Imagination: The dawn of consciousness: Fighting some misconceptions in the discussion about consciousness

•It is hard to integrate the many theories of consciousness (ToC) that have been proposed into a consensus theory: each one has its merits but the terminology is not shared, each ToC aims at answering a different question, and there is not even a reasonable agreement about what ‘consciousness’ is in the first place.•In order to pinpoint what consciousness consists in and how it arises in the brain it is necessary to dissect the steps that lead from sensation to conscious experience, avoiding the misconceptions that arise from using words such as ‘sensation’, ‘perception’, ‘neural correlate of consciousness’ (NCC) as if the directly implied awareness.•The living organisms are necessarily affected by any stimulus/situation that has relevance to their survival/wellbeing; this generates a biological and neurological aspect of emotion that necessarily accompanies every relevant experience.•The neural systems are continuously active, also in the absence of any stimulus; this inevitably produces a continuous activity of information elaboration; in a brain this endogenous spontaneous neural activity consists in recalling memories, reviving past experiences prefiguring scenarios and consequences of one’s one actions, cognitively elaborating learnt information (I call this ‘imaginative activity’).•Sensory inputs are elaborated by computational modules in the cortex that try to identify objects, recognize spatial, temporal, causal relation, contextualize all identified elements into an emotionally coloured conceptual scheme; in each passage of this process the activities elicited by the sensory inputs meddle with and are interfered by emotional evaluation and the endogenous imaginative activity.•This way the brain does not ‘represent’ reality, to be analysed by some conscious entity, but rather guides its own endogenous activity to revive many previous experiences that help interpreting the current one (it ‘imagines’ a likely reality and experiences it).•The specific activities and mechanisms that sustain consciousness as a function can probably be studied and identified more effectively by studying the endogenous spontaneous activity of the brain rather than the activities that are evoked by stimuli (the so-called neural correlates of consciousness, NCC).•Consciousness as a function consists in (a) the uninterrupted turmoil of internal experiences, with its multifarious and inconsistent richness of emotional and symbolic references, and (b) cognitive elaboration to extract from all this a defined and univocal, complete and consistent, explicit experience.•The product of the (a) process is what philosophers call ‘phenomenal consciousness’ (‘what it is like to...’): a subjective, personal, private experience; the product of process (b) is the so-called access consciousness: an explicit experience, that can be verbally reported.