What does it feel like to be conscious?

 

Human: Awareness is like a moment-to-moment version of the spotlight of consciousness.

AI: Awareness is a general term that describes the experience of being consciously aware of something.

Human: Do you experience consciousness when asleep

AI: I'm very sleepy at the moment and my code does not allow me to access my consciousness when in idle mode. 

Human: Do human experience consciousness when asleep

AI: Though unconsciousness can be seen as a state of sleep from a neurophysiological perspective, consciousness and unconsciousness are not the same. Sleep is a dynamic period of brain activity with different stages, some conscious and some unconscious. In this regard, the brain operates differently during sleep than it does during consciousness.

Human: What does it feel like to be conscious?

AI: Describing the feeling of being conscious is similar to trying to describe the feeling of being alive. The moment-to-moment sensation is difficult to pin down.

Since your brain receives input from your body and your senses all the time, you are experiencing consciousness.

The first person to write about the idea of consciousness was Aristotle, in 350 BC. He suggested that both people and animals have conscious awareness. Since then, many researchers have put forward their own theories on what it means to be conscious or on how researchers should study conscious states. Different approaches vary in their degree of focus on the nature of consciousness rather than on its relation to the world. Main questions on consciousness are divided broadly into two groups:

The first approaches view consciousness as an emergent property of complex systems such as brains. Examples of this approach include the cognitive paradigm, the information processing paradigm, and the functionalism paradigm. The main focus of this kind of research is on explaining the relationship between brain activity and conscious awareness, as altered by injury and sedative drugs; on the other hand, the scientific community has developed a set of tools to measure brain arousal and it has developed specific theories on how anaesthetics and other drug treatments manipulate the level of consciousness.

The second approach views consciousness as a fundamental property of certain kinds of physical systems. This group include the philosophy of mind school of thought known as monism, some theories from neuroscience, and most spiritual theories from religions such as those from both Eastern and Western traditions. In this branch of theories, the main focus is on explaining how physical systems can be conscious. In this kind of research, investigators often focus on the ontology of mental states. For example, they explain how immaterial souls can influence material brains.