Consciousness is a favorite subject of mine. It tickles my brain and I can’t help but be aware of how important it is to understand what consciousness is. The more we know how it is involved in our phenomenal experience, the more we are able to control our environment (including the environment we are encased in, eg. bodies). Most people are, to some degree, both intent on their survival and aware that their continued survival requires an assortment of things: other individuals, a reliable food supply, reliable water, a safe environment, and many other basics that too many go without. Our list gets updated as new information is added to our awareness and not everyone shares the same things on their lists. For instance, global warming is beginning to become a concern for a large number of people. It’s an agreement of disparate positions, but the general consensus seems to be that it is indeed happening and whomever is to blame, it needs our global attention. Carl Jung started to talk of a Collective Consciousness near the end of his life, many years after writing about the Collective Unconscious. As information starts to move globally we are beginning to witness a pattern that could be considered a collective consciousness. Not only will understanding our private phenomenal conscious experiences help us control ourselves, it will also give us explanatory tools to probe complex information systems such as social networks. This is reciprocal, as theories on information systems and related fields help us understand consciousness.

Besides the common sense understanding of consciousness as self-awareness, there are many other theories that diverge drastically from one another and more that differ only slightly. Since I want to start talking about how to define consciousness I will refer to other theories and draw from various sources to piece together a coherent, and theoretically useful description of consciousness. In my readings I have come across many who have helped refine my description of consciousness, whether my concept of consciousness was congruent or not. I’ll begin by describing some of the contemporary theories while introducing some consciousness jargon here and there in this series.

The view of consciousness that I wish to propose cannot be summed up in a single sentence, but there is, what I consider, a totipotent form of consciousness. I’ll try and explain how information is a fundamental property for any form of consciousness to be able to exist. This idea of consciousness I’m describing is strongly panpsychist with elements of neutral monism. Most don’t lay out their basic metaphysics right off the bat, as both these terms have a wide range of views within and overlap in various ways, while often leading to confusion in the long run. Also, by so defining my metaphysics there are expectations and assumptions that can be made with regards to how consciousness should be described. But it’s my experience that a great many views have something important to say about how to describe consciousness. Some idea’s I will cover are:

• Functionalism
• Identity Theory
• Quantum Theories concerning consciousness
• Panpsychism
• Property Dualism
• and Neutral Monism to list a few.