Neuroscientist Anil Seth is the Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science. In Being You, he distinguishes between three aspects of consciousness:

Conscious Level: how conscious we are, the difference between being conscious or not
Conscious Content: what we are conscious of, what our perceptions are about
Conscious Self: what it means to be you

Let’s explore Conscious Level.

Conscious level: informational content

Information can be measured in terms of reducing uncertainty. At any time, we have only one conscious experience out of vastly many possibilities so the informational content of each conscious experience relates to the size of reduction of uncertainty (since we have this experience rather than all those other possibilities).

When the brain is stimulated with brief pulses of energy using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, an electroencephalogram (EEG) can record the subsequent electrical echoes. Their analysis can provide a quantitative measure of informational content and how conscious we are. These measures can be used to map out different states of consciousness:

Conscious level: organisational integration

Algorithmic complexity is lowest if a sequence is highly ordered and totally predictable (so that there is no reduction in uncertainty), and highest if totally disordered and completely random. The brain is not disordered and random but ordered and predictable; after all, we do not experience colours separately from their shapes or objects. Mathematics is being researched to quantify both information and integration, and brain imaging methods are being developed so that the right kind of data can be measured.

Measuring How Conscious We Are

When art puts us under its spell

Perception is generative