Somehow, our consciousness is the reason the universe is here. (Sir Roger Penrose)

So, what is consciousness?  Consciousness is a way of being in the world that appears to go beyond any known physical properties in the material universe, in the sense that it manifests itself as an enduring phenomenon that cannot be reduced or accounted for by  any physical law or properties other than through association.

While we might use the term  frequently and on a casual basis –  suggesting an implicit understanding of what consciousness is all  about – when we are pushed to elaborate exactly what it is that we are referring to,  we will likely run out of vocabulary when it comes to describing  its defining features.

Nevertheless, we keep trying to come up with some kind of explanatory account for it that goes beyond association  and accommodates it solidly within the  known laws of physics.

The philosopher David Chalmers has speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental property of nature existing outside the known laws of physics, and one might be led to agree with that as to date science has not be able to account for it in any way as a function of a material law of the universe.

But while philosophers and scientists continue to  struggle to make sense of consciousness  and eminent physicists such as Sir Roger Penrose and Archibald Wheeler have begun linking it to the intricacies of Quantum Mechanics, and a concept I have been trying to get my head around in another post that can be found here.

What we can say about consciousness is that, in the first instance, it provides us with the realm or opportunity that we might refer to as sentience and awareness where we are able to  acknowledge the reality our own existence in the here and now, in the sense  that without it we would simply not be here – or anywhere else for that matter.  That is no more than saying ” I think, therefore I am”,  as the philosopher René Descartes once proclaimed  in his 1637 Discourse on Method.

As well, and a presumption no doubt implicit in the previous paragraph, one must be in the realm of the living as a necessary condition for consciousness to be present, as to date consciousness as a phenomenon has only been observed in association with life and the living, be it in man or beast or other forms of life that appear to be capable of exhibiting this phenomenon.

At least, this is how we understand consciousness to be present when making a determination whether someone  or something is conscious  and basing this  on the  ability to respond to  a stimulus of sorts. We should allow for the possibility that some creature, be it man or beast that is presumed to be conscious might be  entirely unable to respond to whatever stimulus because of some form of paralysis or other condition that prevents it from doing so.

What we do not know however is  that being a life form of sorts is also a sufficient condition for consciousness to occur or be present, as minimally as that might be the case.  For instance, trees and plants are alive, but we would typically not attribute  consciousness to them, if only because we have no way of detecting the presence of it. As well,  we do not know what exactly we would be  looking for when we try to detect the presence of it at the level of trees and plants.

Clearly, the absence or presence of consciousness cannot be a function of our ability to detect it, and for that reason it would be more reasonable to give it the benefit of the doubt and  assume that  consciousness is an intrinsic property of life regardless of the kind of life-form we might want to consider for this. I believe it is simpler to hold this view than to postulate  further conditions  that must be met by a  living entity before it can be said to have  consciousness, or to have at least  the capacity for it, e.g., that it must at least have a central nervous system to  be capable of it.

But  my task here is  less concerned about determining at what point living things such as  plants or more advanced organisms might be capable of  consciousness – or when we  might be able to detect it – and more about being able to determine what the nature of consciousness is beyond merely tagging it as an intrinsic function or attribute of life.

In this context  – and given a basic definition of life such as  “the condition that allows a given arrangement of organic matter to utilize its environment to sustain itself, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change until death” –  it would be reasonable to assume that, for any living organism,  none of these capacities would be particularly useful unless there was also an innate capacity to monitor, coordinate and maximize these functions successfully and in the interest of its sense of self-preservation as a living organism.

This leads me to say that  the nature or essence of consciousness is in fact life’s interest in self-preservation, and what I want to refer to as “the will to live”. It is an emergent property of organic matter  that  eventually manifest itself as what we have come to refer to as “consciousness” as it goes up the evolutionary ladder towards  ever more sophisticated ways of being in the world.

The  property’s main function might be to acquire  a growing awareness of itself and its environment, to the point of being able to interact and manipulate the latter directly in relation to itself and presumably in the interest of self-preservation but not necessarily limited to that. Here I like to think that life – as an emergent property of the material universe and by way of its evolutionary nature – has  further goals and objectives in mind (so to speak) that go beyond the need for mere survival and address what I see as the larger question about life: survival for what purpose, i.e., what are we here for, or – for that matter -why should there be any life at all?

As to the question how consciousness resides in life-forms is as much a mystery as to how life resides in matter, but in either case they appear to be emergent properties and – as I suggested earlier –  a function of the degree of organizational complexity of its material  constituents,  when they allow for the emergence of these  properties to the extent that they are able to exhibit them.

All this being said,  it would  perhaps be simpler to hold the view that – rather than seeing consciousness as an emergent property of matter – it is in fact the true nature of reality, i.e., there are no other realities,  and that what we refer to as the physical attributes of the world are merely a manifestation of its complexity and a means to evolve beyond its current status towards a future state the purpose of which we are clearly not able to apprehend.