic to everything — formal generative naturing of all that appears. This activity is the cognitive activity that manifests the universe, and all that appears, i.e., manifests each vignette of the kNow. And it is not an entity, has no self, and is otherwise than any appearance it manifests. If you look for it, you will never find it, but if you stop looking for it, and empty your mind of silly ideas, you will one day suddenly realize that there is nothing other than this naturing. This is what Tibetan Buddhists call The Great Perfection, and which I call Responsive Naturing.

And finally, the recognition that is the coherent continuity of each appearance is like the feeling of déjà vu because it is a recognition of the activity of manifesting what appears. Remember there is no entity doing all this, so there is no ‘personal’ knowledge of the activity. And importantly, this recognition is not based upon either perception or inference. It is based upon the visceral recognition of the activity, not what it is manifesting, so it is not a recognition of what is manifested, which comes later. Instead, the knowing that arises inseparably as the recognition of the coherent continuity of the activity in each kNow is coterminous with, and inseparable from the active manifesting of what arises — and that is not on the side of the appearances, so no constructed mechanism, even if only a virtual (software) mechanism, has access to that, nor ever will.

A grasping intellect cannot accept this writing whose sole point is to highlight the erroneous nature of the conceptual understanding called “Awareness” by unpinning reality from the conceptual phantasms called into being by habitual desires to understand — phantasms wrought in the image of “Awareness.” It is a perfect circular prison. The escape route is the direct meditative insight of the unreality of the conceptual phantasms. But escape comes only when the prison is viscerally seen to be unreal, and the sentence as self-inflicted.