MANIFESTO OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Where It Begins, How It Evolves, and What It May Become

 

Preface — A Provocation

The greatest scientific problem of the twenty‑first century is neither climate nor artificial intelligence. It is the fact that we still do not know what consciousness is, because we stubbornly confuse words with phenomena.

When a philosopher says “consciousness,” they mean subjective experience—the elusive “what it is like” to be someone. A neuroscientist hears the same word and thinks of the brain’s global workspace. A psychologist thinks of a state of awareness, attention, and self‑regulation. A physicist thinks of a possible fundamental property of matter. All four are talking about real things, but these are different phenomena that have been forced to live under a single name. This is not an academic detail. It is the main obstacle to understanding.

For whom this book is written

This book is for everyone who is consciously not indifferent. For philosophers who are tired of blurry intuitions and want a clear ontological line. For neuroscientists who see the brain “from the inside” every day but are forced to speak in concepts that contradict one another. For technologists who already build systems about which, tomorrow, people will ask: “might they be conscious?”. For physicians who, each time they ask “is the patient conscious?”, mean something very different from what Nagel or Chalmers write about. And for everyone who honestly asks, perhaps the only truly personal question: “what am I?”.

A roadmap

The book is built as a journey with clearly marked transitions.

First you will find yourself in a chaos of definitions and hear how different disciplines stretch the word “consciousness” in opposite directions. Then you pass through a strict demarcation: we separate consciousness, sentience, irritability, and other phenomena into different compartments and give them their own names.

Next comes the evolutionary threshold: we ask where in the history of life on Earth the two conditions of consciousness—inner experience and reflection—first coincided, and why this is not just “a slightly more complex brain.” Then come the clinical limits of embodiment: we enter intensive care, neurosurgery, and rehabilitation, where consciousness cracks, narrows, persists despite the body, or disintegrates together with it.

And finally, you reach the open horizon of new conscious forms: embodied robots, hybrid bio‑silicon systems, possible post‑biological subjects. The book will not tell you whether “this particular robot is conscious,” but it will give you the tools without which that question does not make sense at all.

An interdisciplinary tandem

This book is written by two heads linked by more than genetics.

Medicine sees consciousness from inside the body: in the pulse returning after cardiac arrest, in the gaze of a patient with locked‑in syndrome, in the phantom pain of a leg that is no longer there. Philosophy looks at consciousness from outside any body: in the concepts of Nagel and Chalmers, in disputes between panpsychism and materialism, in the limits of what can honestly be said about the “inner side” of the world.

Each of these perspectives, taken alone, sees a great deal but is inevitably blind to something essential. Together they see what neither can see by itself. One head is good, but two make a helmet, even when they are genetically related.

Connection with our previous books

How to read this book

The book is deliberately written so that it can be read along different paths.

Philosopher‑reader
For you, the conceptual core is Chapters 2–5. There we formulate an ontological definition of consciousness, draw demarcation lines between it and other phenomena, and analyze typical category mistakes, including panpsychism and “protoconsciousness.”

Neuroscientist‑reader
Your entry point is Chapters 6–9 and the Glossary. Here consciousness is placed on an evolutionary continuum, the octopus appears as a living demarcation line, the Cambridge, New York, and Vienna declarations are examined, and embodiment is treated as a necessary condition of subjective experience.

Technologist‑reader
For you, the most useful parts are Chapters 11–13 and the Manifesto in the final section. There we discuss the boundary between complex information processing and consciousness proper, embodied robots as candidates for a new kind of embodiment, hybrid bio‑silicon systems, and what a verification protocol for potentially conscious AI might look like.

“What am I?”‑reader
If your central question is not theory but your own “I,” your guides will be the interludes and Chapter 16. The interludes unfold imagined dialogues with researchers, animals, and future robots, and the final chapter deliberately leaves open those questions to which no honest book can yet give a complete answer.

This preface does not provide answers. It only sets the stakes: either we learn to distinguish words from phenomena and consciousness from everything it is not, or we will go on building theories, ethics, and technologies on terminological quicksand.

PART I — WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?

Chapter 1. The problem of definition

If you ask several specialists what consciousness is, you will very likely get different answers. Not because some are wrong, but because each is answering a different question.

A philosopher will say: consciousness is subjective experience, the elusive “what it is like” to be oneself. A neuroscientist will say: consciousness is a certain kind of neural activity, the brain’s global workspace. A psychologist will say: consciousness is a state of awareness, the capacity for attention and self‑regulation. A physicist will say: consciousness is perhaps a fundamental property of matter, like mass or charge. All four are talking about real phenomena. But they are talking about different phenomena and calling them by the same word. This is not an academic detail. It is the main obstacle to understanding.

Why everyone talks about consciousness but not about the same thing

The word “consciousness” carries at least four different meanings that are constantly conflated in everyday language and even in the scientific literature.

First, consciousness as subjective experience: what philosophers call qualia. Pain that actually hurts. Red that looks red. Music that sounds exactly the way it does. This is the inner dimension of experience, inaccessible from the outside.

Second, consciousness as the state of being awake: the opposite of dreamless sleep, anesthesia, coma. In this sense the doctor asks “Is the patient conscious?” and means not qualia at all, but responsiveness to stimuli.

Third, consciousness as self‑awareness: the capacity to know that you are you. To recognize yourself in a mirror. To have a sense of your own states, intentions, past, and future.

Fourth, consciousness as access to information: a system’s capacity to integrate data from different sources and use them flexibly. This meaning is closer to cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

Each of these meanings is real and important. But they are four different phenomena—and when we talk about them with a single word, we inevitably confuse arguments, conclusions, and even experiments.

Terminological chaos as an obstacle — and how to overcome it

Terminological chaos in the science of consciousness has concrete consequences. Researchers argue for years, only to discover that they have been arguing about different things. Hypotheses refute one another even though they actually describe different levels of the phenomenon. Declarations are signed and immediately contested, because the signatories put different content into the word “consciousness.”

The solution is not to invent a new word. The solution is a clear definition with explicit criteria, and a consistent separation of the phenomena that have so far been hiding under a single term.

This is what we do in the next chapter. We do not invent an entirely new definition. Subjectivity and reflection as key features of consciousness are already present in contemporary philosophical and psychological debates. What we propose is different: to treat these two elements as necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of the phenomenon, and to use them as a demarcation tool that lets us distinguish consciousness precisely from everything it is not.

Without this step, any conversation about consciousness—where it begins, how it evolves, what it may become—remains a conversation in the dark, where everyone holds their own flashlight and thinks they are illuminating the same place.

You can learn more by reading our e-book 

Mykola Iabluchanskyi together with Andriy Yabluchanskiy