Consciousness refers to your individual awareness of your unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and environment. Your conscious experiences are constantly shifting and changing. For example, in one moment you may be focused on reading this article. Your consciousness may then shift to the memory of a conversation you had earlier with a co-worker. Next, you might notice how uncomfortable your chair is or maybe you are mentally planning dinner. This ever-shifting stream of thoughts can change dramatically from one moment to the next, but your experience of it seems smooth and effortless.

Max Velmans
How to Define Consciousness. And how Not to Define Consciousness
Abstract: Definitions of consciousness need to be sufficiently broad to include all examples of conscious states and sufficiently narrow to exclude entities, events and processes that are not conscious. Unfortunately, deviations from these simple principles are common in modern consciousness studies, with consequent confusion and internal division in the field. The present paper gives examples of ways in which definitions of consciousness can be either too broad or too narrow. It also discusses some of the main ways in which pre-existing theoretical commitments (about the nature of consciousness, mind and world) have intruded into definitions. Similar problems can arise in connection with how a ‘conscious process’ is defined, potentially obscuring the way that conscious phenomenology actually relates to its neural correlates and antecedent causes in the brain, body and external world. Once a definition of ‘consciousness’ is firmly grounded in its phenomenology, investigations of its ontology and its relationships to entities, events and processes that are not conscious can begin, and this may in time transmute the meaning (or sense) of the term. As our scientific understanding of these relationships deepen, our understanding of what consciousness is will also deepen. A similar transmutation of meaning (with growth of knowledge) occurs with basic terms in physics such as ‘energy’, and ‘time

Ram Lakhan Pandey Vimal
Meanings Attributed to the Term ‘Consciousness’: An Overview
Abstract: I here describe meanings (or aspects) attributed to the term consciousness, extracted from the literature and from recent online discussions. Forty such meanings were identified and categorized according to whether they were principally about function or about experience; some overlapped but others were apparently mutually exclusive — and this list is by no means exhaustive. Most can be regarded as expressions of authors’ views about the basis of consciousness, or opinions about the significance of aspects of its contents. The prospects for reaching any single, agreed, theory independent definition of consciousness thus appear remote. However, much confusion could be avoided if authors were always to specify which aspects of consciousness they refer to when using the term. An example is outlined of how this can be done (using a ‘PE–SE’ framework).

Anders Sogaard & Stine Osterskov Sogaard
On Definitions of Consciousness
Abstract: It is argued that consciousness studies suffer from a Problem of Essentialism. In response, it is proposed that definitions of consciousness be treated as stipulative definitions. Some example definitions and their relevance for scientific inquiry are discussed.

David Skrbina
Transcending Consciousness: Thoughts on a Universal Conception of Mind
A panpsychist approach provides a double benefit: it gives us a new perspective on our own human mentality, and it allows, by extension, a better understanding of non-human minds. We can see both as existing on one continuum, comparable to and parallel with the physical continuum of being that we have long accepted. This provides us with a more naturalistic and parsimonious account of mind and consciousness. It avoids human chauvinism and neo-Cartesianism. And it bypasses the intractable problem of brute emergence of mind.

Penelope Rowlatt
Consciousness and Memory
Thomas Nagel famously suggested that: ‘an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism’ (Nagel, 1974, p. 436). However, it is difficult to imagine a creature being conscious of anything if it has no memory. As Baars and McGovern (1996, p. 66) pointed out, the only conscious events we can study are those that are ‘reportable’, that is, remembered for a short time at least. In this paper I examine the idea that Nagel-type consciousness might be what it is like to have certain types of memory. If this were the case, then different types of consciousness, ‘phenomenal’ or ‘access’ for example, could be defined in terms of the respective relevant memory stores.

