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Hi guys,

Thank you all for your thought-provoking comments. I'm so glad that everyone found this topic of consciousness so interesting, and I've really enjoyed reading all of the comments posted as a follow-up of the discussion last week.

Mostly, I find it really interesting that everyone seems to have their own conception of what consciousness is or isn't, or what it should be, and yet in our discussion last week someone raised the possibility that consciousness is just something you can recognize from your own experience. We seem to take for granted, much like with color perception, that one person's conception of what they experience as consciousness is the sam as another's, when it may be likely that we all experience consciousness differently. I am still a fan of the idea that there are multiple layers of consciousness, and that we are aware of things on different layers to a varying extent. This would explain how information can be stored in the brain and arise into our awareness at a later time, even when we are not able to retrieve the memory of first being exposed to that information. It also explains how one can drive, listen to the radio, talk on a cell phone, and navigate all at once (not that this is necessarily advisable). I think to really understand consciousness and what separates a conscious being from an unconscious one, we need to allow for the possibility that the distinction between these two states may not be black and white.