Yes and no, and the ambiguity is doing real work. In medicine, "level of consciousness" names something measurable: how a person responds to defined stimuli, scored with instruments like the Glasgow Coma Scale. What those clinical scales track is responsiveness — not what it is like to be the patient.
The popular meaning is different. Charts that rank emotional or spiritual states as numbered, "calibrated" levels borrow the clinical word along with its authority, then apply it to something no clinical instrument measures. They are not peer-reviewed. Between the two sits a genuine research question: whether consciousness has levels at all, or whether "level" quietly compresses several independent dimensions into a single line. Holopsychism's own answer — offered as a proposal, not a finding — is that what varies is resolution, a spectrum rather than a hierarchy.
What are levels of consciousness?
The phrase points at two things that have almost nothing in common except a word.
The first is clinical. A person can be alert, drowsy, stuporous or unrousable, and that gradient matters at a bedside because it changes what happens next. It is assessed by watching behavior: whether the eyes open, whether speech is coherent, whether a limb moves on command.
The second is popular and spiritual. Here "levels" are ranked inner states — shame low, courage higher, enlightenment at the top — usually presented with numbers attached. The numbers give the arrangement the look of measurement.
Three layers are worth keeping apart, and I'll label them as we go. What is established is narrow and mostly clinical. What is open debate is where the interesting work sits, including whether "level" is the right shape for the question. What Holopsychism proposes is a reading, not a result, and it will be marked that way every time.
One distinction does work later: the framework's distinction between consciousness and awareness treats consciousness as pure potential and awareness as selection from it. Under that reading, "level" is the wrong unit before the argument starts.
What do clinical scales like the Glasgow Coma Scale actually measure?
This is the established layer, and it is worth stating in its strongest form, because the clinical position is stronger than its spiritual critics usually allow.
The Glasgow Coma Scale, described by Teasdale and Jennett in The Lancet in 1974, is documented by its custodians in exact terms: "The Glasgow Coma Scale provides a practical method for assessment of impairment of conscious level in response to defined stimuli" (glasgowcomascale.org, consulted September 14, 2026). Every clause is doing work. Practical method. Impairment. In response to defined stimuli.
That last clause is the whole argument. The scale does not claim to read experience. It reports what a body does when something is asked of it, in a way two clinicians in two hospitals can compare. Its power comes from refusing the larger question, not from answering it.
So when someone objects that the scale "doesn't capture inner life," the honest reply is: correct, and it never said it did. Someone scoring low may be experiencing a great deal the scale cannot see. Responsiveness and experience can come apart, and conflating them is the most common error in writing about this topic — including writing sympathetic to my own framework. Nothing here is diagnostic guidance; these instruments belong to trained people in clinical settings, and so does their interpretation.
What the clinical layer establishes is modest and real: impaired responsiveness is measurable, gradable and useful. It does not establish that experience itself comes in levels.
Is there a scientific measure of consciousness?
Here we enter the open debate layer, where proposals exist and none has closed the question.
The most cited attempt to move past behavior is the perturbational complexity index, proposed by Casali and colleagues in Science Translational Medicine on August 14, 2013 (PMID 23946194). The approach is to perturb the cortex with transcranial magnetic stimulation — a brief magnetic pulse delivered through the skull — and quantify how complex the brain's response is. A rich, distributed echo scores high; a simple, local one scores low. The ambition is a measure that does not depend on the person being able to answer you.
It is an elegant idea and it remains contested. An index that correlates with states we already classify by other means is evidence of something, but correlation with a classification is not measurement of experience, and that gap is what critics press on. It is a live research program, not a settled instrument.
The comparison below sorts the main approaches by what each one actually tracks, which is where most confusion starts.
| Approach | What it tracks | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Glasgow Coma Scale (1974) | Behavioral responsiveness to defined stimuli | Established clinical instrument |
| Perturbational complexity index (2013) | Complexity of cortical response to magnetic perturbation | Proposed measure, contested |
| Popular "calibrated levels" charts | Ranked inner or moral states, numbered | Not peer-reviewed |
| Holopsychism's resolution | Coherence of what awareness can hold | This site's proposal, untested |
If the gap between what we can measure and what we want to know is the part that interests you, the guide goes at it slowly and without shortcuts.
