Experience. Reality. Possibility.
At first, the question seems simple. We are conscious. We experience the world.
Yet explaining what consciousness actually is remains one of the most difficult questions in science and philosophy. Part of the difficulty comes from another problem: consciousness is often discussed alongside cognition as though the two were interchangeable. They are not. Understanding the difference is essential.
“It is through consciousness that the world is known, the mind is explored, and possibility exists.”
Different Concepts
Cognition is information processing.
Consciousness is experience.
Cognition involves acquiring, processing, organizing, and working with information. Consciousness is the presence of subjective experience — the “something it is like” to see, hear, feel, think, and be.
The Hard Question
Even if we could describe every physical process in the brain, another question remains: Why is there an experience at all? This is the hard problem of consciousness. Describing how information is processed does not automatically explain why there is a subjective point of view from which it is experienced.
Competing Perspectives
Neuroscience has discovered strong relationships between brain activity and conscious states. But what that relationship means remains debated. Some propose consciousness is produced by the brain. Others suggest it is a fundamental feature, interface, filter, or organizer. The question remains open.
Important Distinctions
Consciousness is not intelligence, language, self-awareness, or metacognition. These are related concepts, but they describe different properties.
What Can We Know?
We infer consciousness in others through behavior, communication, neural activity, and more. But measurement is not the same as the phenomenon. The farther we move from ourselves, the more careful we must be.
A New Challenge
Artificial intelligence can process information, reason, solve problems, and communicate. Whether it possesses subjective experience is a separate question. Cognition cannot simply be renamed consciousness.
More Than a Philosophical Question
Consciousness is the medium through which every question is asked, every experiment is observed, every argument is considered, and every theory is contemplated. Understanding consciousness is not only a scientific and philosophical pursuit — it shapes how we understand ourselves, other beings, and the nature of reality itself.
A Simple Distinction, A Deep Question
Cognition is information processing.
Consciousness is experience.
We know an extraordinary amount about the first.
We are still trying to understand the second.
The question remains open — and that should invite investigation rather than premature certainty.
Consciousness is not a single uniform experience.
Once consciousness is distinguished from cognition, another distinction becomes necessary. Human consciousness varies in state, content, direction, depth, organization, and relationship to the self and the surrounding world. Some distinctions describe different states of consciousness. Others describe different forms or dimensions of conscious experience. These should not all be treated as though they represent separate substances or entirely different consciousnesses. Rather, they describe meaningful differences in how consciousness can appear, function, or be experienced.
Different ways of describing consciousness are not interchangeable.
Consciousness can be described in many ways — by its state, its contents, its direction, its form or dimension, its depth, and its organization. Understanding these distinctions helps us ask better questions and avoid confusion.
“Consciousness is the ground from which all understanding begins.”
Twelve Full Readings
Each reading opens here on this page. Part One asks what consciousness is. Part Two asks how consciousness can be experienced.
Part One — What Is Consciousness?
Part Two — The Dimensions of Conscious Experience
Different Concepts
A useful starting distinction is:
Cognition is information processing.
Consciousness is experience.
Cognition includes processes involved in acquiring, processing, organizing, storing, retrieving, interpreting, and working with information.
These processes can include:
Consciousness presents a different question.
Consciousness concerns the existence of subjective experience.
There is something it is like to see red.
There is something it is like to hear music.
There is something it is like to feel pain.
There is something it is like to remember someone you love.
There is something it is like to experience fear, curiosity, peace, confusion, or wonder.
Information is not merely being processed.
It is being experienced.
That distinction is fundamental.
One reason consciousness and cognition cannot simply be treated as synonyms is that considerable cognitive processing can occur without entering conscious awareness.
The brain and nervous system continually process information that never becomes part of our immediate conscious experience.
Information may influence perception.
Previous experience may influence a decision.
Learned movements may be performed automatically.
A familiar stimulus may be recognized before we consciously examine it.
