I'm wrestling with an idea that as yet remains so nebulous that I can only make reference to it by posting excerpts from essays written by clearer minds. The first, by Erik Davis, from an essay on his website called "The Omega Network" that he describes as a remix from his book Techgnosis

Teilhard [de Chardin]’s appeal to Christians wrestling with the theory of evolution is clear. John Haught, a Roman Catholic theologian who aruges in a number of influential books that church teachings are not incompatible with Darwin, holds up Teilhard as a model for understanding how a purposeful God might be working through the apparently wayward, and sometimes obscenely cruel, development of material forms. The key for Haught, as for Teilhard, is consciousness: the world of human experience and its forms of understanding overlaps the objects and processes described by physics and information theory, but is not identified with them. The material world produced by Darwinian forces is thus layered with human meanings and perceptions exactly the way that Teilhard’s physical planet is layered with the noosphere.

The second comes from an article called Consciousness is Nothing but a Word by Henry D. Schlinger:

As the title of my article suggests, consciousness is not a thing, a place, or a cognitive process (whatever that is); it's only a word that we use in a variety of ways. For example, we can say that an organism is "conscious" if it is awake and/or alert (versus asleep or in a coma). We can then study the behaviors associated with wakefulness and the underlying neural structures that mediate them. Or, like Francis Crick and Christoph Koch, we can use "consciousness" to refer to visual perception, which is acceptable as long as it points to actual behaviors involved in perceiving and their ultimate evolutionary and learned causes. But wakefulness and visual perception are not what most scholars are referring to with the word "consciousness."

So, what the heck is consciousness? Given the title of my podcast, you might reasonably expect me to keep a provisional definition at the ready. Well, all I can say to that is that we're out of toilet paper and I need to make a run to the grocery store.

Tags: consciousness