I was just thinking some more about consciousness being invested into matter. Like that idea that you could pump consciousness into a robot or something. And I was talking to Laura Jane about this online. And I realized that part of what we were doing, and what people are doing on the internet in general, is passing consciousness back and forth.

But it doesn’t stay. The internet itself is not (yet) conscious. My computer is not conscious. It’s a channel for consciousness though. And when my consciousness passes through this object, it leaves sedimentary artifacts. Words, pictures, websites, email conversations, etc. Like silt which is deposited by a river. But the artifacts themselves do not contain the consciousness. Or do they? I think, instead, they must alter the course that other consciousnesses which pass this way must flow. Like when you put a boulder into water. It must flow around it.

So if consciousness, according to the model described above, can flow from one source to another, how do you get it to be retained in some vessel? How do you get a channel for something to become a vessel with which to hold onto it? Like, why is it that we, as people, seem to retain consciousness?

Or maybe we don’t really retain consciousness at all. Maybe we too are just vessels through which it is passing through. Maybe our experiences, and our memories are exactly the same as what I described above: the sedimentary artifacts of consciousness passing through matter. Maybe we’re not retaining consciousness at all. We’re not vessels. We’re channels. Or maybe we’re not even channels. Maybe we are actually wellsprings, from which channels flow…

Fuck, that’s totally nuts…

*Credit where credit is due: I nabbed this post-title from the title of a screen-print my friend John made a while back. I don’t know if he nabbed it from somewhere or not. Thanks John.