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from Part IV - The Runaway Brain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2023
Consciousness is the seamless inner subjective state which accompanies you in every moment of your wakeful life and which no-one else is privy to. It is a non-physical experience, which cannot be observed by examining the brain. In attempting to define consciousness, various scientists have strived to specify its necessary and sufficient properties or at least to narrow these down so as to get a handle on it. This is where the difficulties arise. While we all have consciousness and recognise it as an experience, it is difficult to pinpoint it in the form of a definition.1 And how would one go about doing this? One can give an operational definition: consciousness is when we show awareness and when we react to external stimuli. But it is much more than that, it is our inner world which we experience even when there are no external stimuli. Consciousness is where our thoughts are, where we get our ideas.
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