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The history of ideas in all developed cultures is closely intertwined with ideas about perception, knowledge, memory, imagination, and the like, all involving conscious experience in different ways.

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What questions is a good theory of consciousness expected to answer?

Try to stop your inner speech for ten seconds (timing yourself by looking at a clock). I find it impossible to do for more than five seconds or so. It is the simplest possible demonstration, but it shows how dependent we are on the flow of inner speech.

Anyone truly interested in consciousness should be aware of the rich tradition of "stream of consciousness" novels and poetry, including Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf.

Consciousness is the gateway to a vast unconscious collection of specialized knowledge. All unified models of cognition today suggest some sort of unconscious audience: It may be called long-term memory or automatic productions, but it consists of multiple specialized capacities that are not conscious.

Almost everything we do, we do better unconsciously. In first learning a new skill we fumble, feel uncertain, and are conscious of many details of the action. Once the task is learned, sometimes after only a few repetitions, we lose consciousness of the details, forget the painful encounter with uncertainty, and sincerely wonder why beginners seem so slow and awkward.

"Consciousness" has several meanings. It is used in biomedical science to refer to the state of waking consciousness, as assessed by responsiveness to questions, commands, and mild pain. However, in scientific work "consciousness" is also used to refer to the "dimension of conscious vs unconscious brain events" — that is, as an experimental variable that allows us to study brain differences attributable to consciousness. The second usage is profoundly different from the first, since it involves a measurable dimension of variation. Yet "consciousness as an empirical variable" is still commonly confused with the waking state or with subjectivity.

In science, metaphors must be used with care. They are aways partly wrong, and we should keep an eye out for occasions when they break down. Yet they often provide the best starting point we can find.

This article in Scientific American explores the implications of Global Workspace Theory on the development of Artificial General Intelligence. The crossover of disciplines can provide a deeper understanding of intelligence in both biological and artificial forms. Appreciate the recognition, @gmusser

When a scattered group of scientists began to return to consciousness in the early 1980s, the topic was not popular. Psychologists and brain scientists will remember a time when consciousness was essentially taboo thanks to the dominance of philosophical behaviorism. Yet in the 25 centuries before 1900, the study of mental life was a central topic for thoughtful people in many cultures.

Scientists sometimes mis-use the term "default state" or "resting state" when subjects are asked to do nothing in particular. But good observers have known for thousands of years that we cannot really stop the flow of thoughts, feelings, memories, emotions, and plans, whenever we are conscious, even without an experimental task. Social psychologists have known for decades that the spontaneous Stream of Consciousness is not a zero activity state.

What are some major features of consciousness?

Why do some people deny the existence of consciousness, the "what-it-is-like" of experience?

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Essentially, Global Workspace Theory is a hypothesis about how conscious experience arises from the mind, and more recently, how the brain might give rise to this conscious experience.

"Consciousness is not some extra glow or aura caused by the activities of the mature cortex. Consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations" — Dan Dennett

Inductive science is a fairly messy affair, not nearly as tidy as the textbooks make it seem in retrospect.

Conscious contents are routinely assessed by voluntary report, as we know from 200 years of scientific psychophysics. Yet the reason for that fact is far from obvious. Any theory of consciousness must ultimately explain the basic fact that we can voluntarily report an endless range of conscious contents, using an endless range of voluntary actions.

Where is consciousness found empirically?