Consciousness resolved

Finally I resolved a feature of consciousness that had me stumped since school. In this diagram there is an obvious mistake. The ladybird is duplicated. It is both a real ladybird and a virtual ladybird in the brain of the subject. When we see something however we only see a single real one so the question is, which ladybird then does the subject here see? If they see the "real" ladybird directly then what does all the brain stuff do and if they only see the virtual ladybird then how do they know that there is a real ladybird? Indeed what is a "real" ladybird if we think our virtual ladybird is the real ladybird.

Another way to put this conundrum is to realise that the real lady bird is actually what we the scientist sees and the virtual ladybird is only what the subject says they see. Obviously the scientist can't "see" the virtual ladybird but oddly it means that and the subject can't see the "real ladybird".

Expand this implication and it means that we can draw an analogous picture of the scientist. He is looking at the real ladybird and real patient but what he is actually seeing is his brain's processing of this scene. The scientist can't see what is really there anymore than the patient can see the real ladybird that is at some distance away from them.

This is an ancient conundrum going back into the dawn of history.

It is also nonsense tho it has had me stumped for over 20 years.

The point occurred to me that a distinction must be made between what is "actually happening" and what we are thinking about. Like seeing a film on TV and not wanting a character to die and then realising at the same time that it is only a film and coloured lights on a screen. The drama is what we think - what is actually happening is analogous (but not the same) to the coloured lights on a screen. Analogous because if we think about the coloured lights then that too is now drama and what is really happening is we are having a thought!

As I've sort of said before the Now is outside our field of vision but we have this indefinable sense of Nowness and things Happening for Real ... as opposed to the arbitrary nature of our ephemeral thoughts.

Now in the diagram the patient is involved in a stream of happenings that includes for a while the ladybird. The scientist however is involved in a different stream which is the obervations of the patient brain and the ladybird. When the scientist tries to "think" about what the patient must be seeing when their brain lights up they are only having a "thought" about what is really happening for the patient. To say that the patient is "conscious" of the ladybird and that the consciousness must be part of the brain lighting up is to overlook the importance of "the stream". The consciousness arises because the patient's brain at that moment is linked with the stream of motion in the Universe that presented the ladybird and caused all the movements in their brain. The consciousness is the Nowness. The scientist cannot access this Nowness in the Patient because their Nowness (their consciousness) is Of the Patient. The scientist simply couldn't be observing the patient and experiencing the ladybird at the same time. So the duality that is created is a feature of the experiment itself - the very scientist/patient relationship and the "consciousness of the patient" that the scientist thinks he is investigating is actually the same consciousness that both he and patient experience is their Nowness. That original pseudo-haiku

You and Me;

When we touch

Where?

could be applied here as

You and Me conscious of things;

When we become scientist and patient

Where?