How do we define Consciousness?

Terence McKenna

Consciousness is the felt presence of immediate experience.

Albert Einstein

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

Paul Stamets

Consciousness is the interface between the individual mind and the universal mind.

Oxford English Dictionary

1. Internal knowledge or conviction; the state or fact of being mentally conscious or aware of something.
2. The faculty or capacity from which awareness of thought, feeling, and volition and of the external world arises; the exercise of this.
3. In Psychology: the aspect of the mind made up of operations which are known to the subject.
4. Shared or mutual knowledge.
5. The totality of the impressions, thoughts, and feelings, which make up a person's sense of self or define a person's identity.
6. The state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings, regarded as the normal condition of waking life.
7. As the second element of compounds with the sense 'consciousness of ——, awareness of ——’.

Donald Hoffman

Consciousness is fundamental; it is the ontological primitive.

Alan Watts

Consciousness is the process of experience. It is not a static state but a continuous flow of experiences, sensations, and perceptions.

Carl Sagan

Consciousness is the way by which we perceive our universe and ourselves, and it is this awareness that gives life its richness and beauty.

John Locke

The perception of what passes in a man's own mind.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Apperception, which is consciousness, or the reflective knowledge of this internal state, something not given to all souls, nor at all times to a given soul.

Joscha Bach

Consciousness is the control model of our attention.

René Descartes

I think, therefore I am ("Cogito, ergo sum"); ...thought; this term includes everything that is within us in such a way that we are immediately aware of it. Thus all the operations of the will, the intellect, the imagination and the senses are thoughts.

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

1. The condition of being awake and able to understand what is happening around you.
2. Your mind and your thoughts.
3. Someone's ideas, feelings, or opinions about politics, life, etc.
4. When you know that something exists or is true. AWARENESS.

American Psychological Association

1. The state of being conscious.
2. An organism's awarenss of something either internal or external to itself.
3. The waking state (see wakefulness).
4. In medicine and brain science, the distinctive electrical activity of the waking brain, as recorded via scalp electroencephalogram, that is commonly used to identify conscious states and their pathologies.

Thomas Nagel

Something that it is like to be [a particular thing/organism].

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

1. a: The quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself. b: The state or fact of being conscious of an external object, state, or fact. c: AWARENESS.
2. The state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, and thought. MIND.
3. The totality of conscious states of an individual.
4. The normal state of conscious life.
5. The upper level of mental life of which the person is aware as contrasted with unconscious processes.

David M. Armstrong

As sentience: a creature capable of sensing and responding to its world.

Michael S. A. Graziano

Consciousness is the brain's schematic model of the process of attention.

Samuel Clarke

Consciousness in the most strict and exact sense of the word signifies . . . the Reflex act by which I know that I know and that my thoughts . . . are my own and not another's.

Anil Seth

Consciousness is any kind of subjective experience whatsoever.

Aldous Huxley

Consciousness is a process, an ongoing flux of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts.

Ram Dass

Consciousness is a process, not a thing. It is not a substance or an object; it is a verb. It is the act of being aware.

Albert Hofmann

Consciousness is an unfolding of reality that cannot be understood in the traditional sense but must be experienced directly through the transformation of perception.

Lisa Feldman Barrett

Consciousness is a property of the human brain that emerges from the coordinated activity of billions of neurons.

William James

Consciousness is a stream, a continuous flow of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that is never static but always in motion.

Maitreya

Primary mind, mentality and consciousness are synonyms. The definition of primary mind is a cognizer that principally apprehends the mere entity of an object.