INTRODUCTION

What does it mean to be conscious and to live a conscious life? In Part I we will take the verb ‘to be’ as the act of consciousness and ‘to live’ as how it is for us when we sustain ‘to be’ over time. We endure and I will take duration as more important than any one snapshot even when duration is much like a series of snapshots, as any analysis of life and living often is. In this part I want to suspend belief about how it is to live this life of ours, to test what is commonplace and familiar about life and living and to begin to think about what it is for us to be temporal beings, or beings that have a sense of their time and place.

I will take Derek Parfit’s story of the ‘teleporter’ and examine beliefs about what it is to be a person; but first, what do I mean by the term ‘person’?

I believe persons are made of other people. This may sound outlandish at first pass, but we will go around this idea many times in this book. The idea of person can be related to how we think of parts and wholes. Parts and wholes can be quite a useful way of conceptualising our world. We are, as an example, individual members of the human family. As such, we are each one part of a larger whole that consists solely of all those many parts put together.

Persons are what we know and do not know about someone. After my father died, I realised that I didn’t know why he had come to live in Ramsgate, Kent. My grandfather moved there, but I have no idea why that was; they had come from Taunton in Somerset. It could have been to find work, but I am just guessing. When we read a well-drawn character in a book, it is because the writer has only drawn it sufficiently for us to produce the virtual person that moves through the pages. We do this as the reader. Much that we imagine about the person is ours and is not drawn from the book at all.