 without using the term materialism or idealism, panpsychism, any of those, but without being too simple-minded about it, what are we talking about when we talk about consciousness? What is consciousness to the average person who's intellectually oriented, but maybe is a little bit fuzzy about what the debate is about all this? Consciousness is that which experiences is the ground of experience. Is that whose excitations are the experiences of daily life? If we weren't conscious, we would experience nothing, there would be nothing to talk about. There would be no emotions, there would be no perceptions, there would be no blue and reds, there would be no regret, disappointment, happiness, the warmth of love. That would exist because all of these are experiences or excitations of consciousness, so to say. So as far as we can know for sure, consciousness is all there is. It is the canvas of life. You know the way I sometimes put it, and this is how I put it in the book that I wrote, is that it's an oversimplification, but nonetheless, it's the voice inside your head. It's the voice inside your head that listens because the problem with consciousness as we talk about it, of course, is that if consciousness is everything like you said, then if it is fundamental like you're alluding to, but all of a sudden we're throwing people off a little bit, then we can never really get it. So a simple test I always say is, say hello silently in your head. And what heard that hello is consciousness. Consciousness is always there, always present for the voice inside your head and everything that's going on. Now you can tear that apart philosophically and in a number of ways, but I always felt like that little simple experiment that anyone can do can at least get us to that first step of realizing there's something more. There's something to talk about here because, of course, the real challenge in all this is what does science have to say about what consciousness is?