Reading this
comment, I recall a very good description of pure consciousness that is independent of any platform.
"Look yonder," said my Guide, "in Flatland thou hast lived; of Lineland thou hast received a vision; thou hast soared with me to the heights of Spaceland; now, in order to complete the range of thy experience, I conduct thee downward to the lowest depth of existence, even to the realm of Pointland, the Abyss of No dimensions.
"Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the on-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality; for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn his lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy. Now listen."
He ceased; and there arose from the little buzzing creature a tiny, low, monotonous, but distinct tinkling, as from one of your Spaceland phonographs, from which I caught these words, "Infinite beatitude of existence! It is; and there is nothing else beside It." "What," said I, "does the puny creature mean by 'it'?" "He means himself," said the Sphere: "have you not noticed before now, that babies and babyish people who cannot distinguish themselves from the world, speak of themselves in the Third Person? But hush!"
"It fills all Space," continued the little soliloquizing Creature, "and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness, ah, the happiness of Being!"
"Can you not startle the little thing out of its complacency?" said I. "Tell it what it really is, as you told me; reveal to it the narrow limitations of Pointland, and lead it up to something higher." "That is no easy task," said my Master; "try you."
Hereon, raising by voice to the uttermost, I addressed the Point as follows:
"Silence, silence, contemptible Creature. You call yourself the All in All, but you are the Nothing: your so-called Universe is a mere speck in a Line, and a Line is a mere shadow as compared with —" "Hush, hush, you have said enough," interrupted the Sphere, "now listen, and mark the effect of your harangue on the King of Pointland."
The lustre of the Monarch, who beamed more brightly than ever upon hearing my words, shewed clearly that he retained his complacency; and I had hardly ceased when he took up his strain again. "Ah, the joy, ah, the joy of Thought! What can It not achieve by thinking! Its own Thought coming to Itself, suggestive of its disparagement, thereby to enhance Its happiness! Sweet rebellion stirred up to result in triumph! Ah, the divine creative power of the All in One! Ah, the joy, the joy of Being!"
"You see," said my Teacher, "how little your words have done. So far as the Monarch understand them at all, he accepts them as his own — for he cannot conceive of any other except himself — and plumes himself upon the variety of 'Its Thought' as an instance of creative Power. Let us leave this God of Pointland to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and omniscience: nothing that you or I can do can rescue him from his self-satisfaction."
-- Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott was published back in 1884, so it is available at public domain because the property rights have expired. I mentioned it a few times,
here and
here, when discussing about dimensions.
This was written because Abbott wanted to introduce the concept of higher dimensions, more than three, but of course we as the denizens of Spaceland (3-D world) find it difficult to imagine. So what he did was to go down one dimension and took the point of view from a being in Flatland (2-D world), a Square. Later in the story, Square is visited by Lord Sphere, a 3-D being from Spaceland. Of course, at first he is skeptical about Sphere and dismissed him as simply a Circle, but in the end he realises that his world is simply a flat plane. To make his point, Sphere actually brings Square to Pointland, which is 2 dimensions less, that is, no dimension. Sphere then asked Square to convince the God of Pointland that the world is not zero dimension. So that's the part in the excerpt above.
And why are higher dimensions important, you ask? Perhaps Abbott already foresaw a future research in Physics. You would have heard all the buzz of superstring theory by now, what is it all about? It is a promising Theory of Everything, but there's a catch: the equations only work out if we have 10 dimensions of space. So we imagine that our world may actually have extra dimensions, albeit tucked inside the fabric of space-time, curling and intertwining upon them themselves. Physicist Brian Greene offers the analogy of the power cables to make sense of these extra dimensions. Cables, from afar, look like they only have one dimension, i.e. length. But if you go down the scale as an ant, you would notice that the cables have thickness; an existing dimension, but often too small to observe. Similarly, our world may have 7 extra dimensions that are too ultra-microscopic to observe. This is why the concept of higher dimensions is very important.
This is also one of the purposes of the Large Hadron Collider: to detect the extra dimensions. When particles collide in certain manners, some of the energy may be ejected to the hidden dimensions. We can measure the energy of the particles before collision and compare it to the energy after. If there is energy loss, we may be able to conclude the existence of the extra dimensions.
I highly recommend watching the TEDTalk by Brian Greene on superstring theory (2005), embedded below:
