Michael,

I think the first obstacle to deal with is time.

We are mobile organisms and this sequential process of perception, often accompanied by judgement, is evidently a consequence of having to navigate our environment. Plants are certainly alive and produce behaviors and reactions, often chemical and feedback driven, every bit as complex as fauna, yet they don't have a central nervous system to guide these activities and we don't see them as conscious. The problem is that we view time as this point of the present, moving past to future, when the logical cause is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

The process goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. As consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts go future to past. The wax remains, as the present. The shapes come and go.

Yet try as I might, it seems very difficult to get people willing to consider this conundrum. Probably because it does go to the essence of who and what we are. Though if the question is consciousness, that would seem to be the first step through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole.

Simply referring to mathematical formulae, because both they and consciousness represent larger mysteries, really isn't much more than voodoo. Magic amulets into the volcano.

We are aware and our conscious function is in service to our survival, but the fact we find pleasure in life is as important to our health as finding food.

So when we seek to explain consciousness using reductionism, it seems a bit like seeking the soul through dissection. The trunk of the tree, shorn of its roots and branches. Neither our bodies, nor our minds are islands. The fact that we are tactile creatures, with bifocal vision, biases us to focusing on the details and clarity as the place to search for answers, but, more often than not, this creates the information we find. Math is the high religion of today, but it is descriptive, not explantory. For example, space is no more fundamentally three dimensional, than longitude, latitude and altitude are fundamental to the biosphere of this planet. It is a mapping device and so our maps and models become gods, not just tools.

I could go on, but the point I'm trying to make is that there is simply too much mental clutter in the collective attic to really get to the serious questions about consciousness, if we don't first clean up our mental filters, through which this awareness shines.

Though looking as the world today, many of those filters and lenses are getting torn and cracked, so it might be an opportunity for a deep reset, as to the nature of humanity.

The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.