Book: Sceptical Spirituality
‘Consciousness’ as an ‘identifiable’ something
An exercise in primordial ontology - involving observation and reasoning
From an attentive awareness to a capacity which identifies this attentive awareness
Introduction
‘Consciousness’- as a wildly contested philosophical conception — veering from the supposedly ‘obvious’ (!) such as ‘we all know what ‘self-consciousness’ is’ — to the convoluted and unintelligible — such as consciousness is ‘epiphenomenal’ and doesn’t really exist in its own right. Like the popular conception of ‘art’, everyone thinks they know implicitly what consciousness is and amounts to, but are hardpressed to identify it conclusively, let alone articulate exactly what its features might consist of.
The ‘hard’ problem of consciousness is of course an attempt to reconcile concepts which are categorically irreconcilable — the objectively physical with the subjectively non-physical — along the lines of trying to find a way to prove — conclusively — that black and white, despite their apparent polarities, are in fact exactly the same colour; if you’ll only think about it the right way, and negotiate your concepts properly.
