Perhaps no other word has more confusion surrounding it than consciousness. The word is so fraught that many books on the topic will avoid specifying what it means. For example, Michael Gazzaniga’s ...

Take a moment and consider how you define mind relative to consciousness. In reflecting on questions such as: Can something have a mind, but not be conscious? Can something be conscious, but not have ...

Consciousness is arguably the most important scientific topic there is. Without consciousness, there would, after all, be no science. But while we all know what it is like to be conscious — meaning ...

Christof Koch is a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute in Seattle, Washington, and the chief scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, California. Humans and other animals ...

Panpsychism, the philosophical position that consciousness is a fundamental and widespread feature of the physical world, has ...

Babies blink, cry, and yawn—and a few weeks into their lives, they might smile. But do these movements mean that newborns have conscious experiences of perceiving the world around them? Or are these ...

Could artificial intelligence (AI) become conscious? What used to be a philosophical “thought experiment” is now a real-world conundrum. AI’s explosive development, especially the Large Language ...