Consciousness

philosophy

Definition

Consciousness

Consciousness is the perception of perceiving. ¹

Aspects

Functional

Functional consciousness is defined as the “behaviour of consciousness”. It refers to the parts of consciousness that serve a practical purpose, anything that might be explained as an advantage by natural selection. ²

Phenomenal

Phenomenal consciousness is described as the subjective “what it is like” experience of being conscious. It is divided into two types of states:

1. Global State: These are broad, overall states of consciousness, such as being awake or asleep.
2. Local States (Qualia): These are the specific, sensory experiences that make up our local subjective reality, like the particular smell of coffee or feeling of wet grass.

The functionally conscious Zombie

A possible thought experiment is to create a conscious zombie that is only able to be functionally conscious. The zombie does not possess any phenomenal consciousness. If this zombie can exists in reality then there exists no evolutionary explanation for phenomenal consciousness under the assumption that there exists a distinction between those to aspects of consciousness. ²

Footnotes

1. We Are All Software - Joscha Bach ↩

2. How To Build Conscious Machines ↩ ↩²