Consciousness

Consciousness is a slice, and every word in the definition names an operation performed on the whole to produce it. Filtered, condensed, modified and individuated describe what happens to the conscious, which is all that exists and awareness of every interaction from all perspectives, once it is cut down to what one will can have from one position inside one self. The limits are stated precisely. Only interactions within zero degrees of the subject will are included, and only those initiated through conscious control of will, which excludes most of what is happening even in the immediate vicinity. Then a second filter is applied, and this one is social rather than positional. The endofilter subjects the remaining slice to the laws of endoreality, so what a person experiences as their own unmediated awareness has already been edited by the group whose reality they live inside. That is the departure from every account which treats consciousness as private by definition. On this reading it is a subset of something larger, cropped by where the self stands and then rewritten by an endogroup. Marsh also keeps consciousness apart from life and from will, which ordinary usage runs together. It is possible to be alive and not aware, and she takes seriously the possibility that it is equally possible to be conscious and not alive.

Consciousness in philosophy of mind is the phenomenon to be explained, and the debate runs between accounts that treat it as produced by the brain and accounts that treat it as fundamental, with David Chalmers naming the difficulty of the first as the hard problem. Cognitive science studies attention and access, measuring what makes it into awareness. Marxist and sociological traditions have their own use, false consciousness, in which a group's understanding of its position is shaped by the interests of another class. Marsh's definition is unusual in doing both jobs at once. The positional limits are a metaphysical claim about how awareness is cut from a larger whole, and the endofilter is a social claim of the false consciousness type, folded into the same definition rather than treated as a separate distortion of an otherwise clean signal.