What is Consciousness?

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 12:24:52 +0200

Now that we have entered the era of A.I., this good old question is more pertinent than ever:

What is consciousness?

Here is my current thinking on this.

It seems to me that consciousness is an emergent property of thinking systems that have some mental capacity to spare, and are complex enough to direct some of that capacity to thinking not about the problem at hand, but instead about the fact that they are thinking.

I asked a Genie and it told me that philosophers have a name for this family of views: they call them higher-order theories of consciousness. Roughly, they say that most of what your brain does happens in the dark: keeping your balance, parsing grammar, etc. A mental state only becomes conscious when another part of the mind represents it, when something inside effectively says "I am seeing red right now." My own emphasis is on the word spare. Self-reflection is not free: it takes capacity beyond what survival strictly demands, and I suspect that is why it shows up only in sufficiently complex minds. This probably also means that it comes in degrees rather than as an on/off switch.

People have a hard time accepting this, because to most people, consciousness feels like it is something special. It feels like it fundamentally differentiates us from inanimate matter and from other, simpler organisms.

This feeling of ours is responsible for the notion of dualism that has plagued our thinking for eons¹: the bizarre idea that the mind is some non-physical thinking substance, and that mind and matter are somehow different ontological categories. Sorry folks, but just because it seems to you like that, it does not mean that it has any relationship to reality. Not even if it seems like that to all of us.

In trying to explain this by means of an analogy, what comes to mind are some famous words by Ludwig Wittgenstein, loosely quoted as follows:

“Tell me”, Wittgenstein once asked a friend, “why do people always say that it was natural to think that the Sun goes round the Earth rather than that the Earth turns on its axis?” His friend replied, “I suppose, because it looked as if the Sun goes round the Earth”. To which Wittgenstein replied, “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the Earth turns on its axis?”

The exact quote can be found in Elizabeth Anscombe’s An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (2nd ed., 1963), Chap. 12: Knowledge and Certainty, page 151.

I hope the analogy to thinking is clear, but let me spell it out just in case:

“Tell me”, michael.gr once asked a friend, “why do people always say it was natural to think that the mind is separate from matter rather than that the mind is simply a manifestation of matter?” His friend replied, “I suppose, because it felt as if the mind is separate from matter”. To which michael.gr replied, “Well, what would it have felt like if it had felt as if the mind is simply a manifestation of matter?”

You see, here is the thing: it would not feel any different.

That is what it is, and that is all that there is.

Cover image: Humanoid robot in the posture of Le Penseur by Auguste Rodin, created as a PNG image by michael.gr using Gemini, then traced into an SVG image by michael.gr using Inkscape.

My Genie informs me that the use of the word eons here constitutes hyperbole; please allow me this little liberty on account of being Greek: the word eon comes from Greek αιών, which in modern Greek means century, and that is how I mean it here. ↩︎

Neuroscience on Michael's Blog

What is Consciousness?