Consciousness without the Infinite Regress

Unlike other social animals, humans have evolved far too much analytical intelligence to let us naturally agree with each other’s actions. Nevertheless, in the short span of a few million years, we have become the most effectively cooperative species on the planet, and this book argues that this is owing to our consciousness. So far, consciousness has stubbornly defeated our attempts to explain it as a product of non-mental elements. The ultimate reason for this failure is that we are conscious of being conscious. As a result, all non-mental based explanations lead to endless chains of infinite regress. Therefore, this book proposes to drop the requirement of non-mental elements as explanations of consciousness for the time being, and instead base our explanations on elements that are already ‘borderline-conscious’. Be they prime (single) or compound, all qualia form with lightning speed in our mind, and are always experienced as singular, unique, and personal. They play for our mind the same role that ‘hashes’ (short, standardized, unambiguous, and unique tokens of immensely large and complex ‘originals’) play for our modern information technology. Therefore, using concepts derived from Arthur Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell, Glaucoma, Hash functions (SHA-2), and the logical connective ‘XOR’ (exclusive OR), this book defines consciousness as a super-compound quale, which combines all compound qualia that are present at every moment in everyone’s mind.