IACSIACSInt'l Academy for Consciousness Studies
International Academy for Consciousness Studies

The Glossary of Consciousness

Plain, sourced definitions of the key terms in the study of consciousness, mind, and meaning: what each one means, who coined it, and why it matters. Every term opens onto the questions and courses that use it.

The felt quality
Qualia
Qualia are the felt, qualitative properties of conscious experience: the redness of red as you see it, the sting of a burn, the taste of coffee. Each …
The Explanatory Gap
The explanatory gap is the persistent difficulty of explaining why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. Even a …
The Knowledge Argument (Mary's Room)
The knowledge argument is a thought experiment about Mary, a scientist who knows every physical fact about color but has only ever seen black and whit…
The Chinese Room
The Chinese Room is a thought experiment by John Searle arguing that running a program can never produce genuine understanding. A person who manipulat…
Theories of consciousness
Integrated Information Theory
Integrated Information Theory, developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, proposes that consciousness is identical to integrated information: the degr…
Global Workspace Theory
Global Workspace Theory, proposed by cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars, holds that the mind contains many specialized unconscious processors, and t…
Neural Correlates of Consciousness
The neural correlates of consciousness are the minimal brain mechanisms jointly sufficient for a specific conscious experience. The research program, …
Functionalism
Functionalism is the theory in philosophy of mind that mental states are defined by what they do, that is, by their causal role linking inputs, other …
Mind and world
Panpsychism
Panpsychism is the view that mind, or something mind-like such as experience, is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world, present e…
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is the philosophical study of experience as it is lived from the first-person point of view, describing how things appear to consciousne…
Intentionality
Intentionality is the power of minds and mental states to be about, to represent, or to be directed at things beyond themselves. A belief is about the…
Emergence
Emergence is when a whole has properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own, and that arise from how the parts are organized. Wetnes…
Life and the boundary
Autopoiesis
Autopoiesis (Greek for self-making) is the property by which a living system continuously produces and repairs the very components and boundary that m…
The Epistemic Cut
The epistemic cut is the boundary in a living system between symbolic information, such as the genetic code, and the material dynamics that informatio…
Embodied Cognition
Embodied cognition is the view that thinking is shaped by the whole body and its actions in the world, not by the brain alone. It challenges the pictu…
This school's vocabulary
The C and M Lexicon
The C and M lexicon is the core vocabulary of the framework this academy was founded on. C and c name two grades of consciousness, M and m two grades …
The Closure Ladder
The closure ladder is the framework's picture of nature as one move repeated at rising scales: openness settling into a stable 'this' with rules to st…