What is Consciousness?

Big question! No pressure…

To be completely honest, I think the only fair and honest answer is that nobody knows for sure what consciousness is. Or what generates it, what does and doesn’t have it, why it exists, or even if it’s real, and the list goes on and on.

You’d think, with so many unknowns, that this must be a relatively new area of study— nope, we’ve been discussing and attempting to dissect it for ~3,000 years 😂

As someone who has been actively exploring the nature of consciousness for quite a while, I’ve come to believe that there are a few key aspects holding us back from arriving at answers:

1. Definitions - There is no single, universally accepted definition of consciousness. There are in fact multiple definitions, components, sub-categories, frameworks, and boundaries attempting to describe and constrain consciousness. With so many targets, some of them moving, no wonder we are struggling to hit one.

2. Language - Words are maps, never territory; this is an unavoidable aspect of language, and in regards to something so seemingly complicated, language is no doubt holding us back when it comes to defining consciousness (one might even say “the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao¹”). At the same time, there’s a very real possibility that language itself is a critical component of consciousness, and perhaps even the root of it (more on this in a bit).

3. Science & Technology - Despite many incredible advances in the realm of neuroscience over the last century, there is still a great deal we do not know about the brain specifically and the nervous system generally, limited largely by our ability to scan and emulate the brain in sufficient detail. We are multiple orders of magnitude away from where we need to be in terms of scanning and modeling precision to fully understand the human brain. (We are though, thankfully, closing this gap quickly.)

While this is a complicated subject, I’m going to attempt to simplify it in a few ways.

One, I’m going to explore why we think consciousness is a thing, the key components of consciousness that are at play, and at least some of the various definitions and explanations floating around.

Two, I’m going to use the list above to both poke holes in some of those definitions, and to attempt to narrow things down to a better core set of definitions.

And Three, I’m going to propose what I think are the root causes of this thing we call consciousness, why I think that, and how we might test it.

Buckle up!

Defining Consciousness

First, I want to define a few things that are adjacent to and often overlap with consciousness in many discussions:

• Intelligence - At the most simple, this would be the ability to take environmental input and adjust actions based on said input. But intelligence is both a spectrum and a collection of things (long-term planning ability, abstraction, problem solving, pattern recognition, etc.) Bacteria are intelligent in the most simple sense, but nowhere near as intelligent as a human.

• Sentient - This is often used interchangeably with Consciousness, which I think is a big mistake, as Sentient literally means “able to sense/feel things.” Just as something could be intelligent but not conscious, so too can something be sentient but not conscious. Feeling pleasure or pain in and of itself does not consciousness make (even if it might be a necessary component).

• Qualia - The contents of an experience. The heat of a flame, the intensity of a pain. Anything with sense organs and a brain to process the input technically has qualia, whether or not they can “step back” and observe or pontificate on such.

A definition is the act of both constraining what something is, and what it isn’t, so we have to be very careful about mixing terms and conflating things, particularly with something as tricky as consciousness.

A great many scientific conundrums come from being sure something is a certain way when it actually isn’t that way. Artificial dead ends, if you will.

So…why exactly do we think we have something called consciousness?

I mean, humans created a word for it, so we must have had a reason to create that word, right? There’s gotta be something in our experience that leads us to this thing we’ve named?

Sort of.

It’s interesting to note at this point that the meaning of the word consciousness has changed quite a bit over time (originally it meant more of a shared social knowledge), and at the same time today it’s actually used colloquially in multiple ways to refer to many different things (awake, awareness, sense of self, etc.).

If Julian Jaynes’ research into historical writing and language usage is correct², the idea of consciousness as we think of it today is actually a fairly new concept (~3,000 years old)…which doesn’t mean humans didn’t *experience* what we might think of as consciousness prior to that, but at the very least that our language hadn’t yet carved out the concept the way we have, which is an important line of discussion.

There is a well known saying, “the map is not the territory”, which basically means that no map is ever 1:1 with the territory (if it were, it would BE the territory), and most maps are at best a low resolution rendering of the territory. Borges explored this in his short story On Exactitude in Science.

