Every experience we have is transmitted as first-person and is only accessible through self-reflection.

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The nature of consciousness has always been an extremely prominent topic of discussion within the philosophical and esoteric circles. David Chalmers, a modern philosopher, has coined the term, "the Hard Problem", in reference to the question what is consciousness? A physical brain gives rise to a seemingly intangible expression of reality, but how?

Descartes proposed the body-mind duality, stating that the body was physical and that the mind was immaterial. Descartes stated that the body was similar to that of a machine, with moving parts and working systems governed by the laws of physics and nature; where a machine possesses no thoughts or feelings, neither does the body. The soul, he argued, was capable of producing thoughts and feelings, that the entirety of experience was held within the soul.

Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, whom Descartes was in frequent correspondence with, presented in a letter to Descartes the problem with his argument. The problem was that there seemed to be difficulty in explaining how a nonphysical mind could interact with a physical body.

Descartes responded assuring the princess that the matter was much too complicated and not to spend much time worrying about it.

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So what is consciousness?

To begin, let us start with a basic definition:

con·scious·ness
ˈkän(t)SHəsnəs/Submit
noun

the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings.
"she failed to regain consciousness and died two days later"

the awareness or perception of something by a person.
plural noun: consciousnesses
"her acute consciousness of Mike's presence"

Using this understanding, then, consciousness is any level of awareness. Up until recently, mainstream philosophy has argued vehemently that humans are the only entities which possess consciousness. I would argue that religion has influenced our understanding of consciousness so extremely that it has limited our basic understanding of awareness. However, I digress, there are religions and philosophers which have argued in favor of panpsychism.

Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is found everywhere within everything.

As I mentioned before in, "On the Nature of Free-Will", Thomas Nigel's, "What is it like to be a Bat?", it is outside of our limited scope of experience and understanding to ever be capable of knowing what the subjective experience of any other entity could be like. However, modern science has begun to show that even plants exhibit some form of consciousness.

If plants too are aware of their surroundings, then why are we so hard pressed to accept that plants and other animals are conscious?

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One argument against the theory that plants and animals are conscious is that their level of awareness does not match that of the higher cognitive functions of our brains and those of a select few high brain animals. Plants and animals do not possess a nervous system like ours, and have not developed the sensory organs required to experience consciousness. Philosophers argue that plants and primal brains are working on simple action::reaction, in that they are not actually aware of their environment. The flaw with this lays beyond the implied rebuttal of Thomas Nigel, but rather in the construct of my argument against free-will.

Humans are not immune to the stimulus action::reaction catalyst of experience, and working off of the previous argument, then it would follow that neither are humans actually aware of their environment.

However, it is of my opinion that humans are aware of their environment, being capable of acting upon it is another argument. Therefore, all living things are conscious.

Now here is where I begin to lose a lot of people...

Panpsychism attempts to show that conscious is the prevailing energy that gives foundation to the existence of reality. The nature of reality is consciousness.

Before I may continue, a little quantum mechanics needs to be understood. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the double slit experiment, please watch this following clip that explains the test and the results extremely clearly:

When a single electron is fired through the double slit it continues to create the same interference pattern as it would with a steady stream. Each electron must have awareness of each and every electron's position before it and each and every electron's position after it in order to properly continue creating the interference pattern.

The electrons not only have some level of awareness, but it would appear as though they have an almost omniscient memory being able to accurately recall the past and future before acting itself in the present.

When the measuring device is placed in line with the electrons, the electrons stop behaving as a wave function and collapse into an observable form, choosing either the left or the right slit to create the double slit results of solid particles. Two implications can be made from this observation. First, here stands more evidence that even electrons bear some basic level of consciousness as they were aware they were being measured. Secondly, these results provide evidence for the foundations of the idea that we create our realities through our thoughts and observations.

The double-slit experiment gives us a rather strong argument that electrons are conscious, and if electrons are conscious then what does that say about reality? Electrons are present in everything... EVERYTHING. Would it not then follow that all things are conscious at some basic level?

What do you think?

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O Consciousness, Consciousness, Wherefore Art Thou Consciousness? [A Philosophical Argument on the Nature of Consciousness]