Consciousness presents deep philosophical puzzles about subjective experience, its relation to physical processes, and its distribution across species and machines. Central questions include whether subjective experience is identical between individuals, whether nonhuman animals or artificial systems can possess consciousness, and whether consciousness transcends physical matter. The historical emergence of the concept and its vocabulary is relatively recent in human thought. Some theories treat consciousness as irreducible and fundamental. Philosophical distinctions separate tractable explanatory problems about information processing from the enigmatic problem of why and how subjective experience arises.
There are some questions surrounding this most basic fact: Do my conscious experiences feel the same as yours? How do they compare to an octopus's? A sea anemone's? Is consciousness limited to biological processes, or can machines experience it as well? Does it exist beyond the physical matter of atoms and elements? And how is my subjective experience shaped from flashes of neuron clusters?
Each question has numerous competing answers, many plausible yet all incomplete. It's even difficult to say when we became conscious of the problem. Some scholars contend consciousness is a relatively recent development in human history, with Neolithic or earlier humans not experiencing themselves as internal subjects. Even the word consciousness - in our sense of it - is relatively new, not making an appearance until the early modern era when philosophers like René Descartes, John Locke, and Gottfried Leibniz began exploring the issue.
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