Consciousness
Mind · Awareness · Existence
“What does Consciousness mean?”
The fact that there is something it is like to be you — and the long argument about what that fact is.
Overview
Consciousness is usually used in two different ways at once: being awake and responsive, and having an inner point of view. Most confusion in the subject comes from sliding between them.
The word covers awareness of the world, awareness of oneself, and the raw texture of experience — the redness of red, the ache of an ache.
Origin & etymology
From Latin conscius, 'knowing with' — originally a shared knowledge, closer to complicity than to inner life. The private, first-person sense is a seventeenth-century development.
Historical context
Descartes made inner experience the one thing that could not be doubted, and in doing so created the modern mind-body problem.
Nineteenth-century psychology tried to study consciousness by trained introspection; behaviourism reacted by refusing to study it at all.
It returned as a respectable scientific problem in the late twentieth century, alongside the framing of the 'hard problem': why physical processing is accompanied by experience at all.
Perspectives
There is no single answer here. Each reading comes from a different tradition and should be judged in its own terms.
Physicalism
Consciousness is what certain physical processes are like from the inside. There is no further fact to explain, only a further explanation to find.
Dualism
Experience is not captured by any description of physical structure, so something else must be in the picture.
Advaita Vedānta
Consciousness is not a property of a person but the ground everything appears in — closer to a field than to a function.
Buddhist analysis
There is awareness but no stable self behind it; what looks like a continuous observer is a rapid sequence of conditioned moments.
Philosophy
The question is unusual because the evidence is not public. Every other subject can be pointed at; this one has to be reported.
That asymmetry is why the same word appears in laboratory papers and contemplative manuals, and why they so rarely mean quite the same thing.
Claims
5 of 5 carry a source · 100%
Each statement is held separately, with what supports it and how firmly.
The word comes from Latin conscius, 'knowing with' — originally shared knowledge, closer to complicity than to inner life.
DocumentedRecorded sense history; the private first-person sense is later.
- Oxford English Dictionary — current edition
Descartes made inner experience the one thing that could not be doubted, creating the modern mind–body problem.
Attested in a primary textSet out in the Meditations.
- Meditations on First Philosophy — René Descartes · 1641
The 'hard problem' asks why physical processing is accompanied by experience at all.
Attested in a primary textNamed and argued in Chalmers 1995, following Nagel's framing.
- Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness — David Chalmers · 1995
- What Is It Like to Be a Bat? — Thomas Nagel · 1974
Advaita Vedānta treats consciousness as the ground in which everything appears rather than a property of a person.
ContestedHeld by Advaita; rejected by Dvaita and by most physicalist accounts.
- Brahma Sūtra — Bādarāyaṇa · c. 200 BCE – 200 CE
- Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad — c. 7th century BCE
Consciousness is unusual as a subject because the evidence is reported rather than pointed at.
InferredA reading of why laboratory and contemplative literatures describe the same word so differently.
- What Is It Like to Be a Bat? — Thomas Nagel · 1974
Related ideas
Akasha
Space · Ether · Sanskrit philosophy
Philosophy
Love of wisdom · Method · Inquiry
Yoga
Union · Discipline · Practice
Vedānta
Tradition · Interpretation · Self
Logos
Word · Reason · Order
Further reading
- The many meanings of wisdom
Every tradition that praises wisdom describes it differently. The disagreement is the interesting part.
- The human search for meaning
Why the question keeps returning, in every century that thinks it has outgrown it.
Cited sources
Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad — c. 7th century BCE
Earliest surviving statement that a person becomes good by good action and bad by bad action (4.4.5), and the ātman–brahman identity.
Brahma Sūtra — Bādarāyaṇa · c. 200 BCE – 200 CE
The shared text on which Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita and Dvaita all wrote opposing commentaries.
Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness — David Chalmers · 1995
Names the 'hard problem': why physical processing is accompanied by experience at all.
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? — Thomas Nagel · 1974
Frames consciousness as there being something it is like to be an organism.
Meditations on First Philosophy — René Descartes · 1641
Makes inner experience the one thing that cannot be doubted, and sets up the modern mind–body problem.
Oxford English Dictionary — current edition
Used here for the recorded history of English senses and first attestations.
Sources
Meditations on First Philosophy
Descartes, 1641.
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Thomas Nagel, 1974.
Spotted an error, or know a better source? Tell us.