A big question, for sure. Is there an answer to that question yet? Nope. There is also no good answer to the question of what love is. These are bucket words and symbolic stand-ins for phenomenal things hard to comprehend.
Semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure would probably classify these words (consciousness, love) as ‘signifiers’ (a linguistic form, e.g. a word) in contrast to ‘the signified’ (the meaning of the form).
Anyway, I once worked at the Institute of Noetic Science (IONS), hoping to come to better understand consciousness. However, I was not able to reach a conclusion there.
In the meantime, I kept and kept reading, pondering, and ruminating. These days, I resonate with the following material…
Innate, Intuitive Dualism
Psychological biases are implicit reasoning heuristics that shape how people tacitly construe their psychological reality. One such bias is intuitive Dualism—the tacit belief that the mind is ethereal, distinct from the physical body.
Stanovich 1989, Bloom 2004, Berent 2020, Barlev and Shtulman 2021
The more detailed material is here:
https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2024/1/niae016/7641203
