Few questions feel as intimate—and as intractable—as this one. Consciousness seems immediately given: there is something it is like to be here, now. Yet when we try to explain it, it resists reduction, classification, or localisation. From this tension arises the familiar question: what is consciousness?
“What is consciousness?” appears to ask for the underlying nature of subjective experience.
But this framing depends on a prior move: treating consciousness as a thing or substance that must be explained, located, or generated.
Once that move is examined, the question no longer seeks an underlying object. It reveals a familiar distortion: the reification of relational construal into an inner entity called “consciousness.”
1. The surface form of the question
“What is consciousness?”
In its everyday philosophical form, this asks:
- what subjective experience consists of
- whether consciousness is physical, computational, or non-physical
- how awareness arises from matter
- whether consciousness can be reduced or explained
It presupposes:
- that consciousness is a thing that exists
- that it must have an underlying mechanism
- that it arises from or belongs to a particular substrate
- that it can be located in a system
2. Hidden ontological commitments
For the question to stabilise, several assumptions must already be in place:
- that experience is an object-like inner domain
- that “having consciousness” is a property of systems
- that awareness is separable from the processes that enact it
- that explanation requires identifying a generating mechanism
- that subjectivity must correspond to a thing in the world
These assumptions convert relational enactment into inner substance.
3. Stratal misalignment
Within relational ontology, the distortion involves reification, internalisation, and localisation error.
(a) Reification of consciousness
Consciousness is treated as an entity.
- instead of a relational field of construal
- it becomes a thing that must be explained
(b) Internalisation of experience
Experience is placed inside a subject.
- rather than arising across system–environment relations
- it becomes an inner theatre
(c) Localisation error
Consciousness is assumed to be located somewhere.
- in brains, computations, or substrates
- ignoring that location presupposes construal itself
4. Relational re-description
If we remain within relational ontology, consciousness is not a thing. It is a dynamic field of relational construal enacted through structured coupling between systems and their environments under constraint.
More precisely:
- systems instantiate structured relations under constraint
- some systems develop complex internal modelling and recursive sensitivity
- these systems engage in continuous construal of their relational environment
- what is called “consciousness” is the ongoing actualisation of this construal field
From this perspective:
- consciousness is not generated like a product
- nor located like an object
- it is a mode of relational engagement in which construal becomes globally integrated and recursively available within the system
Thus:
- consciousness is not inside the system
- it is what the system is doing when it is actively constraining, modelling, and re-actualising its relational coupling with the world
5. Dissolution of the problem-space
Once consciousness is no longer treated as a substance, the question “What is consciousness?” loses its structure.
It depends on:
- reifying experience as object
- internalising awareness into a domain
- localising it within a system
- assuming it requires a generating mechanism
If these assumptions are withdrawn, there is no hidden entity to define or locate.
What disappears is not experience, but the demand that it be explained as a thing.
6. Residual attraction
The persistence of the question is entirely understandable.
It is sustained by:
- the immediacy and vividness of experience
- the apparent unity of subjective awareness
- neuroscientific models that localise function in systems
- philosophical intuitions about the “inner life”
Most importantly, consciousness feels like a place:
- there is a sense of being “inside” experience
- as if perception occurs within a bounded field
This experiential framing encourages reification.
Closing remark
“What is consciousness?” appears to ask for the substance of subjective experience.
Once these moves are undone, consciousness is not explained as a thing.
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