1974 · trunk question
What is consciousness?
The cuts
Thomas Nagel 1974
An organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism.
A definition that refuses all mechanism — which is exactly its power. It names what mechanisms leave out.
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?1974
The 'something it is like' is a user illusion — a story the brain tells itself about itself.
The strongest counter-lens: maybe the leftover is an artifact of self-report, not a further fact.
Consciousness Explained1991
Joscha Bach 2024
Consciousness is a coherence-inducing operator — a second-order perception the mind uses to bind its own states into a single now. It's software the brain runs, not a substance it secretes.
Turns the question into an engineering one: what does this operator compute, and what architecture could run it — in a brain or anywhere else?
Cyber Animism2024
Michael Levin 2022
Whatever consciousness turns out to be, it likely comes in degrees, not kinds. The cognitive light cone — the scope of goals a system can represent and pursue — scales continuously from cell to organism, and any line drawn for 'conscious' is a convention, not a joint in nature.
Extends the question below the brain: a gradient of minds across scales rather than a human property to be granted or withheld.
Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME)2022