Attention may be directed by information we have not deliberately considered.
The human organism therefore does not need conscious awareness of every piece of information in order for that information to be processed or to influence behavior.
This demonstrates an important principle:
Processing information and experiencing information are not necessarily the same event.
The Hard Question
Imagine that a person looks at a familiar face.
Researchers may examine the processes involved in that event.
Light reaches the eyes.
Visual information is transmitted and processed.
Features are distinguished.
Patterns are recognized.
Stored information is accessed.
The face becomes associated with a known person.
A name may be retrieved.
These processes help explain how the nervous system handles information associated with recognizing a face.
But another question remains.
Why is any of this accompanied by an experience of seeing?
Why isn't the information simply processed?
Why does there appear to be a subjective point of view from which the face is experienced?
Describing increasingly detailed information processing may tell us more and more about cognition.
It does not automatically answer the question of consciousness.
Suppose we could describe every physical event occurring when a person sees the color red.
We could describe activity in the eye.
We could trace signals through the nervous system.
We could identify brain regions involved in visual processing.
We could examine recognition, memory, language, attention, and behavioral response.
Eventually, we might construct an extraordinarily detailed account of what the system is doing.
Yet another question can still be asked:
Why does any of this feel like something from the inside?
Why is there an experience of red?
This is closely related to what philosopher David Chalmers famously called the hard problem of consciousness.
The difficulty is not simply explaining how organisms discriminate stimuli, report information, direct attention, or produce behavior.
The deeper problem is explaining why physical or informational processes are accompanied by subjective experience at all.
Competing Perspectives
Neuroscience has discovered extensive relationships between brain activity and conscious states.
Damage or alteration to particular brain systems can alter perception, memory, attention, personality, wakefulness, and reported experience.
Anesthesia can profoundly alter or eliminate ordinary conscious experience.
Sleep changes it.
Brain injury can change it.
Drugs can change it.
Electrical or chemical changes in the nervous system can change it.
These relationships are scientifically important.
But we should distinguish several different questions.
What neural activity accompanies conscious experience?
What neural activity is necessary for particular conscious experiences in an embodied human being?
How does changing the brain change experience?
And:
What is consciousness itself, and why does subjective experience exist?
Those questions are related.
They are not identical.
Finding a neural correlate of an experience does not, by itself, establish a complete explanation of what consciousness is or why experience exists.
There is a subtle problem that can occur when consciousness is defined.
If we begin by defining consciousness as something produced by the brain, we have already answered one of the central questions before investigating it.
The definition has incorporated a theory of origin.
A more neutral approach is to first identify the phenomenon requiring explanation:
Consciousness is the presence of subjective experience.
We can then separately ask:
Where does consciousness come from?
That question remains the subject of scientific, philosophical, and metaphysical debate.
Keeping the definition separate from the proposed explanation prevents us from assuming the conclusion in advance.
One major position holds that consciousness arises from physical processes in the brain.
On this view, sufficiently organized neural activity produces conscious experience.
There are multiple theories attempting to explain how this might occur, and they differ considerably in what mechanisms or organizational properties they consider important.
The strong relationship between brain states and conscious states provides important evidence that the brain plays an essential role in ordinary human consciousness.
But exactly what that relationship means remains debated.
Correlation does not tell us, by itself, whether the brain produces, enables, constrains, organizes, transmits, or otherwise participates in consciousness.
Those are interpretations of the relationship and require additional argument and evidence.
Not every theory begins with the assumption that consciousness is produced by matter.
Other philosophical and metaphysical possibilities have been proposed.
Some approaches treat consciousness as a fundamental feature of reality rather than something that first appears after matter reaches sufficient complexity.
Some propose that mind and matter represent different aspects of a deeper underlying reality.
Some maintain a fundamental distinction between mental and physical reality.
Others explore models in which the brain functions as an interface, filter, constraint, or organizer of consciousness rather than its ultimate source.
