Consciousness – a short summary

What is consciousness?

No one fully knows. But we have some compelling ways of describing, exploring, and theorizing it — from philosophy and neuroscience to psychology and even spiritual traditions.

 A Working Definition

Consciousness is the state of being aware of and able to experience yourself and the world around you.

It’s the subjective “feel” of being alive — the inner movie, the voice in your head, the sensation of seeing blue, or the feeling of sadness.

It’s what it’s like to be you right now.

Key Aspects of Consciousness

1. Awareness – You know something is happening
2. Self-awareness – You know that you are experiencing it
3. Intentionality – Conscious states are about things (you think of something, feel toward something)
4. Qualia – The raw, first-person experience (like the taste of coffee or pain)
5. Unity – All your senses and thoughts come together in one stream of experience
6. Continuity (most of the time) – Consciousness usually flows, like a story or a film

 Neuroscience Perspective

Neuroscientists look at brain activity patterns and networks that correlate with consciousness:

• The thalamus, cortex, and default mode network play key roles
• Consciousness may emerge from integration + complexity (see: Integrated Information Theory)
• But we still don’t know why brain matter gives rise to experience — that’s the “hard problem”

Philosophical Takes

Dualism (Descartes)

• Mind and body are separate substances
• Consciousness is non-physical
  
  

Materialism / Physicalism

• Consciousness emerges from brain activity
• It’s like software running on neural hardware

Phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty)

• Consciousness is always intentional — directed at something
• It’s embodied, lived, and situated in the world, not in isolation

Panpsychism

• Maybe everything has some form of proto-consciousness
• Consciousness is a fundamental property, like mass or charge

 Radical Constructivism & Consciousness

In this view:

• Consciousness is not a mirror of reality
• It’s a constructive process: you bring forth a world through your experience
• You never access an objective reality directly — you live inside your self-created meaning system
• Consciousness is self-referential, closed, but adaptive

 Eastern & Contemplative Traditions

• Buddhism: Consciousness is ever-changing; the self is an illusion
• Vedanta: Pure consciousness (awareness itself) is the true self (Atman/Brahman)
• Meditation explores consciousness without content — just awareness itself

Big Questions That Remain

• What exactly causes consciousness?
• Can AI be conscious?
• Can consciousness exist without a body?
• Is there a difference between human and animal consciousness?
• Is your consciousness the same as your identity?

Consciousness is your subjective, first-person experience of reality — the feeling of “being you.”
Science can describe correlates, philosophy can explore meanings, but the essence? Still one of the greatest mysteries out there.

Consciousness: Three Perspectives Compared

Perspective	Radical Constructivism	Phenomenology	Integrated Information Theory (IIT)
Core Idea	Consciousness is a self-organized, constructed system of viable experiences.	Consciousness is intentional, always directed toward something — it’s about how things appear to us in lived experience.	Consciousness is an intrinsic, quantifiable property of systems that integrate information.
Reality	Reality is unknowable; all we have is what we construct.	Reality is accessed through experience, but how it appears matters. There’s no separation of subject and object in perception.	Reality has structure and causal power; consciousness is tied to physical systems with high “Φ” (phi).
Self	The self is a cognitive construction — not a fixed entity, but a system maintaining coherence.	The self is a lived body (Merleau-Ponty) — experienced from within, embodied, situated in the world.	The self is a pattern of integrated information within a system (like a brain).
Perception	Perception is not about mirroring the world, but constructing viable models.	Perception is embodied and pre-reflective — we are always already in the world, not detached observers.	Perception arises from how information is processed and integrated across the system.
Consciousness Itself	Constructed within a closed system to make sense of experience. No direct access to “real” world.	Direct experience is the foundation of all knowledge — explore how things appear, not whether they’re “real.”	Consciousness = high levels of cause-effect power and differentiation within a system (Φ).
Language & Thought	Language is a tool to coordinate understanding, not to transmit objective truth.	Language shapes our experience but is secondary to direct perception.	Not focused on language; focuses more on system architecture and data integration.