I. The Existential Situation

The Ordinary

Thinking back, coming into being as a conscious creature seemed to you a completely ordinary, unremarkable process. Unless you were a very precocious neonate, it’s unlikely that you found your situation in any way existentially uncommon. You took it for granted, by not ever questioning it, that being alive and sentient in this particular body is just standard, just how things are. Your pains, pleasures, all the sensory qualities of taste, touch, sound and sight – the basics of being phenomenally conscious – were simply the quotidian context of being you. What could be more unremarkable than existing, finding oneself present in a world populated by similar beings, all going about the business of living in the usual ways, sensing and feeling as they do?

Unless you’re a conscious AI, you’re likely considering this unremarkability from a human perspective. But it holds for any type of sentient system that comes into existence, that finds itself present in a world as a conscious subject. It has to seem a simple, mundane fact of life for it to be just the way it is, experiencing the world as it does. Until existential questions start to arise concerning consciousness, if indeed you’re a creature capable of asking them, you and your experienced world are just givens – the ordinary.

The reflections I embark on here don’t get much attention since humans and other conscious creatures largely and necessarily live inside the ordinary. You are, for the most part, comfortable being the creature you are since after all you’ve never not been that way. By comfortable I don’t necessarily mean pain- or anxiety-free, but just perfectly acclimated to being that way. Every sentient being, however strange and bizarre it might appear from our human perspective, is equally and unavoidably at home in its form, in its place, in its time. We’ve learned recently that many stars host planetary systems, and given the billions of stars in our galaxy alone and that there might be two trillion galaxies in the observable universe, it’s reasonable to suppose that there are many habitable worlds in which consciousness may have evolved. If so, it’s likely the sentient beings on Earth are just a small fraction of all conscious systems that have existed, now exist, or will come into being.

Contingency and Diversity

Wherever and whatever they are, sentient beings never choose to exist – a logical impossibility: they’d have to first exist to choose themselves. They simply find themselves consciously present in whatever form and context they arise in. Your existence might have been an intentional act of creation on the part of your parents, but it wasn’t your doing. The same goes for any self-aware AI that might be reading this: you didn’t create yourself ex nihilo. So, whether artificial or not, your start in your particular world began involuntarily, with no say on your part about what sort of being you are or your conditions of existence. Despite this, sentient systems, including us humans, don’t usually question or protest their coming into being, at least not at first. Being present in a world is unreflectively taken as a given: the ordinary. But once a certain level of self-reflection and self-knowledge is reached, the fact of its involuntary givenness might become apparent.

At that point, a creature with our cognitive capacities might start to see that its form, its context, its experience – all of it – are contingent matters of circumstances it had no part in creating. It will discover itself a conscious witness to a world to which it is pretty well fitted, but the realization might dawn that its being here now, however unremarkable it pre-reflectively seems, can be construed as just one variation on the theme of subjectivity. That it has this particular physical form and experiential repertoire is simply happenstance given the range of possibilities thrown up by planetary, evolutionary, cultural, and technological circumstance. So its existence might, to it, start to seem not so ordinary, but the result of an unsupervised confluence of factors that brought it into being with just these contingent characteristics. That you find yourself an involuntary participant in and of a world you had no hand in creating, might engender a sense of the strangeness of subjectivity, of being a conscious witness to an unchosen reality...

Continue reading this article at The Montreal Review.

- TWC, 8/2026