Mitchell’s 15 Questions

Neuroscientist Kevin J. Mitchell offers 15 questions that he says an explanatory, integrated theory of consciousness should encompass, grouped into somewhat related domains (Mitchell, 2025):

1. The Which Question: What kinds of things are conscious, sentient beings? What kinds of things is it like something to be? What is the basis of subjective phenomenal experience, and what kinds of things have it?

2. The Awareness Question: Does being “sentient” necessarily involve conscious awareness? Does responsiveness entail awareness? Does awareness (of anything) necessarily entail self-awareness? What is required for “the lights to be on”?

3. The Capacity Question: What distinguishes conscious from non-conscious entities? (That is, why do some entities have the capacity for consciousness while other kinds of things do not?) Are there entities with different degrees or kinds of consciousness or a sharp boundary?

4. The State Question: For things that have the capacity for consciousness, what distinguishes the state of consciousness from being unconscious? Is there a simple on/off switch? How is this related to arousal, attention, awareness of one’s surroundings (or general responsiveness)?

5. The Content Question: What determines what we are conscious of at any moment? Why do some neural or cognitive operations go on consciously and others subconsciously? Why/how are some kinds of information permitted access to our conscious awareness while most is excluded?

6. The Attention Question: What distinguishes things that we are currently consciously aware of from things that we could be consciously aware of if we turned our attention to them, and from things that we could not be consciously aware of (that nevertheless play crucial roles in our cognition)?

7. The Architecture Question: Which systems are required to support conscious perception? Where is the relevant information represented? Is it all pushed into a common space, or does a central system just point to more distributed representations where the details are held?

8. The Unity Question: Why does consciousness feel unitary? How are our various informational streams bound together?

9. The Selfhood Question: Why do things feel like *our* experiences or *our* thoughts? Where does our sense of selfhood come from? How is this sense of self related to actually being a self?

10. The Qualia Question: Why do some kinds of neural activity feel like something? Why do different kinds of signals feel different from each other? Why do they feel specifically like what they feel like?

11. The Valence Question: How do we become conscious of our own internal states? How much of our subjective experience arises from homeostatic control signals that necessarily have valence? If such signals entail feelings, how do we know what those feelings are about?

12. The Intentionality Question: How does the aboutness of conscious states (or subconscious states) arise? How does the system know what such states refer to? (When the states are all the system has access to).

13. The Function Question: What is the point of conscious subjective experience? Or of a high-level common space for conscious deliberation? Or of reflective capacities for metacognition? What adaptive value do these capacities have?

14. The Mentality Question: How does mentality arise at all? When does computation become cognition? When does cognition become cogitation? Why are only some elements and aspects of cognition part of conscious experience?

15. The Control Question: How does conscious activity influence behavior? Does a capacity for conscious cognitive control equal “free will”? How is mental causation even supposed to work? How can the meaning of mental states constrain the activities of neural circuits?

Mitchell concludes: If we had a theory that could accommodate all these elements and provide some coherent framework in which they could be related to each other—not for providing all the answers but just for asking sensible questions—well, that would be a theory of consciousness (Mitchell, 2025).