consciousness

 Here's an old mini-essay on consciousness:

I've been spending a great deal of time trying to understand exactly what “consciousness” means and how to wrap my head around the idea of anything being more or less conscious than anything else.
If consciousness is agreed upon by most to be some type of indication that a being is able to perceive its surroundings, then how is there an unconscious at all? Even at the smallest layer of reality, atoms and particles and energy all have to, to a degree, have an awareness of what's happening around them in order to react to their surroundings.
Now, take an atom with electrons present. Those electrons “know” they are “attracted” to certain other particles. They have to or else they would not move. They may not have the same line of thinking one may associated with making conscious decisions, but them having any type of “preference” to what moves them suggests they “know” enough about their surroundings to react. How is this consciousness any different from any other consciousness?
Life is merely a series of interactions between moving parts, reflections of matter, and reactions caused by said interactions. (Yes, this is vague and can be expanded upon, but for a purely logical explanation's sake- we'll bypass the rest.)

THE CONCEPT OF NOTHING
In order for “nothing” to “be,” something outside of itself has to deem it “nothing,” and when that happens, “nothing” becomes “something.” Considering the concept of death and afterlife theories, people will often ask “what if there is just 'nothing' after all this?” To that- I can't help but conclude that “nothing” wouldn't ever be an observable state as even just “being” with no external stimuli implies a conscious mind being able to perceive that lack of something.
It starts to become very binary in nature. It either is or isn't and it cannot “not” be.

“This is a theory that makes a very clear prediction: it says that consciousness is a property of complex systems that have a particular “cause-effect” repertoire. They have a particular way of interacting with the world, such as the brain does, or in principle, such as a computer could. If you were to build a computer that has the same circuitry as the brain, this computer would also have consciousness associated with it. It would feel like something to be this computer. However, the same is not true for digital simulations.”
- Christof Koch, on Integrated Information Theory