What Is Consciousness?

Answer 1

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. It is a subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science.

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Representation of consciousness from the 17th century.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. For instance, to what extent are non-human animals conscious? At what point in fetal development does consciousness begin? Can machines achieve conscious states? Are todays autonome and intelligent machines already conscious? These issues are of great interest to those concerned with the ethical treatment of other beings, be they animals, fetuses, or, in the future, machines.

In common parlance, consciousness denotes being awake and responsive to one's environment; this contrasts with being asleep or being in a coma. 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-.

Answer 2

It's one aspect of the process going on within the brain. Much of the processing of the brain is sub-conscious. The brain is a marvelous organ for information processing. It is hierarchical, temporal, auto-associative memory. It creates invariant representations of the temporal patterns are input into it, and uses those invariant representations model the world and to make predictions about the future. Human brains have become complex enough that our brains make models of not just our bodies and our environments, but also of our own mental processes. Our consciousness is our internal model of our own internal states.

A really excellent book to get more information is "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins.

Answer 3

Consciousness is a trick of the mind. Or maybe it's the soul.

Answer 4

Consciousness is awareness. It is knowing anything. It is thinking.

Answer 5

It is said to be like a little voice in your mind or heart telling you what to do and what not to do. Sometimes it could be a bad voice and sometimes it could be good but you would have to decipher between the two.

Answer 6

awareness of one's surroundings. Not to be confused with "sentience" which is when a organism to totally aware and understanding of their origins and true place in the universe.

Answer 7

Your mind must be controlled and working with awareness.
It mean you must think only what you are doing and must not think other things. Always watch you yourself.

Answer 8

Being aware of and responding to your surroundings.

Answer 9

being awake.....
but when you are unconcious in the bible it refers to you going to sleep in death..and in the resurrection you will be awakened and given a new body..

Answer 10

Being awake and alert