#denis budkov

Dragon’s Lair

The photo shows the eruption of the highest and most active volcano in the natural park Kamchatka “Klyuchevskoy”. The park is near the seismic station “Apakhonchich”. The lenticular cloud above the top of the volcano, illuminated by hot lava, creates the impression that a fire-breathing dragon is sitting on the top under the clouds.

Volcano erupting at night

These stunning snaps of an erupting volcano lighting up the night sky will take your breath away. The beautiful pictures show the hot red lava shooting out of the Klyuchevskaya Sopka volcano — the highest mountain on the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia.

As the steaming lava spurts from the volcano, the vivid red color illuminates the dark blue sky. The incredible shots were caught by photographer Denis Budkov during the four times the volcano has erupted — in 2010, 2013, 2015 and 2016. (Caters News)

Photography by Denis Budkov/Caters News

The “knower” is not a thing, not an entity sitting somewhere in your brain or body like a hidden controller. It’s not hardware, it’s not software, and it’s not a “user” of the mind-system. It’s more like the system functioning itself, the emergent process of experience.

Think of your laptop analogy: there is no separate “knower” inside the machine. The hardware + software + inputs interact, and suddenly Chrome appears, or Tumblr responds. The “knower” is what it looks like from the inside when the system is running like the self-aware phenomenon, not an object you can find.

When you look for the knower, you’re searching for something that your system cannot produce as an object because the knower is the system itself in operation, the process of experiencing. The "knower” is the pattern, the configuration of cognitive functions, memories, perception, and reactions, and the “I” arises as a reflection of that operation but there’s no separate operator.

So, the question “who is perceiving?” is a trick question if you expect a thing. The perceiving happens, and the “who” is a label your system attaches to the ongoing process of perceiving. The knower, if you want to call it that, is not a thing you can isolate, it is the dynamic emergence of knowing itself like electricity flowing through the circuits, not a light bulb.