The question returns

History can fold. A question asked in one century can be asked again without being the same question. Follow a thread rather than a date.

1. 01

   What knows?

   When something is known, what is the knower? A soul, a heart-mind, a stream, a brain, a person?

2. 02

   What is a self?

   Is a self a substance, a forensic role, a momentary stream, a heart-mind, or something we should not assume?

3. 03

   Can the mind know itself?

   Is awareness always already of itself, or is self-knowledge a further act?

4. 04

   Is awareness always reflective?

   Must one perceive that one perceives, or can there be awareness without a second look?

5. 05

   Is everything mental conscious?

   Can something happen in the mind without appearing to consciousness?

6. 06

   Is consciousness continuous?

   Does experience flow, flicker, or arise moment by moment?

7. 07

   What makes you the same person?

   Body, soul, memory, consciousness, or a forensic practice of holding someone to account?

8. 08

   What happens outside awareness?

   Sleep, habit, plastic nature, minute perception, unreported seeing, the life of the body.

9. 09

   How can experience be measured?

   How do you measure an experience only one person can have?

10. 10

    How do we know another mind exists?

    You meet speech, behavior, bodies, brains, signals. You do not meet the experience.

11. 11

    Which creatures are conscious?

    If another creature can suffer, what follows? Intelligence is not the test.

12. 12

    What would count as evidence for machine consciousness?

    Fluent speech about consciousness is not itself proof of experience.

13. 13

    Why does consciousness matter morally?

    If there is something it is like to be another being, does that change what we owe it?

14. 14

    Why is there experience at all?

    The hard question is not a late invention. It is also not a solved science.

15. 15

    What does the mind add to seeing?

    A mirror receives. An eye is perceptive of what it undergoes. What does intellect add that has no color?