When asleep the more immediate environment is the internal environment. It’s always more immediate in a sense, but when wakeful one is more immediately responsive to the external environment (from the senses).
The sleep retreat, and twilight retreat interests me (and brain wave changes), too the twilight from sleep to wakeful.
It’s tempting to think the more awake one is the more conscious, which maybe true, but this may not reveal some trick of consciousness generated by the retreat into the less wakeful. It’s no great stretch, it fits with sleeping so not so tired when awake.
Less of this while asleep, can mean more of that while awake. This and that can be quite different things, not just lowered vigilance of sleep makes sustained heightened vigilance of wakefulness more effective/possible. The two may be differentiation of sorts, not necessarily from each other. Probably not from each other. Divergent in ways, not necessarily from each other, but may happen to be (if all the details were, or could be seen, from external).
Brain wave changes may indicate a different modulation, changed global operation, a cyclic reconfiguration. Any present configuration (the now) is unlikely to be mostly only what generates reality (consciousness, the self-awareness thing). To do the self-awareness thing probably memory of previous configurations is required, or feelings related of internal past.
If wakeful consciousness (that includes self-awareness) is somehow or in some part generated over time by senses folding back, the trip into the retreat through the twilight, then efforts of wakeful consciousness may not easily reveal the thing that generated it. You know I might stagger out of bed in the morning, then over to the kettle to make a coffee, light my smoke and hope for a revelation about what generates self-awareness while the lights all turn on in my head, but the truth is something that came nearer explaining it happened as my senses faded and lights out the night before. As I wake, become more wakeful, i’m further from it, looking in the wrong place.
During wakefulness the impositions of the physical external world can’t be so easily ignored, or turned off (senses folding back). Of course there is much control during wakefulness, adjustment.
But is the retreating, are the retreats physical things? Mental states, inhabiting the internal environment more so.
A neural modulation, a configuration of six hours ago has stopped (it, or something similar will return, likely – the future), but it’s passed and past.
Seems absurd maybe that the trajectory of less awareness (cyclic, temporary) might be critical to generating self-aware consciousness, but why not? You shut your eyes then the wetware processing is left to do what (for vision, but consider the folding back of all senses with sleep)?
The usual presence/proximity detectors (too) for the sensory array (radar if you like) is getting pings back from the wetware. So near it needs to put them through delays to make use of. Slow the clock down, route it through something extra, try and test. It’s got time, and surplus resources.
The (re)configuration possibilities, the resource recombination possibilities are just that, possibilities, from which something may be happened upon. Are the range of possibilities a physical thing, as physicalism might have it?
Or, put more directly perhaps, can there be any retreat into something that’s not physical?
There can be a retreat to something where less of the external environment imposes (less immediate, for some period anyway), which is a more practical consideration of the proposition, or idea.
So fading the external environment, willed, or otherwise, proximately, or directly for, might be necessary to self-aware type consciousness.