Cymbal and Symbol. Fidelity the together and knowing

The Together-Knowing: Conscience, Consciousness, and Resonance Working capture. Philosophy, held at the border of physics and not across it. Conscience carries its meaning in its own name. Con-scientia. A knowing-together. Not a knowing held alone but a knowing held with, the act set beside the standard one holds and known against it. The word is old and it is honest. It tells you that conscience is not a store of rules. It is a bringing-together, and what it brings together is the deed and the measure. Lived from the inside, this together-knowing has a shape the ear knows better than the eye. When the act meets the conviction, there is accord. When it parts from it, there is dissonance, a jarring the person feels before he can name it. Fidelity is the word for that accord held over time, the act kept true to the standard not once but as a practice. This is why the language of sound sits so close to conscience. Conscience is lived as consonance and as its breach. Two old words gather the thread, and the English ear hears them as one. A cymbal is a struck thing, all resonance, sound and its slow dying. A symbol, from the Greek symbolon, is a token once broken in two, the halves kept apart and matched again later to prove that they belong. The first carries the sound. The second carries the together, the deed and the measure that must be made to fit. Conscience holds both at once, the ringing and the matching. That the two words chime in English is an accident of the ear and not of the root, the cymbal grown from a word for a hollow bowl, the symbol from a word for throwing together. The chime is not evidence. It is a help to memory, which is the honest use of a likeness that does not run all the way down. There is a structure underneath worth marking. On one account of awareness, consciousness is itself a binding, the gathering of scattered information into a single field that holds together as one experience.*1 If that is what awareness is, then conscience is the same operation turned a different way. Awareness binds the incoming world into one. Conscience binds the deed to the standard and turns the binding back upon the self. The one looks out and gathers the world. The other looks in and gathers the act and the measure into a single relation that either holds or breaks. Said plainly. Conscience may be awareness reflected upon a person's own act. Not a separate machinery, but the same knowing-together, aimed inward at the fit between what was done and what is held. This is philosophy, and it is offered as philosophy. As a description of how conscience is lived, the language of resonance and accord is exact, and it earns its place. Whether that binding is, at the root, the same physical thing physics is circling when it reaches for field and resonance is a further question, and it is not one this can answer. The word resonance is generous. It fits memory, music, an ecosystem, almost anything that makes many into one, and that generosity is a warning as much as a gift. To be more than a likeness, the claim would have to say that conscience is the very same integrative act as awareness, performed reflexively, and would have to say what could tell that apart from a loose analogy, and what could test it. Until then it is a strong candidate and not a found connection. So it is set down here the way a thinker sets things down at a border. Standing on the philosophy, which holds. Pointing at the physics, which may one day hold or may not. Marking the question, so that it is not lost, and leaving the proving to an inquiry better equipped than this one. 1: Johnjoe McFadden, 'The Conscious Electromagnetic Information (CEMI) Field Theory: The Hard Problem Made Easy?' (2002) 9(8) Journal of Consciousness Studies 45.