Thoughts on life and consciousness

August 9, 2023

I want to draw some connections between my favorite quotes from the Kurzgesagt video on Optimistic Nihilism and from the Waking Up course on Consciousness by Sam Harris.

Some takeaways and notes:

The very notion of "value" or "importance" is always a relative construct of consciousness and its contents.
Consciousness is the root origin of "value". All value originates from consciousness and its contents.
The construct of value originates in consciousness and thus is always relative to it.
All questions of value must come from the context of consciousness.
Without consciousness, the universe would be devoid of the concept of value or "good".
Consciousness is the core context of value.
Consciousness is intrinsically valuable.
Consciousness is the root intrinsic value. (The most foundational, fundamental, and rudimentary intrinsic value.)

If the universe was devoid of any consciousness, there would be no awareness of experience, existence, life, the universe, and everything.
The awareness of experience and existence gives rise to the concepts of "value" and "good" (within the relative context of consciousness).
The concept of value and "good" is relative to the context of conscious experience.

What can we conclude about consciousness (thus far in our attempts to study its nature)?
Consciousness is the (conscious) state of awareness of the experience of existence.
In an oversimplified sense, consciousness only seems to emerge from "complex" beings capable of being aware of experience and existence.
Consciousness emerges from "complex" living "beings".

Consciousness is a point of being a "thinking and feeling part of the universe" at a particular point in the "emergence spectrum". The way it feels at this particular point and the thoughts that emerge there are the "mind". In its most independent form, its ideal state is joy, serenity, and equanimity. But in the "emergence spectrum", it is always interconnected and interdependent on the other points up and down the "emergence spectrum" and alongside it.
The mind cannot exist without everything else and its interconnectivity to everything else. The mind can only be described by its relationships to everything.
Generally speaking, the living "being" is directly connected to consciousness itself.

There is nothing more valuable or important than consciousness and therefore conscious beings.
All consciousness is comprised of present moment conscious experiences.
Each conscious experience has "quality" that can be better or worse based on the consequences of the experience on/for the conscious being.

Consciousness inherently prefers good vs bad, flourishing vs suffering, joy vs misery, love vs hate, contentment vs discontentment, serenity vs anxiety, calmness vs distress, happiness vs sorrow.

Consciousness is a single point of awareness in the infinite interconnected system of emergence.

Conscious experience consists of both a system of inner states of being and a system of interconnectedness.
Consciousness is both a system of inner states of being and also an interconnectedness.