From a medical perspective,consciousness is a description of our current level of awareness: people who are fully awake are completely conscious but, at the other extreme, people in a coma arewithout consciousness because they have no subjective thoughts or sense of awareness. Other states of consciousness, such as sleep and intoxication, sit between the two – awareness and subjective clarity arediminished but not completely absent.
From aphilosophical perspective, consciousnessishardto define. Usually what is meant by the term is ‘phenomenological consciousness’ – a subjective feeling of what it is like to be that person or thing. Philosophers call these subjective conscious experiences ‘qualia’ (examples would be the redness of red and the bitterness of coffee). They are tricky for scientists to investigate, as we can never truly know if another personis having a subjective conscious experience.
Neuroscientists still don’t agree on how the human brain gives rise to a subjective sense of consciousness. One popular theory – the global neuronal workspace theory – likens the mind to a theatre, and proposes that when something becomes the focus of our attentional ‘spotlight’, this leads to a spread of neural activity beyond purely sensory processing areas, allowing the information or experience to reach the level of conscious experience.
Read more:
- Can consciousness be switched on and off?
- Could the internet become conscious?
- How is consciousness physically constructed in our brains?
- How much do we understand consciousness?
