The Entity

I keep wanting to write something about the first moment that an entity becomes aware.

Where does “awareness” start? How does it even happen?

Imagine an Entity with no memories. Fully-formed, yet completely new to the world, a blank slate of impressions.

What’s the first sensation it perceives? Is it the sand beneath it? The sun, up above? Is it even capable of distinguishing between the coarse texture at its back and the heat, or will it take a breeze, a sudden shift in temperature, a gust ruffling the texture of its skin, to provide enough context to make it realize it can feel.

If the wind does blow over it, will that make it stir? At what point will the Entity even realize that it has a body? That it’s capable of movement?

Its eyes are closed—must we posit that it has eyes? It has eyes, and they are closed. They are turned, though, up towards the heavens. As the sun shines down on its eyelids, it turns its field of vision red. But does the Entity even notice?

What is “sight”? What keeps us in our heads? If there was no sight and no sound, would we still think of our belly and our chest and our genitals as being “down”? Or would we live there, in the center of ourselves, only to be summoned upwards once we needed sight? Or is it our brain, perhaps, holding us prisoner? If our brains were in all belly, would we still think through our heads, just because those have the most sensory organs?

Perhaps the Entity must have some basic instinct. It should know just enough to be able to move when it has to, to react instinctively. Maybe it will even know to open its eyes—

Then what will happen once the new eyes are opened? What a sensory flood that would be! In the silence of the desert, to be suddenly flooded with light! Would it know the difference? It must.

But what will happen when it looks down at its body? Will it even recognize its own contours? Again, contrast. If a part of it wiggles, perhaps in response to outside stimuli, will it feel that change? Yes, and then it will know, it will know that is a part of its body. But what if it then looks out, looks up, and sees a withered tree against the backdrop of the sky? Will it recognize that the tree is different? How disappointed will the Entity be when it realizes it cannot wiggle those branches?