Biological and, possibly, artificial consciousness

Biological ‘consciousness’ is a well documented feature in diverse taxa within the animal kingdom. The existence of non-animal biological consciousness is debated. The possibility of artificial consciousness is also debated. Overall, our knowledge of historic Homo sapiens consciousness (H-consciousness) is by far the most extensive. This chapter specifies the content of consciousness studies, reviews selected theories of human consciousness, and proposes a novel theory of both biological and artificial consciousness that is inspired by the notion of evolutionary transitions and extends the theory of noémon systems developed by Gelepithis (2024a; 2024b chapter-2).