I’ve been reading a lot about the ways people have been trying to approach the study of consciousness even to the most recent notion that it can be examined mathematically.

I don’t know how to approach the problem from a scientist’s pov or from a philosopher’s. I think of consciousness as part of evolution, that the evolutionary process allows certain materials to combine in certain ways to produce life. Not just animals, but plants as well, and perhaps even fungi.

And life forms do things. That implies consciousness to me.

I am emphatically not talking about panpsychism, which implies ––or allow us to infer––intentionality which is not needed when thinking about consciousness. Panpsychism is more about some kind of oversoul. Nay.

The idea we all accept is that chemistry evolves to life and life is conscious. Not intentional. Not progressive. Just another possibility of the process that began with the big bang developed stars, and stardust - me and my plants.

We know the chemistry of trees allows trees to communicate with each other in certain situations, that plants have relationships with one another and sometimes with fungi as well. I can’t site sources, forgive me, but they are out there.

The idea I’m playing with, as a writer, has nothing to do with an intentional universe or materialism as panpsychism is often imagined, no mystic superstition here. I’m a pure materialist who sees life as part of Evolution on Earth. AND if it happens here, why not other places?

My plants, btw, know when to send new leaves out of their twigs in the Spring and when to blossom and when to go to sleep again. It’s chemistry at bottom. Some bacteria eat viruses. And viruses know how to connect with my cells to reproduce. Is that NOT a species of consciousness?

To think that the universe is planned and intentional seems unnecessary and without evidence. No one has ever produced evidence that can be tested of a universal mind or of anything beyond our universe.

But we live with life every day and in my experience, it is all conscious to some degree.

Consciousness is an attribute of life, which is an attribute of chemical evolution and there is no other kind.

We seem to have lots of evidence for that idea, so what is wrong with it?