I find it kind of funny when people talk about "consciousness" as though it were something so mysterious, compelling and inexplicable, but that's just me...
Consciousness is not a mystical, inexplicable thing, nor is it the ground of all being, nor is it a fundamental property of the universe. It is described as the ability to be aware or have feelings, emotions, senses, but that doesn’t really explain what specifically it is or what causes it from a physical standpoint. This is my explanation… From a physical standpoint, consciousness is the ability to interact with our environment in a complex manner. Everything interacts with the environment in some way, even rocks and plants. The ability for energy forms to interact and change form is fundamental to all of existence. That is why we have such thing as the Fundamental Interactions. Interaction is the fundamental driving force behind our universe, not consciousness. A rock or tree interacts with its surroundings, but what makes something “conscious” however, is the complexity of those interactions. A human interacts in a far more complex manner than a tree or a rock. Humans interact with the environment in a number of ways…light, sound, touch, taste, smell, etc… A rock interacts with its environment also, but on a much more basic level. Consciousness therefore is no more than a complex form of interaction, or a combination of several complex interactions working together, which evolved over millions of years from much simpler forms of interaction. Of course this is an extremely simplified explanation, but it really doesn't take a novel to explain what consciousness is.