Language is just one type of map, a low fidelity segmentation of some aspect of the whole that is all of reality, and as Wittgenstein said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

This is more literally true than you can imagine.

For example:

Now, we CAN experience something (sentience, qualia) without language to describe it (of course, since the nervous system and senses are in place well before language, and this is how language comes to be in the first place). But there are aspects of reality we may not (fully) experience because without the right words some things never make it to the level of our awareness.

For example, there are a TON of words in other languages with no English equivalent.

As with words like God, or Enlightenment, the word Consciousness is a jumbled mess of a word, with way too much baggage attached to it. Too many flavors, too much mental and social cruft built up over too much time.

I call these Loaded Words, and and they are a HUGE problem.

“Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.” — Arthur Koestler

The reason this matters is that, if you are trying to determine if something exists, and what causes it, having a very clear, VERY precise definition makes a world of difference. A definition that is wrong is essentially a map that is wrong, and such a map won’t lead you to where you’re trying to go.

At the same time, creating a word for something that doesn’t actually exist can lead us to believe in something illusory. Confirmation bias is a bitch.

This I think may actually be a big part of why the hard problem of consciousness is STILL, after thousands of years, a hard problem…

We’ve perhaps been looking for the wrong thing AND in the wrong place.

To help illustrate the issue of Loaded Words, here are just a few of the many working theories, definitions, and possible aspects of consciousness that I’ve come across (with some overlap):

1. Phenomenal Consciousness: This refers to the qualitative, subjective, experiential aspect of consciousness, often called "what it is like" to have an experience. For example, what it's like to see the color red or feel pain.

2. Access Consciousness: Proposed by philosopher Ned Block, this refers to the information in our minds that we can use, act upon, or report.

3. Self-Consciousness: This is the awareness of oneself as an entity that exists and has experiences.

4. Panpsychism: The idea that everything has individual consciousness, that it is not some special attribute that some things have and some things don’t.

5. Non-Duality: The idea, stemming from Zen and Advaita, that there is only one singular consciousness, and that everything is just a mind construct of this consciousness, that there are in reality no separate beings or things.

6. Quantum Mind: Posits that consciousness stems from various quantum processes in and/or interacting with the brain (entanglement, fields, superposition, etc.)

7. Simulation Hypothesis: Could mean that consciousness is illusory, just a programmed NPC trait, or that the real conscious beings (player characters) exist a “level-up” from us.

8. Integrated Information Theory (IIT): Proposed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, IIT suggests that a system is conscious to the extent that it possesses a high degree of both differentiation (unique information) and integration (interconnectedness).

9. Global Workspace Theory (GWT): Proposed by Bernard Baars and later developed by others like Stanislas Dehaene, this theory suggests that information becomes conscious when it's broadcast to a "global workspace" in the brain, making it available to a range of processes.

And this isn’t by ANY means a complete list!

In addition to not having a firm definition of consciousness, we also don’t know whether consciousness is a binary thing (you either have it or you don’t), or a spectrum (many things, or maybe even everything, has it to varying degrees). Could be a bit of both.

And again, I think in part this is because the definition is not sufficiently precise.

So, let’s assign a more precise definition:

Aware, and aware of your awareness.

That sense of being an individual, a self (with memory), with experiences that you are aware of, observing, and maybe even narrating those experiences as they happen to you via language.

Sense of Self + Sensory Experience + Interpretation

You don’t just have an experience, but you are aware of the experience and thinking about the experience via some method of abstraction such as language. This is the key.

So let’s break it down.

Sense of Self: Every creature that can react to the environment HAS to have, in some way, a sense of self…you don’t feel hunger and put food in someone else’s mouth and then feel full 😂

Sensory Experience: Those individually modulated experiences picked up by sense organs and processed by your brain and nervous system are referred to as Qualia; the heat of a flame, the feeling of warmth on the skin from the sun, the pang of hunger from smelling cooking food, etc. Part external signal, part reaction to/processing of said signal.