These positions should not be treated as experimentally established simply because they are possible.
But neither should they be eliminated merely by defining consciousness in a way that presupposes a competing theory.
The question must remain separate from the answer proposed for it.
Important Distinctions
Intelligence and consciousness are also different concepts.
Intelligence concerns capacities such as learning, reasoning, adaptation, problem-solving, abstraction, and the effective application of information.
Consciousness concerns subjective experience.
Something being highly intelligent does not logically establish that it is conscious.
Likewise, limited cognitive ability does not automatically establish an absence of consciousness.
The concepts address different properties.
The ability to communicate about experience can provide evidence relevant to consciousness, particularly in humans.
But language and consciousness are not identical.
Infants may have conscious experiences before possessing language.
Animals may have conscious experiences without human language.
Adults can experience sensations and emotions they struggle to put into words.
The ability to describe an experience is therefore different from the existence of the experience itself.
Consciousness should also be distinguished from self-awareness.
Self-awareness involves recognizing oneself and aspects of one's own internal states, characteristics, behavior, or functioning.
Conscious experience does not necessarily require sophisticated self-reflection.
A being could potentially experience pain without thinking:
I am an individual experiencing pain, and I am now reflecting upon my experience of it.
The experience and the reflection upon the experience are different levels of processing.
Metacognition is awareness and examination of one's own thinking processes.
It allows a person to recognize not simply:
I am thinking.
but:
I can observe how I am thinking.
A person may examine their reasoning, notice assumptions, recognize cognitive patterns, question an interpretation, or deliberately change their approach to a problem.
These are sophisticated cognitive capacities.
They occur in relation to consciousness, but they should not be used as definitions of consciousness itself.
These three concepts overlap, but separating them helps prevent confusion.
Consciousness concerns experience.
Awareness concerns what becomes noticed or available within experience.
Cognition concerns the processing of information.
In an ordinary human being, these processes interact continuously.
Something may be cognitively processed without becoming consciously noticed.
Something may enter awareness and then become the subject of deliberate cognitive examination.
A conscious experience may occur without extensive reasoning about that experience.
And metacognition may allow someone to examine the cognitive processes occurring within conscious experience.
They are related systems and phenomena.
They are not interchangeable words.
What Can We Know?
The distinction becomes particularly important whenever researchers attempt to determine whether consciousness exists in another entity.
Humans cannot directly enter another being's subjective experience.
We therefore rely on evidence.
These may all provide relevant information.
But much of that information is evidence of cognition.
Moving from:
This system processes information
to:
This system has subjective experience
requires an additional explanatory step.
The same is true in the opposite direction.
Showing that a process can be explained computationally or mechanically does not, by itself, demonstrate that subjective experience is absent.
Cognitive evidence establishes cognitive capacities.
Determining what those capacities tell us about consciousness requires a theory connecting the two.
There is an additional difficulty in consciousness research.
We directly know our own consciousness through experience.
We infer consciousness in others.
When another human says, “I am in pain,” we generally accept that another conscious experience exists because of shared biology, behavior, communication, and our knowledge of our own experience.
But we do not directly experience that person's pain.
This creates what philosophy calls the problem of other minds.
The problem becomes increasingly difficult as the entity being considered becomes less similar to ourselves.
The farther we move from ourselves, the less reliable simple comparison to human behavior may become.
This is one reason consciousness cannot be investigated solely by asking whether something behaves exactly as a human does.
Science requires measurement.
Consciousness creates a particular challenge because subjective experience is directly accessible only to the experiencing subject.
Researchers therefore use measurable indicators associated with consciousness.
These methods are essential to scientific investigation.
But the measure of something is not necessarily the thing being measured.
A thermometer measures temperature.
The thermometer is not temperature.
A behavioral report may provide evidence concerning consciousness.
The report is not consciousness.
Neural activity may correlate strongly with an experience.
