What is consciousness?

Consciousness is the subjective experience of being aware — the felt sense of perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and selfhood. It includes both raw sensory experience (qualia) and the cognitive access we have to those experiences (the ability to report, reflect on, and use them). Consciousness is studied across philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and cognitive science because it raises fundamental questions about mind, reality and personhood.

Key features

• Phenomenal experience: what it feels like to see red, taste coffee, or feel pain.
• Wakefulness/arousal: the brain state that allows experience (e.g., awake vs. asleep).
• Access consciousness: the availability of information for reasoning, reporting and action.
• Self-awareness: the experience of being a subject — a “self” that has thoughts and sensations.
• Intentionality: experiences are typically about something (a percept, a thought, a memory).

Major scientific and philosophical theories (brief)

• Dualism: mind and matter are fundamentally different (historical positions such as Cartesian dualism).
• Physicalism / Materialism: consciousness arises from physical brain processes.
• Emergentism: conscious states emerge from complex interactions in neural networks.
• Panpsychism: consciousness or proto-experience is a fundamental feature of reality.
• Integrated Information Theory (IIT): consciousness corresponds to systems that integrate information in a particular way.
• Global Workspace Theory (GWT): consciousness is global availability of information across brain networks.
• Higher-Order Theories (HOT): conscious states involve higher-order representations of first-order experiences.

Neural correlates and brain systems

• Neural correlates of consciousness (NCC): brain processes and networks reliably associated with conscious experience.
• Key areas often implicated: thalamocortical circuits, frontoparietal networks, and the default mode network (DMN) for self-related processing.
• Consciousness depends on both local processing (sensory areas) and large-scale integration across networks.

Types and levels

• Phenomenal vs. access consciousness: felt experience vs. reportable/usable content.
• Minimal consciousness: simple responsiveness or presence of experience.
• Higher-order/self-consciousness: reflective awareness of one’s own mental states.
• Altered states: dreaming, meditative states, psychedelic states, coma, vegetative state — all vary in content and level.

How consciousness is studied

• First-person methods: phenomenology, structured reports, experience sampling.
• Behavioral measures: reportability, discrimination, reaction-time tasks.
• Neuroimaging & electrophysiology: fMRI, EEG, MEG to map brain activity associated with conscious states.
• Computational models: simulating information integration or global broadcasting to test hypotheses.

Practical and ethical implications

• Clinical: understanding consciousness guides treatment of disorders of consciousness (coma, vegetative state), anesthesia, and psychiatric conditions.
• AI & ethics: determining whether complex systems could have experiences raises moral questions.
• Spiritual/practical: practices like meditation alter conscious content and can deepen understanding of attention and selfhood.

Quick FAQ

• Is consciousness the same as the brain? Not identically — most scientists treat consciousness as arising from brain processes, but exactly how is debated.
• Can animals be conscious? Evidence suggests many animals have at least basic forms of experience; the degree and richness vary by species.
• Can machines be conscious? It’s an open question: functional similarity does not automatically imply subjective experience.
• How does meditation affect consciousness? It can change attention, reduce self-referential thought, and alter the felt quality of experience.

For further reading and related topics, see our knowledge base: Awakening Consciousness — 5DDating.