We began with conscious level—the difference between being in a coma and being wide awake and aware—where we focused on the importance of measurement. The key point here is that candidate measures, like causal density and integrated information, are not arbitrary. Rather, they capture highly conserved properties of all conscious experiences, namely that every conscious experience is simultaneously unified and distinct from all other conscious experiences. Every conscious scene is experienced “all of a piece,” and every experience is the way it is, and not some other way.