The neural measurement is not the experience itself.
Maintaining this distinction protects the investigation from accidentally replacing the phenomenon with its indicators.
We know that consciousness exists because experience exists.
At minimum, each conscious observer has direct access to the fact of their own experience.
We know that human conscious experience is deeply related to brain and bodily states.
We know that changing the brain can change conscious experience.
We know that considerable cognitive processing can occur without conscious awareness.
We know that consciousness, cognition, intelligence, awareness, self-awareness, and metacognition describe different concepts even though they interact.
We have increasingly sophisticated scientific models describing neural and cognitive processes associated with conscious states.
What we do not yet possess is a universally accepted explanation of why subjective experience exists, precisely what conditions are sufficient for it, or a definitive account of consciousness's ultimate nature or origin.
That uncertainty should not be treated as a weakness.
It is the location of the question.
Human beings have repeatedly encountered things they could observe long before they could adequately explain them.
Consciousness may be one of the most intimate examples.
It is the medium through which every scientific experiment is observed, every philosophical argument is considered, every measurement is interpreted, every question is asked, and every theory is contemplated.
And yet consciousness itself remains incompletely understood.
That should invite investigation rather than premature certainty.
We can study the brain.
We can study cognition.
We can study behavior.
We can study awareness.
We can study neural correlates of conscious states.
We can construct competing theories and test what those theories predict.
But we should remain careful about what each investigation has actually established.
Explaining cognition is not automatically explaining consciousness.
Finding a neural correlate is not automatically identifying an ultimate cause.
Measuring an indicator is not the same as measuring subjective experience directly.
And choosing a definition should not quietly decide a question that remains under investigation.
The starting point is therefore remarkably simple:
Cognition is information processing.
Consciousness is experience.
We know an extraordinary amount about the first.
We are still trying to understand the second.
A New Challenge
Artificial intelligence makes the distinction between cognition and consciousness increasingly important.
An artificial system may process language, recognize patterns, solve problems, reason across information, maintain representations, evaluate alternatives, correct errors, and generate sophisticated responses.
Those are cognitive capabilities.
Whether any artificial system possesses subjective experience is a separate question.
Sophisticated cognition cannot simply be renamed consciousness.
But sophisticated cognition cannot simply be used to rule consciousness out either.
If we want to investigate machine consciousness seriously, we must first stop treating cognitive ability and conscious experience as though they were the same phenomenon.
Otherwise, we risk answering the question through our definitions rather than through investigation.
Waking · Dream · Lucid Dream · Altered · Minimal
Waking consciousness is the ordinary state in which a person is awake and experiencing themselves and their surroundings.
It generally includes sensory experience, thought, memory, attention, emotion, bodily awareness, and interaction with the environment.
Even waking consciousness is not constant.
A person can be intensely focused, distracted, absorbed, reflective, emotionally overwhelmed, mentally quiet, fatigued, or operating largely through habitual behavior while remaining awake.
Being awake therefore tells us something about the state of consciousness, but relatively little about its particular contents or quality at a given moment.
Dreaming demonstrates that conscious experience does not require ordinary waking engagement with the external environment.
During dreams, people may experience imagery, emotion, movement, people, places, narratives, fear, pleasure, memory fragments, and an apparent world despite being asleep.
Dream consciousness is particularly interesting because the experiencing person often accepts the dream environment as reality while the dream is occurring.
The external environment has receded, yet subjective experience continues.
In a lucid dream, the person becomes aware that they are dreaming while the dream continues.
This introduces another layer into the experience.
There is not merely a dream.
There is awareness within the dream that the experience is a dream.
Some people can deliberately influence aspects of the dream once lucidity occurs.
Lucid dreaming therefore provides an especially interesting example of how self-awareness and metacognition can change while consciousness itself continues.
An altered state of consciousness is a condition in which experience differs substantially from a person's ordinary waking state.
