What is consciousness?

What is consciousness? Has it always been around, or did it evolve as animals evolved? How might we begin to explain the elusive quality of consciousness?
One definition is being aware of our surroundings. Another is being aware of being aware, aware of one’s internal psychology, a knowing of one’s self, to be self-aware. Or what about simply being awake? Or having perceptions? When we come up with each new definition, what are we ruling in as conscious and what are we ruling out?

Another description by philosopher of the mind Thomas Nagel is “the feeling of what it is like to be something.”

This definition led Nagel to ponder on notions of scientific objectivity regarding consciousness. For how could you explain consciousness from what he called a “viewpoint from nowhere”? To have a mind and to be a thinker is to have a subjective viewpoint, from inside one’s own mind. You cannot describe what being a human thinker is like without being a human yourself. Put another way, it would be unrealistic to try and be objective about what it’s like to be a thinker, when the viewpoint is about you being the viewpoint. In this sense, he’s saying objective science cannot be used directly to help people to understand themselves.*

Nagel also wondered if other animals had this feeling too. In his book What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, Nagel speculates about a mammal that has a remarkably different way of being in the world to that of many other animals. A bat uses sonar for perception, as opposed to vision. As we use vision but do not use sonar, how can we possibly come close to imagining what it’s like to have sonar and no vision? How can we begin to work out subjectively what having the mindset of a bat might be like, let alone to objectively say what the mindset of a bat would look like, when we are not bats?

Philosopher and scientist David Chambers believed that the easy problem of consciousness was working out how the brain functions; how we remember and how we process information. The hard problem of consciousness was to ask how we come to have subjective experiences. How do we explain the characteristics of having an experience? What study, what words, what language do we have to even make a start on such a line of inquiry?

Just as the bulk of outer space, otherwise known as dark matter, is a mystery to us, so too is the case with our inner space.

Do you have any thoughts on this matter?

[*This could be a useful consideration for anyone undertaking detective work on themselves.]