I've always been fascinated by what people mean by the word "God." One quality common to most people's idea of God is that God, like us, is self-conscious. The same ability that gives us self-consciousness also gives us the ability to simulate the self-consciousness of others, an essential tool for human communication. We easily ascribe consciousness and will to animals and natural phenomena. Modern people, however, confine self-consciousness to humans only, leaving anthropomorphising to children and poets.
What is self-consciousness? How can the self perceive itself? When we become conscious of things other than the self it is because we create symbolic representations of these things in our minds. We do not directly perceive anything except our own 3-D simulation of reality and can only communicate what we perceive by further reducing that simulation to shared symbols. Conscious states are symbolized in language, which requires a physical substrate, breath or writing to be communicated to others.
Self-consciousness then is a perception feedback loop, consisting of 1) perceiving self and 2) perceived self. Human self-consciousness adds step 3) symbol of perception of self. This symbol can be our name or our photograph or simply the word "I." Whereas self and perception of self are illusive, like a black hole that permits no light to escape, the symbol of perception of self exists in the real world, it is the "event horizon" of the black hole of self-consciousness.
Deep in human symbolism is an uneasiness about these symbols of self. Narcissus was transfixed by his own image, but what if then he saw himself get out of the water and walk down the road? Would he run after this other self, hopelessly in love, or would he kill the impostor? Myths are rife with twins, doppelgangers, doubles, wax dummies, all identity stealers, all proof I am not unique. There is only one authentic me, consisting of my unique self-consciousness. Twins often stay intertwined their whole lives, unable to separate from that vision of self. They seem to share a brain. Others begin pushing against each other, defining the self by its quality of being "not like the other."
Twins, then, represent symbols of the self that are indistinguishable from the self. There can be only one such symbol, as there is only one self to perceive. I can only be I. Yet, the symbol of the perception of self is not the self. In a sense, it too is a twin. My name is not me, my photograph is not me, not even my corpse is me. The more perfect the symbol the more it will be like the self until it is the self. In the real world, nothing is perfect, so there can be no perfect symbol of the self. Twins and doppelgangers abound.
Even without a twin I have always had an inchoate anxiety about the self. I was who I was because of my parents. What if I had different parents? Or we lived in a different country? I didn't invent English or Mormonism or the Great Books or color television, all things that influenced me greatly. I had no say. It was already there, waiting for defenseless baby me. My brain was shaped by the language and ideas and values that were being coded into me, all in the form of symbols. My brain grew around the symbols that were already there. Who was I really other than naked self-awareness?
God, it is agreed, possesses this naked self-awareness otherwise He is no God. Anyone who proposed a god who lacked self-consciousness would be accused of substituting something that is, by definition, not God into the concept of "God." Not only that, by analogy with human self-consciousness, God must communicate his self-consciousness in a way that other self-conscious entities will understand.
Man lives in a world of imagination and symbols, things that partake of little reality. God's imagination and symbols are reality itself. Reality is God's symbol of of the perception of his self. But what of the perception of self, the second element in self-consciousness, itself? Is what is beheld in perception of self the self itself, indistinguishable from the self in all respects except that it is the pereceived self rather than the perceiving self? These two states, perceiving and perceived, must exist simultaneously for there to be self-consciousness. A distinction is brought into the nature of God.
Within the single self of God, then there is 1) perceiving self, and 2) perceived self, the self being identical in both cases. One sees from the inside, one from the outside. One is transcendent, one is imminent. Each is twin of the other. From God's self-consciousness, from His twinning, comes God's message, "I am that I am," and God's symbol, the physical world. Reality should then, to communicate God's self-perception, consist of self-recursive processes, such as self-replication and self-consciousness. Our own self-consciousness is a result of the self-recursive nature of reality, the symbol of God's simultaneous perception and perceiving of God. Each of us, in that act of naked self-awareness, participates in the primal and timeless act of God's self-awareness. We ourselves are the symbols of God's twinning, and through His twinning, His creating.
