We have classified the different approaches to consciousness following the basic criterion that distinguishes between consciousness as an entity and consciousness as a property of an entity. In a less precise way, but more far reaching in the historical and cultural perspective of human reflection on consciousness, we can distinguish the opossed ontological positions of the materialist and the ascetic. We could call both of them with related names, like physicalist, pragmatic, immanentist to the first one, and spiritualist, idealist, transcendentalist to the second. All this terms are not synonyms, though the careless popular use some times equates them in everyday talk. For the time being let us consider them as general fuzzy tags for two distinct ontological approaches. One who believes that human life and the universe as a whole originates from purely physical principles, that reality begins and ends in physical experience as offered to us by the mind and senses, and is expressible and exhaustible in rational constructions, whether formal or merely intuitive. Social constructions are the result of physiological and physical laws that can explain all interactions, and that the foundation and meaning is the pragmatic form that we give to these interactions. For this ontology, the concept of truth is not transcendental, a priori, before any experience, but rather a posteriori to experience, pragmatic and immanent. Moral truth does not exist outside the human world as something independent, but it is made in vital praxis.
The other point of view considers the human as one more element in a framework that is not only material. The physical world is not the only reality but there are or are different forms of reality that are not shown by the sensory organs and the pragmatic functioning of the mind. Universe, life and the human world are interconnected in a more complex form of reality that does not exhaust rationality. Not all versions of this point of view consider equally the existence of a Supreme Being that acts and expresses itself in the physical Universe and in the emotional and mental Universe of life forms, but it is considered that this Being is not a mere Law of the Universe and of all beings but a Self-conscious and intelligent force that acts according to an infinite range of meanings and goals.
In cultural terms, a distinction is usually made between Eastern spiritualist and Western materialist approaches. However, an examination of the concept of "matter" would lead us to appreciate the imprecision that such a notion connotes in our everyday communications, to the point that narratives about matter are metaphysical constructions like any other metaphysical construction of the human mind. Contemporary physics does not define the concept of matter. In fact its difference with respect to "energy" is difficult to establish, if there is any. We understand by matter the conceptual representation that takes as referents the so-called objects of sensory experience. Matter itself can become part of conceptual theoretical structures of various kinds, acting as a basic reference for even more complex concepts that use the intuition of space-time propitiated by matter. This is the case, for example, of the subatomic structures on which we project the basic intuitions of macrocosmic space-time even though we know that theoretically they violate the most basic principles of that intuition. The representation of matter is in a certain sense an intuition that continues the basic one of space-time, almost as if it were a corollary of the latter.
Thus, concepts such as matter or energy have validity within a conceptual system but not an explanatory universal validity, in fact, not even an approximate validity, since they show more the shortcomings of our conceptual projections on the apeiron we call the universe than its intended structure and composition.
Can we know what consciousness is ignoring what is the nature of the universe? Well, Reality might be something independent of the Human Being, but our assessment of Reality is certainly not independent of our nature. We go back to the Delphi sentence: know thyself. Do we need to deny the world to know ourselves as the spiritualist says? Do we have to deny ourselves, our past, as the materialist says in his old faith in something abstract called matter?
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