Does the Whirlpool Know It’s a Whirlpool?

The church bells were ringing as I walked into Ludlow. Market traders were putting the finishing touches to their stalls, the morning had a chill to it, and I stopped to record the sound. For a moment, listening brought me fully into the place.

Returning to that moment now, I find a question waiting inside it.

If the self is an ongoing process, what exactly is it that becomes aware of itself?

I like this question because it seems innocent until you try to answer it. Then you discover it has already furnished the room. There’s an experience, and somewhere behind it there’s supposed to be someone watching. A little captain behind the eyes, receiving reports from the senses and occasionally turning his chair around to inspect himself.

I’ve spent much of my life assuming he was in there.

Yet whenever I try to find him, I encounter more experience. A thought about myself. A memory. The feeling of being somewhere inside my head. Even that feeling can become something I notice.

The temptation is to appoint another observer behind the first one. Someone must be watching the watcher. But this quickly becomes an overcrowded head, with nobody able to explain how the watching began.

Putting a smaller person inside the person simply gives the mystery another address.

There’s a trap in the other direction, too. Failing to find an inner captain doesn’t prove that nobody’s home. The search may be asking experience to present its subject as though it were another object, something I could locate alongside a sensation or a passing thought.

I can hear a bell. It doesn’t follow that I should be able to find the hearer in the same way.

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Consider a whirlpool.

You can point to it. It has a shape, a location, a recognisable movement. Water passes through it while the pattern persists. But you can’t lift it out of the river and take it home.

The whirlpool keeps happening.

I wonder whether something similar is true of the person I call me. There’s continuity here: memories I recognise, habits I repeat, people I love, a particular way of wandering into a question and forgetting what I originally came to do. All of it belongs to a living body that changes, gets hungry, sleeps badly, hears church bells and reaches for its phone.

I’m real enough. The question is what kind of reality that amounts to.

Does being real require a permanent core? Or can a person persist through the ongoing activity of remembering, sensing, relating and responding?

I find the second possibility easier to inhabit than I once did. It loosens the pressure to discover the definitive Clay underneath all the temporary versions. There’s a life being lived here, with enough continuity for responsibility and recognition, and enough openness for something unexpected to happen.

Still, the whirlpool leaves something out.

Does it know it’s a whirlpool?

Describing how a pattern holds together doesn’t explain why anything should feel like being that pattern. I can replace self with process throughout an essay and still leave the central mystery untouched.

The water turns. I hear bells. There’s an unresolved difference between those two sentences.

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One possibility is that awareness doesn’t need to wait for an act of inward inspection.

When I’m listening to the bells, I don’t have to tell myself, “I am now having an auditory experience,” for the hearing to be present to me. Reflection comes afterwards, when I begin describing what happened or wondering who was there.

In the phenomenological tradition, this distinction appears as the difference between reflective and pre-reflective self-awareness. Dan Zahavi develops the thought that experience already has a first-person character before we turn it into something we examine. On that account, awareness of experience needn’t depend on a second observer inspecting the first.

That gives me something more interesting to consider than an empty chair where the captain used to sit. The sense of being someone could be woven into the experiencing itself.

It also complicates the question I began with. “What becomes aware of itself?” makes awareness sound like a possession acquired by a thing that was already complete. But a living person can develop ways of attending to their own experience without there being an unchanging spectator at the centre.

I can learn to recognise irritation before I turn it into an argument. I can notice an old story organising my response to a new situation. I can catch myself defending an identity I no longer particularly want.

The changing person does the noticing. Change doesn’t, by itself, make that impossible.

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Reading Francesca Ferrando has been drawing my attention towards the conditions that make this person possible. Her The Art of Being Posthuman approaches existential posthumanism through self-inquiry that extends into questions of other species, technology and our place in the world.

The turn I’m following from there leads outwards.

Who am I when I stop treating the world as scenery around a self-contained individual?

In Ludlow, the bells were part of what brought me into the present. So were the cold air and the people preparing for the day. My attention took shape through an encounter with a place. Even the words I’m using now arrived through other people, carried by a language I inherited.

The same thing happens in conversation. I arrive with an intuition I can barely articulate. Someone offers a phrase, I disagree with part of it, and in working out why, I discover what I was trying to say. In my conversations with AI, the exchange can make a thought possible that I wasn’t managing to reach alone.

That doesn’t settle where the boundaries of mind belong. It does make the sealed-off picture of the thinker feel less convincing.

The environment participates in what becomes thinkable. A conversation changes the next question. A town interrupts a preoccupation. A bell calls attention out of its habitual circuits.

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I still don’t know why any of this is experienced from within.

The whirlpool helps me think about continuity through change. It gives me no warrant to declare consciousness explained. And the fact that I can question my sense of self doesn’t allow me to step outside experience and inspect the whole arrangement from nowhere.

I’m inside the question I’m asking.

For now, I keep returning to that pause in Ludlow. There was a sound, and I was listening. Then I reached for my phone because I wanted to carry something of it away.

I’ve brought the recording home. I can play the bells again.

The listener is harder to hold still.

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