Interpretation: This is probably the fuzziest of the buckets, and may actually be the modulator on a consciousness spectrum, but my hunch is that language in particular plays a key role in the human experience of consciousness. Without language, we would be unable to slice up reality as finely as we do, so I think it most likely plays a critical part.

Now, a couple of things here: One, we can also surmise that every creature with a nervous system has “experiences”, even if they are as simple as sensing heat, light, or hunger. This is a root aspect of biology, a feedback loop that takes environmental cues and triggers action from the thing receiving the cue.

This is at the very root of evolution, and is intelligence in its simplest form.

Two, we have no way of knowing for sure what that experience is actually like for any other creature (objective, subjective, etc.). We can make guesses based on the complexity of their biological components, but they are guesses.

We only every *truly* know what it’s like to be us, and even then, due to all manner of mental shortcut, sensory limits, and various cognitive biases and linguistic limits, we have a pretty skewed perception.

So, even if consciousness is a thing, as of now we have no way of validating it with certainly in anyone or anything other than ourselves, and even the self-validation is itself suspect.

With me so far?

Now, with what we know of our own human sense organs, we know that not everyone experiences reality the same way at the sensory level. If fact, some people have a very, very different experience of reality than others (those with sensory impairments for example, or tetrachromats, those with Aphantasia, folks with autism spectrum, split brain patients, and on and on).

And of course our human experience of reality differs wildly from the experience of other creatures with different sense organs (different ranges of hearing, different visual spectrums and color channels, etc.).

For example:

And there are components of reality that are beyond the organic sensory range of any known creature!

We also know that, due to differences in language and upbringing, we humans interpret our experiences in different ways as well. This means that human experience is *highly* subjective, as I explored in-depth in this post, The Words That Divide Us.

But beyond that, while we have found ways to use technology to greatly expand our sensory range, we are still technologically limited when it comes to exploring consciousness fully:

• Our ability to scan the brain is still done at a relatively low resolution

• We can’t do high(er) resolution scanning without destruction

• Even if we could scan the brain down to the smallest details, our best computers can’t come close to modeling the human brain at that level of detail

• We still don’t fully understand the quantum realm, which may play a role in cognition and consciousness

• We don’t fully understand the microbiome, the gut-brain axis, and how that comes into play with our experience of reality (potentially a big deal)

• We still don’t know the true nature of reality

And many more things besides.

We’ve come a long way, but there is likely still far more that we don’t know than we do.

So, knowing that we may well lack the technology and language and understanding to even properly assess consciousness, I’m still going to move forward with what we do have, and how I think we could narrow things down even at our current level of understanding and technology.

Winnowing Flavors of Consciousness

While there are, as we’ve already covered, MANY possible theories and components of consciousness, you can boil down the conceptual space into these 4 buckets:

1. Consciousness is intrinsic

2. Consciousness is extrinsic

3. Consciousness is a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic

4. Consciousness does not exist

All of these are perfectly feasible, which is what makes this so hard!

Let’s look at each category in turn.

Consciousness is Intrinsic

Another way to say this would be, your brain and/or body fully generate consciousness.

While there have been attempts to identify one specific brain or biological structure responsible for consciousness (the claustrum for example is one), in truth it’s probably more accurate to say that if consciousness is generated “by the thing”, then it is actually a combo of many interacting systems and concepts (senses, nervous system, self-awareness, theory of mind, etc.), and not so much some single brain region.

The idea that the claustrum is behind consciousness for example stems from the apparent modulation or even full loss of consciousness while under anesthesia, but this is countered by the argument that it could just be the memory/recall that is shut down during anesthesia, not actual consciousness.

As you might imagine, this makes it quite difficult to test! If awareness is a key component of consciousness, but memory is necessary for recall, how do you know for sure when you’ve turned it off?

Further exploring the biological basis, we see behavior that reflects at least some possible aspects of consciousness at the individual level (self-awareness, intelligence, problem solving, communication, planning, etc.) coming from only a fairly small number of animals (primates, elephants, cephalopods, cetaceans, corvids, horses, canines, rats, cats, etc.).