Are the popular "maps of consciousness" based on evidence?
No — and the useful version of that answer is not a sneer.
The best-known of these, the Map of Consciousness associated with David Hawkins, assigns numerical values to states such as shame, courage, acceptance and enlightenment, arranging them on a single ascending axis. It has no peer-reviewed basis. No published, replicated study establishes the calibration procedure or the numbers it produces, and the framework it belongs to has not been tested in the way its numerical presentation implies.
Why do the maps persist anyway? Because they answer a question people genuinely have, and the clinical literature does not. Someone moving from resentment to something steadier is tracking a real change. The map gives that change a vocabulary and a direction; what it does not give is measurement, and the numbers make a promise the method cannot keep.
A number implies an instrument, an instrument implies a procedure, and a procedure implies that two people running it independently get the same result. Strip the digits and much of what these maps describe becomes an honest phenomenology of moral experience — contestable, but no longer dressed as physics.
Is "level" even the right concept?
This is the question I find hardest to put down, and it does not come from the fringe. Bayne, Hohwy and Owen raised it inside mainstream cognitive science, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in June 2016 (DOI 10.1016/j.tics.2016.03.009), asking whether "level of consciousness" is the right conceptual tool at all rather than a convenient summary of several things that vary independently.
The worry is easy to feel once stated. A dreaming person is unresponsive and vividly experiencing. Someone under certain anesthetics may be behaviorally absent and later report something. A single number has to rank these against each other, and the ranking hides what varies. Whether the alternative should be a multidimensional space, or several distinct measures kept apart, is unresolved — and the people arguing it are not arguing for anything spiritual. If you want the range of cases that pressure the single axis hardest, the work on altered states and consciousness is where they gather.
Now the proposal, marked as such. Holopsychism suggests that what changes across these cases is not the quantity of consciousness but its resolution — a spectrum, not a hierarchy. On this reading, consciousness is pure potential, awareness is the selection that makes some of it determinate, and the brain functions as a receiver, filter and translator rather than a generator. A drowsy brain, a dreaming brain and an anesthetized brain would then be tuning differently, not holding less of a substance.
The status of that matters. It is a tentative framework, not a finished theory, and this site's coinage rather than a recognized school. It predicts no number. It tells a clinician nothing usable tomorrow. It does not explain why any particular coherence should feel like something rather than nothing — the hard question stays hard. Quantum mechanics does not prove that consciousness creates reality, and nothing here rests on that claim.
What the proposal does buy is a reason the clinical and the spiritual senses of "level" never reconcile. They are not two readings of one scale. One measures a body's response; the other describes a change in what awareness can hold. Once they stop being ranked against each other, the ladder metaphor loses its grip — and the honest picture is less tidy, but it stops promising a top.
What else do people ask about levels of consciousness?
Does the Glasgow Coma Scale measure how conscious someone is? It assesses impairment of conscious level in response to defined stimuli, in the words of its own documentation. That is responsiveness. A low score does not establish an absence of experience, and the two should never be treated as the same quantity.
Is the perturbational complexity index accepted as a measure of consciousness? It is a serious proposal from 2013, not a settled instrument. It correlates with states classified by other means; whether that amounts to measuring experience remains disputed.
Are near-death experiences evidence for higher levels of consciousness? They are among the cases that make a single axis look inadequate, since people report vivid experience during states scored as deeply unresponsive. What follows from that is contested, and the evidence around near-death experiences deserves examining on its own terms rather than as a verdict.
Can you raise your level of consciousness? People do change how they attend, and that change is real to them. What no verified instrument supports is a number assigned to the result, or a ranking of people by it.
If the ladder never fit, it is worth seeing what fits better.