The psychological state of being aware. Several different meanings can be distinguished, including the state of being awake (in contrast to unconscious) and the state in which mental experiences are directly accessible and reportable (in contrast to subconscious or preconscious). William James stressed the continuity of consciousness (the stream of thought). Cognitive psychologists have emphasized that consciousness may be restricted to certain levels of processing; for example, we may be conscious at a high level of what someone has said, but not be aware (nor be capable of being aware) of the low-level processing details of the acoustic signal that conveyed the message.
Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment.
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Some philosophers divide consciousness into phenomenal consciousness, which is experience itself, and access consciousness, which is the processing of the things in experience Phenomenal consciousness is the state of being conscious, such as when we say "I am conscious." Access consciousness is being conscious of something in relation to abstract concepts, such as when we say "I am conscious of these words." Various forms of access consciousness include awareness, self-awareness, conscience, stream of consciousness, Husserl's phenomenology, and intentionality. The concept of phenomenal consciousness is closely related to the concept of qualia.
An understanding of necessary preconditions for consciousness in the human brain may allow us to address important ethical questions. At what point in fetal development does consciousness begin?
In common parlance, consciousness denotes being awake and responsive to one's environment; The term 'level of consciousness' denotes how consciousness seems to vary during anesthesia and during various states of mind, such as day dreaming, lucid dreaming, imagining, etc. Nonconsciousness exists when consciousness is not present. There is speculation, mostly among religious groups, that consciousness may exist after death or before birth.
Etymology
"Consciousness" derives from Latin conscientia which primarily means moral conscience. René Descartes has been said to be the first philosopher to use "conscientia" in a way that does not seem to fit this traditional meaning, and, as a consequence, the translators of his writings in other languages like French and English coined new words in order to denote merely psychological consciousness. However, it has also been argued that John Locke was in fact the first one to use the modern meaning of consciousness in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, although it remains closely intertwined with moral conscience (I may be held morally responsible only for the act of which I am conscious of having achieved; and my personal identity - my self - goes as far as my consciousness extends itself). The modern sense of "consciousness" was therefore first found not in Descartes' work - who sometimes used the word in a modern sense, but did not distinguish it as much as Locke would do -, but in Locke's text. The modern sense of the word (consciousness associated to the idea of personal identity, which is assured by the repeated consciousness of oneself) was therefore introduced by Locke;
Locke's influence upon the concept can be found in Samuel Johnson's celebrated Dictionary, in which Johnson abstains from offering a definition of "consciousness," choosing instead to simply quote Locke.
Philosophical approaches
There are many philosophical stances on consciousness, including: behaviorism, dualism, idealism, functionalism, phenomenalism, phenomenology and intentionality, physicalism, emergentism, mysticism, personal identity etc.
Phenomenal and access consciousness
Phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness) is simply experience, it is moving, coloured forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and feelings with our bodies and responses at the center. The hard problem of consciousness was formulated by Chalmers in 1996, dealing with the issue of "how to explain a state of phenomenal consciousness in terms of its neurological basis" (Block 2004).
Access consciousness (A-consciousness) is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior. Chalmers thinks that access consciousness is less mysterious than phenomenal consciousness, so that it is held to pose one of the easy problems of consciousness. Dennett denies that there is a "hard problem", asserting that the totality of consciousness can be understood in terms of impact on behavior, as studied through heterophenomenology. Daniel Dennett (1988) suggests that what people think of as phenomenal consciousness, such as qualia, are judgements and consequent behaviour. He extends this analysis (Dennett, 1996) by arguing that phenomenal consciousness can be explained in terms of access consciousness, denying the existence of qualia, hence denying the existence of a "hard problem."
Events that occur in the mind or brain that are not within phenomenal or access consciousness are known as subconscious events.
The description and location of phenomenal consciousness
Although it is the conventional wisdom that consciousness cannot be defined, philosophers have been describing phenomenal consciousness for centuries.
