Consciousness developed to impose order on the increasingly complex and chaotic mechanisms at work in the human organism, and the chaotic environment in which we are “thrown” into – to improve the usefulness/survivability of the organism. It does this not only through awareness but more importantly through selection/suppression between a matrix of multiple stimuli and the direction of the organism to a calculated decision deemed most beneficial. This is systematically carried out through hierarchical relational reasoning, ordering desires and responsibilities – towards survival mechanisms – and enabling the individual to learn more optimal routes towards these ends. These “selections” are chosen through an environmentally, culturally, socially, deterministic lens, organized hierarchically in beneficiality to the organism (all factors included). Thus, even though consciousnesses may technically be what it “feels like” to be an organism, it really is just being aware of some aspects of the psyche within an organism, solely those aspects that arise from the brain and the vast matrix of external and internal factors into the sphere of conscious awareness (or the ego, or subjectivity, etc), which is of course a very small amount of the total stimuli received by the body’s sense organs, and a small representation of the activity of the brain.

This feeling of what it “feels” like to be a being, or consciousness, includes the thoughts to take a certain action, or the conceptualization of different situations, all which arise from the brain into subjective experience, all which have a deterministic cause preceding manifestation into subjective experience, i.e. consciousness. Also, because a number of thoughts enter consciousness, in reference to possible actions or answers to a particular problem, we feel like our consciousness chooses a solution, like “we” choose a solution, or we feel like we are in control just because a conscious idea ends up being selected and coming to fruition in the external world. In actuality, this is a mechanistic process in which the conscious awareness and selection is a cog in the chain of deterministic factors preceding events that seemingly “come from consciousness” itself, this is the very role of consciousness, it is a tool developed through evolution, just like eyes and ears serve the organism, consciousness developed for the same broad purpose in coalition with the material structure that it is. Consciousness may seem to be making decisions, and it may sometimes be the crucial element which does in fact lead to decisions, but what is unconscious or unrealized by consciousness, is the fact that everything that enters into its sphere is not chosen by it because that is NOT it. The number of external stimuli contacting the sense organs, relaying to the brain, the brain projecting conceptualizations in thoughts, release of hormones, manifestation of feelings, perceptions, as well as conscious instinctual reaction, accumulation of past volitional formations/habits, all funnel into what one delusionaly is coerced by the psyche to thinking are parts of consciousness, choices made by consciousness, by an “I” or individual in the sense of thinking they are choices of the being behind the eyes, the delusional “me” which is itself a manifestation of intrinsic neural pathways producing a delusional belief which appears to be a correct conceptualization, but doesn’t match up with reality except in its usefulness to the preservation of the whole organism.

It doesn’t seem logically necessary that this center for awareness of certain aspects of experience become subjective, and the hard problem of consciousness will always remain in the skeptics’ mind, but if we take what we actually know, and apply it to what we “think we are” we can deduce that it is, in fact, the necessary correlation to being that which it is, which is the higher nervous system located in the brain in the human. Consciousness is the material basis which we have, up to this point, assumed to underlie conscious formations. What matters to us here is the recognition of answers to questions we can ask, of what the nature of consciousness is, and how it manifests itself to us in experience, and of what content is thus arising. What we can effectively do is examine the role it seems to play, and deduce its necessity as an information filter. The bundles of content bodily perceived, whether conceptualized and transmitted to consciousness, or merely experienced in the present as sensory datum perceived through the bodies perceptive abilities, will here be generalized as “information”, meaning, information that represents underlying value structures reflecting what is important to the organism. That which the gaze of consciousness is directed towards to, apart from being culturally, biologically (bodily perceived), and environmentally determined, reflects what is important to the genetic material and thus the survival machine in which it has constructed (the entire organism), whether that content is what is consciously important to us or not is not here the point, it reflects what is important to the totality of the current state of the developed organism. Thus our predominance of sight and visualization in consciousness’ subjective experience is due to the large relevance it has to our survival in identification of our external environment, which we developed a plethora of ways to manipulate towards our genes benefit. Our body perceives content through the value system instantiated first and foremost by the genetic material, which is the initial blueprint for how to filter content, which develops due to the environmental factors that play a role on the organism through their life, further informing the value system – including, what content is bodily perceived and in what way, impacting, if the information is valuable enough, what content rises to conscious awareness, and what content doesn’t (Intro to Phenomenology of Action, Spontaneity and Conscious Directedness). This bottom up system can be influenced reflexively, through conscious direction towards the manifestation of actions and which serve to inform the system in a top-down manner, in short, they inform each other, and are, in actuality, one system.

 In analysis of this content of consciousness which arises, we find information which is most crucial to progressing the individual organism’s internal desires are those contents which arise, implying a value structure inherent in us. As to why this content can’t be systematically deduced from the totality, and acted upon without subjective experience, a satisfactory response has yet to be posited, I here will attempt to provide the answer to the conundrum, albeit, it is hard to conceptualize, and I’m aware of the limitations of language, and the fact that language is an integral part of what it is to be what we think we are.

