There’s a recurring theme in my life’s adventures: I’ll head out on a backpacking trip with friends, some intriguing question will inevitably surface as we muck about, a lively discussion ensues, and then I find myself compelled to put pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard—once I’m home.
This time, the setting was Yosemite National Park, near the Hetch Hetchy reservoir that supplies much of the Bay Area’s freshwater. We hiked a two-night, 20-mile loop through shrub and granite. The mosquitoes, undeterred by our repellent or optimism, treated us as an all-you-can-eat buffet. My friends joked that I came back “bigger,” courtesy of visibly swollen biceps from the sheer number of bites.
For whatever reason (or perhaps very obvious ones), our group of six gentlemen spent much of the trail—somewhere between bushwhacking and stargazing—discussing consciousness. The question, What is consciousness? isn’t new; each of us had brushed up against it before, to varying degrees of depth and befuddlement.
As expected, the group offered a spectrum of takes. But there was one shared intuition: consciousness has a vibe. Some things feel more conscious than others. And being alive doesn’t necessarily mean being conscious.
I Am, Therefore…
My own stake in the ground was that consciousness begins with the ability to declare, I am. That simple phrase signals self-awareness; a recognition that there is such a thing as an “I,” capable of experiencing the rich tapestry of anger, longing, sadness, hope, and more. Nested within I am are its temporal echoes: I was, acknowledging memory and a past; I will be, recognizing foresight and a future; and finally—what I see as a declaration of man’s agency over his present—I must.
One friend challenged my “I am” criterion almost immediately. To him, it felt too human-centric. I see his point. I am presumes language or some form of expressive behavior. It leans heavily on empathy and interpretation. I instinctively grant consciousness to fellow mammals—lock eyes with a dog and it feels like someone is looking back. But that instinct falters with ants, or those relentless mosquitoes. Am I perceiving their consciousness, or merely projecting mine onto them? If I rely solely on this empathetic instinct, my definition becomes a slippery slope: the less a creature resembles me in form or behavior, the less inclined I am to deem it conscious. And if these vastly different beings are in fact conscious in some profound, metaphysical sense, then my anthropocentric yardstick does us all a tremendous disservice.
That question forced me to reconsider what counts as evidence. Maybe “being-ness” requires repeated, intentional expression. A dog barks, begs, nudges. It has personality. But what about an ant? Ants, it turns out, communicate with surprising sophistication. Through chemical signals, they convey identity, origin, even intent. I could almost hear the carpenter ants as they excavated the logs we’d sat on, sawdust piling up beside them—one ant saying to another: “Ave, I am so-and-so, from such-and-such, on a mission to do this-and-that. You are who-and-who and ought to help me with this-and-that.”
But then again, couldn’t a sufficiently advanced machine do the same? Store memories, articulate goals, simulate intention? If both AI and ants can pass this bar, then consciousness must be something more than communication or goal-directed behavior.
That same friend didn’t have a definitive answer either. Instead, he tumbled headfirst into what I later learned is a flavor of panpsychism: the idea that all things—down to inert rocks—possess consciousness. If we define consciousness as the capacity to respond to the environment, then rocks, which may expand, contract, or erode under pressure, qualify.
While appealing in its inclusivity, this framing risks diluting the term “consciousness” to the point where it no longer captures the subjective experience we associate with it. If a rock’s reaction to sunlight counts the same as a child’s joy or a dog’s excitement what are we really measuring? His rebuttal was that any difference lies in the perceived complexity between them. I’m not convinced.
Another friend, more skeptical still, cut the Gordian knot: Maybe nothing is conscious, he said—or at least, we’re utterly unequipped to know for sure. If we can’t rigorously define consciousness, how can we confidently attribute it? In his view, we’re like cartographers trying to map the landscape of the mind with tools made from the same mud and timber that form the terrain itself.
Yet another friend took a theistic stance. He argued that no material explanation would ever suffice—that consciousness is rooted in the soul. To him, it was irreducible, not emergent. God, measuring out one soul per person.
Mind Over Matter? Or the Other Way Around?
I’ve wrestled with these questions before. Years ago, I wrote about the tension between materialism and idealism; the age-old debate about whether mind gives rise to matter or vice versa. Idealists claim consciousness precedes the physical, that reality is born of mind or spirit. Materialists argue the opposite: that mind is a product of matter in motion, the result of neurons firing and molecules doing their dance.
I still find materialism attractive. But even here, the ground can feel shaky. I’ve seen definitions of physical things loop in on themselves, like saying an electron is that which exhibits the properties of an electron. It’s a circularity that smacks of capitulation, hinting that perhaps the idea of something has primacy over the material it purports to define.
Then there’s the quantum weirdness. At the macroscopic scale, materialism gives us confidence in what we can weigh, measure, and model. But at the quantum scale? Certainty collapses into probability, into wave functions, into that maddening superposition of states. What even is matter down there? And how do we reconcile information, time, and the very concept of “zero” with a purely material substrate? Can you assign a physical origin to nothingness?
These aren’t knock-out punches to materialism, but they’re not soft jabs either. They reveal that the ground beneath our certainties is shakier than we’d like.
To be fair, idealism and the soul aren’t off the hook, either. That view risks hand-waving at mystery instead of explaining it—especially when it fails to show how mind gives rise to consistent, shared material reality. A world where the mind invents the world is poetic but veers toward solipsism (which I find—yawn—boring).
Neither Here Not There
So I’m left unconvinced by both, and yet drawn to the questions they keep alive.
We didn’t resolve the matter, of course. It’s been a week or two, and the conversation still pops up from time to time. I’ve little choice but to keep chewing on it, perhaps destined to wander deeper into a befuddlement of increasing Dostoyevskian proportions.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe these spirals are best reserved for the trail.