Conscious

This is conscious as a noun, and the distinction from consciousness is doing real work. The conscious is not something a brain has. It is all that exists, awareness of every interaction from every perspective at once and universal knowledge, which makes it the whole rather than a faculty operating inside the whole. Consciousness by contrast is a slice of it, filtered and individuated from the position of one will inside one self. Marsh is willing to speculate about what the conscious is in physical terms. If the conscious is all that is, and conscious control over will is what creates order or macroscopic objects, then the Higgs field and Henry More's spirit may both be synonyms for it. She raises the possibility that the higher plane of conscious is the warm one and the earthbound plane the cold, and asks whether living is an attempt to rescue those trapped in the cold. The practical consequence is in the anima system. Primary anima is obtained through conscious connection to primary sources, and it can only be accessed with conscious engagement, which is why her example is music. The previous note has to be held in the conscious for the present note to mean anything, and someone with a greater appreciation for complex music may have a stronger connection to the conscious.

Philosophy of mind uses conscious as an adjective almost exclusively, and the noun position is occupied by consciousness, which is treated as a property of certain organisms and debated as the hard problem of why physical processes should be accompanied by experience. Idealist and panpsychist traditions come nearer to Marsh's usage, from Advaita Vedanta and the Neoplatonic One to Alfred North Whitehead's process metaphysics and recent panpsychist arguments that experience is fundamental rather than emergent. Marsh's move is to fix the vocabulary so that the two senses stop competing, reserving conscious for the totality and consciousness for the individuated slice, which lets her ask how the slice is cut without arguing about whether the whole exists.