Consciousness can be divided into two subtypes. Phenomenal consciousness involves subjective experiential states and phenomenology; individual instances of experience are called . Access consciousness includes all the information that is globally available for reasoning and report in a cognitive system.
The materialist position is that consciousness has a physical explanation. Jackson (1982) shows how Mary’s Room disproves a materialist basis for consciousness.
Scientific explanations of consciousness include:
- Recurrent processing theory
- Higher-order theory
- Global workspace theory
- Integrated information theory