Feeling the Feeling of Feeling Feelings
It’s (probably) not nonsense
And, or and not are the three words that make a computer able to solve nearly any problem we can formulate. Without diving into the math, the three terms, as logic gates, form what’s called a functionally complete set. A logic gate is a simple construct to understand, there are at least two wires that go in to an and and an or gate, one for a not, and one that comes out for all three. Current traveling down the wire represents the number 1, while a lack of electricity represents 0; so, in the case of an and gate, if wire one and wire two are 1s, then the out wire is a 1, otherwise the out wire is 0. An or gate means if wire one or wire two is 1, then the out wire is a 1. A not gate flips it’s input: a zero goes in, a one comes out.
There’s a simple beauty in the foundational layer of every computer — unlike the human mind, which becomes more complex as we dive deeper into the base layer of our own biology. Leaving the physical explanation of our minds to neuroscientists, consider a logical abstraction for self-awareness.
The first step is identifying a sufficient base layer of self-awareness, the way logic gates are a base layer for computer processing. In the mind, this layer consists of feelings: emotional and sensory. Ultimately, the internal sensations of hunger and happiness hit the same philosophical bedrock as external feelings like sight and touch. They both reduce to qualia, and from there it’s very hard to explain further without appealing to something itself unexplainable which only sidesteps the problem, like a soul or panpsychism. So instead of trying to dig into the bedrock, let’s assume that the deep answers to consciousness aren’t any deeper than this.
Jumping to the conclusion, we get to the title: Feeling the feeling of feeling feelings. Let me break this phrase down: the last feelings represents what was described in the previous paragraph, internal and external sensations. While we don’t know that others experience these feelings just the same as ourselves, with zero-knowledge proofs we can actually know for certain that someone does see or hear. Those same proofs can’t establish emotional existence, but if you’ve every interacted with another person then you’ve probably been given enough proof that those emotions exist.
Step two: feeling feelings. You might be thinking “isn’t this already what I experience?” and I say to you dear reader, no! Not because it isn’t sufficiently complex to make a satisfying philosophical answer, but because many creatures may already fit this definition. Consider a moth flying towards a light, the light acting as a force against the neurons of the moth to draw it in. The moth feels the light, but it is doubtful that the moth is experiencing feeling the light. The moth is closer to an automaton than even a dog in the way it acts. It is programmed, in a way, to fly towards the light, giving the same response to the same stimulus. Never learning, never recognizing the mistake it makes.
The feeling of feeling feelings is a description of our self-awareness. Instead of digging through the bedrock of qualia, qualia itself can describe our awareness of it. If feelings are a type of thing, the way numbers and letters are types of things to computers, then why shouldn’t our experience of feelings itself be the same type? This is true of machines, that a base type of a language is still a type itself. The same way a proof does not exist for the existence of the feeling of hunger, a proof does not exist for the existence of feeling hunger — the hard problem of solipsism reformulated.
To capture the self-mind-boggling experience of the feeling of feeling feelings, I came up with the phrase ‘feeling the feeling of feeling feelings’. This, I think, describes our relationship with our minds succinctly, if a bit confusingly. It makes sense, if our self-awareness is itself a feeling, then it can be felt, and the recognition of all other feelings including itself is what we experience in a moment-to-moment basis. While the idea presented here does not exclude any other external construct which may exist to give rise to the strange experience of our awareness, the self-contained nature of the phrase “feeling the feeling of feeling feelings”, if true, rules out the necessity for such externalities.
