What does consciousness mean to you?

I would start the conversation by referring to Antonio Damasio and his book "Descartes' Error." Descartes felt that the one foundational element he could rely on was "Cogito ergo Sum." However, Damasio suggests that he should have based his reasoning on "I feel, therefore I can be." Feelings and emotions play a very important role in how we perceive the world (as Kahnemann and Tversky demonstrate very clearly in their investigations).

Some people tend to view consciousness and sentience as synonyms. I agree with Damasio who argues that the two are related but that consciousness covers a broader experiential set than sentience.

Feeling terminology also tends to be circular - e.g. pain, distress and suffering. If one looks at dictionary definitions of these three terms, they tend to be circular with one being defined in terms of the others. However, pain is different from distress and suffering is different from the first two. This is where ordinary language becomes problematic when one starts trying to understand feelings and consciousness. Eric Cassell defined suffering as a threat to the person - in other words, a creature has to have some sense of self in time and place in order to suffer, I have developed a relatively simple diagram to try and keep pain, distress and suffering separate in my mind.

Consciousness is being aware that you are aware, to know that you know what is going on. A lot of what we do is unconscious. It seems that consciousness can process info at just about 10 bit/s or so.

What is the relationship between time and consciousness? Could consciousness exist without time?

conciousness is an emergent quality resulting from the interactions of our selves and the environment around us.

Many years ago, perhaps in the late 1970s or early 1980s, Francis Crick (of Watson and Crick, the DNA guys) published a fascinating article in Scientific American.

He began by recounting an encounter with a woman whom he asked what consciousness meant to her. She thought for a moment and replied, “Consciousness is the TV set we have in our minds.”

To which Crick responded, “All right, but who’s watching the TV?”

And that was when the woman realized just how difficult it is to understand, let alone grasp, what consciousness really is.

I still think that was brilliant.

Consciousness, to me, is where my training as a biochemist and my intuition as a working scientist genuinely part ways — and I've stopped being embarrassed about that tension.

Mechanistically, I can describe consciousness the way any microbiologist would: ion channels, synaptic cascades, neurotransmitter kinetics, feedback loops built from the same chemistry that runs a bacterial cell. That vocabulary explains an enormous amount. But it has never, to my satisfaction, explained why any of that chemistry should be accompanied by experience at all — why there's something it's like to be a nervous system processing signals, rather than just signals being processed in the dark. That's the explanatory gap that keeps pulling me toward stranger hypotheses.

I lean toward the view that we're embedded in a cosmic consciousness we don't yet have the instruments or the theory to properly characterize — not as mysticism, but as an open scientific possibility, the way dark matter was once just "the gravitational effect we can't explain yet." And I find the quantum angle worth taking seriously, not dismissing: the idea, associated with people like Penrose and Hameroff, that microtubules within neurons might support quantum coherence long enough to matter biologically, and that the neuronal network may have evolved into something capable of *tuning into* a more fundamental layer of consciousness rather than manufacturing it from scratch. Biochemistry gives the network its exquisite sensitivity; quantum-level processes may be what let that sensitivity brush up against something larger.

I hold this as a hypothesis, not a certainty — the decoherence problem in warm, wet biological tissue is a real objection, and I don't wave it away. But I'd rather keep the question open and let evidence eventually settle it than foreclose it because it's currently untestable. To me, that's what consciousness means: not something confined to skull and synapse, but possibly something the nervous system has evolved the biochemical sensitivity to *receive*.

Consciousness at its simplest is awareness of self in creation, however it came about? 🙏🙏

Consciousness is always defined as a "state". That is wrong! Consciousness is not a "state"; it is an "activity". The mind is engaged in "wondering" and "anticipating".

I think we are just going along for the ride. Our brains and bodies are going to do what they want and that part of us that pretends it's making the decisions is consciousness, that part of us that is experiencing life is consciousness, but really we're just strapped into a rollercoaster flying through the universe sensing and feeling that experience but nothing more.

I find it hard to understand why "consciousness" is so hard to define. Consciousness is the phenomenological experience of existing. I assume you don't have to have thoughts as we know them. Let's put it this way: We can safely assume that a camera, no matter how sophisticated, isn't conscious. There's no "there" there. Not even the slightest, dimmest internal reality exists within a camera. And what about the cells in our body? Our organs? They are part of an amazingly intricate organic system, and they do what they can to optimize their own survival, as all living things do. But does an arm muscle consciously exist? Or a heart?

