Consciousness at its simplest is “sentience or awareness of internal or external existence”. Despite centuries of analyses, definitions, explanations, and debates by philosophers and scientists, consciousness remains puzzling and controversial, being “at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives”. Perhaps the only widely agreed notion about the topic is the intuition that it exists. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied and explained as consciousness. Sometimes it is synonymous with ‘the mind’, other times just an aspect of the mind. In the past, it was one’s “inner life”, the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination, and volition. Today, with modern research into the brain it often includes any kind of experience, cognition, feeling, or perception. It may be ‘awareness’, or ‘awareness of awareness’, or self-awareness. There might be different levels or orders of consciousness, or different kinds of consciousness, or just one kind with different features. Other questions include whether only humans are conscious or all animals or even the whole universe. The disparate range of research, notions, and speculations raises doubts about whether the right questions are being asked.
Examples of the range of descriptions, definitions, or explanations are simple wakefulness, one’s sense of selfhood or soul explored by “looking within”; being a metaphorical “stream” of contents, or being a mental state, mental event, or mental process of the brain; having Panera or qualia and subjectivity; being the ‘something that it is like’ to ‘have’ or ‘be’ it; being the “inner theatre” or the executive control system of the mind.