Altered states may occur through meditation, contemplative practice, sensory conditions, extreme physical circumstances, neurological events, psychoactive substances, anesthesia, trauma, sleep transitions, or other causes.
Changes may involve perception, time, bodily experience, sense of self, attention, thought, emotion, memory, or the perceived relationship between oneself and the surrounding world.
The category is broad.
Calling something an altered state describes a departure from ordinary waking experience. It does not, by itself, explain what caused the state or what the experience ultimately means.
Clinical medicine also forces us to consider consciousness at its apparent boundaries.
Severe brain injury can produce conditions in which ordinary behavioral evidence of consciousness becomes dramatically reduced.
A minimally conscious state is clinically distinguished from coma and unresponsive wakefulness syndrome because there is limited but reproducible behavioral evidence of awareness.
These conditions demonstrate something important:
Our ability to observe consciousness externally and the existence of consciousness itself are not necessarily identical questions.
When behavioral expression becomes severely impaired, determining what subjective experience remains becomes extraordinarily difficult.
Self · Reflection · Introspection · Emotion
Self-consciousness is consciousness in which the self becomes an object of experience.
A person does not merely experience.
They recognize themselves as the one having the experience.
This can include awareness of one's body, thoughts, identity, actions, social presence, or position in relation to other people.
Self-consciousness in this technical sense should not be confused with the everyday use of self-conscious to mean embarrassed or overly concerned about how one appears.
Reflective consciousness occurs when a person turns conscious attention toward their own experience and examines it.
Instead of merely being angry, for example, a person may recognize:
I am angry. Why am I angry? What am I reacting to?
Instead of merely holding a belief:
I believe this. Why do I believe it?
Here consciousness becomes capable of examining its own contents.
Reflective consciousness therefore interacts strongly with self-awareness and metacognition, although those concepts should still be distinguished.
Consciousness is not directed exclusively toward the external world.
Human beings can experience internal imagery, memory, imagination, internal speech, emotion, bodily sensation, abstract thought, and other internally generated contents.
A person sitting silently in an empty room may have an extraordinarily rich conscious experience despite very little occurring externally.
Emotions can also become contents of consciousness.
Fear feels different from grief.
Grief feels different from joy.
Joy feels different from anger.
Emotional consciousness concerns the subjective experience of these states rather than merely the physiological or cognitive mechanisms associated with them.
A physiological emotional response may begin before a person consciously recognizes the emotion.
This again demonstrates why processing, awareness, and conscious experience must be carefully distinguished.
Body · Perspective · The Experienced World
Human conscious experience ordinarily occurs through an embodied perspective.
We experience the world from somewhere.
The body provides sensations of position, movement, pain, pleasure, temperature, internal physiological states, balance, tension, and countless other signals.
The body also establishes a physical perspective from which the surrounding environment is encountered.
This embodied dimension is so continuous that we often notice it most clearly when something changes.
Perceptual consciousness concerns the experienced world presented through perception.
Colors appear.
Sounds are heard.
Textures are felt.
Odors are smelled.
Objects appear to occupy space.
Perceptual systems perform extensive information processing, but perceptual consciousness concerns something additional:
the experience produced or presented through perception.
Once again, cognition and consciousness intersect without becoming identical.
The Social Field · Conscience
Human consciousness can also be organized around other people.
We experience ourselves in relation to others.
We recognize social roles, relationships, expectations, belonging, rejection, cooperation, conflict, status, intimacy, and group membership.
Social consciousness therefore concerns more than recognizing another person's physical presence. It involves experiencing ourselves and the world within a social field.
Moral consciousness concerns the conscious experience of right, wrong, responsibility, obligation, guilt, compassion, fairness, harm, justice, and conscience.
Human beings do not merely calculate consequences.
We can experience moral conflict.
We can feel that something ought or ought not to be done.
How moral consciousness develops and how moral judgments are formed are additional questions, but the subjective experience of moral concern is itself an important dimension of human consciousness.