When we look around a room or have a dream, things are laid out in space and time and viewed as if from a point. However, when philosophers and scientists consider the location of the form and contents of this phenomenal consciousness, there are fierce disagreements. Another example is found in the work of Thomas Reid who thought the contents of consciousness are the world itself, which becomes conscious experience in some way.
Other philosophers, such as George Berkeley, have proposed that the contents of consciousness are an aspect of minds and do not involve matter at all.
Some philosophers, such as David Armstrong and Daniel Dennett, believe that qualia exist in terms of judgements or beliefs about things in the world, and are therefore meaningless when separated from behavior, while other philosophers insist that qualia cannot be understood in terms of belief. (Silby, 1998)
It is sometimes held that consciousness emerges from the complexity of brain processing.
Some theorists hold that phenomenal consciousness poses an explanatory gap. But others have proposed speculative scientific theories to explain the explanatory gap, such as Quantum mind, space-time theories of consciousness, and Electromagnetic theories of consciousness to explain the correspondence between brain activity and experience.
Parapsychologists sometimes use the unproven concepts of psychokinesis or telepathy to support the dualism belief that consciousness is not confined to the brain.
Philosophical criticisms of the concept of consciousness
From the eighteenth to twentieth centuries many philosophers concentrated on relations, processes and thought as the most important aspects of consciousness. These aspects would later become known as "access consciousness" and this focus on relations allowed philosophers such as Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault to claim that individual consciousness was dependent on such factors as social relations, political relations and ideology.
Locke's "forensic" notion of personal identity founded on an individual conscious subject would be criticized in the 19th century by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud following different angles.
Marx considered that social relations ontologically preceded individual consciousness, and criticized the conception of a conscious subject as an ideological conception on which liberal political thought was founded.
Nietzsche, for his part, once wrote that "they give you free will only to later blame yourself", thus reversing the classical liberal conception of free will in a critical account of the genealogy of consciousness as the effect of guilt and ressentiment, which he described in On the Genealogy of Morals. Hence, Nietzsche was the first one to make the claim that the modern notion of consciousness was indebted to the modern system of penality, which judged a man according to his "responsibility", that is by the consciousness through which acts can be attributed to an individual subject: "I did this! Consciousness is thus related by Nietzsche to the classic philosopheme of recognition which, according to him, defines knowledge.
According to Pierre Klossowski (1969), Nietzsche considered consciousness to be a hypostatization of the body, composed of multiple forces (the "Will to Power").
Michel Foucault's analysis of the creation of the individual subject through disciplines, in Discipline and Punish (1975), would extend Nietzsche's genealogy of consciousness and personal identity - i.e. In other words, Foucault maintained that, by judging not the acts (the crime), but the person behind those acts (the criminal), the modern penal system was not only following the philosophical definition of consciousness, once again demonstrating the imbrications between ideas and social institutions ("material ideology" as Althusser would call it);
Consciousness and language
Because humans express their conscious states using language, it is tempting to equate language abilities and consciousness. There are, however, speechless humans (infants, feral children, aphasics, severe forms of autism), to whom consciousness is attributed despite language lost or not yet acquired. Moreover, the study of brain states of non-linguistic primates, in particular the macaques, has been used extensively by scientists and philosophers in their quest for the neural correlates of the contents of consciousness.
Julian Jaynes argued to the contrary, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, that for consciousness to arise in a person, language needs to have reached a fairly high level of complexity. According to Jaynes human consciousness emerged as recently as 1300 BCE or thereabouts. Quine and Daniel Dennett, and neuroscientists, including Christof Koch, contest this hypothesis, as it suggests that prior to this "discovery" of consciousness, experience simply did not exist.
Cognitive neuroscience approaches
Modern investigations into and discoveries about consciousness are based on psychological statistical studies and case studies of consciousness states and the deficits caused by lesions, stroke, injury, or surgery that disrupt the normal functioning of human senses and cognition.
