I can't seem to find it but isn't there somewhere BK describes consciousness (or MAL) as "volitional". There seemed to be a debate about on the old forum about whether that implied that it is meta-cognitive. I thought it was poor choice of words but interpreted it to mean energetic and creative.
BK covers this as thoroughly as it gets in Decoding Schopenhaurer's Metaphysics. Of course, he's also spoken to it, though not as in-depth, in various interviews such as this one ...
I think you could argue, however, that it has an energetic property even though the property is not the same as the energy that physics measures. If we can assign no properties or attributes to consciousness, other than consciousness itself, we are left with what I think I have called a "consciousness blob".
Well yes, consciousness does stuff, and that's why BK talks of excitations. If quantum fields are the weak representation of the real deal (which we can't access, due to our inadequate perceptual interface), then it makes sense that the Plato's cave shadow of what we see is related to what is really there out in the sunshine. So I'm happy with your idea that consciousness has a type of energetic quality - however that works. Strength or power of will (volition), as you say, also makes sense.
My school days told me ethyl alcohol was C2H5OH. I 'd better look at that.
C2H5OH = C2H6O
The first formula just has the hydroxy group separated out as it is representative of alcohols.
Alcohols contain the hydroxy functional group (-OH), bonded to a carbon atom of an alkyl or substituted alkyl group. The functional group of an alcohol is the hydroxyl group, –OH.
Jim,
I haven't googled, because I wanted to try and remember what it was like when I was a teenager exposed to this stuff in the 1960s. Last night, I remembered that it was "lumeniferous ether", Latin "lumen" 'light' and "ferous" 'bearing'. Ether was the sky. The belief that ether was a fluid or medium was, IIRC, undermined by Einstein. At that time, we were encouraged to think of light as particles. We envisaged them as billiard balls (and reading 'hard' science fiction, I remember how Isaac Asimov was upset that his 'Billiard Ball' short story didn't win a Hugo Award). We were told that when we got to college all these ideas would be undermined. I had a strong sense that physical stuff was going to become as mysterious as mental stuff. But to my great disappointment, it didn't happen - everything just became swamped in maths ("shut up and do the maths"). Logical Positivism was on the up. So I moved on to other interests.