Consciousness is subjective experience or awareness or wakefulness or the executive control system of the mind.
Consciousness is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental phenomena.
Although humans realize what everyday experiences are, consciousness refuses to be defined, philosophers note.
Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.
Consciousness in medicine is simply regarded as wakefulness and is assessed by observing a patient's alertness and responsiveness.
Consciousness in psychology and philosophy has four characteristics: subjectivity, change, continuity and selectivity.
Within the philosophy of mind there is no consensus on whether intentionality is a requirement for consciousness.
Consciousness is the subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill or comatose people; whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how it can be measured; at what point in fetal development consciousness begins; and whether computers can achieve a conscious state.
There are many philosophical stances on consciousness, including: behaviorism, dualism, idealism, functionalism, reflexive monism, phenomenalism, phenomenology and intentionality, physicalism, emergentism, mysticism, personal identity etc.
Phenomenal consciousness is P-consciousness.
Phenomenal consciousness and P-consciousness are the same.
P-consciousness is another name for phenomenal consciousnes.
Phenomenal consciousness is simply experience; it is moving, colored forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and feelings with our bodies and responses at the center.
The hard problem of consciousness, formulated by David Chalmers in 1996, deals with the issue of "how to explain a state of phenomenal consciousness in terms of its neurological basis".
Access consciousness is A-consciousness.
Access consciousness is the same as A-consciousness.
A-consciousness is another name for access consciousness.
Access consciousness is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior.
When we perceive, information about what we perceive is often access conscious; when we introspect, information about our thoughts is access conscious; when we remember, information about the past is often access conscious, and so on.
When we perceive, information about what we perceive is often access conscious.
when we introspect, information about our thoughts is access conscious.
when we remember, information about the past is often access conscious.
David 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.
There have been numerous approaches to the processes that act on conscious experience from instant to instant.
Daniel Dennett suggests that what people think of as phenomenal consciousness, such as qualia, are judgments and consequent behavior.
Events that occur in the mind or brain that are not within phenomenal or access consciousness are known as subconscious events.
For centuries, philosophers have investigated phenomenal consciousness.
Philosophers have investigated phenomenal consciousness for centuries.
René Descartes, who arrived at the famous dictum 'cogito ergo sum', wrote Meditations on First Philosophy in the seventeenth century.
Conscious experience, according to René Descartes,  included such ideas as imaginings and perceptions laid out in space and time that are viewed from a point, and appearing as a result of some quality such as color, smell, and so on.
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.
When philosophers and scientists consider the location of the form and contents of this phenomenal consciousness, there are fierce disagreements.
Philosophers, such as George Berkeley, have proposed that the contents of consciousness are an aspect of minds and do not necessarily involve matter at all.
It is sometimes held that consciousness emerges from the complexity of brain processing.
Some theorists hold that phenomenal consciousness poses an explanatory gap.
Parapsychologists sometimes appeal to the unproven concepts of psychokinesis or telepathy to support the belief that consciousness is not confined to the brain.
From the eighteenth to twentieth centuries many philosophers concentrated on relations, processes and thought as the most important aspects of consciousness.
The failure to produce a workable definition of consciousness also raises formidable philosophical questions.
It has been argued that when Antonio Damasio defines consciousness as "an organism's awareness of its own self and its surroundings", the definition has not escaped circularity, because awareness in that context can be considered a synonym for consciousness.
The notion of consciousness as passive awareness can be contrasted with the notion of the active construction of mental representations.
The brain is massively involved with creating worlds of experience for us with meager input from the senses.
In a way, what sense organs do is assist our brains to construct a useful model and it is this model that we move around in.
Because humans express their conscious states using language, it is tempting to equate language abilities and consciousness.
There are speechless humans, to whom consciousness is attributed despite language lost or not yet acquired.
Infants are speechless humans.
Feral children are speechless humans.
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.
To understand consciousness fully, the generation of culture must be explained.
The idea that language and consciousness are not innate to humans, a characteristic of human nature, but rather the result of cultural evolution, beginning with something similar to the culture of chimpanzees, goes back before Darwin to Rousseau's Second Discourse.
According to Vedanta, the development of self-awareness is considered to be primarily a phenomenon of consciousness and not a product of physical processes.
For a long time in scientific psychology, consciousness as a research topic or explanatory concept had been banned.
Research on topics associated with consciousness were conducted under the banner of attention.
Modern investigations into 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.
Discoveries suggest that the mind is a complex structure derived from various localized functions that are bound together with a unitary awareness.
Several studies point to common mechanisms in different clinical conditions that lead to loss of consciousness.
Persistent vegetative state is a condition in which an individual loses the higher cerebral powers of the brain, but maintains sleep-wake cycles with full or partial autonomic functions.
Loss of consciousness also occurs in conditions, such as general epileptic seizures, in general anaesthesia, maybe even in deep sleep.
Brain chemistry affects human consciousness.
Sleeping drugs can bring the brain from the awake condition to the sleep condition.
Sleeping drugs can bring the brain from the conscious condition to the unconscious condition.
Wake-up drugs such as flumazenil reverse the process of sleeping drugs.
Midazolam is a sleeping drug.
Dormicum is a sleeping drug.
Flumazenil is a wake-up drug.
Many drugs such as alcohol, nicotine, Tetrahydrocannabinol, heroin, cocaine, LSD, and MDMA have a consciousness-changing effect.
Tetrahydrocannabinol is THC.
THC is another name for Tetrahydrocannabinol.
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 appears to abolish consciousness, causing coma, PVS, severe mutism and other features that mimic brain death.
The centromedian nucleus is one of the principal sites of action of general anaesthetics and anti-psychotic drugs.
A functioning thalamus is necessary, but not sufficient, for human consciousness.
Neurophysiological studies in awake, behaving monkeys point to advanced cortical areas in prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes as carriers of neuronal correlates of consciousness.
A new approach has attempted to combine the methodologies of cognitive psychology and traditional philosophy to understand consciousness.
Consciousness can be viewed from the standpoints of evolutionary psychology or evolutionary biology approach as an adaptation because it is a trait that increases fitness.
Consciousness also adheres to John Alcock's theory of animal behavioral adaptations because it possesses both proximate and ultimate causes.
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 Quantum mind.
Theories that seek to explain behaviour are an everyday part of psychology and 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 Quantum mind measurement problem include Pribram and Bohm's Holonomic brain theory, Hameroff and Penrose's Orch-OR theory and the Many-minds interpretation.
None of the quantum mechanical theories has been confirmed by experiment, and there are philosophers who argue that QM has no bearing on consciousness.
QM is quantum mind.
QM is the same as quantum mind.
QM is short for quantum mind.
There is a concerted effort in the field of Artificial Intelligence to create digital computer programs that can simulate 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; academic research is investigating the extent to which animals are conscious.
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.
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.
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 and collective intelligence.
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.
Several tests have been developed which attempt to provide an operational definition of consciousness and try to determine whether computers and non-human animals can demonstrate through their behavior, by passing these tests, that they are conscious.
Though often thought of as a test for consciousness, the Turing test is actually a test to determine whether or not a computer satisfied his operational definition of "intelligent".
The Turing Test was named after computer scientist Alan Turing, who first proposed it.
The Turing test has generated a great deal of research and philosophical debate.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
The application of the Turing test to human consciousness has even led to an annual competition, the Loebner Prize with a Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's.
One problem researchers face is distinguishing nonconscious reflexes and instinctual responses from conscious responses.
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.