Several studies point to common mechanisms in different clinical conditions that lead to loss of consciousness. Some electroneurobiological interpretations of consciousness characterize this loss of consciousness as a loss of the ability to resolve time (similar to playing an old phonographic record at very slow or very rapid speed), along a continuum that starts with inattention, continues on sleep, and arrives to coma and death .
Loss of consciousness also occurs in other conditions, such as general (tonic-clonic) epileptic seizures, in general anaesthesia, maybe even in deep (slow-wave) sleep. At present, the best-supported hypotheses about such cases of loss of consciousness (or loss of time resolution) focus on the need for 1) a widespread cortical network, including particularly the frontal, parietal and temporal cortices, and 2) cooperation between the deep layers of the brain, especially the thalamus, and the upper layers, the cortex. Such hypotheses go under the common term "globalist theories" of consciousness, due to the claim for a widespread, global network necessary for consciousness to interact with non-mental reality in the first place.
Brain chemistry affects human consciousness.
There is a neural link between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, known as the corpus callosum.
The bilateral removal of the centromedian nucleus (part of the Intra-laminar nucleus of the Thalamus) appears to abolish consciousness, causing coma, PVS, severe mutism and other features that mimic brain death. This evidence suggests that a functioning thalamus is necessary, but not sufficient, for human consciousness.
Neurophysiological studies in awake, behaving monkeys performed by neuroscientists point to advanced cortical areas in prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes as carriers of neuronal correlates of consciousness. Christof Koch and Francis Crick argued that neuronal mechanisms of consciousness are intricately related to prefrontal cortex — the most advanced cortical area. However, neuroscience only focuses on the neural correlates of consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness is to explain how all these flows and electrochemical processes in the brain give rise to the inner experience of subjective awareness.
Physical approaches
Even at the dawn of Newtonian science, Leibniz and many others were suggesting physical theories of consciousness. Modern physical theories of consciousness can be divided into three types: theories to explain behaviour and access consciousness, theories to explain phenomenal consciousness and theories to explain the quantum mechanical (QM) Quantum mind. Theories that seek to explain behaviour are an everyday part of neuroscience, some of these theories of access consciousness, such as Edelman's theory, contentiously identify phenomenal consciousness with reflex events in the brain. Theories that seek to explain phenomenal consciousness directly, such as Space-time theories of consciousness and Electromagnetic theories of consciousness, have been available for almost a century, but have not yet been confirmed by experiment. Theories that attempt to explain the QM measurement problem include Pribram and Bohm's Holonomic brain theory, Hameroff and Penrose's Orch-OR theory, Spin-Mediated Consciousness Theory and the Many-minds interpretation. Some of these QM theories offer descriptions of phenomenal consciousness, as well as QM interpretations of access consciousness. None of the quantum mechanical theories has been confirmed by experiment, and there are philosophers who argue that QM has no bearing on consciousness.
There is also a concerted effort in the field of Artificial Intelligence to create digital computer programs that can simulate consciousness.
Free will and consciousness
Chris King in the article Chaos, Quantum-transactions and Consciousness (2003), starts from Einstein’s energy-momentum relation (retrocausality and supercausality), and states that all quantum objects are constantly faced with bifurcations which force the system to operate choices. Starting from these premises King suggests two separate levels of explanation of consciousness. King suggests that, in order to understand what consciousness really is, it is necessary to start from free will, because at this level it becomes necessary to definitely refuse any attempt to use mechanical approaches (http://www.sintropia.it/english/2006-eng-3.htm).
Spiritual approaches
Spiritual approaches to consciousness involve the idea of altered states of consciousness or religious experience. Changes in the state of consciousness or a religious experience can occur spontaneously or as a result of religious observance. It is also maintained by some religions and religious factions that the universe itself is consciousness.
In shamanic practices, changes in states of consciousness are induced by activities that create trance states, such as drumming, dancing, fasting, sensory deprivation, exposure to extremes of temperature, or the use of psychoactive drugs.
