Theory number 3.

[Angrboda]

@Genk (if you don;t mind Apo...lol, one of those rare moments that you and I are in lock-step on this subject..lol, I plan to milk it)

Academically....it is very difficult to distinguish between what is conscious and what is not without adding a boatload of additional qualifiers that are all, themselves, open to scathing criticism.

Well, obviously. Otherwise consciousness would not be such a fascinating subject. So, what is the line (along with those additional qualifiers)?

I'll break with that lock step of Rhythm's for the moment in suggesting that the concept of a specific process or entity that is unified spatially and temporally, and which presents some minimum of a particular property or process across all instances is a folk psychological concept. It doesn't exist. So attempting to "explain consciousness" is much akin to attempting to explain phlogiston or the elan vital. The definition and meaning and such will change with the needs and context of the argument because it is trying to explain a bundle of complex, similar effects as one, unified, simple thing.

Beyond that, as Rhythm alludes to, depending on who you talk to, the qualifications become more substantial, and more poorly justified. There is, I think, a break between the naturalists and, for lack of a better term, the Mysterians. The Mysterians believe that even our everyday consciousness displays traits which cannot be materialistically explained. In this camp are those who believe in quantum consciousness; the idea that the backbone of conscious process which we don't understand lies in quantum effects which we don't understand.