Consciousness
The property of being a subject — of there being something it is like to be a particular system, to perceive, feel, or experience the world from the inside. Philosophy of mind divides the territory into the "easy problems" (explaining the mechanisms of attention, perception, memory, behavioural control) and the "hard problem" (why any physical process should be accompanied by subjective experience at all). Approaches range from dualism and panpsychism to reductive materialism and predictive-processing accounts that aim to dissolve the hard problem by reframing experience as a kind of controlled hallucination generated by the brain. A separate tradition — phenomenology, founded by Husserl and developed by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre — brackets out questions of underlying mechanism and instead describes the structures of lived first-person experience on their own terms.