Question: What is consciousness

Jess Wade answered on 19 Jun 2015:

consciousness is a controversial topic: no one really knows what it is, or why we dream, or why we can think. If we look in a dictionary it will tell us about how we perceive or feel the world around us. The 17th century French philosopher René Descartes proposed the notion of “cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am)- and he also gave us the idea of the mind-body relationship being important. We only really know we are conscious- so any way of explaining it has to start there!