What is consciousness and what does it mean to be conscious?  There is no simple definition and no shortage of debate on the matter.  Many people tend to think of it as a holistic term that covers self-awareness, subjective experience, sentience and an ability to perceive ones relationship to the surrounding environment.

Scientific research has made great progress in exploring and explaining the structure and function of the brain, enabling us to get a good insight into many of the mechanisms that play a part in consciousness and cognitive neuroscience. However, one area in particular remains stubbornly hard to explain and that is subjective experience – the ineffible sensation of “what it is like” to have conscious experience. This is the topic which tends to cause a great number of philosophical and scientific debates and, thanks to a term coined by Chalmers, is often referred to as “the hard problem”.

On this site you can find articles and posts that I’ve written on the topic of consciousness. They are ordered in the archives by publishing date, so I’ve included a list of them here: