Philip Goff and Keith Frankish of Mind Chat talk about why we are aware.

The question of awareness is one of the most important ones in modern science. Philosophers have been trying for decades to rewrite the story of this strange event. The most common view, called "functionalist," says that awareness is a result of how the brain shares knowledge around the world. Some people, though, think it's more than that.

There are many different ideas about where awareness comes from. The global neural network (GNW) and panpsychism are two of the most important.

Consciousness is a word that describes how you feel or what you sense. It includes everything from the sweet taste of chocolate mousse to the sharp pain of a toothache.

Without awareness, mistakes and routines in the way neurons work could cause a complicated brain to break down. The development of consciousness and the power of choice that came with it would have helped solve this problem by making the brain manageable by awareness.

Whether or not awareness is intentional is one of the most important questions in modern theory of mind. There are two major ways of thinking about this: naturalism and phenomenal intentionality theory. Naturalism says that intentionality is just a feature of the mind, while phenomenal intentionality theory says that conscious states of affairs are made by consciousness.

Edmund Husserl, a phenomenology thinker, is probably best known for his theory of intentionality, which says that first-person conscious awareness is the most basic way to know something. He says that a thorough study of this awareness can have big effects on other areas of philosophical interest, like the theory of perceptions, decisions, and memories, as well as aesthetic experience.

In the philosophy of mind, the question of whether or not consciousness is real is often seen as one of the most difficult. Philosophers have tried a number of different ways to answer this question, but most of them fall under the general term "phenomenalism."

Identity theory, or at least strict psycho-physical type-type identity theory (Hobson, 1997), is the most common way to solve this problem. This theory links aware mental traits, states, and processes with physical ones, usually neural or neurophysiological ones. This oversimplified method doesn't take into account the quality of mental experience.

Consciousness has been a psychological puzzle for a long time, and many ideas try to explain how it comes to be. Dualism (or physicalism) and materialism are the two main ideas that have been around for a long time.

Both believe that awareness is, in some way, not real. But both dualism and materialism have major problems and problems with them.

The question of whether or not awareness is real is one of the most basic questions about it. Many thinkers and scientists say it's not, but it seems likely that awareness is in some way a material thing.

Various reductionist views try to explain mental states in terms of their physical causes. Some are more specific than others, but they all work in some way to make you less aware.

In one way or another, many scientists and thinkers have tried to answer the question of how awareness arises from the brain. Some have said that it is a property of matter (like panpsychism), while others have said that it is an illusion and that science can never study it in a serious way.

In his book Being You, which will be published in 2021, neuroscientist Anil Seth says that our sense of being and having a body is a managed illusion made up of a lot of different physical inputs. This is a very important idea, and it also helps us understand how people with madness or psychedelia see things differently.

Philosophy and science have both been interested in the question of whether or not awareness is a study. Because of the work of psychologists and neuroscientists, the study of consciousness has become a field in its own right.

Many science attempts to explain consciousness use qualities of the brain, usually electrical properties like "spike rates," to explain consciousness. This is one way to understand what consciousness is, but it's still not clear which trait offers the best explanation.