On Consciousness by Patrick Phillips

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Posted on January 27, 2026

Consciousness is the first-person subjective experience. It is the "what it's like" to be alive in each moment.

While it's hard to pin down consciousness more precisely than this, I've written a separate post clarifying what I'm talking about if you're not on board.

Now that we have a handle on what we're talking about, we can ask some interesting questions. I've organized them into four categories: distribution, origin, metaphysics, and ethics.

Distribution: What Is Conscious?

The distribution question asks where consciousness shows up in the world.

  • Is consciousness binary (on/off) or does it come in degrees/gradations?
  • Are all humans conscious? What about different states—asleep, comatose, under anesthesia?
  • As you move through the animal kingdom (humans → dogs → chickens → rats → insects → single-celled organisms), where does consciousness begin or end?
  • Could machines ever be conscious, and how would we know?
  • Is substrate independence plausible—could consciousness run on silicon as well as neurons?
  • What happens to consciousness under psychedelics, meditation, or anesthesia—and what does that tell us?

Origin: Why Does Consciousness Exist?

The origin question asks why there is consciousness at all.

  • Is consciousness evolved and emergent?
  • Is it fundamental to all matter (panpsychism)?
  • Why is there subjective experience at all rather than just information processing "in the dark"? (Chalmers' hard problem)
  • Does consciousness serve a function, or is it epiphenomenal?

Metaphysics: How Does Consciousness Relate to the Physical World?

The metaphysics question asks about the fundamental nature of consciousness and its relationship to physical reality.

  • What's the relationship between consciousness and attention? Memory? Language?
  • Are qualia real, and can they ever be communicated or shared?
  • Is consciousness a physical state, or is there dualism where conscious states are non-physical?
  • Can consciousness be reduced to brain states, or is there an explanatory gap?
  • Is there a "self" that experiences, or is the self an illusion constructed by consciousness?
  • Can consciousness be unified, or is it fundamentally fragmented? (Split-brain cases)

Ethics: What Should We Do?

Finally, there are practical questions about how our understanding of consciousness should shape our actions.

  • If we can't be certain what's conscious, how should we act under moral uncertainty?
  • Should consciousness be the basis for moral consideration, or something else (like sentience, preferences, or interests)?
  • What are the ethical implications if AI systems become (or already are) conscious?
  • How should uncertainty about animal consciousness affect how we treat them?

I am only asking questions as you might have noticed. The nature of consciousness - first person experience - is difficult to investigate scientifically. So my final question is whether we can ever come up with an answer at all to any of the above? Can we learn scientific objective truths about our own subjective experience?