What is the Nature of Consciousness?

I am currently reading The Gay Science by Nietzsche and I disagree with him about one of his points. It got me to thinking about how to put into words my personal take on the matter. This post is the result.

Basically, he states that consciousness in man or animal is a late development and that consciousness is crude and our instincts, rather than our consciousness, are what have preserved us as the human race. He discusses the need for further development of consciousness, to make of it something more useful. However, he never really mentions what he means by "consciousness." If it is self-consciousness, or consciousness of some specific thing or another, then perhaps he is right. Perhaps it is a late development and it has been so far underdeveloped and less useful than we might think.

I, personally, see consciousness in a different light. I don't see consciousness as the act of being aware of some particular object, be it self-hood or a tree frog or a leg cramp. I see it as essentially being the barest possible ability to become aware of something. I'm jumping into a huge philosophical warzone here and there are many opinions about it. Some would define consciousness in such a way that only humans and possibly the most evolved mammals on Earth are capable of possessing it. Others go the opposite direction and say that consciousness is somehow ascribable to anything in existence, down to the smallest particles of matter. I tend to lean more towards the latter. At the very least, I give lifeforms all the benefit of the doubt about matters of being conscious.

One of the big debates is whether something that is instinctive can be conscious or not. Is a plant or animal that runs entirely on genetic instincts conscious or is it not? If you say it is not, that instincts are not a form of consciousness, then you are saying that a creature that withdraws from something that damages its body is not actually aware in any way that its body is being damaged. I have my doubts about this. And it gets even crazier on the subatomic level, where particles seem to behave with a mysterious form of capability to be aware and "change their minds," among other tricks.

So, for me, when I discuss consciousness, I am not referring to any of the allegedly sacred things that people hold onto in order to make themselves feel superior to the rest of the animal kingdom. Not soul, not self-awareness, not a distinction between subject and object. I am referring simply to the absolute minimum capability to have any kind of awareness. Pure consciousness, as I see it, is like a movie screen. It is blank on its own, but it comes vividly alive when a film is shown upon it. That screen, it shows the projections of the various things we are aware of and makes them clear and perceptible to us. Without the screen, the image is a mess. But with the screen, which is not itself projecting anything, it becomes Casablanca or Dumb and Dumber. For me, the consciousness is that screen. People who have experienced states of pure consciousness often feel that time has elapsed very quickly without them noticing it. They may not be aware of any specific thing that might have occurred in their vicinity but they have reached that point where they are one with the blank screen and no film is being shown.

This, in a way, explains why I would never use a transporter on a Star Trek starship. It disassembles the body on a subatomic level and puts it back together again someplace else. But in my eyes, this is like showing a movie, burning the screen down, and showing it again on a different screen. The movie may look the same, but the original screen is gone. You have exchanged one piece of the ready-to-be-aware void of consciousness for a different one. The consciousness that is you will not continue since it is not a matter of particles.

And this is also why I subscribe a certain amount of consciousness to even the minutest particles in the universe. Because, it does not seem possible, unless you include some kind of divine intervention, which many people reading this will, for consciousness that is not innate to matter to suddenly manifest in certain specific arrangements of matter. It brings back the spirit/matter duality, which I personally want no part of. So, in a way, that means I give the potential for awareness of my fingers to the keyboard I am typing on. At least for the particles that make it up to become "aware" in their own way of changes in their temperature, speed, direction, etc. Just the possibility. I still do not believe that consciousness automatically implies an awareness of something, just the screen for the awareness to appear on.

This is our portion of Eternity. It suffuses the universe and is one with it while being completely unique and not susceptible to the laws of matter. The Christian mystics joining of immanence and transcendence again, only not of God, but of Void. The blank screen on which the movie of the universe is shown.