Our relational reasoning powers, and the ability to have the most viable content presented to the organism in the present moment is an evolutionary basis which must produce consciousness in direct proportion to the quantity of mental formations arising in the organism. We have consciousness in degrees to the quantity of content with which an organism’s nervous structure is able to systematically organize. The less psychic ability, the less sensory input, the less ability to rationalize and provide an internal representation of externalities, including our present notion of language in conceptualizations, the degree in which a life form has the physical “underpinnings” (which are, in fact, what we are) to these systems is the degree to which it is conscious, or able to have what is conceptualized as “subjective experience” – this ability to rationalize itself as “subjective experience” may currently be a strictly human ability, and problem, but the same goes for any other material in the natural world. The subjective experience is really just what it feels like to be that part of the organism which is presented as the most presently deduced (by the nervous system) valuable content in relation to the totality of the organism. It isn’t a subjective experience; it is an objective experience of that part of the organism, of that specific aspect of reality, essentially just like any other part of reality, but different in the material basis organization. Just as elements, and compounds, just like cells and multicellular organisms, all differ in their material basis, and thus their roles, and what they are, so too we can differentiate ourselves from reality, and thus the differences we easily can see between ourselves and other “things”. Perhaps it “feels” (please note the usage of this anthropomorphized word as representing the idea of “being”) like something to be any other part of an organism, or to be anything in material existence, just the fact that we (I mean we in the sense of our identity of what it feels like to “be” the organism) happen to be that part of the organism that is the information hierarchy’s representation system, which itself necessitates the “experience” of subjectively “being” the organism. If we were any other part of the organism, it wouldn’t have the tools (language / reason) which are the directly related correlates to the brain and thus the part of the organism which we claim “to be”.

Each thought that arises isn’t chosen by consciousness to arise, rather it is forced into the realm of consciousness by innumerable factors which rightfully escape our scrutiny. One should not identify oneself with this ego, or conscious awareness/conscious directing force, or the illusory conscious control mechanism, yet with the whole psyche, the whole organism, or more realistically with none of it. We should maintain the thought when thinking of agency of being the whole organism acting with all aspects of the psyche/body/universe coming into manifestation, and there being no center, no “I” which directs, just a feeling within, consciousness, of this process happening, just as any other material substratum potentially has this ability to “feel like what it is” it merely doesn’t talk about it, because it is not that part of the material reality which has language, which has neural structure that produces language, amongst other important factors. It is merely because we are that part of the material reality which IS the brain of a highly developed biological organism that we are able to experience and describe what it is like to BE IT.

Rather than ascribing consciousness to all forms of matter, and thus separating the duality between mind and matter, as panpsychists attempt to do, here we are making a distinctly different move. Panpsychists unknowingly ascribe consciousness because that word has been used to conceptualize our version of “Being” in its many forms, and thus generalize it across the spectrum to a matter in degrees. Our employment of the word “consciousness” is quite misleading in this context, as to the method in which we are using it is a great deal different form its conventional usage. What we here are recognizing is that there merely is a bias and a limit to the method of cognition which is available to us through what we are, and the “limit” is something which every effective group of matter and life all contain in relation to our conceptualization of the word consciousness. Consciousness here is a symbolic representation which fits into a pattern which is practical and useful for us to use in our daily lives, as the notion of “self”, “me”, “mine”, also are useful, but in an Absolute Universal Objective sense, they fail at accurately representing reality. Many aspects of philosophy hold this distinction, between practically being “true” in a “metaphorical truth” notion, as being in contradiction to Absolute or Objective Truth. Here the limit of Being which we find ourselves as containing can be compared to the process through which we recognize it. As in particle physics, specifically on the quantum level, we theorize that quantum particles have been known to fit into patterns recognizable to us when we observe them, giving them properties and displaying the effect of an observer onto the wave function, which, enables the separation of observable particles from the mathematical and theoretical wave which they represent. This is due to a limit in our perceptive ability, and includes the limit of perceivability in relation to time. We formulate conceptual frameworks and recognize patterns due to the nature of what we are. In a similar way, we conceptualize and differentiate ourselves into a pattern that we use to describe ourselves, the pattern, and method in which we do so, is limited and determined by the beings which we are. In other words, we shouldn’t ascribe consciousness to all matter, as our notion of consciousness is used as a practical description of the being which we find ourselves to be, rather we should recognize that everything is as it is, and the experience given to us in which propagates the idea of subjectivity is merely something individualized to the type of Being which we find ourselves as, as it seeks to attach a symbolic representation of itself (the description of subjectivity or experience itself is this symbolic representation which is useful, for biological and psychological reasons, as is the intuition of free will or “selfhood”).