The nature of consciousness is to express life. Maharishi defined life as "the light of God". So, the nature of consciousness is to express the light of God.
Philosophers have been interested in consciousness for a much longer time than scientists. So, from a philosophical perspective, there are several different answers to the question - what is the nature of consciousness?
However, before looking at the philosophical answers in detail, you may like to check out the article on the broader question of what consciousness means.
Philosophers try to answer questions about the nature of consciousness - what kind of entity is it? Is it real and if so, what is the nature of its reality? Is it fundamental to life or is it a by-product of certain kinds of biological organisation such as found in human brains? Can a machine ever be conscious?
In humans, consciousness expresses itself through a mind and a mind requires a body. Mind and body go together.
Then it gets tricky. You or I can perceive our own thoughts and feelings but they are "inside" ourselves, inside our minds. They are mental objects not physical ones and are a completely different kind of thing from a physical object. No one else can perceive your thoughts but anyone can in principle perceive a physical object.
So I can ask a question. Are your thoughts real? I can't see them or measure them even if you say you have them. I can measure changes in the way your brain functions when you say you think and that's real. So you could be a cleverly designed robot. How can I know? I can poke you and you can squeal but I can't know if you really have thoughts?
Life would be terribly lonely if I were the only real person. So we make assumptions. Like assuming that all the other people I meet are as real as me and have their own, private to them, ability to perceive, think and feel.
So, we live in a mental world and a physical world simultaneously. And my thoughts affect my actions. I can decide to get up or to lie in bed. I can plan how to build a dam and then organise people to build it.
we have five senses can see, hear, touch, smell andc taste.physical objects, events and processes that In the conscious life of humans and likely the higher animals, one kind of reality - the physical world - is connected to another kind of reality - the mental world. But how does this happen?
The actual experience of “red”, for example, is a completely different kind of thing to the particular wavelength of visible light that it is associated with, or to the physical and chemical changes that take place at the back of the eye when the red light is received, or to the changes in the firing of neurons in certain parts of my brain which might “correlate” with my experience of the colour red.
This philosophical puzzle is called the mind-body problem. In relation to the scientific understanding of consciousness it has been called “the hard problem” of consciousness. Science can map the correlation between mental experience and brain function alright but how can we explain those connections? If we can't answer that then we can't answer the question - what does consciousness mean?
To see how scientists approach the correlations between mind and body from the outside, visit the page on the science of consciousness
Different philosophical systems approach this problem in different ways:
The materialist or physicalist approach which underpins modern science takes the physical world to be the primary reality. Consciousness is therefore seen as an emergent property of highly organised and complex biological systems.
The idealist approach treats mind as the primary reality - either the mind is held to be a kind of subtle substance or else everything is thought of as being made of knowledge forms of one kind or another.
The dualist approach says that the world is in fact made of two completely different kinds of substance. One is material (or physical) which occupies both time and space - and from which all physical objects are made and the other is mental, manifest in time but not at all in space, from which minds are constructed. The problem with this approach is that there has to be a mechanism for these two utterly distinct components of the world to interact.
The panpsychist approach says mind and body are equally real and every physical entity has an outer nature (the physical part) and an inner nature (an associated mental state).
Whichever approach is taken, the philosophical answer to the question "what does consciousness mean?" involves solving the mind-body problem.