Our survival, as individuals and as a species, has thus far depended upon our ability to deduce rules and laws from observed phenomena. This allowed us to note and predict seasonal changes in weather, in the edibility of vegetation, the seasonal migrations of food animals and the hunting techniques of rival predators. It enabled us to become apex predators and build a tehnological civilisation. It is the same ability which, if utilised properly and quickly enough, will save us from climate disaster and allow us to reduce our population to a manageable level. All down to things that can be counted, weighed, measured, timed, predicted.
Cosnciousness, with all its ramifications, has thus far defied all attempts at quantification. It cannot be predicted. It ranges from the simple folk who understand and perceive only the daily round of work, eating, leisure and sleep, to the enhanced perceptions and functions of the scientific or artistic genius, and includes the often entirely different perceptions of the neurodivergent and the extraordinary ones of the Psyker. There is no way to predict which human will fall into which category. No detected particle, wave or field whose properties can be categorised and measured. Because of this, only those parts of it which can be brought to bear on matters of day-to-day survival have been valued, studied and worked on. The results have been education, religion, politics, science and to some extent philosophy. It is only in the last couple of centuties that any serious attention has been given to a study of the nature of consciousness, and much of that study has attempted to apply the traditional, scientific methodology. However, this could only work is consciousness is subject to the same types of laws and processes the external phenomena we observe are. Clearly it does not, and a different methodology is required, Until and unless we can find that, we remain in the dark.
Of course, there are those who theorise that reality is material and it is consciousness that is the aberration. A once-useful but now over-evolved characteristic which will inevitably lead to our extinction and replacement by a species as intelligent, but less imaginative.
