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.

A fictional proof of the existence of God:the rabbit in casserole

Back in the days Scholastic philosophy elaborated a bullet proof demonstration of the existence of God. We can think of God, which is the biggest, most sublime, Uber-paramount idea we could possibly entertain. Who put it there? Only God might have. Zac! 

You got it. If we can think of God then only God must concede himself to our mind. You are giggling? Not convinced? Maybe you find risible the Biggus Dickus argument that from our thinking we entail our own existence.

“I think, therefore I’m”.

Yet human minds always have found something magic in words. As if like the mere utterance of sounds CUM meaning, would produce an effect in reality. The more we worship the internal structure of language, the more we meditate in the empty hall of verbal building, the more names seem obviously to have powers of their own. The most intolerant Idealism is precisely the rise of words-thought to the throne of reality. I think, therefore I participate in the almighty divinity of consciousness, which is everywhere, which is everything. Therefore my thoughts are real, they are thing that constitute the nature of the universe.

But of course Idealism is actually a form of religion. And we know very well what happened to all religion in the West. They died. We know for a fact that the idea of God is a product of men’s thinking. We know for a fact that there are no spirits in the mathematical regularity of nature. In the universe there is only matter and all the riddles that torment human minds are created by misuse of language, thus, by an accurate police of our way of expression, we will get to the truth. IT COULD WORK.

If only we could make sense of impossible sentences like “The king of France is bold”: there is no such a thing of a king of France, yet our language can glide so smoothly on false surface??? And why “Transparent liquid on Earth is water” is true only if we point the chemical substance H2O? Why the correct usage of language has been anchored to reality only with the discovery of modern chemistry??? And what if we are in the matrix of vats for brains? What is fixing our expression to reality is we are not anchored to REAL thing, but only to a flux of information? Why??? Why if we randomly and assemble a sentence that by mere chance mirrors an actual true sentence of knowledge? Does our random sentence constitute an example of genuine knowledge? Why???

Well, the aseptic analytical philosophy of language, so impatient of finding mere deserts, actually found them: it is worshipping the divinity of language, like all the heat-stroked fanatics of God-desert, blinded by the undoubted dedication to the unique light in front of them. Guys, you are in the desert and that is a Kant-Mother-Fichte Star blasting all its nuclear fusion towards you. Turn!

We, nomads of those derelict, religious civilizations, we know that after the deposition of Gods, after the deposition of one, only God, the fanatic conviction in consciousness couldn’t stand still. We know that the mind itself, is a brain trick (thank you Patricia, and you Paul, you are awesome. Yeah, you married, tenured, published brains, you always are in my heart. Respect).

The mind is the hallucination of a community of brains to project virtual ecological niches where to play augmented cognitive performances. But the mind is empty. Nobody at home. Zero. It’s the hologram of a character played by a Homo Sapiens Sapiens body in social structures.

In the Demons of Dostoevsky, Stavrogin teases Satov the supposed believer about the existence of God. We can say a lot of nice and gracious words about faith and the projection of God. Basically the entire high hierarchy of the Catholic Church is convinced that God is actually a metaphor to help the sufferance of man. BUT to make the rabbit in casserole, all the sauce is not enough, not matter how logical, compassionate, goodhearted your deeds: you need the rabbit!

Well, we discovered that the casserole too is fictional, that the consciousness of men is fiction. That our experience of being self-conscious is fictional. Was it all a joke then??? What a cruel, infinite jest! The fake antagonist of Satov the believer is Kirillov, the humanist atheist. He discovered (and so did David Foster Wallace) the joke and the only way to solve the riddle, is to terminate the game by your own will. Shot the Brain-Sherif! Both Kirillov and Satov were puppets played by Stavrogin for his mere amusement, he knew that this is pure philosophy, just a game and it can be played only one way or the other. He killed himself as well.

So?

Well, there is no real rabbit and there is no real casserole, but we are still here, with our eyes wide open, and legs, and arms, and hearts, and sex, (thank you Nina), then something is there. Something is always there. I have a feeling that something is always near. You’ve sensed that something’s watching you. It’s a white rabbit and we follow him down the hole to see how deep it is. Always a mind happens when a cognition chases the trail left by another consciousness and when at dusk we finally reach the preceding mind, then it’s us leaving the footprints. Being the mind that our experience of self-consciousness is. Distant memories when we move the first steps, stumbling and then the first words, stammering, and all the game is just a loop. When you catch the character in the mirror, don’t be afraid to see a rabbit.