The following quotes are only a very-small selection of the hundreds of examples of the “Consciousness is…” statement on social media. Roughly 90% of the comments take that proclamatory form. That’s a large number of categorical statements without argument, evidence or data. So, when it comes to consciousness, the floodgates are well and truly open.
[Scroll down to the end for a concluding comment on this deluge of “Consciousness is…” statements.]
“Consciousness is existence. No debate required.”
“Consciousness is all that is.”
“Consciousness is a gift from God.”
“Consciousness is an embrace of what is. It is an openness to what is. It is acceptance of what is.”
“Consciousness: our awareness that things continue to exist even when we can’t see them.”
— justice7788
“Consciousness is a Farsi word ‘کنجکاویست knonch-kavist’ which means ‘Curiosity’.”
“Consciousness is More than known.”
“Consciousness is a point-like singularity.”
“Consciousness is care.”
“Consciousness is a fundamental property of matter/energy.”
— pandoraeeris7860
“Consciousness is what it is.”
— pobinr
“The Vedic Tradition, which says that consciousness is preexisting as an eternal, unmanifest, absolute field beyond time, space, causation.”
— transcender5974
“The answer was provided in Bhagavat Gita as ‘Absolute Truth’.”
“I believe that consciousness is that part of the Energy which forms us, is us, which is aware of itself.”
“Self-awareness is consciousness.”
“Consciousness is the terminus of the observation.”
“Consciousness is a spirit that has a language in evolution to each human being, and then each person needs learn to understand the difference between good and bad (i.e. moral).”
“Consciousness is the space-field that is fundamental.”
“Consciousness I.S. Thought ~ Mind Interaction between bits of Information.”
“The whole universe is Pure Consciousness; the seamless Ocean of Sat-Chit-Ananda.”
“Consciousness = life, every night I die only to be reborn every morning — so far.”
“Consciousness is most likely by product of our soul interacting with our brain and the experience we get out of these interactions.”
“Consciousness is the basic excitation of superfluid quantum time-invariant space. Consciousness has Planck frequency.”
— stationary.universe.initiative
“Consciousness is the immortal soul.”
“Consciousness is like a yummy carrot a darling little bunny eats when they wake up each morning.”
— djtomoy
“Our consciousness is a separate organism that leaves the physical body upon death. Love is the portal to our next existence.”
“Living consciousness is identical to the unified totality of all existence.”
“Consciousness is the Information of the Universe and all of Reality. 0=1, Something from Nothing.”
“Consciousness is organized information with which we perceive matter, which is also energy.”
“Consciousness is holding the same place in the universe what it holds in a dream.”
“Consciousness is what remains when everything is peeled off. It is the ‘I’.”
— SB-wu6pz
“Consciousness is the primordial source of energy — the Cause behind and within everything physical.”
“Consciousness is all that there is and consciousness is happening within itself.”
“Consciousness is perhaps a dimension of the universe same as length, width, depth and time. Somehow the brain through evolution taps into it.”
“Consciousness is just self awareness of one’s ‘beingness’ through all of the individualized but intertwined senses.”
…
Often, There Is No “Debate” About Consciousness
Some readers might have noticed how confidently the claim, for example, “Consciousness is the basic excitation of superfluid quantum time-invariant space” is stated. It’s as if he’s stating an arithmetical truth. Readers may also wonder what a statement like “Consciousness is care” has in common with “Consciousness is organized information with which we perceive matter, which is also energy”. After all, both statements are supposedly about consciousness.
What we often have above are expressions of spiritual fundamentalism. (“Our consciousness is a separate organism that leaves the physical body upon death. Love is the portal to our next existence.”) They’re the precise equivalent of a Catholic making categorical statements about the Trinity or a Muslim making proclamations about the prophet Muhammed. In other words, there’s no equivocation or modesty here. Most of these people are absolutely sure that their “Consciousness is…” proclamations are true. Yet they rarely argue their case or offer evidence/data. In other words, they have a deep faith in these spiritual truths.
If consciousness isn’t a thing, or even a “process” [see here], then that would explain the multifarious and often very-vague uses of the word “consciousness”.
All that’s largely because of the non-scientific nature of the subject matter. If consciousness were as intersubjective a phenomenon as a cat or a neuron, then we wouldn’t have so many multifarious and vague statements which take the “Consciousness is…” form.
What’s more, there have been dozens — even hundreds — of definitions of the word ‘consciousness’. There have also been hundreds of books on consciousness. It’s a scare-quoted “debate” that’s become — in recent years — hot and trendy. However, it’s also often pointless. The main reason for this is that people are nearly always talking about different things when they talk about consciousness. More relevantly, they define the word “consciousness” (if they define it at all) in very different ways.
As a result of all this, perhaps it would be wise to adopt a deflationary position on the word “consciousness”. Indeed, that’s what the English philosopher Kathleen Wilkes did when she wrote that
“perhaps ‘consciousness’ is best seen as a sort of dummy-term like ‘thing’, useful for the flexibility that is assured by its lack of specific content”.
The psychologists James Ward and Alexander Bain (writing at the end of the 19th century) believed that it’s precisely because of the fact that the word ‘consciousness’ is a dummy-term (or placeholder) that traps us in the mud. They wrote:
“‘Consciousness’ is the vaguest, most protean, and most treacherous of psychological terms.”
With words like that, one can see how it didn’t take long for behaviourism to take up its hegemonic position in psychology and philosophy in the 1920s and beyond.
So do many people simply — if sometimes tacitly — stipulate what they mean by the word “consciousness”? Indeed, is there any way around this?
The philosopher David Chalmers often mentions what he calls “stipulation”. The basic point is that if we stipulate what we mean by a particular philosophical technical term, then the answers to the questions about facts, data, what something is, etc. must — at least partly — follow from such stipulations.
Of course, some (or even many) people will be horrified by the argument that acts of stipulation are decisive when it comes to what we take consciousness to be. Chalmers sums up this problem with a joke. He wrote:
“One might as well define ‘world peace’ as ‘a ham sandwich.’ Achieving world peace becomes much easier, but it is a hollow achievement.”
The problem here is that if people engaged in an exchange are using the same term in very different ways, then we can hardly say that there’s any debate occurring at all. What’s more, this situation is confounded by the fact that the debaters (if that’s an appropriate word to use in the extreme cases) often assume that his/her opponent is using the same term in the same way. That’s the case even when it’s clear to some on the outside that this isn’t the case.
When people bandy around the word “consciousness” and mean very different things by that word, then that situation is far worse than one in which a debater simply makes a statement which is followed by a largely unrelated counter-statement (though not a counter-argument) from his fellow debater. In this former case, there’s the situation that the debaters are at least talking about the same thing. Yet if they’re using their primary term — i.e., ‘consciousness’ — in very different ways, and that use is born of very different philosophies, then that’s even worse than a simple shouting match between two rival debaters. At least in this latter case the debaters are talking about the same thing — even if they strongly disagree with each other.
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