A direct answer
Consciousness is the presence of subjective experience or awareness, though the term also refers to access to information, wakefulness, self-awareness, and reportable mental states. Philosophers and scientists disagree about how these forms are related and explained.
Questions hidden inside
- What makes a mental state conscious rather than unconscious?
- Can every fact about experience be captured in a physical description?
- How can anyone know whether another being or system is conscious?
- Is consciousness necessary for understanding, agency, or moral status?
Several meanings of consciousness
Phenomenal consciousness concerns what an experience feels like from the subject's perspective. Access consciousness concerns whether information is available for reasoning, decision, report, and the guidance of action.
The term can also refer to wakefulness, awareness of an object, or self-consciousness. These meanings overlap in ordinary human life but should not be assumed to identify one single capacity.
| Sense | Central question | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Phenomenal | What is the experience like for the subject? | The felt quality of seeing red |
| Access | Can the information guide reasoning and action? | Using a perceived signal to make a decision |
| Wakefulness | Is the organism in a conscious state rather than asleep or unresponsive? | Being awake and responsive |
| Self-consciousness | Does the subject represent itself as the subject of experience? | Recognizing a thought as one's own |
Why consciousness is difficult to explain
Physical and functional explanations can identify neural activity, information processing, behavior, discrimination, memory, and report. The philosophical difficulty is explaining how or why such processes are accompanied by subjective experience.
Some theories identify conscious states with physical or functional states. Others argue that experience has features not captured by current physical explanations. The existence of an explanatory difficulty is widely discussed, but its metaphysical significance remains disputed.
Description and acquaintance
Mary's Room asks whether a scientist who knows all physical information about color vision learns something new upon seeing color. A new-fact interpretation challenges physicalism, while ability, acquaintance, and phenomenal-concept replies explain the change without positing a new nonphysical fact.
The debate reveals that knowing descriptions, possessing abilities, and directly undergoing an experience may be different epistemic relations. It does not by itself establish that experience is a nonphysical substance.
Recognizing consciousness in others
People do not observe another person's experience directly. They rely on behavior, communication, shared biology, context, and explanatory inference. Evidence can be strong without becoming direct access to another point of view.
Artificial systems make the problem more difficult because linguistic fluency, problem-solving, and self-description may arise through unfamiliar processes. Claims about capability, understanding, and consciousness should therefore be evaluated separately rather than inferred from one another.
- Specify which sense of consciousness is under discussion.
- Distinguish a behavioral test from a definition of subjective experience.
- Separate uncertainty about another mind from proof that no consciousness exists.
- Avoid treating confident first-person language from a system as independently verified evidence of experience.
Continue with Ada
Professor Ada Rowan
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Related paths
Sources
- Consciousness (2014)
Wide-ranging scholarly overview of phenomenal consciousness, access, self-consciousness, explanatory questions, neural and functional approaches, and the difficulty of defining the subject. It keeps consciousness distinct from intelligence and behavior.
View source - Epiphenomenal Qualia — Frank Jackson (1982)
Jackson’s paper introduces the knowledge argument through Mary, a scientist who knows the physical information about color vision while confined to a black-and-white environment. The case asks whether experience provides knowledge not captured by complete physical information.
View source - Qualia: The Knowledge Argument (2024)
Detailed survey of the knowledge argument, Mary’s Room, formulations of physicalism, ability and acquaintance replies, phenomenal concepts, and questions about what new experience teaches. It supplies the objections needed to avoid treating the case as a simple proof.
View source - The Computational Theory of Mind (2024)
Survey of views that explain cognition in computational terms, including representations, algorithms, implementation, classical architectures, connectionism, and objections about semantics and embodiment. It supports careful distinctions between computation, cognition, intelligence, and understanding.
View source - Artificial Intelligence (2018)
Scholarly overview of artificial intelligence as a scientific and philosophical field, including symbolic and statistical approaches, reasoning, learning, language, robotics, and questions about whether artificial systems can think or understand.
View source
Last modified 2026-07-31. Reviewed by Thinking Paths editorial team.