What is it to be conscious in the primary ordinary sense? Five leading ideas—qualia, what it’s like to be something, subjectivity, intentionality or aboutness, phenomenality—all fail to give an adequate initial clarification of this consciousness. However, there is much data, some in the ideas, for a figurative initial clarification of all consciousness. Being conscious is something’s being actual. This results in the literal and explicit theory or analysis that is Actualism. Right or wrong, it is unprecedented. As against other theories, it is true to our three-part distinction between consci ... More

What is it to be conscious in the primary ordinary sense? Five leading ideas—qualia, what it’s like to be something, subjectivity, intentionality or aboutness, phenomenality—all fail to give an adequate initial clarification of this consciousness. However, there is much data, some in the ideas, for a figurative initial clarification of all consciousness. Being conscious is something’s being actual. This results in the literal and explicit theory or analysis that is Actualism. Right or wrong, it is unprecedented. As against other theories, it is true to our three-part distinction between consciousness in seeing or hearing and thinking and wanting in generic senses—perceptual, cognitive, and affective consciousness. It rests first on a clarification of objective physicality. Then what is actual with perceptual consciousness is demonstrated to be subjective physical worlds. Your being perceptually conscious now is only the existence of such a world out there, probably a room. Its being actual is its being subjectively physical, which includes taking up space, being causal, being lawfully dependent both on the objective physical world and you neurally. Cognitive and affective consciousness, differently, consists in representations, related to linguistic representations but distinguished by being actual—differently subjectively physical. Actualism uniquely satisfies accumulated criteria for an adequate theory of consciousness, one to do with its reality and thus physicality, another with its difference in kind. Is the question what it is to be conscious in the primary ordinary sense a right question? Yes it is.