What is Consciousness/Awareness?
The *definition* is at least easy!
To begin, let me get past something every academic mentions: Tomas Nagel’s paper What Is It Like to be a Bat. In it Nagel defines consciousness as follows:
"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."1
While, for most intents and purposes, I don’t disagree with the definition, it’s needlessly complicated and wordy. There has been no small amount of confusion and arguing around what the phrase “…like to be…” means. What a cumbersome word choice!
Here’s a much better definition:
“Consciousness is the fact that something has experience.”
Now let me offer a more accurate definition, because the preceding one — like Nagel’s — can imply a false duality between the “something” and “experience” (due to the word “has”).
“Consciousness is the fact that something experiences.”
…where “experiences” is a verb. This is a somewhat odd grammatical arrangement and, as such, shares some of Nagel’s definitional difficulties. But my definitions are both far simpler and more accurate than Nagel’s. Why do people bother with the unnecessarily complicated?
Next point to clarify: many academics use the term “consciousness” and “awareness” interchangeably. Given that, I avoid using the word “consciousness” in favor of the word “awareness” when discussing spiritual seeking matters. This is in keeping with how average people use the term “consciousness” in everyday conversations.
In colloquial conversation “consciousness” is more or less the same thing as “wakefulness.” If someone is asleep, in common speech would say they are “unconscious.” Similarly, if an MMA fighter gets knocked out, we would say he is “unconscious.” What about someone dreaming? Are they conscious or unconscious? There actually isn’t a good answer to the question, as worded. Hence I try to steer people away from using the therm “consciousness” as much as makes sense. The answer to characterizing dreaming is to say the person is both asleep (“unconscious”) but yet still aware of vivid experience.
Further, when one is in deep, dreamless sleep it makes perfectly good sense to say someone is not conscious — but even though they are not conscious they are aware. In deep sleep it’s not a question of whether one is aware or not — one is aware — it’s just a question of what one is aware of. What is one aware of in deep sleep? Chances are the answer is “not very much.” But if you slam a door loudly right next to a sleeping person, you can bet they’ll wake up in an instant. In deep sleep you are fully aware of the “contents” of the auditory and visual fields, it’s just that normally there’s very little distinguishable, interesting information present in those fields. It’s attention that temporarily goes “offline” in sleep, not awareness itself. More on this later.
Awareness is a pretty straightforward concept, and can be employed in common speech without much confusion. So the salient question is (or should be):
What is “awareness?”
The definition: “awareness” is the fact that something experiences anything at all.
Again where “experiences” is a verb. There is not one “thing” that exists, then appropriates another “thing” that’s called experience. The fact of experiencing (which is a verb, thus an activity/process as opposed to a “thing”) is what awareness is. A pointer along these lines:
“‘Experience’ is experiencing itself.”
Let me temporarily use common grammar and ask simple questions. Does a bat have experience? Of course it does! How do we know? Well, do you have experience? Of course you do! And your mammalian brain is not so different from a bat’s. Biologically speaking it should be pretty obvious that anything with a brain and central nervous system “experiences” (verb) — experiences of what we may have no idea. But the fact of experiencing should not be in doubt. Our personal experience should demonstrate that brains are inherently aware in some fashion. Careful observation of one’s own behavior and comparing it to the behavior of other beings with brains (both humans and non-humans) can yield manifold parallels and insights. As Andy Clark said in his conversation with Sam Harris on the Making Sense podcast, episode 322, “Brains are the mediators of perception-action loops.2” You can see this in yourself and in others. A robust sense of both “perception” and “action” to me imply phenomenological experience coming “along for the ride.”
As we go “down the food chain” it becomes arguable if things with neurons but no brains still experience/are aware. That is a huge topic that cannot be addressed in this essay. We must stay on-point for the high-level discussion first. To that end, here is a critique of the use of common grammar in the bat/experience discussion above:
Does a bat have experience? No, a bat is experience — from it’s own point of view. Again we can use our direct experience as a guide here. Do you have experience? No! From your direct point of view — this must be confirmed (or denied) through investigating your own experience — if you look closely, you don’t “have” experience, you are your experience. Learning to tell the difference is a key to solving the riddle of “the illusion of the self.”
Perhaps a more grammatically-correct phrasing will shed further light: you are experiencing. Experiencing is an activity, a ongoing process. If you just pay attention to the fact of experiencing, it can become obvious that there’s no “one” no “agent” that stands apart from the experiencing itself. There’s just experiencing. Any notion or feeling that there is “something that experiences” is just another appearance within the already-in-motion experiencing process. The “self” we take ourselves to be is actually a verb (activity/process) — I like to call it “selfing” — and it is a “subroutine” of the totality of the experiencing process. But you are not merely that “subroutine,” you are the totality of your experience. A pointer I like to offer along these lines:
“Some aspects of your experience could be described as “self.” Some aspects of your experience could be described as “other.” But it’s all your experience. How could “you” be only a mere fraction of it?”
This is an inroad into insight about the often-confusing term “nondual.” Both “the self” and “the other” appear within the same field of experience. It is totality of that field-of-experiencing that we need to get curious about. That field-of-experiencing is what I mean by the word “awareness.” In grammar “awareness” is classified as a noun, but grammar fails to capture the reality of what the word refers to. What the word is pointing at is alive, dynamic, spontaneously unfolding activity — not a “thing” (noun) at all!
I use the terms awareness and experience interchangeably. If one can clear the hurdle of confusion caused by grammar (i.e. getting past the fact that we’re using a noun as a label for an activity/process) one is one step closer to understanding.
A great deal of confusion for the aspiring seeker occurs when they confuse their preconceived notions about what awareness/experience is, with what awareness/experience actually is. Keys to awakening can be found in exploring awareness/experience and attention. Most important: their relationship and their tremendous differences. Most seekers focus — unsurprisingly! — on the “contents” attention to the exclusion of the both the properties of attention and, more importantly, to the exclusion of awareness (including both its “contents” and its properties).
Untangling that mess can take a fair bit of work! I’ll write a future essay about the differences between attention and awareness and give hints as to how one can explore them in their own, direct experience. But the general themes of awakening will often revolve around coming to see awareness for what it already is (as opposed to what we think it is), which we’ve overlooked to date.
Nagel, Thomas (1974). "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?". The Philosophical Review. 83 (4): 435–450. doi:10.2307/2183914. JSTOR 2183914.
Making Sense Podcast Episode 322, “Predicting Reality,” time stamp [0:57:44]. A fascinating conversation; very much worth listening to in its entirety.
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/322-predicting-reality