The change in state of consciousness in Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam is reported to be quite similar. for instance, James (1902) provides the following report:
I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did "lie down in the stream of life and let it flow over me." I had no consciousness of time or space or persons, but only of love and happiness and faith.
Gangaji, in her book, the Diamond in your Pocket (p68), puts it this way 'Consciousness is not an object. Pure consciousness is what these words appear in, what this book appears in, what all bodies appear in. In your recognition of yourself as pure consciousness, you awaken to yourself. Normally, when we speak of consciousness, we are referring to particular states of awareness - being aware of something or not being aware of something - rather than the awareness itself.'
Meditation is used in some forms of yoga such as Raja Yoga, Hatha Yoga, Transcendental meditation, the Buddhist Jhanas, the Buddhist Immaterial Jhanas (there are several versions of the jhanas in different types of Buddhism), in the practices of Christian monks and Islamic scholars such as Sufis. Meditation can have a calming influence on practitioners, as well as changing the state of consciousness. In most types of Buddhism, serenity meditation is followed by a philosophical "insight meditation" that focuses on the idea that the universe is consciousness only, one that is perhaps indistinguishable from Monism.
Functions of consciousness
We generally agree that our fellow human beings are conscious, and that much simpler life forms, such as bacteria, are not. Many of us attribute consciousness to higher-order animals such as dolphins and primates; This suggests the hypothesis that consciousness has co-evolved with life, which would require it to have some sort of added value, especially survival value. People have therefore looked for specific functions and benefits of consciousness. Bernard Baars (1997), for instance, states that "consciousness is a supremely functional adaptation" and suggests a variety of functions in which consciousness plays an important, if not essential, role: prioritization of alternatives, problem solving, decision making, brain processes recruiting, action control, error detection, planning, learning, adaptation, context creation, and access to information. Antonio Damasio (1999) regards consciousness as part of an organism's survival kit, allowing planned rather than instinctual responses. He also points out that awareness of self allows a concern for one's own survival, which increases the drive to survive, although how far consciousness is involved in behaviour is an actively debated issue. Many psychologists, such as radical behaviorists, and many philosophers, such as those that support Ryle's approach, would maintain that behavior can be explained by non-conscious processes akin to artificial intelligence, and might consider consciousness to be epiphenomenal or only weakly related to function.
Regarding the primary function of conscious processing, a recurring idea in recent theories is that phenomenal states somehow integrate neural activities and information-processing that would otherwise be independent (see review in Baars, 2002). However, it has remained unspecified which kinds of information are integrated in a conscious manner and which kinds can be integrated without consciousness. Obviously not all kinds of information are capable of being disseminated consciously (e.g., neural activity related to vegetative functions, reflexes, unconscious motor programs, low-level perceptual analyses, etc.) and many kinds can be disseminated and combined with other kinds without consciousness, as in intersensory interactions such as the ventriloquism effect. From this standpoint, consciousness functions above the level of the traditional module to “cross-talk” among high-level, specialized and often multi-modal, systems.
These abilities, especially social and cultural development needs extended ability for imaginations (manipulations on mental images)
Ervin Laszlo argues that self-awareness, the ability to make observations of oneself, evolved. Emile Durkheim formulated the concept of so called collective consciousness, which is essential for organization of human, social relations. The accelerating drive of human race to explorations, cognition, understanding and technological progress can be explained by some features of collective consciousness (collective self - concepts) and collective intelligence
Tests of consciousness
As there is no clear definition of consciousness and no empirical measure exists to test for its presence, it has been argued that due to the nature of the problem of consciousness, empirical tests are intrinsically impossible. However, several tests have been developed which attempt to provide an operational definition of consciousness and try to determine whether computers and other non-human animals can pass these tests as a way of demonstrating that they are conscious.
Turing Test
Alan Turing proposed what is now known as the Turing test to determine if a computer could be considered conscious. If the human is unable to determine which of the conversants is human, and which is a computer, the computer is said to have "passed" the Turing test for consciousness.
