I'm all in favor of leaving room for mysteries which resist our powers to understand. But I don't think this everything is conscious. Perception and cognition only exists in the domain of organisms IMO. In as much as living things put themselves together in part from non-living things, you could say everything has the potential for consciousness by virtue of its ability to constitute a living organism. But then I think we have a level problem. In a multi-cell creature such as ourselves, the consciousness we experience seems to exist at the level of organs, not on a cellular level. How cells give up their independence to play a role in a collective of cells is nothing I know anything about. I do believe consciousness is fragmentary but I don't believe it derives from the suppressed consciousness of each cell. Do you?
There is a sense in which our being conscious and self-aware is at the same time consciousness of the cosmos itself. What else is there to be aware of except that which exists? But I don't imagine any mega-multi-cellular creature that exists in relation to us as the individual cells of our bodies exist to us. Do you?
What we can be sure of is that we at least are conscious as multi-cell animals. We don't know about what is below or beyond us, we only know what we experience. Still that is pretty cool.
There is a sense in which our being conscious and self-aware is at the same time consciousness of the cosmos itself. What else is there to be aware of except that which exists? But I don't imagine any mega-multi-cellular creature that exists in relation to us as the individual cells of our bodies exist to us. Do you?
What we can be sure of is that we at least are conscious as multi-cell animals. We don't know about what is below or beyond us, we only know what we experience. Still that is pretty cool.
