I’m confident in my assumption that anything can have experience, but not necessarily comprehension or thought. I imagine consciousness as a field similar to electromagnetism, present throughout the universe and manipulated by the matter there, with certain configurations colouring the experience.
There remain, however, some questions, like that of the self: why aren’t we experiencing everything? What creates the boundaries between instances of experience? I assume, continuing with the comparison to electromagnetism, that experience has fields. Each field creates its own separate region of consciousness. This in turn requires us to reinterpret the original postulate of universal experience, because then experience arises not necessarily everywhere, but in regions where the matter allows it to occur, even though the potential for experience does exist everywhere, just like electromagnetism and gravity. It seems that, incidentally, we’re back to materialism.
But let me refine that thought and introduce time. Consciousness only seems to exist in time, and likewise time only seems to exist in consciousness. Take, for example, your experience when you sleep. You are still conscious, but much less so, and in that reduced consciousness you are sprung forward in time. Under anesthesia you effectively teleport instantaneously forward in time. Likewise, flow states, emotions, and substances all appear to distort time. It appears that time and consciousness are related, with more consciousness slowing down time and less consciousness accelerating it. I imagine this is tied to how universal experience works, and it explains the boundary between the self and the rest of experience.
Our neurology, which we observe to be increasingly clock-like the more we understand it, creates time (or at least our perception of it), incidentally or not. Without this perception we would effectively experience our entire life in a moment; it is what makes our brain a region of universal experience that doesn’t immediately reach its end. So everything else in the universe can be conscious, but effectively perceive nothing without a mechanism of matter to create time, because without time, formation and destruction occur immediately. There is nothing separating the two. Our self then arises from that perception of time! This region of space in our brain feels only itself, and not the whole of the universe, because in that region time is generated, and the time generated is physically separate from other times generated, ergo resulting in multiple selves despite a universal experience.
There is a metaphor for this which I believe conveys the sentiment well. The experiential field is the canvas, and time and matter are the paint. The canvas is very real, and without the canvas we have no experience, but it holds nothing until coloured by matter. Our brain and its processes, inclusive of time perception, provide the paint that ends up on the canvas, thereby allowing us to have a meaningful experience with thought and understanding.
Of course, this creates a lot more questions. Does this mean any clock-like mechanism generates a self? Is a lightbulb with its pulses therefore conscious? It is intuitively ridiculous but nonetheless possible under this framework. Would it be possible to join two selves by merging their times together? How do split-brain patients still retain a full self… or perhaps split-brain patients actually lose one self and we’re simply unaware because the neurological machinery is still functional? How does it feel, then, to lose half your self? When we lose our self, e.g. at death, do we “return to the source” and experience everything all at once, or do we fall into another metastable cavity of experience? What are the implications of this vis-à-vis reincarnation? And is there a way for us to gain control over this? Could we manipulate time in some way or another to generate, change, or ablate experience? Transfer experience, even?
To be clear I believe it is a fun theory useful for discussing the hard questions of consciousness, but it’s not what I necessarily believe in. This is, however, what I would think if I were a materialist, and there is plenty that argues against materialism (such as Mary’s room and terminal lucidity), notwithstanding my own religious beliefs.