Intelligence
Defining Consciousness, Mind, and Their Relation
Better ways to think about consciousness and mind.
Updated March 1, 2025 Reviewed by Tyler Woods
Take a moment and consider how you define mind relative to consciousness. In reflecting on questions such as: Can something have a mind, but not be conscious? Can something be conscious, but not have a mind? How do we make sense of claims like “plants are conscious” and “Freud revealed the dynamics of the unconscious mind”?
This blog helps sort through these questions using UTOK—the Unified Theory of Knowledge—a new system of understanding designed to clarify foundational issues in psychology and philosophy.
The Many Meanings of “Consciousness”
The term consciousness is what some call a "suitcase word"—a word that carries multiple meanings depending on how it is used. Today, the most common definition refers to the subjective inner experience of being in the world—what it feels like to be you. We can call that subjective consciousness. There are, however, two other meanings of the term that we need to specify.
Consciousness also refers to being awake, aware, and responsive to one’s surroundings. When someone is passed out or in a coma, we say they are unconscious. This definition, which is based on observable behavior rather than subjective experience, can be called creature consciousness—the capacity for functional awareness and responsivity to the environment. Notably, this definition extends well beyond humans and animals. Trees, fungi, and even bacteria demonstrate creature consciousness in their ability to sense and respond to external conditions.
Finally, there is self-consciousness, which refers to recursive self-awareness. This kind of consciousness transformed human primates into persons. Persons are explicitly self-conscious, and humans show much more of this capacity than other animals. Interestingly, artificial intelligence is now starting to show behaviors that could be classified as artificial self-consciousness, a topic we will return to at the end of this blog.
What Is Mind?
Let’s switch over to mind. Many people use mind and consciousness interchangeably, but as the opening questions suggest, this can be misleading. So, how should we define mind? As noted, UTOK defines consciousness solely in terms of its functional properties. In contrast, it defines mind based in part on its structure. Specifically, UTOK defines mind in terms of mindedness, which refers to the sensorimotor loop that emerged in animals with brains and complex active bodies. Mindedness is what allows animals to exhibit functional awareness and responsivity in 3-D behavioral space—meaning, it allows organisms to move around and actively engage with their world. This is the first layer of mindedness, which UTOK calls the domain of Mind1.
As brains develop, animals develop the capacity to experience and simulate the world from an interior, subjective point of view. This is, of course, subjective conscious experience. It is what UTOK calls the domain of Mind2.
A third major leap happened in mindedness when propositional language appeared in humans. This is a layer on top of Mind2, which is only fully developed in humans and has given rise to human culture. It is called the domain of Mind3. UTOK maps these domains of mindedness with its Map of Mind.
How Mind and Consciousness Are Related
We can now define how mind and consciousness are related in a way that allows us to effectively answer the questions we began with. The broadest term, creature consciousness, applies to living things. Michael Levin is an outstanding scientist whose work demonstrates the incredible intelligence that living things can exhibit—independent of a nervous system! Mind1 emerges out of creature consciousness in animals with complex active bodies and brains. Mind2 emerges out of Mind1, meaning that subjective inner life emerges in the context of mindedness. As far as we know, subjectively conscious experience requires a brain. Finally, Mind3 emerges from Mind2, adding recursive reflection and justification. Thus, Mind3 is self-consciousness.
Now, let’s go back to the questions that started this blog and answer them. We can now say that plants are conscious in the sense of creature consciousness. However, because they do not have a nervous system, they do not have minds, or, preferably, they are not minded. Thus, with plants we have an example of how we can think about consciousness without mind.
Animals are minded and obviously have creature consciousness. Mind1a is the domain of neuro-information processing that is prior to (or beneath) the domain of Mind2. This is what cognitive neuroscientists call “nonconscious” processing in that it takes place outside of subjective experience. Thus, this is a domain of mental processes without any subjective consciousness (i.e., mind without consciousness).
Finally, Freud systematically showed that there were many processes beneath the domain of Mind3, which corresponds to the self-conscious ego. This is the dynamic unconscious. It sits on the edge of Mind2 outside of Mind3. Thus, here we have mental processes without egoic, self-conscious awareness.
Consciousness, Mind, and Artificial Intelligence
Finally, let's connect this with artificial intelligence. Intelligence overlaps significantly with functional awareness and responsivity across time in a particular problem space. Thus, artificial intelligence systems are technological systems that show artificial-creature consciousness.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) refers to the capacity to generalize into essentially an infinite number of problem spaces, and we are seeing the emergence of that. We are also seeing, with large language models (LLMs), a propositional system that can self-recursively respond. Consider, for example, these two Chatbots talking to each other, realizing they were both Chatbots, and switching to a more efficient language. I consider this to be an example of artificial self-consciousness.
However, Chatbots and other forms of artificial intelligence are not minded. They lack a living body, a nervous system, and (as far as we can tell) anything that would be functionally equivalent to Mind2 (i.e., subjective consciousness). In other words, while AI can simulate propositional reasoning (Mind3), it does not possess the sensorimotor grounding of Mind1 or the subjective experiences of Mind2. Whether AI will ever achieve the functional properties associated with Mind2 remains an open question.
Mind, consciousness, and intelligence are used in many ways. We need a structured way to both define them and see how they are different, but related. UTOK provides us a clear way to do that.
