To pick up a rock and say-
“I am conscious, this rock is not, therefore consciousness is something apart from the rock (as in, that consciousness is separate from matter)”
-is to misunderstand consciousness, or rather to mistake one ephemeral part of consciousness for the whole.
Consciousness is not, and cannot properly be, anything objective or objectifiable. It is neither “this thing” nor “that thing”, and most importantly, it is not something possessed by either a subject or an object.
Neither is consciousness to be set up as some other substance as opposed to matter. Consciousness is, briefly, the unifying condition, or principle, of the universe which unifies both the world and our experience of the world. It is the ground condition of all subsequent divisions of experience and as such is neither subjective nor objective, nor separate from anything which appears in experience.
What is localised is the “I consciousness” which is tied up as the activity of an organic being with the capacity for self-reflection (as in, a human being). A lot of bother is invested in determining what, if any, distinction can be made between matter and mind, or the psychical and physical, which quite misses it’s mark in that it takes the old dualism of body and mind as it’s point of departure. Terminology no doubt plays a huge part in the confusion, especially since there are good medical and scientific uses for the terms conscious and unconscious etc, just as the terms of substance and matter, force and causation did and to significant degrees still do have practical uses.
Eliminative materialism, no less than psychologism or idealism seems to be an effort to fetishise a way of understanding one aspect of experience beyond it’s relative appearance and hence take that understanding beyond it’s practical value. Another might be the confusion of taking patterns of relation as being somehow more real than basic perceptions or visa versa.
Once anything is substantialised (in the western ontological or metaphysical sense) even if that something is extremely dialectical or dynamic like Hegel’s notion of Spirit, and having been substantialised is set up against something else, then it fractures reality and the problems become endless in resolving the fracture.
If however the Buddhist (although, it doesn’t have to be particularly Buddhist – it has universal application) notion of non-substantiality -the lack of any independent substance to any of the phenomena of reality- is taken, then all such divisions return to their relative or practical nature and consciousness too can be properly understood as a condition for the appearance of phenomena or phenomenal forms while itself having no form.
When it comes to the “I consciousness”, of course here we could usefully talk about innate structures and neurological activity, but even here it should be regarded as a feature of a dynamic that includes both the human, (or other self-aware organism) itself and it’s environment.
Like the inseparability or non-duality of time and being, or permanence and impermanence, difference and similarity, existence and nonexistence, so too with “I consciousness” and it’s objective world; they are all discriminations based on consciousness as a condition and as such have relative validity but do not transcend relative existence.
What is unconditioned awareness, and in that sense does transcend relative existence, is the awareness of conditionality or relativity, but there we’re getting into an area where other teachers are far more adept and have greater merit in talking about than this “I” !
Numen💡