Wednesday, 1 July 2026
Some basic clarifications about the confusing concept of “consciousness”
The word “consciousness” may refer simply to the state in which you are awake, as opposed to states in which you are not (for example, when you’re asleep, or in a coma, or under general anaesthesia).
But the word “consciousness” may also refer to the content to which you have conscious access (for example, memories, thoughts or perceptions of the world around you).
One particular form of such content is self-awareness—awareness of yourself as a specific individual with your own life story, plans and so on.
Going beyond your awareness of yourself as individual, you may also have social consciousness—a concern for the well-being of other people, your community, your species and the entire planet.
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When it comes to epistemological clarifications (attempts to explain consciousness), I have always found Anil Seth’s approach highly instructive, in which he asks the usual basic questions.
The first question, where in the brain consciousness lies, preoccupied researchers when functional brain imaging technology first became available in the 1990s and let them observe that some of the brain’s structures (such as the claustrum) were highly involved in consciousness and others, such as the cerebellum, were far less so. But they soon realized that these findings did not tell them much about what made consciousness possible.
This brought them to the question of how consciousness works—by what neural mechanisms do we become aware of something? To answer this question, researchers began examining such matters as the phenomena by which the rhythmic activity of the brain’s neurons is synchronized.
The next question, which in a sense subsumes the first two, is what is the nature of our conscious processes? This question has given rise to the major general theoretical frameworks which often touch on the ontological questions that philosophers examine in this regard. We will explore five of these major theories in the second part of my presentation tomorrow.
Lastly, there is the question of when, from an evolutionary standpoint, conscious processes first appeared in various species. This question is of necessity highly speculative, and it raises further questions, such as what are the functions of these conscious processes and, no less important, what is the function of suffering in animals?.
And on top of all that, the icing on the cake, so to speak, is the great distinction so well formulated by philosopher Ned Block in 1995, between access consciousness (the cognitive availability—presence or absence—of certain information for reasoning, guiding behaviour, reporting verbally, etc.) and phenomenal consciousness (the subjective experience that makes us feel what it is like to have a given experience with its qualitative characteristics or “qualia” (why we experience space as vast, time as passing, and colours, sounds, textures and pain as having different natures).
So when you consider all the questions that the idea of consciousness raises, you can clearly see that it is no simple matter!
The Emergence of Consciousness | Comments Closed
