Philosopher Thomas Nagel proposed that if it is "like anything" to be a creature, then that creature is conscious

Overview Debates Related claims Topics

At Hilaree Nelson's memorial service, climber Timmy O'Neill stated that people die once when their soul leaves the body, and a second time when stories about them cease to be told

Joscha Bach's Machine Consciousness Hypothesis proposes that biological consciousness functions as an algorithm for training self-organizing animal brains

In philosophy of mind, a philosophical zombie is a hypothetical entity that exhibits intelligent behavior without experiencing phenomenal consciousness

Joscha Bach and Hikari Sorensen co-authored a paper modeling the mind as generating two distinct domains: external world representations and abstract ideas

Anil Seth advocates biological naturalism, positing that consciousness requires the specific physical and causal substrate of biological living organisms

Michael Graziano's Attention Schema Theory posits that consciousness is an internal model of attention analogous to a physical body schema

Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory states that standard von Neumann architecture computers cannot be conscious because their integrated information value phi is too low

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's mill thought experiment asserts that mechanical interactions of physical parts cannot explain perception

Aristotle's treatise De Anima defines the soul as a mortal causal pattern bound to the physical body

Stanislas Dehaene and Bernard Baars developed Global Workspace Theory to describe the cognitive architecture of consciousness

Aristotle categorized living souls into three hierarchical divisions: vegetative souls in plants, sensate souls in animals, and rational souls in humans

Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory posits that consciousness corresponds to the quantitative degree of integrated information, designated as phi

Deconstructing the internal observer representation during deep meditation dissolves phenomenal conscious experience

Consciousness involves second-order perception, defined as a perceptual representation of the act of perceiving

Animism defines living systems as possessed by intrinsic, agentic causal patterns capable of experience

An agent is a control system that directs future states based on anticipatory models of the future

Stephen Wolfram proposed the Ruliad as the entangled limit of all possible computational rules and automata executions

L.E.J. Brouwer formulated mathematical intuitionism, proposing that mathematical validity requires constructive finite procedures rather than non-constructive axioms

Biologist Michael Levin hypothesizes that the algorithm driving morphogenesis across biological organisms is identical to the coherence algorithm operating in conscious minds

Human infants experience an ignition of consciousness early in development that facilitates directed attention, world modeling, and language acquisition