We’ve tried all sorts of experiments to test this in humans of various ages, and in many types of animals, and these tests (such as the mirror test) have been inconclusive at best.

That said, you could make the argument that the simplest explanation for consciousness, if it does exist, is that our minds generate it. Since turning our minds off appears to make it go away, this is not an unreasonable stance.

But it is uncertain.

Consciousness is Extrinsic

This could be defined as a “brain as a receiver” scenario, or some flavor of non-duality or simulation hypothesis. Anything where consciousness is generated fully external to your brain/body.

A singular universal consciousness of which we are all part.

A player or user a level-up riding around in a character in a simulation.

An automaton of some sort that receives a signal from elsewhere that activates it.

A spirit riding around in a meat suit as part of some test.

Not only is this possible, but some flavors of this seem quite likely, and match many aspects of what quantum physics is finding.

I’ve explored this in tremendous depth in this post, The Nature of Reality. I HIGHLY recommend reading this post…it’s a long one, but I guarantee it’ll be one of the most fascinating things you’ll read in your lifetime 😎

Consciousness is a Mix of Intrinsic and Extrinsic

This is saying it takes a specific type of mind PLUS some outside factor(s) to generate consciousness. Quantum Mind³ would be one potential flavor of this.

For example, what if consciousness requires both the right neural architecture (hardware), but also the right software running on top of that architecture to generate consciousness?

Language, for example, is a type of “software”, and one that not all minds on earth are capable of running. Some of the most intelligent species on our planet though, humans included, are capable of learning and using language. Some SUPER cool things are happening at the intersection of AI and animal language.

Did you ever draw with crayons as a kid? How many different colors did you have? Did you ever go from having only a few colors, to having a shit ton of colors?

It’s quite a leap in options, right? More colors, more options!

Language is effectively a means of adding colors to your pack, enabling you to recognize, label, and use shades of reality you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.

Furthermore, as language evolves, through various mechanisms of evolution it also causes changes to the hardware as well, in a positive feedback look.

Could it be that it takes a certain brain structure or structures PLUS language to generate what we think of as consciousness?

Maybe!

Consciousness Does Not Exist

Like a fictional character such as the Jabberwock or Cerberus, just because someone created a word and a concept for something does not make that thing real. Shapes in shadows, clouds, or desert mirages, or characters we read about in stories, are real *experiences* (our senses process them in some way), but they are not real *things*.

So too may consciousness be.

Like a mirage, or perhaps more accurately an Anamorphic Illusion, it could be that consciousness is just something that appears to appear when a number of other things align just so, but it is not a thing in and of itself. Take for example, this art from Bernard Plas⁴:

From one perspective you see chaos.

But from another perspective, you see startling order.

It’s not only possible, but perhaps even quite likely that what we think of as a single thing (what we call consciousness), is in fact just a bunch of different things that line up *just so*, which results in an illusion of sorts that we treat as a single thing because we created a word to describe the illusory whole, instead of the disparate interacting pieces.

Perhaps the search for consciousness is nothing but a snipe hunt…

If this is the case, it would certainly explain why we’ve had such a hard time pinning this down over the course of the last few thousand years 🤔

A thing can be both experientially real, but also untrue, as anyone who has observed an optical illusion can tell you.

The Root Cause of Consciousness

So, with all of this in mind, what might be the actual root cause of the experience we call consciousness? Is it a real, true thing? Or an illusion of some kind?

While we still don’t know the answer with any certainty, I do have a few theories of my own, one of which I think is worth calling out and exploring a bit. Here are the components:

• I think consciousness is both binary, AND a spectrum. Not everything has what we would call a conscious experience (no panpsychism or non-duality in the traditional sense), but of those things that do have a conscious experience, there is a spectrum from low-level consciousness (dog) to high-level consciousness (human).

• Human level consciousness requires a dual-hemisphere brain, with a corpus callosum (or other system to facilitate cross-hemisphere communication), where one hemisphere narrates/explains/justifies the experience of the other hemisphere⁵ via language. Consciousness in general may require multiple brain hemispheres connected and communicating in some fashion.

