You've asked the billion-trillion dollar question that ultimately gets into arguments about the existence of "souls" or if consciousness is an emergent property of complexity. This is a question far bigger than ELI5. It's actually unanswered even at the ELIhave-a-PhD-in-a-relevant-field level.

Absolutely nobody have any idea about this and we are pretty sure we will never know because there is no valid scientific experiment to answer this question.

We are not even capable of telling if something is alive or not.

I’ll go further for fun.

You are alive and conscious. That’s the only thing you can be sure.

But you are made of millions of billions of alive things like cells, and bacterias.

Ok. But they are part of you, they can’t live without « you ».

Yes like ants. Ants are alive. They have pretty simple and predictable behaviors, like your cells. However, ant colonies have complex behaviors that the individual ants can’t understand. Like you and your cells. Are ant colonies alive ?

If you accept that definition and say that ant colonies are alive. What about human societies ?

And don’t start me on viruses. Viruses are just inert chemical assemblies. Well. They can be pretty complex. But they have no energy. They don’t move. They have no will. They are dead materials that just happens to have complex chemical interactions with living things. And by doing that, they also evolve through natural selection. Are viruses alive ? They are just simple things we probably could create in a laboratory with our current technology or in the near future. So they are dead assemblies. But they reproduce. And they evolve. Why ?

Good luck finding the answers. But if you want to go further, you just discovered what philosophy is about.

I totally agree with /u/TheLuteceSibling and /u/pocketjpaul that this may be an unanswerable question.

BUT...*if* conciousness is an emergent property of complex systems (which is one of the competing theories but we may not be able to confirm), then you go into the general space of emergent properties, which is that you get properties of systems that are *more* than the sum of their parts because the "thing" is the interactions, not the parts.

A bunch of lightly-electrified cells *aren't* conscious. Dopamine isn't happy. But the interaction of a whole bunch of dopamine (and other stuff) mediated lightly-electrified cells results in a network/interactions that are conscious. It's the relationship between the things, not the things themselves, that defines the phenomenon.

It's roughly like pointing at a wave and saying "how do a bunch of water molecules make a wave?". The water molecules have no idea that they're part of a wave and "the wave", which is a perfectly visible measurable predictable thing, is made up of different water molecules from moment to moment but it's still "one wave". It's the interaction/relationship between water molecules that defines the wave, not the molecules themselves.

I think we need to grow some full size human brains in a lab and ask them (with imaging, dissection, and every other test conceivable) before we get any real answers

Doing cool things with microbrains already

We don’t have an answer for you here, but if you’re interested in reading up on the topic, it’s called “the hard problem of consciousness”. Look up David Chalmers - one of the primary people writing about this currently. See the Wikipedia article on the hard problem of consciousness for more authors as well

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The best answer I've seen to this is that it doesn't. Consciousness is a self-reported quality, which is to say that there's no way to tell if something is conscious without asking it. Furthermore, many things can answer 'yes, I'm conscious' even if our intuition says they aren't actually conscious (computer chatbots, choose-your-own-adventure books, post-it notes with 'Yes, I'm conscious' printed on them), so there's no way to tell for sure if something is conscious even if you ask it. The "Philosophical Zombies" thought experiment tells us that it's perfectly plausible to imagine a society where nobody is conscious but nothing is different.

What do you call a quality that can't be measured, detected, or tested for, and the absence of which causes no difference whatsoever? You call it 'imaginary'.

Consciousness is just an illusion born from our brain's predictive and empathetic abilities to simplify concepts of agency.