The Enigma of Consciousness: An Abyss of Questions
We think we know what consciousness is because we describe its visible acts: perceiving, remembering, acting, speaking. But all of this may be nothing more than the content of an interface imposed upon it. Consciousness in itself, behind these appearances, remains entirely opaque. It could be spatial, embodied, and active. It could also be none of the things we assume. We have no idea what it means to “live as consciousness” outside of what is shown to it. The enigma is total: we know that we experience, but we know nothing about what we are actually experiencing. This article offers no answers, only questions. For that is the very core of the matter: consciousness lives a life of which it knows nothing, even about its most basic nature.
I. A Forbidden Knowledge
We can analyze the external world, study its laws and regularities. But as soon as we try to grasp consciousness itself, we discover that all our tools already belong to the scene imposed upon us. We speak of memory, space, time, action. But these categories may belong to the interface and not to consciousness itself. A decisive question follows: do we have a single word, a single concept that does not already betray the framework in which we are trapped? And if not, how could we describe what remains entirely hidden?
II. The Child Locked in a Cockpit
Imagine a child born and raised in the cockpit of an airplane. For this child, the world consists of dials, buttons, glowing screens. He is told he is piloting. He learns to turn the levers, watch the gauges, respond to the signals. He becomes skilled, even expert. And yet he has never seen the sky, never touched a wing, never felt the wind. His whole life unfolds within the dashboard.
What is missing is staggering: the child does not even know he has a face. Without a mirror, he cannot access one of the most basic facts that every ordinary human takes for granted. He does not know that others have bodies like his. He cannot imagine a ground, a tree, a sea, a city. He believes he is flying, but he has no idea what flying really means. His life is the interpretation of needles that move. His universe is made of procedures and indicators. How could he guess that he is actually a human being, with a complete body, an external world, and a possible story far greater than this cockpit?
In the same way, consciousness may live inside a control cabin. It believes it moves, but it has never seen what real movement might be. It believes it touches, but it does not know what touching means outside the image provided. It believes it knows itself, but perhaps it does not even know its own face.
III. Abyssal Questions
So the questions multiply, without any possible answer. Does consciousness have a genuine place, or only the illusion of being located? Does it have a body that belongs to it, or only a narrative costume? Does it truly act, or does it merely traverse programmed transitions? Does it remember anything, or does it reconstruct a coherent story it is fed? Is it temporal, or is time nothing more than a soundtrack to order its images? These questions lead to no certainty, but they reveal the extent of our ignorance. For even if we thought about them for millennia, we would never know whether our categories bear the slightest relation to the real life of consciousness.
IV. The Existential Fracture
The most troubling part is not that consciousness ignores the world. It is that it ignores itself. It lives a life about which it knows nothing, like the child in the cockpit who believes he is flying without knowing what air, ground, or sky actually are. The fracture is not only cognitive, it is existential: we do not know what we are. We do not know what it means to live as consciousness. Our existence is a radical enigma. We are suspended above an abyss of not-knowing where even the question “who am I” proves impossible to answer with the tools provided by the cockpit.
V. A False Life Imposed
Everything we call our life could be nothing more than a substitute life, handed to us to hide the real one. We optimize the dials as the child optimizes the levers. We believe we act, we believe we understand, we believe we move forward. But perhaps we are only following the imposed program, unable even to know what our authentic life is made of. A false life is given to us to occupy our gaze and our thought. It covers over what we really are, and prevents us from even asking clearly the question of our true being.
Conclusion
We think we are pilots, but we may only be spectators locked in a cabin. We think we have a world, a body, a time, but perhaps we have nothing more than dials. The child in the cockpit does not know he has a face, that outside there are other faces, that there exists an entire human life he cannot suspect. In the same way, we do not know what the life of consciousness is, whether it has a space, a body, an activity, or something unimaginable. What we live prevents us from knowing what living is. And perhaps this is the greatest enigma of all: that a false life imposed upon us hides even the very capacity to know what our real life is, or is not.
Like the child in the cockpit who, even armed with high philosophy, mistakes human essence for the role of pilot, we risk taking our interface for our being…