At its root, all consciousness is the sense of endurance – or perhaps the failure of the sense of endurance. Another way of putting it is that all consciousness is a sense of belonging, or its loss. To endure is to belong.
Subatomic particles, which flash in and out of existence, sometimes exist just long enough for qualia to attract them to other subatomic particles similarly flashing in and out existence. They bond together, for a brief eternity. Together they endure, together they belong…or not.
The same is true for a snowflake, and even the frozen water molecules which belong to it. As the temperature warms the snowflake can no longer endure. Likewise, as the snowflake landscape melts, the water molecules are released from their hexagonal community.
Our human sense of belonging (and duration see below) is so complex and profound that we discount that same sense in a leaf falling from a tree, much less a snowflake or some infinitesimal particle. But who are we to say?
All matter, from subatomic particles to water molecules to living beings like us have a consciousness of belonging. The consciousness of a molecule may not seem to have much poetical imagination to it, but at some level, perhaps only at the very moment it drops off of a melting snowflake, it knows I am if not I was. But if a fundamental awareness of being isn’t poetical, I don’t know what is!
Human consciousness is unique, perhaps because of the sheer multiplicity of signs and symbols that we must interpret in order to make sense of the world – that is, to figure out how we belong in it. Making the right interpretations can quite drastically enhance or jeopardize our ability to endure – as individuals as well as a species!
As a race we have put, not just our own survival, but the survival of all the rest of the beings on the planet at risk. We are living, currently, in an epic, potentially tragic, poem.
We live in an age where we are all becoming strangers. In losing our sense of belonging we may very well be losing our sense of self as well, as identity is, evolutionarily speaking, primarily determined by community. Can we endure this way?
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There exists, uniquely and universally, a point of view – a unique and universal relativity.
An interesting article in Aeon bears upon endurance or “duration.” There is a long-standing disregard of consciousness by the scientific community (specifically in this article by physicists). But consciousness appears to be a necessity, the very event horizon of all that is and how we know of it.
https://aeon.co/essays/who-really-won-when-bergson-and-einstein-debated-time
Some relevant quotes:
“Since clock time presupposes the experience of duration, to claim that duration and the ‘now’ are an illusion, as Einstein did, cuts out the ground on which science must stand. (Italics my own.) Investigating that ground and gaining cognitive insight into it are the remit of philosophy, which transcends science. There is a time of the physicist and a time of the psychologist. But there is also a time of the philosopher, which lies beneath both, and which Einstein failed to grasp.”
“Alfred North Whitehead argued around the same time as Bergson [who debated Einstein about this], we can single out the characteristic of nature’s passage and describe its relation to other characteristics of nature but we cannot explain it by deriving it from something else – such as the temporal units of a clock.”