On the 2nd of July, while driving a car, I lost consciousness and drove into a tree at 100 kilometers an hour. The reason seems to have been I had my first real seizure. These are more widely known as epileptic fits, but in my case the reason is not epilepsy, but a pretty big brain tumor.

I mentioned before that was going to do the scary part: to spell out my explanation of consciousness, which needs to be part of the 7th Sermon, in prose first, in order to see whether it actually makes sense, by making it explicit and exposing it to the critical attention of others. I’ve been incubating this idea since one particular moment of insight hit me back in (I think) 2011 as I was walking home from my job at the time as a research associate in an EEG lab, through a sunlit summer park. From the moment the Sermons were conceived as a concept, in early summer 2012, I knew this had to be part of the 7th Sermon. But for 12 years it was just a bunch of ideas in my head that I thought and meditated about.

I had a very strong feeling it was right, which was in tension with my understanding that it rationally didn’t deserve that, because it amounts to a claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness, unsolved for decades despite concerted efforts of very many very smart people. This quarter, I wrote it all out, and failed to find such a flaw myself. And several friends far more educated in philosophy than I am, who I solicited feedback from, didn’t find it either.

After the unscheduled mid-quarter progress report, some more work got done, though not as much as in the first half of the quarter. Both the writing of the seventh sermon and the translation of the fourth have proceeded incrementally. I have finished, though not yet published, the third song with my friend Idris and my brother Thomas. And I have recorded, with my father Martin, the first one…

The first quarter of 2024 is only half done, but there is enough progress to warrant a report.

Work on the seventh sermon has progressed satisfactorily. The single thread to be spun through the many Big Ideas is becoming clear. While much of the narrative that needs to become stanzas is quite complex, I currently feel I’m probably up to the task. The draft currently stands at 33 stanzas, with a few more removed since the last progress report. I’m increasingly optimistic I might finish it before the end of this year, if the vicissitudes of life permit it. This means I’m nearing completion of the entire set of seven!

The fourth quarter of 2023 was a very productive one.

1. I have made some progress translating the fourth sermon into German, and hope to have it done by summer for my grandmother’s next birthday.
2. With my father, I derived a new song from the fourth sermon much like Children of the Milky Way was derived from the first. We premiered it to some of our family yesterday. I’ll post that one next. It was written in English and German (so the German version of the song is a kind of preview of the translated sermon) near simultaneously…
3. …much Iike The dockyard masters / Die Meister eines Docks.

These three are just neatly circumscribed side projects set apart from the huge construction zone of The Noticing Machine.

A month after the previous progress report, there is already surprisingly much new progress to report. Sermon number six, “Our Maps and Territory”, has become an unfinished, but structurally complete, first draft. So now we’re in the sixth polishing stage. Trembling with nervousness, I will now solicit feedback and suggestions for improvements from a very few select friends, go over each stanza many times to make each as good as I can, add a few details still missing from the narrative, and swap out or cut the weakest bits.

Usually I write about 120 stanzas and cut out a third to get to the final count of strictly 80. I’m pretty sure I have already removed around 40 stanzas from this one, and the count still stands at 82. I already know I have to add at least one section with around three stanzas, even before I address omissions that will be pointed out by my beta test readers. They often demand additions of new sections, and I usually agree to one or two of these demands. Making those additions will of course take me further past the 80 stanza limit. So I expect cutting will be hard.

Lots of progress in the last two months. I did the docket space again and began to sort out the various bits and pieces that I had, over the last decades, pushed ahead into the last two sermons. Again this method worked beautifully. The key question was where to draw the line between the sixth and seventh sermons – this is answered. On that basis, I wrote some more. Now the sixth sermon has a pretty detailed structure and 41 completed stanzas – as usual, I expect not all of those will be among the 80 stanzas of the finished sermon. The title is changed again, to “Our Maps and Territory”. The seventh has a rough structure and 15 complete stanzas; it remains named “The Universe Machine”. Many of these stanzas are old, some over ten years, but most are new.

The scary part is the seventh sermon will open with a novel theory of consciousness that I have been incubating since before I started the sermons in 2012. This theory has always been intended to turn up somewhere near the end. I have the insanely bold, possibly megalomaniacal, idea that this theory might actually solve the hard problem of consciousness. This is extremely unlikely to succeed. But it’ll at least be a serious attempt. To make that attempt, I need to finally put the vague exciting ideas in my head down into language structured enough to see whether they’re actually coherent… let alone right. Before I do this in poetry, I’m doing it in prose, and talking with friends who know more about philosophy than I do. If the ideas turn out to be crap, which is very likely because so far all explanations of consciousness have, I do have a plan B. But plan A is the utterly mad one.

For once, I can report a large amount of progress. The last few days have been the most productive of the entire project so far. I now have a complete draft of the fifth Secular Sermon, now titled “The Words our Voices Raise”. I’m now nervously showing this draft to a very few very select friends, in order to get their feedback and to find those mistakes that only become apparent when I read the text out loud, rather than just see it written.

Over the last few days I have experimented with a method of writing that was new to me. It is very well described in professor Edward Slingerland’s blog post There is Only One Way to Write a Book. In my (new) experience, this method works quite well! So if you plan to do a big complicated piece of writing, it is worth a thorough read.

If not, basically the idea is to put all the notes and ideas you have onto little pieces of paper (I say “dockets” for short), lay them out in a big room, and arrange and re-arrange them into groups and sequences that eventually produce an outline, which you then “only” need to fill out when writing.