I see consciousness as the elephant in the room... not noticing the other elephant.
For me the concept of consciousness applies not only to humans but to everything, on different levels.
Anyway I will reffer only to human consciousness here.
I think we all agree that humans consciousness exists. But this consciousness fluctuates:
- throughout the day in our daily activities we can be more or less aware of things and of us
- throughout the day and night cicle, where I see dreaming state as a different level of consciousness; there are also even deeper levels when sleeping with no kind of dreams, and so on
- throughout the live - different levels of consciousness from the time we are born to the time we die
- maybe even beyond that if we would agree that being conscious does not necessarely need to rely on something physical
- it fluctuates from person to person based on a multitude of factors, from the condition of the body to human qualities that cannot be measured physically
I think we could also agree that we know only what we've experimented in terms of consciousness and there can be degrees of consciousness that exists and we're just not aware of.
As described before I see consiousness as dependent to more factors, and in permanent fluctuation. I don't see a begining or end for consciousness, I see transformation and I see it as a property of things (yes, I did not say humans or life but I will not go further
).
Where some see the consciousness as a result of a physical computer, I see a computer being operated by consciousness existing on different levels (which actually acts as both the hardware and the software engineer of the computer)
I perfectly understand the concept of the consciousness beying produced by the brain, but for me this is just an oversimplified act of judgement, a speculation, it's not an experimental result - how would you be able to say something about consciousness by thinking of how it's generated by a physical something or by actually using it and experimenting with it?