I can only wonder how I missed this when it was posted.

Such splendor we find in contemplating ourselves. Such joy and splendor indeed that this been a well cogitated concept for a great long time. To ask, “Are we conscious?” I find we must first ask, “What is consciousness?”
I’m probably the least qualified of any to give that explanation a try, but I would suggest thinking of it as a critic, watching you in arbitrary judgment of your actions, your reasoning, and your perceptions, even the perception of the aforementioned subjects. Your consciousness, your Jiminy Cricket of sorts, isn’t responsible for your impulses, if anything being impulsive and acting habitually inhibits your consciousnesses instructions; instructions that would otherwise seek to guide you from your morality and ethics.
As to whether or not your critic and your habits are derived as a result of an immanent empiricism, that’s somewhat more speculatory. Our habits, certainly they’re born from repetition, but what of our sense of self, our interpretations of our actions. Are we naturally good or evil or just a tabula rasa waiting to be written on?
I would like very much to think that humans are inherently good, with a sense of justice and redemptions. Regardless of whether or not that is the case, people are irrefutably prone to sin. It’s such a clichéd word these days, as are the commandments, now passed off as biblical trivia. But both all to accurate represent the motivations for the errors we make, the ones that bring us to ruin and the laws meant to safeguard them.
Our consciousness is a gift, beauteous beyond compare that allows us to not to think, nor to act, but to realize we are capable of both; to sit in reflection of ourselves.

“The mirror does not reflect evil, but creates it.”

With that in mind I pray you’ll tell me, what do you see in your mirror?