What Do We Mean by “Conscious”?
Is my dog conscious? Probably. Is a mosquito conscious? Not so clear. Is my cell phone conscious? I think not. These questions are pretty understandable because we understand the term “consciousness” more or less the same way. But the folk notion of consciousness is rather vague. I realized I will be writing a lot about consciousness so I decided to make a post about what is consciousness. What is to be conscious and what exactly we refer to when we use the term.
The problem of consciousness is not neutral. It is not a simple pragmatic issue, nor an impersonal, scientific question about the world. It is something that concerns us to the extreme, I would say it is the phenomenon that bears the strongest relation to ourselves, our experience, our nature, our existence. It is our prime reality, the sense of our lives. The reasons we act and live for are the things we experience; what we are conscious of.
To be conscious is not the same as “to think” or to “respond to the environment”. “Conscious” is not the same as “mental”. It is well known there is unconscious mental activity. Many perceptions and visual recognition processes occur while we remain unaware of them, decisions or complex body movements can also be orchestrated unconsciously, we can respond to the environment while sleeping, etc. By conscious we mean aware, we mean something that is a noticeable experience for the subject. How things and thoughts are experienced, what is it like to have them.
To be conscious is to witness a qualitative experience of something, anything. This is also called phenomenal experience. The standard way to define consciousness is the following: if a living creature (or any other entity) is conscious, that means there is something like to be that creature. There is a qualitative experience to it, there is an experience happening, occurring, existing which is, to be that creature. Being a conscious creature implies having phenomenal experience. Only then one can try to imagine herself living the consciousness of the other. Wonder what it is like to be such a creature and to have such and such phenomenal experience.
Say you arrive at an ice cream truck. You choose the ice cream the qualitative experience of which is most pleasant for you at that moment. You will choose according to the best conscious experience of eating it: how the texture feels, how the flavor tastes, etc. Such experiences are yours. Only you will experience them and they are the best for you. Now imagine you notice an unexpected flavor in your ice cream: “Wow, this tastes weird”. Your friend next to you wants to understand what you mean. She wants to understand your conscious experience. For that, she will need to get herself a phenomenal experience of her own. She will have to try the ice cream, there is no way around this.
This is actually an important part of the problem of consciousness. It is by definition a first-person kind of reality. It is not an externally observable phenomenon, from the outside. It is only witnessed by the entity that possesses it, that is conscious. This is not only what makes consciousness the most intricate, personal phenomenon we dear to study, it is also the most frustrating one for our materialistic conception of the world.
From a scientific worldview all there is is material, but the conscious mind exists, it is clear and evident for all of us and we don’t know how to give up on that easily. For our desired conception of the world, conscious experience poses an obstacle. In fact, the problem of consciousness is linked to many others, for example, we want a deterministic, predictable world but we experience freedom of choice and a sense of agency in the world. With all of this, conscious experience is a quite disturbing piece of our philosophical puzzle. With the help of different approaches, we need to accumulate insights that, little by little, reveal the keys of its fitting while respecting the facts, both material and phenomenal.
