Consciousness can be divided into two subtypes. Phenomenal consciousness involves subjective experiential states and phenomenology, with individual instances of experience called qualia. 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 attempts to explain consciousness include recurrent processing theory, higher-order theory, Global workspace theory, and integrated information theory.