consciousness

Examples of consciousness in the following topics:

• Describing Consciousness

  • Consciousness is an individual's state of awareness of their environment, thoughts, feelings, or sensations; in order to experience consciousness, one must be both awake and aware.
  • Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness include the following: whether consciousness can ever be explained mechanistically; whether non-human consciousness exists, and if so, how it can be recognized; how consciousness relates to language; whether consciousness can be understood in a way that does not require a dualistic distinction between mental and physical states or properties; and whether it may ever be possible for computers or robots to be conscious.
  • He pointed out that there is no reason to assume that consciousness is tied to any particular body or mind, or that consciousness cannot be transferred from one body or mind to another.
  • Today, the primary focus of consciousness research is on understanding what consciousness means both biologically and psychologically.
  • It questions what it means for information to be present in consciousness, and seeks to determine the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness.

• A History of Theories of Consciousness

  • Consciousness can be defined as human awareness to both internal and external stimuli.
  • In fact, Locke held that consciousness could be transferred from one soul to another.
  • René Descartes also addressed the idea of consciousness in the 17th century.
  • They posit that consciousness changes over time, in quality and in degree: an infant's consciousness is qualitatively different than a toddler's, a teenager's, or an adult's.
  • Abnormal development also affects consciousness, as do mental illnesses.

• Neural Underpinnings of Consciousness

  • Consciousness is the awareness of the self, the environment, and the relationship between these two distinct worlds.
  • In this context, the neuronal correlates of consciousness may be viewed as its causes, and consciousness may be thought of as a state-dependent property of some complex, adaptive, and highly interconnected biological system.
  • Neuronal consciousness is often described as involving two distinct dimensions: arousal and content.
  • Sleep is just one of the many types of consciousness we can experience and comprises several states of consciousness itself.
  • One popular theory implicates different patterns of brain waves in producing different states of consciousness.

• Unconscious Perception

  • We encounter more stimuli than we can attend to; unconscious perception helps the brain process all stimuli, not just those we take in consciously.
  • Individuals take in more stimuli from their environment than they can consciously attend to at any given moment.
  • The brain is constantly processing all the stimuli it is exposed to, not just those that it consciously attends to.

• Unconscious Perception and Influences on Behavior

  • Our brains take in more information than we are consciously aware of, which influence our perceptions and behaviors.
  • It takes in much more information than we are consciously aware of.
  • Despite not being consciously aware of it, much of this information still influences how we think and act.
  • Many believe that that hypnosis is a form of unconsciousness resembling sleep, and that because the information is internalized on an unconscious level during a trance, the person may not be consciously aware of it .

• Introduction to the Process and Types of Memory

  • We must locate it and return it to our consciousness.
  • Sensory memory is not involved in higher cognitive functions like short- and long-term memory; it is not consciously controlled.
  • Explicit or declarative memory requires conscious recall; it consists of information that is consciously stored or retrieved.
  • These memories are not based on consciously storing and retrieving information, but on implicit learning.
  • An example of implicit learning is learning to ride a bike: you do not need to consciously remember how to ride a bike, you simply do.

• Hypnosis

  • Hypnobirthing is a new way of giving birth in which expecting mothers enter a state of altered consciousness in order to avoid the use of pain medication during labor.
  • Role theory is when a person is not actually in an alternate state of consciousness, but rather is acting out the role of a hypnotized person.
  • Dissociation theory states that hypnosis causes a person to actively or voluntarily split their consciousness.

• Studying the Brain

  • There is an ongoing debate today over whether the mind and body are separate materials, or whether consciousness can arise from purely physiological processes.
  • This is known in psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, and artificial intelligence as the hard problem of consciousness.

• Meditation

  • Meditation is the practice of training the mind in order to induce relaxation or an altered mode of consciousness.
  • Meditation is the practice of training the mind to think in a particular way or to induce some mode of consciousness.

• Early Frameworks: Structuralism and Functionalism

  • This theory focused on three things: (1) the individual elements of consciousness, (2) how these elements are organized into more complex experiences, and (3) how these mental phenomena correlate with physical events.
  • He defined consciousness as the sum total of mental experience at any given moment, and the mind as the accumulated experience of a lifetime.
  • Similar to Wundt, the main tool that Titchener used to try and determine the different components of consciousness was introspection.