Introduction

Attempts to define consciousness are as numerous as they are fruitless. People speak about completely different things. Lying in a donor chair with a tourniquet on my left hand and actively losing that very consciousness, I decided to figure out why is it so. It seems to me that the problem is deeper than the distinction proposed by Chalmers between psychological and phenomenal consciousness, and that phenomenal consciousness itself has irreducible, mutually contradictory facets.

Intuitions About Consciousness

For my purposes, I use the following intuitions about phenomenal consciousness, none of which I am willing to painlessly abandon, although contradictions—albeit resolvable through refinement of formulations—emerge already at the stage of listing them.

So, in the view of this non-specialist but advanced user, consciousness:

1. Is binary: it "turns on" and "turns off"; at any moment, one can definitely say about an object whether it possesses consciousness or not.

2. At the same time, has gradations: your pale and reclining obedient servant, slowly thinking exactly one thought and holding attention on only one element of context, without regrets admits being less conscious than the rosy-cheeked nurse who holds three such unfortunates in her attention simultaneously.

3. Is countable: the nurse and I do not share one consciousness; I can swear (if philosophy accepts such arguments) that there are two.

4. At the same time, is potentially fragmentable: I cannot vouch for how many consciousnesses, say, I and my tulpa-cat-girl share, or, using less extravagant examples, my acquaintance with dissociative identity disorder and his alter, sharing one functional brain organization, inputs, and outputs.

5. Is not identical in its different manifestations: my consciousness and the nurse's consciousness are different and not interchangeable; if we were to "swap consciousnesses," we would notice it, a trope exploited in culture as "they switched bodies."

6. Is intermittent: if I do black out next time, my consciousness will be interrupted; my body will lack it for a time; the same happens when I fall asleep. It also follows from this that not everything possesses it, and I can assert this from the first-person perspective, despite its privacy.

7. Yet, it is identical over time: I will recover, and the same consciousnes...

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