The Turing test has generated a great deal of research and philosophical debate. For example, Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter argue that anything capable of passing the Turing test is necessarily conscious, while David Chalmers, argies that a philosophical zombie could pass the test, yet fail to be conscious.
Philosopher John Searle developed a thought experiment, the Chinese room argument, which is intended to show problems with the Turing Test.
The application of the Turing test to human consciousness has even lead to an annual competition, the Loebner Prize with "Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal (pictured above) for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's."
Mirror test
See also the concept of the Mirror stage by Jacques Lacan
With the mirror test, devised by Gordon Gallup in the 1970s, one is interested in whether animals are able to recognize themselves in a mirror.
Delay test
One problem researchers face is distinguishing nonconscious reflexes and instinctual responses from conscious responses. Neuroscientists Francis Crick and Christof Koch have proposed that by placing a delay between stimulus and execution of action, one may determine the extent of involvement of consciousness in an action of a biological organism.
For example, when psychologists Larry Squire and Robert Clark combined a tone of a specific pitch with a puff of air to the eye, test subjects came to blink their eyes in anticipation of the puff of air when the appropriate tone was played.
Ability to delay the response to an action implies that the information must be stored in short-term memory, which is conjectured to be a closely associated prerequisite for consciousness.
Cognitive Neuroscience
Attention Binocular rivalry Blindsight Change blindness Cognitive science Iconic memory Multistable perception Neural correlate of consciousness Neural Darwinism Short term memory Society of Mind Split brain Unconscious mind Visual short term memorySpirituality
Higher ConsciousnessPhilosophy
Mental body Mind Mind-body problem Dennett's Multiple Drafts theory New Mysterianism Philosophy of mind Qualia Stream of consciousness Supervenience Theory of mind Philosophy of perception Personhood Theory Freedom of thoughtPhysical Hypotheses about Consciousness
Orch-OR theory Electromagnetic theories of consciousness Holonomic brain theory Quantum mind Space-time theories of consciousness Spin-Mediated Consciousness TheoryGroups
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness Center for Consciousness Studies Mind Science FoundationFurther reading
Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Consciousness studies Baars, B. In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind. The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, and Dissociation. (2005) What is Consciousness? (1996), 'Conscious Events as Orchestrated Space-Time Selections', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3 (1), pp. newsletters Anthropology of Consciousness Journal of Consciousness Studies Consciousness and Cognition Psyche Science & Consciousness Review ASSC e-print archive containing articles, book chapters, theses, conference presentations by members of the ASSC.Philosophy resources
Publications of the Tufts Center for Cognitive Studies, including Daniel Dennett David Chalmers' directory of online papers on consciousness Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Consciousness (General) Animal Consciousness Higher Order Theories of Consciousness Consciousness and Intentionality Representational Theory of Consciousness Unity of Consciousness Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Consciousness Higher-Order Theories of ConsciousnessMiscellaneous sites
History of Consciousness Graduate Program, ("consciousness as forms of human expression and social action manifested in historical, cultural, and political contexts") at the University of California, Santa Cruz, headed by Dr. Angela Davis Online lecture videos, from an undergraduate course taught by Christof Koch at Caltech on the neurobiological basis of consciousness in 2004. Ken Wilber's Integral Theory of Consciousness from Journal of Consciousness Studies Brain Atlas, Brain Maps, Neuroinformatics Physics and Consciousness Quantum Relations to The Mind Online course in consciousness at University of Virginia A survey course at University of Florida Edinburgh thesis (.ps) on consciousness including up-to-date reviews Conscious Entities Discussions of leading theories and issues. Articles Consciousness & psi phenomena Consciousness-Related Engineering Anomaly Princeton Evolution of Consciousness Literature Review, Notes and Excerpts (.pdf) by Doug Phillips Computational Models of the Attentional Blink Experience, awareness and consciousness: suggestions for definitions as offered by an evolutionary approach The role of consciousness in the evolution of human society| Philosophy Portal |
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