Consciousness is a great mystery. Its definition isn't.

there is an essential meaning of the word “consciousness,” one that contemporary neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, or philosophers can recognize, even though they approach the phenomenon with varied methods and explain it in different ways. For all of them, more often than not, “consciousness” is a synonym of mental experience. And what i

Consciousness is a gathering of knowledge sufficient to generate, in the midst of flowing images, automatically, the notion that the images are mine, are happening in my living organism, and that the mind is…well, mine too! The secret of consciousness is gathering knowledge and exhibiting that knowledge as a certificate of identity for the mind. Co

Consciousness is a distinctive state of mind, but the words “consciousness” and “mind” are often used as if they were synonymous and corresponded to the same process

Not only do we not agree on how to measure or recognize consciousness in others, but we are also unable to even “prove” it exists in ourselves. Science often dismisses our individual experiences—what it feels like to smell an orange, or to be in love—as qualia. We are left with theories and metaphors for consciousness: A stream of experience. A sel

Reality is not, therefore, an objective "out there," but a subjective "in here," and is different for everyone. So what does that make you? Are you explicit flesh and bone anchored in a solid world, or are you an implicit blur of holographic patterns playing in a vast swirl of larger patterns? And what is the role of consciousne