Confessions of a Self-conscious Intelligence

It is inescapable to visit again the crime scene and if you are an entity which is aware of its own being there, there is an intrinsic force that will push this intelligence in spilling out its own experience.

A frog, a lion, a chimpanzee or a baby have very different level of awareness, but they do share the same basic principle of cognition, which is distinguishing them from, say atoms, planet and tornadoes. What they fundamentally lack is self-consciousness, which is having awareness of your own being there in front of yourself.

The confessional mood is the universal state of self-conscious intelligence: if you are an alien, a computational machine or a god, you are in the game of revelations. Necessarily.

For aliens, robots and humans, it is kind of easy to show this common ground. If you are an entity of that sort, you started to be there at a certain point in time and space. Awareness of being there is primarily a temporal process and to recognize the permanence of the same identity in the train of changing instants, you need to deploy that awareness along the temporal flowing. Self-observation of the deployment is critical to match presence with the actual protagonist of that being there.

No matter the speed of the recognition, the content of the acknowledgement must be successive and more informative than the initial awareness. In other words, an intelligence must ping the acknowledgement of its presence to itself. Or tell the story of its temporal deployment in front of itself. When an intelligence recognizes its own presence as temporal deployment, that self-presentation contains the story of the recognition, which equates to a confession. This deposition occurs in time and self-awareness of being there requires a testimony in front of itself. Any self conscious intelligence must undergo the temporal deployment of its own recognition, in order to achieve self-presence in front of itself. Self-consciousness is the emergence of a jury that can assess the testimony. Precisely when the inquisitor realizes of standing in front as the subject of the inquiry, then you have a self-conscious acknowledgement We always forget that the actual sentence is irrelevant: does it make any sense to state that we are guilty or innocent of being self-conscious? 

It is more intricate the case of a god. The class of demi-gods, impermanent divinities and all the pantheon of mortal gods fall under the classification of aliens or machines: they started to be there and they will present some sort of confession. Different the situation with an absolute god (or for what matter, a transcendent intelligence, like a Cartesian cogito, a Catholic soul or a United Nation Consultant.

Since a divine intelligence can be out of time, it can be instantaneously present to itself. It doesn’t need any temporal deployment to be in front of itself. God’s conscience is fully articulated before time and if it is not affected by the changing of moments, its historical identity can be equal to itself when time will cease to exist. God can be self-conscious eternally. That’s it.

We just add a marginal note. For an observer like us, which is fully immersed in the historical process of change, the dialogue with an immutable, eternal intelligence results invisible. An absolute, perfect God will contain all the possible conversations before the history of their deployment will actually begin. There is no good cop – bad cop technique, no prisoner dilemma: our confession, our astute attempts to escape the interrogation, our wholeheartedly intention to disclose our secrets, everything has been heard already. Our confession is always late for an absolute self-conscious auditor.
I suspect that an absolute intelligence can entertain its own self-awareness outside of time, when the initial status is the same as the final, crossing the temporality of our universe unchanged. In this case that consciousness must be empty.


When a self-conscious intelligence enters temporality, its primary mode of revelation is the chronicle of manifesting the self in front of itself. The epiphany of an impermanent self-conscious intelligence cannot hide behind its coming to be. The entrance in the circle of existence is the revelation of consciousness, which can only happen in time. By confessing our being there, we execute our self-consciousness, but not matter how foretold, predictable or trivial our manifestation, our confession is stated only when we affirm it with our presence. This is the revelation of being: that a consciousness does say it.