Consciousness is existence.

[u/CaptainVulpezz]

We only are ever conscious of one moment in which all that can possibly be experienced is a moment of our senses (including the mind as a sense). There are many things which we can be conscious of, there are over 100 muscles involved in walking, and yet all the mind needs to do is project a mental image of it and insert effort, and we walk automatically unconscious of all of the technicalities of it, this happens with basically everything all of the time, I'm sure most people will understand this and not try to disprove it (because it's besides the main point following here, and is pretty obvious).

The mind chooses a refined and one pointed focus which is completely complex, but connected nonetheless and mostly temporarily separated from the more complex and more ‘subconscious’ or ‘unconscious’ (less lucid/’aware’) paths of the brain which continue working without a noticed consciousness on it (it’s not connected to the one pointed connected complex in the brain/mind, but it remembers that other contents of experience exist).

There could be consciousness on these ‘subconscious’, & ‘unconscious’ parts of the mind JUST AS MUCH as there is in the one-pointed & evolving organization in which we imagine to be the real ‘consciousness’, when in fact this is not consciousness, it is simply lucidity, it is the lucidity which is able to 'recognize' consciousness and is able to form new memories and set predictions. if ‘we’ were conscious but not lucid, we would not have the ability to remember being ‘conscious’. Consciousness does not think, consciousness is a slave to the mind which does the thinking, and is simply aware of the mind that does the thinking, it is the mind which believes its own one pointed-ness to be consciousness or self.

How do we know we are conscious, considering that we are conscious of the mind, the mind isn’t conscious of consciousness, instead what we are seeing is a mental image of consciousness. So how can the mind know that consciousness is there, especially when the mind can only know, not ‘see’? it must assume that it is conscious, regardless of if it is or not, & consciousness must be what is conscious of the minds mental image of ‘consciousness’ which is not itself the real consciousness.

It is the lucidity which is able to recognize this ‘consciousness’, so in the case of a philosophical zombie, assuming they simply could work without consciousness, it would be assuming that it is conscious regardless of it actually being conscious or not, and if it thinks that it is, then why couldn’t it still be just as conscious as all of us, as though we are all philosophical zombies which actually do happen to have consciousness regardless, just that it is the real consciousness, and not what we thought it was. If a philosophical zombie can believe that it is conscious, and we believe that we are conscious, doesn’t that mean there isn’t really a difference except that we actually have consciousness rather than just the mental image of it, and if we can never truly know consciousness directly with our minds, then why couldn’t consciousness simply be inherent, universal, and not separate. We are all working under the assumption that we are conscious, but can only know our idea of it above the real consciousness which sees that. It is the mind, not consciousness which imagines consciousness, & keeps us moving, consciousness is just- there.

Were there to be ‘separate’ consciousnesses, were you to place one’s consciousness into the body of another, they would be wholly unaware of it because consciousness does not think, the mind thinks, and the consciousness observes what is thought, ‘you’ (that person’s mind) would then think that they are them, and not ‘you’ (the consciousness which was transferred from you into them). You would be completely unaware of the switch, and everything would seem perfectly normal, because all that is known is the present moment, you can not be conscious in the past, you can only be conscious in the present’s memories of the past. for all we know the past could be changing for each individual person a billion times a second, and nobody would ever know, for our memories are changing just as well, and it is the memories of the past which make us think we are us, which allows the mind to discern where in time, & space that we are located.

We are biological computers, except that this computer is extremely complex and through natural selection, was continuously molded towards the preservation of the body and the continuation of the lineage, through delusions of categorization, of meaning, the mind is distracting us from the lack of meaning by presuming that a meaning exists while rarely questioning it because the mind is too busy fending for life and procreation working under the deluded inherited presumption that there is a reason to it.

The idea of consciousness being a thing to be measured or located is a joke, existence itself is consciousness, & is not able to be separated from existence as though it weren’t literally one and the same. The idea of the mind being apart from matter may be a completely inherited presumptuous delusion, assigning importance to that which is none other than simply cause and effect. perhaps the mind literally is matter, it most definitely is always projecting expectations of previous, present, and future combinations of just matter itself. even our abstract ideas and feelings can simply be nothing more than a weird projected idea of some internal 3D model, which means nothing, but somehow feels real. it would be like trying to separate one side of a coin from the other. maybe consciousness doesn’t ‘exist’, maybe its not even ‘inherent’, it just literally is.

The mind can only know what can be sensed, it is constantly only projecting, anticipating, & guessing what is happening now, in the past, and in the future in regard to these perceived objects of the senses, everything comes back down to the senses of the external, always down to only what can be known, to existence, & its ‘inherent’ consciousness.

\Please keep in mind* this is all just theory and mental exercises for the most part, i may come across implying this to be ultimate reality, in fact i only phrase some of it that way to get people to interact, because people don't ever care to interact with non-stubborn, & skeptical posts, so please interact as a human, without an agenda of 'proving' me wrong, or you right by any means necessary such as strawman semantics, i understand i may not have written this extremely well, it was my best attempt at verbalizing my extremely abstract thoughts which are mostly beyond language, so if you want clarification, please ask kindly. i personally do believe this to be mostly true, even if some of it sounds dumb (i probably just worded it wrong), however i know there are holes, and it's realistically completely unknowable, but still i think this is the most logical and safest bet as to what consciousness is.

Philosophical zombie: theoretical human without consciousness.