Melanie Challenger in Undark Magazine:
For centuries, humans have sought a vital essence to explain what makes life different from the rest of matter. Therein lies one of the most persistent errors in human thought, and one that has acquired new force in an age when intelligence is increasingly imagined as something separable from biological life. At its Latin roots, consciousness literally meant “knowing with.” This was a borrowing from an earlier Proto-Indo-European verb for splitting or separating something, which gave rise, in turn, to a host of related words for division and distinction.
Consciousness, then, was to know others and thereby to know oneself. Perhaps, too, it was to know what no one else knew. And so, at its post-Aristotelian origins, to be conscious was both a differentiation of knowledge and a knowledge of difference. Potentially, consciousness might be more comprehensible, then, as a form of knowledge of the knowledge of the body.
More here.
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