Is Being Conscious Not Synonymous With Being Awake?

Many people, as you said, conflate with consciousness as a mental property. There's obviously a relationship between these things, but they're not the same. We can do different kinds of experiments and try to isolate distinct phenomenal properties in their mechanistic basis by making these distinctions. When it comes to conscious level, i think that the simplest way to think of this is more or less as a scale. And in this case, it's from er when the lights are completely out, when or dead, brain death, or under general anaesthesia,. Or perhaps in very, very deep states of sleep.