Consciousness: What Is It Like?

Abstract

Moment to moment there can be sights, sounds, feels, tastes, and smells, informing us of the world around us and of ourselves. Being conscious encompasses all this and more. What is it to be conscious of each of these things? Can I be conscious of all of them at the same time? Am I conscious of each of them in the same way and to the same extent? They seem to flesh out the continuous and unified details of my current conscious state. But is that right, or do I only become conscious of each thing as I notice it, shifting attention from one thing to another? It’s hard to say. And that’s because it is hard to get to grips with each conscious moment as it transpires. Yet that’s what philosophical reflections on consciousness seem to require. How are we aware of these conscious states? How well can we know them as we undergo them? And can our answers to these questions tell us anything about the nature of consciousness? I here argue that we cannot rely on just our intuitive take on our own experience to know what is going on there. What we seem to pick out, whether by misleading talk of “what it’s like,” or by “untutored attention,” do not necessarily provide constraints on account of the nature of consciousness. Instead, we need philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists working together to elicit information from different sources in order to arrive at a collective view of how the different types of evidence and information fit together to produce the best explanation of the phenomena of consciousness we are interested.