---
title: "Consciousness · Library · Simulation Hypothesis"
url: https://simulation-hypothesis.com/library/consciousness
description: "Consciousness is subjective experience: there being something it’s like to be a given system."
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
credit: "Ross Allan Dahl, Simulation Hypothesis (simulation-hypothesis.com)"
---

## Philosophy of mind

# Consciousness

Definition

Consciousness is subjective experience: there being something it’s like to be a given system. It’s very hard to define and very hard to explain in physical terms.

On this site

The inner-lives cutoff and the Mind model together decide which entities get credited with experience, and how much.

Role in the model

The sandbox has one dial for how many things have an inside and another for how much inside each one has. Both rest on one working premise, stated here once for the whole site: computational functionalism. That’s the view that running the right computation is enough for a mind. On that premise, the model measures the computing that would run a mind. It doesn’t measure experience itself, and the tiles carry a “wild guess” tag where that matters.

Related

[The hard problem](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/library/hard-problem)[Qualia](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/library/qualia)[Sentience](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/library/sentience)[Panpsychism](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/library/panpsychism)

In the trees

[Cambridge Declaration · Ethics](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/trees/ethics?n=c-cambridge)[New York Declaration · Ethics](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/trees/ethics?n=c-ny-declaration)

## The people behind the terms

14 short pages, one per thinker, each with its matching dial. See also the [reading list](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/reading).

[Plato’s cave](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/plato)[Zhuangzi’s butterfly](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/zhuangzi)[Vasubandhu’s dream](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/vasubandhu)[Shankara’s māyā](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/shankara)[al-Ghazali’s doubt](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/ghazali)[Ibn Arabi’s imagination](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/ibn-arabi)[Calderón’s life is a dream](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/calderon)[Descartes’ demon](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/descartes)[Berkeley’s perceiver](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/berkeley)[Borges’ circular ruins](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/borges)[Nozick’s experience machine](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/nozick)[Putnam’s brain in a vat](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/putnam)[Bostrom’s trilemma](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/bostrom)[Chalmers: virtual worlds are real](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/chalmers)