***Reading @ https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jp4s3kPj6aE
Modern philosophy has long tried to establish universal consensus that our consciousness is autonomous of any higher authority. In upholding consciousness in terms of an autonomous egoic sense-certainty or pure sense-of-self, modern philosophy pit everyman’s “self” against a mindless material world, a mechanical universe the language of which is that of modern mathematics. A challenge ensued to reconcile a “thinking thing” (res cogitans) and “quantifiable matter” (res extensa) whereby consciousness has been supposed to have evolved out of mindless matter, as a property of compounds of organic or animate/living matter.
Since the nominal, silent God that early modern philosophy appealed to as supernatural guarantor of the human ego has nothing to say about the discrepancy between the unconscious and the conscious, modern man was left trying and failing to account for that discrepancy “algebraically,” in terms of purely quantifiable mechanisms.
Succeeding in driving ostensibly inorganic matter to yield to organic matter, today’s Dr. Frankenstein’s are apt to explain the conversion of the inorganic in the organic on the basis of the Machiavellian principle that things are fundamentally compelled to struggle for survival, as opposed to being called freely by some mysterious spiritual magnetism to imitate in their organization a permanent providential order or mind.
A modern anthropological principle is then artfully projected onto the genesis of all organisms (consider talk of a "selfish gene"), even though consciousness itself remains unaccounted for. For, while an organism might be produced out of inorganic materials, the passage from the tangible organism to consciousness remains a mystery--one that no analysis of neurological dynamics can account for.
We are faced here with a categorical, even ontological discrepancy akin to the one between quantity and quality, categories that are empirically mutually irreducible, even as modern philosophy invites the building of a new mechanical, even digital world in which quantity defines quality if only by taking for granted the justice of the mechanical world in which what is safely compartimetalized is ipso facto good, while what is mechanically unaccounted for is automatically assumed to be evil.
We could of course assume that consciousness is a quantifiable byproduct of certain organisms--as quantifiable as flatulence is--yet our assumption would remain unjustified. Nothing quantifiable, as such, tells us anything at all about sense-certainty, which is unlike any other merely-quantifiable properties of organisms. All such properties are abstractions presupposing an original whole in which quality and quantity are not yet split apart. Prior to modern man's symbolically abstracting pure quantities out of nature, nature contains not mere quantities but a unity out of which we can abstract quantities and qualities as distinct factors.
Consciousness does not presuppose, in sum, mere quantities, but a mysterious, original unity of quantity and quality and so a pre-empirical end-in-itself, a living being whose life is presupposed by that of every empirical one defined by a certain mutual-alienation between quality and quantity.
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