Consciousness always exists, regardless of your recognition of it. You are awareness. Can a hand grasp itself? Can a blade cut itself? Can the sun shine upon itself? .....no more than your awareness can be aware of awareness. The mind is what is aware of awareness... not awareness itself. Then the awareness is aware of the mind which is aware of the awareness which is aware of the mind which is aware of the awareness....... (pardon the overzealous repitition but I am trying to address the futility of all of this) Quite a conundrum is it not? You cannot not be aware. There is no need to try to recognize awareness because you are awareness
Consciousness is an awareness of external objects and relations, whereas self-consciousness is an awareness of internal objects and relations. It could be argued, although it might fog our perception of consciousness, that, on the basis of photon absorption and emission, the individual electrons of atoms are conscious. Then we can argue that since the electrons suffer perturbations in the presences of photons, so too do the electric and gravitational fields passing through the nucleus, and so then are the protons and neutrons conscious of the varying position of the electron. Therefore, we might be tempted to conclude, the entire atom has a consciousness of photon dynamics. We might extend our argument to human perception in saying that we possess not only faculties such as the atom to determine spatially the position of objects (using imaging techniques from information capture by our eyes) and store those positions in our brain, but also faculties which allow us to store positions pertaining to our own thoughts. This would be self-consciousness. It is thought that simple species have only the same sort of consciousness of the atom, remembering only things pertaining to the instantaneous present such as surroundings, and then forgetting things as soon as the surroundings evolve. That is to say, some species live in the 'remembered present'. Humans are not locked down in this sense, because we can stop thinking about our surroundings at any time to give consideration to some other scenario we had been previously exposed to.
Imagine the guy on Avatar... In the movie, when he wakes up for the first time as his avatar on Pandora, he is aware of his true identity and that his physical existence is a creation. No matter how much he poked or probed himself, his own body, the planet around him, etc., nothing there would have told him about who Jake Sully truly was. But in response to the original question, "How does consciousness exist?" here's my ramblings. Consciousness is one of the best terms we have for what is. Consciousness exceeds time. Instead of seeing the universe as anything, simply see it was one giant white canvas... only this canvas has no edges, no borders, no 'surface', it's simply what we think of as infinite space. Only it's the opposite of infinite space since when we think of "space" we think of an "absence," a "void." There is no void, no absence of our great canvas. Everything is the great canvas. Sometimes the brush strokes look black against the white and make the canvas appear like it has a hole, like it's empty. But it's not. It's just an illusion. We ask what comes before us because we believe in the illusion of "before" and "after." But when you're floating in infinity, which way is "before" and which way is "after"? Which way is "up" and "which" way is down? Well, I'm floating in the infinity, and I tend to like jewel colors... vivid reds, blues, purples, greens... and I see a place filled with these colors... so now I'm swimming/kicking/wiggling/floating trying to squirm my butt towards that patch of beauty. Because that's my "up," my "after." That's just my preference!
[FONT="]Consciousness is aware of itself as an experience between itself and the environment in which it exists, it is a ‘self-awareness' having the capacity for understanding, but.. the understanding of, and organization of, information acquired through awareness, inwardly from or outwardly from the perspective that is conscious, that understanding and organization are elements of intelligence.. intelligence, like awareness, is an inherent attribute of consciousness, and the inherent attributes of awareness and intelligence may be dormant or active without negating the experience that informs consciousness of its existence.. [/FONT]
Some thinking: We build an automobile. Physically, the automobile has everything it needs to move. However, we need force to put it in motion. Standing behind it and pushing it would kind of defeat the purpose since we want to ride in the automobile. So we provide fuel, energy, that moves through the machine and creates energy through heat and combustion. This energy is what moves the automobile. The automobile now has a physical construct, and it has the energy it needs for existence, gas in the tank or "spirit." But the automobile still doesn't move. Why? Because it has no mind. So we use our mind to control it. It's given no free will. Once we turn it off, it will not operate again until another mind comes along and operates it. The Spirit exists for the Physical, and the Physical exists for the Mind. That's why one of the first Hermetic Principles teaches that the universe is Mental. The Spiritual and the Physical are the tools for Mental creation. The Spiritual is force. The physical is resistance.
Daniel Dennett one of my heroes has a the intentional stance multiple drafts theory of consciousness. Daniel Dennett's theory of consciousness - the intentional stance and multiple drafts.
I think of the non physical world as information or data. [FONT="]Setting itself apart from itself, that it might know itself through the experiences of relationships with itself apart from itself.[/FONT]