IB Philosophy 1.3.1 Consciousness, the Self and the World Notes

What Is Consciousness?

The Nature and Types of Consciousness

1. The previous sections of Unit 1 explored what constitutes identity (1.1) and how the self relates to others (1.2). This section turns to a more fundamental question: what is the nature of consciousness itself?
2. Consciousness sits at the heart of the overarching inquiry into what it means to be human, because any account of identity or selfhood presupposes some understanding of awareness.
3. At its most basic level, consciousness refers to the capacity for subjective experience. When you see a colour, feel pain, or consider a philosophical argument, there is something it is like for you to have that experience.
4. The philosopher Thomas Nagel captured this in his influential paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974): consciousness is defined by the fact that there is something it is like, from the inside, to have an experience, a quality that cannot be captured from the outside alone.
5. Philosophers distinguish between several types of consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness refers to the raw feel of experience, what it is like to taste chocolate, see the colour red, or feel pain. Philosophers call these felt qualities qualia.
6. Access consciousness refers to information being available to the mind for reasoning and action, even without a felt experience. The distinction becomes vivid in cases of blindsight: a patient with damage to the visual cortex can accurately guess the location of objects in their blind field (access consciousness) while reporting no visual experience whatsoever (no phenomenal consciousness).
7. This shows that the two types can come apart: you can have access to information without feeling anything, and the distinction matters for understanding what consciousness really is.

Buddhist and Empiricist Perspectives on Consciousness

1. Aristotle, in De Anima, offered one of the earliest systematic accounts of the soul (psyche) as the form of a living body. For Aristotle, the soul is not a separate substance but the organizing principle that makes a body alive and capable of perception, thought, and action.
2. Aristotle's own illustration makes the point concrete: 'If the eye were an animal, sight would be its soul.' Just as the eye's function (seeing) cannot be detached from the organ, consciousness cannot be detached from the living organism that gives rise to it.
3. The Buddhist tradition, particularly through thinkers like Vasubandhu, challenges the assumption that consciousness requires a unified self. As explored in topic 1.2.1 on self and non-self, the doctrine of anattā holds that what we call consciousness is a constantly changing stream of mental events rather than the possession of a single, enduring subject.
4. David Hume captured a similar insight from the Western tradition: the mind, he wrote, is ‘a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance, pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety.’ When we think about and look within ourselves, we find not a unified self but a constantly shifting sequence of impressions, feelings, and thoughts, a stream with no underlying subject to hold it together.
5. Vasubandhu illustrated this through the dream analogy (svapnavat). In a dream, we experience vivid sights, sounds, and emotions, yet no external objects cause these experiences, consciousness alone generates them.
6. Vasubandhu argued that waking experience works similarly: what we take to be an external world is actually a construction of consciousness itself. This does not mean the external world is unreal, but that we never have raw, unfiltered access to it, the mind always plays an active role in shaping what we experience.
7. The dream analogy makes the philosophical point concrete: if consciousness can produce a complete experiential world without external input, then the relationship between consciousness and reality is far less straightforward than common sense assumes.

Embodied Consciousness and the Hard Problem

1. Phenomenologists (philosophers who study the structure of first-person experience), such as Merleau-Ponty, argue that consciousness is always embodied. In The Structure of Behaviour, Merleau-Ponty rejects the idea that consciousness is a purely mental phenomenon sitting inside the skull.
2. Instead, our awareness of the world is shaped by our bodily engagement with our surroundings. The phenomenon of phantom limb pain illustrates the point: a person who has lost a hand continues to 'feel' it as part of their bodily self.
3. Consciousness is shaped by the body-schema (the brain’s built-in map of the body), not merely located in the brain. The body is not a container for the mind: it is what makes conscious experience possible in the first place.
4. A central philosophical puzzle is the hard problem of consciousness, a term coined by David Chalmers. The hard problem asks why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience at all.
5. Frank Jackson's thought experiment of Mary's Room captures the puzzle: Mary, a colour scientist, has spent her entire life in a black-and-white room. She knows everything physical about colour vision, yet when she finally sees red for the first time, she learns something new: what it is like to see red.
6. If complete physical knowledge leaves something out, consciousness cannot be fully explained in physical terms. Even if neuroscience can explain which brain states correlate with which experiences, it remains unclear why those processes feel like anything from the inside.
7. This question connects directly to the Unit 1 overarching theme: what do we mean by consciousness and how does it relate to the physical world? If consciousness cannot be fully explained by physics and brain science, this raises deep questions about what kind of beings we are and whether a purely scientific account of the mind can ever be complete.
8. The explanatory gap (the gulf between describing what neurons do and explaining what it is like to feel something) is one of the most debated issues in both philosophy and cognitive science. Some philosophers argue this gap shows that consciousness is fundamentally non-physical: no brain scan, however detailed, can tell you what it feels like to taste coffee from the inside.
9. Others maintain it reflects our current ignorance and will close as neuroscience advances.