By the time we have fully understood present-day consciousness, we will have transcended it many times over.
If we look at our situation conservatively and leave aside any Divine or supernatural force, Nature - the will of Nature - has somehow advanced us to a relatively high degree of intelligence, imagination and overall ability in the animal kingdom. What the state of other animals' minds is cannot be known from their behaviour alone and this is more or less the case with men, women and children that I come into contact with - and those people may even speak a language that I cannot understand, so that makes it even more difficult to understand their situation. All I can know for certain is what I will, think, remember imagine and dream. My body remains in space while my mind revisits my past and I can place myself in possible futures and in dreams I find myself in uncharted territory and this is a profoundly disquieting aspect of my existence.
As Schopenhauer beautifully puts it: "We find ourselves like hollow glass globes, from whose vacancy, a voice speaks."
At which point of my physical existence did I become conscious? Like Carl Jung, I realized at the age of eight that "I am," as he wonderfully puts it in Memories, Dreams, Reflections: "I came out of a fog." But how did that come about? Is it a case of storing up enough memories for one to reflect on that brings out this awareness of existence? I percieve that consciousness/mind is an immensely powerful, yet deeply dormant force within us that will not easily manifested, as my will is the primary force and it only utilizes the intellect in a minimal capacity. I am a considerably detached person and I often 'observe' myself whilst doing mundane acts and the exprience is curious. I often feel that pain that my body experiences is not effectively 'felt' me myself - this voice communicating to you now via this text. My body is unaware of this voice; if it were, I would be free of all ailments and disease in the future. Faintly, there is a suggestion that this internal voice has some kind of permanence, whereas the body will fail and fade. It exists in a darkness that gives way to strange landscapes and characters one hour after putting on my pyjamas. The body regulates itself during this period, unaware of these psychic events. There are people who claims to be able to will themselves 'out of their body' and float above their house - some of them by accident, much to their distress. If this is true, then it says a lot about of what the Mind might be.
Consciousness is not fixed though, is it? It can be altered. When certain molecules enter the bloodstream and pass the blood/brain barrier, startling, appalling transformative changes take place to our consciouness. This is something that academic philosophy has never taken into account. Consciousness is always discussed in its 'normal' level - which is seen as its only level. But after smoking N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) the individual is seemingly 'sent' to an uncategorizable place that is agree by all who have seen it as most definitely NOT of their own making. Similar chemicals and compounds such as psilocybin have exceptional, unimaginable effects on our minds. So, consciousness seems to be maleable or has many levels. This was the case in remote past - Julian Jaynes' theory of the 'Bicameral Mind' are fascinanting - and it will surely be the case in the days to come. But, as I say, we - you and I and all 21st Century Humans - won't be able to contrast, compare and reflect - just as I cannot experience neanderthal consciousness. Alfred North Whitehead and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin concieved of a wonder "Process of Reality" where the Cosmos (including us) more towards what Teilhard de Chardin wonderfully called "concrescence" - where all consciousness and valuable ideas converge into an "Omega Point" and a new epoch would begin. Whitehead's concept of "Novelty" is very interesting and the late Terence McKenna (a cranky sceptic in addition to being a mushroom eater) wonderfully expanded on his theories, though they will go unnoticed in academia.
The main problem of tackling the "Mind/Body Problem" is due to the difficulty in articulating what bloody hell it is. Wittgenstein was painfully aware of this and he has some bracing statements on it. The breakthrough in understanding what mind is, will follow from a profound and unmissable breakthrough in human language skills and this is something that is well within the realms of immediate possibility. Man's next evolutionary step will be in the domain of language.
