> The possibility that the sun is conscious expands the scope of our thinking. As would the possibility that cheese sandwiches are our creators. No study of t

> The possibility that the sun is conscious expands the scope of our thinking. As would the possibility that cheese sandwiches are our creators. No study of the sun ever produced a clue that it was conscious. There is no explanatory power regarding the sun, or us, that comes from assuming the sun is conscious. That isn't science. Or even rational. -- If consciousness means anything, surely it means self-awareness, encompassing a level of self-awareness of one's own self-awareness. Self-awareness requires a few things. An ability to sense oneself and one's context, some memory of that sensory information, an ability to develop understanding and application of that information with a learned model of oneself, second level sensory access to some of those internal activities creating self-awareness, and a richness of modeling and self-awareness to allow for clear recognition, consideration, and exploration of the state of being self-aware of one's own self-awareness. So consciousness at a minimum, is a gradation based on the product of those features. -- Explanations of consciousness as resulting from some level of particles consciousness would be the materialistic constructive explanation. In contrast, consciousness based on the attributes above is an information organization and flow explanation. Which in the end can be divorced from any particular material substrate. Self-awareness of self-awareness requires a rich second or third order loop in information flow, reflectively about that information flow and the system doing the information flow. Just as a recursive function can't be explained by the non-recursive functions that it is composed of. Only by the entire loop organization. -- Also, there needs to be a plausible mechanism of creation or development. In our case, we see the path evolution took over aeons to develop the components of consciousness listed above. The result are brains whose activity enhances the gathering of energy and resources required to allow those brains time to grow, and the energy budget to operate. -- The only part of consciousness that is "mysterious" is the qualia aspect. The strange and seeming inexplicable experience of being conscious. But that is largely mysterious for the same reason as other mysteries. We are missing information. We can't yet access most of our brains activities, just some of them. So our consciousness seems to float above other things we sense. There is a self-modeling/awareness gap there. Which we are closing over time with science and technology. Being which can access their own behavior at all levels will be more conscious