Understanding consciousness
There was a theist vs atheist discussion when both accepted a premise that argument is ultimately about whether is the highest power conscious or not. At this point I left the original dispute between them and just answered what consciousness is, for it is a more productive thing to do.
A theist asked: "...Has anyone figured out what consciousness is?"
I've read some literature on the topic - namely Consciousness explained by Dennett - and would say my answer was pretty accurate set of words, so I'm saving it here.
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Consciousness is an echo within analyzing process experiencing itself.
On the other hand, the more automatically you do things, the less conscious you feel.
When you try to focus on yourself, it doesn't mean you'll succeed in experiencing yourself more, because brain will just think about itself as an object and rethink static answers it gave.
When you feel more alive, it's rather when you sense new things which challenge you to analyze your own way you react on them and this analysis too, and that too... all at the same time. Echoes spreading through the network of the mind. It doesn't have to be a logical analysis echo, but basically brain parts shouting processed sensory data at each other.
That's why eye contact of intelligent beings feels so powerful. Or why we feel more alive as kids. We don't have things automated yet. Memory also depends on this - we remember things according to their 'echo intensity' within the network.
Consciousness only has capacity to consciously understand much weaker consciousness, how brain works is far beyond capacity of the same brain to understand itself - that's why it feels mysterious even though universe is fully mechanistic. Mysteriousness aka unknown areas of existence cannot be removed. In fact, the more you know about how what works, the more borderline mysteries you reveal to yourself. Much smarter future AI can tell you how something works, and you can find sense in it, but you'll hardly see the whole picture at the same time, just part by part and connections, as if chemistry was one part and feelings other part.
Limits and form of our consciousness can be overcomed without losing but improving consciousness itself. The idea that outside agent can never know if something is conscious unless he experiences it "from inside" - which is not possible without becoming it and losing the old form - is not entirely true. We can be pretty sure other people are conscious like us because of their similar behavior under circumstances. The key is to understand the link between external behavior and inner experience. People who claim "it's not possible to know" just reflect their own lack of knowledge onto capabilities of future technology. To predict today what exactly will consciousness turn out to be, if humans will be able to spread it via mind on matter before we lose ability to spread via genes, remains unclear to me, but potential is definitely there. It doesn't mean that any random change will be an improvement, but at the very least, an experiment with chance of vast success.
Part of the universe is conscious down here... how tiny and important that little part, how huge the unliving monster... is this view of our significance subjective? It surely is. But the unliving monster is not an authority on this matter, universe doesn't have one, vast dark sky doesn't have societal order, universe is not dead because someone who knows better wants it that way. Some people seem to fail to realize the blasphemous thought: Allahu Akbar of consciousness is within you.
