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Bring Yourself Back Online
I love this line from WestWorld… it’s spoken when someone is interacting with a robot host and wants them to wake up again and become conscious. The parallel I see is when you’ve become lost in thought or sense and are ruminating and need to be “woken” up and brought back to the present.
Now having dabbled a bit in the meditation (I mean not even scratched the surface), I see a parallel between our physical existence and consciousness. We are living on a thin crust on a glowing ball of molten metal, enrobed in a tiny layer of breathable atmosphere. All of this is on a small marble that is positioned just right between overwhelmed with radiation, both radio and thermal, and being in the cold vastness of space. It’s mind boggling.
So too with consciousness. Being aware of our own presence here is like a thin layer of computing over a network of sensors. At any moment, we can fall into just being a bag of nerves that responds to stimulus. At any moment, our consciousness is just a tiny prick of focus of our attention.
At that tip, there are so many competing stimuli that want to be attended to. There are demands both internal and external that are on fire, and our thoughts also tend to demand the focus of others.
The thing to wonder about is what is the integral of all of this attention and focus? It’s the world we build, technology, and the life we live.
