“O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all—what is it? Where did it come from? And why?” (Julian Jaynes 1976)

Welcome. A few words about myself. I have come to believe there is something irreducibly real in the world that subtly reveals itself as having meaning in the midst of a chaotic flux of the ten thousand things. Even though life on this fragile but resilient planet seems to have emerged over nearly 4 billion years, anatomically correct modern humans with cognitive abilities of symbolic expressiveness have been around for less than 70,000 years; and these hominins capable of modern linguistic thought for less than the 11,700 years since the dawning of our current Holocene interglacial period. Homo sapiens have adapted from nomadic bands struggling to survive on a sparse hunter-gatherer landscape to dominating the entire planet and intellectually reaching for and grasping the origins and vast expanse of the universe using our self-aware, introspectable ‘mind-space’ capable of abstract thought, critical thinking, and birthing artificial intelligence prodigies in our own image. I hope to use this blog space to foster a dialogue on the nature of our human consciousness that appears to be everything, and yet nothing at all—what is it? Where did it come from? And why?

Don J Blythe