The Overhyped Mysteriousness Of Consciousness

If every conscious being has access to its own mind, why would the idea that consciousness is an unsolved or unsolvable "mystery" persist?  There is no such thing as an experience apart from consciousness, whether one is dreaming or awake, and thus consciousness is present as long as one is aware of anything at all.  With the sole exception of the laws of logic, there is nothing more foundational to the experience of human life than consciousness.  This necessarily means that consciousness is by default one of the most familiar things for all people, yet this does not stop some scientists from making misleading claims about the understandability of the mind.

Perhaps it is the tendency for them to try to scientifically analyze that which can only be analyzed through reason and introspection that keeps them from seeing the relative simplicity of consciousness, or perhaps they fall into the same trap many other people do and simply inherit their ideas from others.  They may falsely equate the mind with the brain, mistaking something nonphysical with something material and then finding themselves in a metaphysically incoherent belief system.  Whatever their reasons, they have only dramatically overhyped the "mysteriousness" of consciousness.

Thoughts, emotions, volition, and the intellect are all aspects of human consciousness that certainly have a depth that few even begin to truly understand, but it is immediately obvious to any intelligent thinker that consciousness itself is simply the ability to perceive.  All that one must do to grasp the metaphysical nature of consciousness is reflect on one's introspection in a rationalistic manner.  Whether mind sustains matter or matter sustains mind is completely irrelevant to understanding what consciousness itself is.

The difficulty some people have with thoroughly comprehending what consciousness is does not come about because mind is an inherently enigmatic existent, as one can easily see that mind is a non-physical seat of experience.  Rather, the difficulty emerges when they think that they must know the exact mechanism by which consciousness could be created by the arrangement of matter referred to as a brain or when they think science will someday be able to illuminate the exact manner in which an immaterial mind interacts with a physical nervous system.

Science will never be capable of framing genuine knowledge about consciousness because the only demonstrable truths about consciousness itself are verified by reason and introspection.  At most, science can identify correlations between mental and physiological events--this reveals nothing about the function of the body outside of observation through one's consciousness.  As soon as one recognizes this, it becomes clear that not everything about consciousness must be known before one can prove with absolute certainty what consciousness itself is--and that it exists.