Cafe Inquiry

This month's discussion topic: what is consciousness?

At is simplest, consciousness is an awareness of an internal and external existence. In the past it was considered as synonymous with the mind, and awarness of the external world. Philosophers have used the term consciousness to encompass distinct aspects of the human mind: knowledge, subjective intentionality, introspection, and individual experience.

However, consciousness has proven difficult to study and describe in modern science. Recently, research in psychology, neuroscience, and AI have informed our understanding of the nature and limits of consciousness. The medical approach focuses mostly on the amount of consciousness a person has: in medicine, consciousness is assessed as a "level" ranging from coma and brain death at the low end, to full alertness and purposeful responsiveness at the high end. It is not clear, despite advancements, why conscious experience arises from our neurology and biology. Many philosophers consider experience to be the essence of consciousness, and believe that experience can only fully be known from the inside, subjectively.

What is consciousness? Is it related to problem-solving, or to experience, or to volitional choices? To what extent do other animals have consciousness? If consciousness arises naturally from neural networks, will we see it arise from sufficiently complex AI networks? If nto, what differentiates AI from biological networks? Is consciousness a solvable scientific problem, or will the existence of the subject keep consciousness outside science for the foreseeable future?