Alfredo Pereira Jr. & Hans Ricke
What is Consciousness? Towards a Preliminary Definition
Abstract: There is little or no general agreement about what researchers should focus on when studying consciousness. The most active scientific studies often use the methods of Cognitive Neuroscience and focus mainly on vision. Other aspects and contents of consciousness, namely thoughts and emotions, are much less studied, possibly leading to a biased view of what consciousness is and how it works. In this essay we describe what we call a referential nucleus, implicit in much of consciousness research. In this context, ‘consciousness’ refers to (partially) reportable content experienced by living individuals. We then discuss the philosophical concept of a phenomenal world and another contemporary view that conscious experience involves, besides integration of information in the brain, participation in action-perception cycles in a natural, social and cultural environment. These views imply a need to reconceptualize ‘qualia’ as the conscious aspect of subjective experiences, thus stating properties of consciousness that pose serious challenges to an exclusive approach via Cognitive Neuroscience, because experimental settings oversimplify conscious experiences, narrowing them to fragments correlated with measured brain activity and behaviour. In conclusion we argue that a science of consciousness requires a broad interdisciplinary range of research, including qualitative methods from the Human Sciences.

Bill Faw
Cutting ‘Consciousness’ at its Joints
Abstract: To define ‘consciousness’ is to describe its uses and determine its boundaries, essential nature, and mechanisms. I distinguish between ‘normal waking consciousness’; altered forms of waking consciousness underlying trance, absorption, hypnosis, dissociation, meditative states, drug states, and out of body experiences; and REM/dreaming and slow-wave/deep sleep — examining them by the basic characteristics and mechanisms of normal waking consciousness: cortical arousal, qualitative experiences, first-person subjectivity, intentionality, knowing objects and self, interaction with e

Michael Beaton
Qualia and Introspection
Abstract: The claim that behaviourally undetectable inverted spectra are possible has been endorsed by many physicalists. I explain why this starting point rules out standard forms of scientific explanation for qualia. The modern ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ is an updated way of defending problematic intuitions like these, but I show that it cannot help to recover standard scientific explanation. I argue that Chalmers is right: we should accept the falsity of physicalism if we accept this problematic starting point. Accepting this starting point amounts to at least implicitly endorsing certain theoretical claims about the nature of introspection. I therefore suggest that we allow ourselves to be guided, in our quest to understand qualia, by whatever independently plausible theories of introspection we have. I propose that we adopt a more moderate definition of qualia, as those introspectible properties which cannot be fully specified simply by specifying the non-controversially introspectible ‘propositional attitude’ mental states (including seeing x, experiencing x, and so on, where x is a specification of a potentially public state of affairs). Qualia thus defined may well fit plausible, naturalisable accounts of introspection. If so, such accounts have the potential to explain, rather than explain away, the problematic intuitions discussed earlier; an approach that should allow integration of our understanding of qualia with the rest of science.

Sophie Allen
The Definition of Consciousness: Is Triviality or Falsehood Inevitable?
It is now more than two centuries since David Hume asserted that the longevity of some philosophical controversies lay in incompatibilities of definition, thus implying that their resolution required careful attention to the meanings of terms and the removal of ambiguity. He had in mind, when writing the passage above, debates about the compatibility of free will and determinism, but perhaps contemporary debates over consciousness provide equally good examples of how ambiguity and equivocation can fuel philosophical and empirical confusion, and hinder explanation.
This paper discusses why the (implied) Humean resolution is unachievable. I will argue that the main difficulty faced by anyone engaged in defining consciousness is to find a way between triviality on the one hand, and falsehood on the other (or, more accurately, probable falsehood, since there is always the possibility of unjustified truth), and that this problem is insurmountable. The best outcome would be the provision of a useful, and most probably fairly trivial, working definition or range of definitions, which furthered the empirical (and conceptual) exploration of the phenomenon or phenomena which they are intended to capture. Such working definitions of consciousness would not be definitive in the usual strict, unrevisable sense as they would need to be open to revision as investigation proceeded; if we are to explain consciousness, we have to be prepared for our conception of consciousness to change as our understanding of it improves.