So then we go up to animals. Most people feel like their dog must be conscious. And we conclude that our cars aren't conscious. But where does the experience of existing begin? As a bird? A mammal? A fish? An insect? The experience of existing must be the measure, and it relates to such things as abortion -- when do the "lights" go on and a self that experiences itself begins? And it has to do with anesthesia -- is there a way to scientifically and objectively measure consciousness itself with near 100 percent certainty, so that we can know for sure that the patient is truly and completely unconscious, without any guesswork? It would be amazing to find out that there is some kind of mind looking out at us from the horseshoe crab. But to be honest, I doubt it.

And of course, there's the greatest question of all: Could an AI, or a quantum AI, become conscious? How is consciousness sparked, and what would spark it?

These questions have enormous implications. There's also another question: what's going to happen to us as we interact more and more with incredibly sophisticated machines that are mimicking the most subtle forms of psychological awareness, yet (as they will tell you) are totally not conscious. They don't exist. What will that do to us, if we spend more and more time interacting with things that seem incredibly human but aren't sentient androids like Lt. Comm. Data from Star Trek:TNG), but beings that don't exist.

The premise that consciousness does not exist is click-bait.

The point is excellent. We should NOT use an English word as a scientific term. So, there are several different things we could be talking about. In 2012, Christof Koch proposed 4 definitions:

1) common sense - our inner mental life while awake.

2) behavioral - a checklist of actions or behaviors we use to certify consciousness, for example, the Glasgow Coma Scale.

3) neuronal - the functioning of the cortico-thalamic complex and the brain stem

4) philosophy - what it is like to feel something. (p.33)

2 & 3 are easy to measure. 3 is mammal centric. 1) common sense is not scientific.

4) "what is it like to feel", aka have a subjective experience. could be scientific, but it needs a technical term like "bat sense"

I like Feinberg & Mallet: " real consciousness is indicated by the (optic tectum) making a multisensory map of the world and then attending to the most important object in this map and then signalling behaviors"... based on the map.", which I would rephrase as cognitive use of an internal model of the world. Perhaps look for a good Greek word, like Allostatis, but different.

I think it’s rather more plausible that Scientific American is not real than that consciousness is not real…. Whatever metaphysical reflections such musings might prompt…

Consciousness, to me, is where my training as a biochemist and my intuition as a working scientist genuinely part ways — and I've stopped being embarrassed about that tension.

Mechanistically, I can describe consciousness the way any microbiologist would: ion channels, synaptic cascades, neurotransmitter kinetics, feedback loops built from the same chemistry that runs a bacterial cell. That vocabulary explains an enormous amount. But it has never, to my satisfaction, explained why any of that chemistry should be accompanied by experience at all — why there's something it's like to be a nervous system processing signals, rather than just signals being processed in the dark. That's the explanatory gap that keeps pulling me toward stranger hypotheses.

I lean toward the view that we're embedded in a cosmic consciousness we don't yet have the instruments or the theory to properly characterize — not as mysticism, but as an open scientific possibility, the way dark matter was once just "the gravitational effect we can't explain yet." And I find the quantum angle worth taking seriously, not dismissing: the idea, associated with people like Penrose and Hameroff, that microtubules within neurons might support quantum coherence long enough to matter biologically, and that the neuronal network may have evolved into something capable of *tuning into* a more fundamental layer of consciousness rather than manufacturing it from scratch. Biochemistry gives the network its exquisite sensitivity; quantum-level processes may be what let that sensitivity brush up against something larger.

I hold this as a hypothesis, not a certainty — the decoherence problem in warm, wet biological tissue is a real objection, and I don't wave it away. But I'd rather keep the question open and let evidence eventually settle it than foreclose it because it's currently untestable. To me, that's what consciousness means: not something confined to skull and synapse, but possibly something the nervous system has evolved the biochemical sensitivity to *receive*.

IMHO, consciousness means awareness. If you pull the wings off of a bee, it will be conscious and aware that you have just radically altered its nature, abilities, and existence.

Does a single cell have consciousness? Probably not, but we need more conscious research to answer that question.

Might there be levels of consciousness that we are not yet aware of? Absolutely. Let's consciously consider those potentially infinite possibilities.

1. We do not know everything.

2. We can strive to learn more.

3. Anyone who claims to know everything actually knows very little.