Question: What is consciousness?

Lowri Evans answered on 17 Mar 2016:

That’s a great question, and very smart people have spent their entire careers trying to understand the answer! It’s very surprising that something that we all experience is so hard to explain.

On a basic level, consciousness is the fact of being awake and processing information. Doctors judge people as being conscious or not by how awake they are and how they respond to certain things. But being conscious in a literal sense is more than that, it is part of what allows us to exist and understand ourselves.

Different people may experience consciousness in different ways, and it can be difficult to make comparisons of people’s subjective perceptions of reality with very much detail. When you look at people that say, from the same culture, roughly the same age, and not very difference intelligence, and you make a lot of detailed questions about the experiences of say colours, situations, and so on, you’ll get very similar answers. So I think it’s reasonable to say that even though, in all likelihood, we have slightly different experiences of reality, they are similar enough to us not to clash.

What we call consciousness is the fact of our having a subjective experience of the world—it is our sense that the world is separate from us, and that we exist independently. While it is unclear exactly how neural firings in specific parts of the brain result in this kind of subjective thought, it’s believed that conscious thinking is related to the prefrontal cortex—and possibly extends down to a cellular level.