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The steadily emerging view by philosophers, cognitive psychologists, and theoretical physicists concerning the nature of consciousness is that consciousness is a fundamental non-determinate aspect of reality; and therefore is of  ‘pan-psychic’ nature.

The bold claim made here is that all that we sense reside in the realm of consciousness.  Consciousness must therefore be the matrix of reality; a reality that all humans experience as a simulation; and which, therefore, humans remain fully unaware of.

This bold claim suggests, furthermore, that consciousness must be autonomously independent of any particular matter, including the human brain.  Consciousness, by our observations of human nature, must be what some philosophers, cognitive psychologists, and theoretical physicists determine by hypotheses to be ‘substrate-independent.’

That is to say, these researchers postulate that the mind and computation do not depend on any particular or specific kind of physical or implementation to experience consciousness; that consciousness is an indelible force of energy that permeates every fabric of existence; the material and the immaterial; from the microscopic to the macroscopic levels of representations.

Consciousness, as phenomena, exists beyond any human conceptualization to define or describe it with full certainty.  It appears only subjectively to the human imagination which, itself, resides in an hypothesized postulated Einsteinian space-time physics of special relativity and general relativity; limited in its application only to all physical phenomena.  We, and indeed all matter, all elements of the cosmos, are ‘conjurations’  or creations of consciousness that itself is fundamental to all reality.

In this regard, Einstein’s space-time physics, as a formulation of classical symbolic reality, is incapable of describing or defining consciousness,  which as is proposed here, is a fundamental phenomenon; and therefore is what must be recognized and regarded as an ‘emergent’ phenomenon that is of a much deeper, immeasurable non-physical state of quantum reality.  Our Einsteinian-constructed space-time reality must also therefore be considered, in reflection, as a window, a refractive rear view window, a framework, a simulacrum; not unlike Plato’s allegory of the cave, serving or functioning as merely a projection screen of the ‘forms’ or the archetypal images of an eternal truth that is beyond human comprehension.

For Plato, and indeed for some modern philosophers, cognitive psychologists, and theoretical physicists, consciousness is increasingly being perceived as a fundamental phenomenon that is non-measurable in any absolute manner.  It can only be merely glimpsed as a projection in our ephemeral world of forms;  to be realized at some deeper levels as primordial energy that is manifested to us, inhabiting a conceptualized and acknowledged  ‘relative’ space-time, in variously perceived states of representation.  From our experience, our behaviors, and our ‘knowledge,’ it would appear that we can only idealize our senses of consciousness marginally, symbolically, and, even so, peripherally.  Ours, metaphorically, is a simulated world of Freudian dreams in which our sense of reality remains a potential effort,  and is never fully manifested.

As the magician, Prospero, in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Act 4, stated so eloquently and poetically:  “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little Life is rounded with a sleep.”  It is a sleep from which we are yet to awake.

Asleep, indeed, we are; and hard of hearing, too, to the fundamental nature of consciousness.  As Christ, the Lord, the metaphysician of metaphysicians, the archetypal metaphysician, once remarked, in the Gospel of Matthew 13:14-16:

“Hearing you will hear and shall not understand. And seeing you will see and not perceive; for the hearts of this people have grown dull.  Their ears are hard of hearing.  And their eyes have closed.  Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears.  Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, so that I should heal them.”
       
Admittedly we see and hear material things of the world that are explained scientifically, arguably metaphorically, by classical or symbolic reality, via the lenses of a Plato-like cave perception.  But we remain forever blind to, and hard of hearing indeed, in matters concerning the much deeper and even harder problem of quantum reality that are manifested pan psychically in relation to those immaterial things that are seemingly experienced, yet are not seen.  The pan-psychic view is that the non-physical ‘mind’  or a mind-like aspect (some ethereal force or energy) must therefore be a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality that we ‘unconsciously’ discern, and which, for lack of better understanding , we designate ironically, metaphorically, and symbolically as  ‘Consciousness.’

That is to say, that for the disciplines of theology, philosophy, and psychology; as for all human endeavors of cogitation,  the effort to explore and explicate consciousness, in order to attain a rudimentary measure or understanding of its absolute truth value remains absolutely non-determinate. The conclusion to be made, therefore, is that our contemplation of the metaphysical nature of consciousness is, for humanity, the non-ending recursive perennial effort to  “know thyself.”