A Philosophical Happy Hour investigating the apparent problems of consciousness, with particular focus on human beings and the signs by which our experience is known.
Imagine yourself in the grip of a powerful passion: say, anger or lust, perhaps grief or loneliness. You might even imagine that odd condition we call “apathy” (literally, the lack of a passion—the unnatural condition of being an “unmoved moved”). We all seem to suffer these conditions, at least occasionally (if not often). But what really is happening to us, in us, when we are in a bout of rage? Neuroscientists will point to increases in norepinephrine and epinephrine, potential increases in dopamine and cortisol, decreases in serotonin, dysregulation in the prefrontal cortex, and increased activity in the amygdala and hypothalamus.
But is that all rage really is? “Sing, O Muse, of Achilles’ elevated norepinephrine and various other neurochemical markers”? Nobody wants to read that failure of an epic.
No. Our experience of the passions shows a truth that fragmentary scientistic description obscures. Just as the experience of seeing a beautiful face cannot be reduced to the firing of synapses—for we do not see those synapses firing when we see the face—so too the experience of rage, or any other passion, cannot be reduced to the quantification of chemicals and electrical signals.
What is it to have Consciousness?
The term “consciousness” enters the English philosophical lexicon through John Locke’s late seventeenth-century Essay Concerning Human Understanding, wherein he defines it as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind” (II.i.§19). This use does not appear, of course, out of thin air—close antecedents are found in Descartes, the Scholastics, Islamic thinkers, and can be traced back into antiquity. The Lockean use, however, distinctively makes “consciousness” a kind of distinctive awareness of our own “interior” life. Generously interpreted, we could take his sense to mean that we are not only aware of the objects of our experience, but aware that we ourselves are aware.
But what does it really mean to be aware of being aware? What is the “self” of which we are aware—how is this object, the self, distinguished from the act of awareness? Is there an awareness of the self apart from awareness of the objects? How does this awareness change through our relating to objects—and through our “self-awareness”?
Locke spoke of “what passes in a man’s own mind”. But what is that? And is there anything distinctive about the things passing in the human mind? It seems there is; but deep confusions about what we human beings are have made this a difficult discussion, despite being in some ways rather obvious. At any rate, there seems to be some correspondence between the nature of living and the nature of consciousness. Plants are environmentally reactive but they do not seem to have “consciousness”. A starfish is more reactive than a plant, but not much. Many mammals on the other hand exhibit behavior of awareness not entirely unlike our own.
The Signs of Conscious Human Experience
When we experience a powerful passion, we experience something of a displacement. We become, in a sense and truly, no longer fully ourselves. The object that moves us—be a good in which we seek pleasure or an evil we want to destroy—“takes over”, in a manner of speaking. Truly powerful passions crowd out our capacity to think. For this reason, we should guard against becoming deeply impassioned persons—for such is contrary to our nature as reasoning beings.
But even such extreme examples show something very important about the nature of conscious experience: even when we “lose control” of ourselves, everything still happens to and within us. Our existence as conscious persons is not eradicated in these situations, but rather we remain aware of suffering the loss of something proper to our humanity.
Notably, we are able not only to have these experiences, but to share in them through language. You, reading what I have here read, know what I mean—perhaps not with absolute precision, but enough to talk about it. Does this mean that consciousness is something distinctively or exclusively human? Perhaps, perhaps not. It certainly seems that other non-human beings have some kind of self-awareness, but certainly not of the same kind had by humans. I think here of a passage from Walker Percy’s “Delta Factor”:
If beasts can be understood as organisms living in environments which are good or bad and to which the beast responds accordingly as it has evolved to respond, how is man to be understood if he feels bad in the best environment?
Where does one start with a theory of man if the theory of man as an organism in an environment doesn’t work and all the attributes of man which were accepted in the old modern age are now called into question: his soul, mind, freedom, will, Godlikeness?
There is only one place to start: the place where man’s singularity is there for all to see and cannot be called into question, even in a new age in which everything else is in dispute.
That singularity is language.
Today we face a new challenge, of course: if language is what distinguishes conscious human experience—does this mean AI systems might actually become conscious, if they are not already? Or have we perhaps been misled about language and what it is doing in our awareness?
This brings us back to the central question: what does it mean to be conscious?
Join us in conversation this Wednesday (10 June 2026, from 5:45-7:15+ pm ET)—and if you are ambitious, read Percy’s “Delta Factor”—as we explore these and other related questions:
- When we say “conscious”, what do we mean? Sensation, environmental perception, feeling, intellectual cognition? Autonomy? Something else?
- How do we as human beings experience consciousness? Is it something possessed or enacted?
- How is the consciousness of others made known to us?
- How is this question treated or approached from different philosophical perspectives? Cartesian, Kantian, Aristotelian, phenomenological, semiotic, analytic, etc.?
- Why might AI systems convincingly simulate consciousness? Is it the use of language, the apparent “memory”, self-reference, “emotional markers” in the algorithms?
- Is there a threshold after which a technological system ceases to simulate and begins actually to possess consciousness? What is that threshold? How is it recognized?
philosophical happy hour
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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.
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