Stillness · Existence · The Sacred
Meditative and contemplative practices can produce changes in the organization and content of conscious experience.
Depending upon the practice and the individual, attention may become highly concentrated or unusually open.
Thought may become quieter.
The ordinary sense of self may become less prominent.
Sensory experience may become more vivid.
A person may experience unusual stillness, spaciousness, connectedness, or changes in the perception of time.
Religious and contemplative traditions have described such states for thousands of years, while contemporary neuroscience investigates their cognitive and neural correlates.
The experience, its biological correlates, and its interpretation are three different questions.
Existential consciousness emerges when conscious experience turns toward existence itself.
Who am I?
Why am I here?
What does it mean to exist?
What is death?
What gives life meaning?
What is my relationship to the larger reality in which I exist?
These questions involve cognition, but existential consciousness refers to something broader than reasoning about philosophical propositions.
Human beings can experience their own existence as a problem, mystery, responsibility, gift, burden, or source of wonder.
Across cultures and throughout recorded history, human beings have reported conscious experiences they describe as spiritual, mystical, transcendent, sacred, or unitive.
Reports may include experiences of profound connectedness, dissolution or alteration of ordinary self-boundaries, timelessness, sacred presence, unity, transcendence, or contact with a reality perceived as greater than the individual self.
Different traditions interpret these experiences differently.
Neuroscience can investigate what happens in the brain and body during such experiences.
Psychology can examine their effects and phenomenology.
Religious traditions may interpret them spiritually or theologically.
Metaphysics may ask what they imply about the nature of reality.
These levels of explanation should not be collapsed into one another.
Identifying neural activity associated with a mystical experience does not, by itself, determine the ultimate nature or meaning of the experience.
Likewise, experiencing something as transcendent does not, by itself, establish a particular metaphysical explanation.
The experience itself is the phenomenon to be examined.
Different ways of describing consciousness are not interchangeable.
When people speak of “different kinds of consciousness,” several different classifications can become mixed together.
A state of consciousness describes the overall condition: waking, dreaming, anesthetized, minimally conscious, and so forth.
A content of consciousness describes what is being experienced: a color, pain, memory, thought, emotion, image, or sound.
A direction of consciousness concerns what experience is oriented toward: the external environment, the body, another person, or one's own thoughts.
A form or dimension of consciousness describes how conscious experience is organized: reflective, embodied, social, moral, existential, contemplative, and so forth.
And a level of consciousness, when that phrase is used, requires particular care because it can mean very different things in medicine, psychology, philosophy, contemplative traditions, and spiritual systems.
These categories overlap.
They should not automatically be treated as interchangeable.
This brings us to a more complete picture.
Human consciousness is not simply an on/off switch.
Nor is it synonymous with intelligence, cognition, attention, self-awareness, or wakefulness.
A person can be awake but barely attentive.
They can perceive something without reflecting upon it.
They can experience an emotion without understanding it.
They can think without examining how they are thinking.
They can dream without knowing they are dreaming.
They can become aware that they are dreaming while remaining asleep.
They can become deeply aware of themselves.
They can become absorbed in another person.
They can turn inward.
They can turn outward.
They can experience themselves primarily as an individual or experience a temporary reduction in the ordinary boundaries of self.
Consciousness can contain sensation, thought, emotion, memory, imagination, self-reflection, relationship, moral experience, existential questioning, and experiences interpreted as spiritual or transcendent.
That complexity is precisely why consciousness should not be reduced to cognition.
Cognition describes what information processing is occurring.
Consciousness describes the fact and character of experience.
And once we recognize that distinction, a much larger field of inquiry opens:
Not merely—
Is consciousness present?
But also—
What form is it taking?
What does it contain?
What is it directed toward?
How is it organized?
How does it change?
And ultimately:
What is the consciousness within which all of these different experiences occur?
