Lexical Quarantine
There comes a point when a word is so overburdened with multiple connotations that don't have any necessary logical connection with each other that it becomes necessary for clear thinking to avoid the use of it altogether. Because of this, I intend to henceforth avoid using the word "conscious" and its derivatives in serious writing, with the possible exception of "unconscious" to describe someone who's simply offline in all possible relevant senses of the term.
However, it's worthwhile to review the origin of the word, which is actually rather curious. It derives from the Latin conscire, which is a combination of con- and scire, the latter meaning "to know" and the former indicating a relation of togetherness. (Exercise: Try combining con- [sometimes com-] with vehere ["to carry/bring"], sentire ["to feel"], ponere ["to place"], jugare ["to join"], and petere ["to strive/seek"]; see how many other English words you can think of with that prefix.)
Scire is related to scindare ("to cut/divide") in that both are derived from the PIE root skei-, meaning "to cut/split" (whence also the Greek cognate skhizein and the Old Iranian scian ["knife"]), and thus scire's original meaning was most probably "to distinguish, to tell things apart". After all, "to know a thing well, know its limits", as the Bene Gesserit remind us; we know things by comparison (usually implicitly) with unlike things.
So conscire might be translated as something like "to know mutually" (in the sense of a shared understanding), but this doesn't seem to match its usage nor that of conscientia, which seems used to refer to personal, internal knowledge. If we might venture to descend down into the concepts the two parts of the word seem to denote, we seem to have a conjunction of dividing and togethering. This seems odd at first but really isn't when you consider the word combinare, which meant "to unite two things" and was derived from com- + bini ("two-by-two", as in marching formations). But of course conceptualizing two things as separate objects requires distinguishing them, so combinare's meaning isn't far off from conscire's.
In his Scienza Nuova, the under-appreciated Italian scholar Giambattista Vico has an interesting passage where he contrasts scienza and coscienza:
"Men who do not know what is true of things take care to hold fast to what is certain, so that, if they cannot satisfy their intellects by knowledge (scienza), their wills at least may rest on consciousness (coscienza).
Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true; philology observes that of which human choice is author, whence comes consciousness of the certain." (§137-138)
"Philosophy" here should be read to include "natural philosophy", what we'd now simply call science; "philology" refers to the study of history, broadly construed. Vico's distinction between the "true" and the "certain" (with scienza concerning itself with the former and coscienza the latter) has an odd ring to it, but we can get some clarification from a later passage:
"In good Latin certum means particularised, or, as the schools say, individuated; so that, in over-elegant Latin, certum and commune, the certain and the common, are opposed to each other." (§324)
"Common" here is in the sense of abstract relations (or laws), which are the familiar goal of scientific inquiry. So scienza deals with the abstract and conscienza the particular, the unique, the concrete. Concrete (from concrescere, "to grow together") experience is built up by an integration of abstract patterns, making conscire a "togethering" of sciens. This seems to cover pretty well what people indicate with the word "consciousness" (and a lot else besides), which is precisely the problem: The term is simply too all-encompassing to be operationally useful at the level of knowledge we've arrived at; taking a cue from Wittgenstein, we can and ought to throw away this particular ladder after having climbed up on it.
However, it's worthwhile to review the origin of the word, which is actually rather curious. It derives from the Latin conscire, which is a combination of con- and scire, the latter meaning "to know" and the former indicating a relation of togetherness. (Exercise: Try combining con- [sometimes com-] with vehere ["to carry/bring"], sentire ["to feel"], ponere ["to place"], jugare ["to join"], and petere ["to strive/seek"]; see how many other English words you can think of with that prefix.)
Scire is related to scindare ("to cut/divide") in that both are derived from the PIE root skei-, meaning "to cut/split" (whence also the Greek cognate skhizein and the Old Iranian scian ["knife"]), and thus scire's original meaning was most probably "to distinguish, to tell things apart". After all, "to know a thing well, know its limits", as the Bene Gesserit remind us; we know things by comparison (usually implicitly) with unlike things.
So conscire might be translated as something like "to know mutually" (in the sense of a shared understanding), but this doesn't seem to match its usage nor that of conscientia, which seems used to refer to personal, internal knowledge. If we might venture to descend down into the concepts the two parts of the word seem to denote, we seem to have a conjunction of dividing and togethering. This seems odd at first but really isn't when you consider the word combinare, which meant "to unite two things" and was derived from com- + bini ("two-by-two", as in marching formations). But of course conceptualizing two things as separate objects requires distinguishing them, so combinare's meaning isn't far off from conscire's.
In his Scienza Nuova, the under-appreciated Italian scholar Giambattista Vico has an interesting passage where he contrasts scienza and coscienza:
"Men who do not know what is true of things take care to hold fast to what is certain, so that, if they cannot satisfy their intellects by knowledge (scienza), their wills at least may rest on consciousness (coscienza).
Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true; philology observes that of which human choice is author, whence comes consciousness of the certain." (§137-138)
"Philosophy" here should be read to include "natural philosophy", what we'd now simply call science; "philology" refers to the study of history, broadly construed. Vico's distinction between the "true" and the "certain" (with scienza concerning itself with the former and coscienza the latter) has an odd ring to it, but we can get some clarification from a later passage:
"In good Latin certum means particularised, or, as the schools say, individuated; so that, in over-elegant Latin, certum and commune, the certain and the common, are opposed to each other." (§324)
"Common" here is in the sense of abstract relations (or laws), which are the familiar goal of scientific inquiry. So scienza deals with the abstract and conscienza the particular, the unique, the concrete. Concrete (from concrescere, "to grow together") experience is built up by an integration of abstract patterns, making conscire a "togethering" of sciens. This seems to cover pretty well what people indicate with the word "consciousness" (and a lot else besides), which is precisely the problem: The term is simply too all-encompassing to be operationally useful at the level of knowledge we've arrived at; taking a cue from Wittgenstein, we can and ought to throw away this particular ladder after having climbed up on it.