In regards to the dual hemispheres connected together, functioning effectively as the Experiencer and the Narrator, would we have that perspective of Observer without that set-up? Because that perspective, observing things as if from outside, that sort of awareness, seems to be the root of what we call consciousness.

And can you even begin to imagine consciousness without language to describe it? What must it be like to be, say, an infant? Senses intact, but brain not fully developed, and no language with which to describe or divide any facet of your experience…

Is a baby “conscious”? (maybe, maybe not)

As conscious as an adult? (it would seem not)

Perhaps in this regard Julian Jaynes was correct…not that consciousness is newly evolved per se, but that language has only somewhat recently clustered those disparate things under a single label, which is leading people to search for a single thing that doesn’t actually exist as a single thing.

How would we test this?

While I think it would be wildly unethical, the only process I can think of for humans would require a few steps:

• Engineer better non-verbal tests for the components of consciousness, using fMRI and similar technologies. The mirror test is…not great⁶.

• Sever the brain hemispheres of a human at birth (it might even be necessary to remove the left or right hemisphere entirely⁷). This should probably be done before exposure to language, though you could test before and after.

• Never teach them language, and never use language around them, no books or pictures, nothing. Or, at the very least, never teach them words like consciousness, awareness, etc. (to avoid confirmation bias).

• Run them through the various tests concocted over time to see if there is evidence of consciousness.

You might need to run a few variants of this to determine if it’s language or the left or right hemisphere or some combo that are at play, but my guess is this line of experimentation would get us MUCH closer to consciousness.

But again, not remotely ethical, so perhaps it’s a dead end…

As far as flavors of consciousness go, this probably falls closest to Global Workspace Theory (GWT), and could be considered a subset of that.

There HAVE been very young children who have had a brain hemisphere removed (the youngest I know of was effectively born with no left hemisphere, as it was damaged tremendously, and was removed fully at 9 months old⁸), so perhaps some consciousness research could be ethically conducted with this individual.

Split-brain patients and people who have undergone hemispherectomy surgery are definitely of interest to consciousness researchers, and I think we’ve barely scratched the surface there.

Conclusion

So here we are, over 4,000 words later, having covered a very wide swath of territory map, and we STILL don’t know what consciousness is with any degree of certainty.

We clearly *seem* to have a particular experience of reality, and we use the word consciousness to label that experience, and there are certain things we think are critical components of that experience.

But whether consciousness is a thing itself, or a jumble of things, or just an illusion…we’ve got no fucking clue. Just lots of guesswork (only some of which is educated).

Sorry 😂

That said, hopefully I’ve at least provided you with:

• A clear definition of consciousness

• Many important adjacent definitions

• Four specific potential categories under which consciousness may lie

• Many possible components and causes

• My personal working theory for the root cause of consciousness

• At least one possible process by which to test it

Your crayon box now has a few extra colors if nothing else.

You’re welcome!

This probably isn’t a super satisfying place to end things, without a clear conclusion and all, but hey, welcome to the world of philosophy and neuroscience, where it seems there are always more questions than answers 🤣

If I feel so compelled I might just write a follow-up on the intersection of AI and consciousness research. Stay tuned!

1. From verse 1 of the Tao Te Ching, which basically means if you can name it, it’s not the thing, just a representation of the thing: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:gff,sm,jhmd,jc,rh/section:1

2. It might not be. The biggest reason it might not be correct is due to translation errors, as it is very hard for a modern translator to not bring their own linguistic maps to play in said translation, and it always involves a measure of guesswork.

3. Not the most hard science-y source, but found this interesting: https://thedebrief.org/a-quantum-brain-could-solve-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-new-research-suggests/

4. Some examples of Bernard Plas’ art

5. See Ian McGilchrist’s book, The Master and His Emissary

6. See this for one possible take https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/04/fish-mirrors-animal-cognition-self-awareness-science/673718/

7. See this on Anosognosia: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6403150/

8. The 9mo patient was Mora Leeb, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/22/1165131907/neuroplasticity-plasticity-glass-half-full-girl