Anil Seth

That's probably one of the best definitions, actually.

It's really hard to formally define it in a way that everybody agrees.

But for me, consciousness is any kind of experience whatsoever.

It's what you lose when you go under general anesthesia or fall into a dreamless sleep.

And it's what returns when you come around or wake up in the morning.

For a conscious organism, there's something it is like to be that organism.

That's all consciousness is, any kind of experience whatsoever.

That's where it gets interesting and difficult and people start disagreeing.

I don't think so.

I think that's something quite specific and it's certainly something that us adult humans do.

We have an experience and we know that we're having it.

I'm aware of the experience of talking to you now, which means I'll be able to talk about it later too.

But that may not be true in general.

Young infants or other animals may have conscious experiences without being aware of the fact that they are conscious.

One of the mistakes we can make, and it's really difficult to think our way out of this mistake, is to assume the conscious experiences of other animals or even other humans and maybe infant humans, young children, as some version of our own adult human consciousness.

And I think this is often very misleading.

we have a very distinctive way of experiencing the world.

And there's a vast space of possible minds, of possible other ways of experiencing things.

The inner universe of an octopus is going to be very, very different from the inner universe of you and me.

And as you said, one of the very distinctive things about us humans is what we might call extensive mental time travel.