What is consciousness?

Question

Thanx for your answers :)

Answer 1

Hi ANGEL.

Consciousness. I spent 2 hours yesterday working on this question, & then I lost the entire question right at the end because — I LOST CONSCIOUSNESS — lol. I am 100% serious; that's been happening to me lately. I'll give it another try; I just wish I had a clue as to what I wrote yesterday!?

What is consciousness?

In its simplest form, it is the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings.
It is also a person's ability to perceive something with the senses, whether hearing, sight, smell, touch or taste.

These 2 brief definitions are what medical doctors use in determining if a patient is, indeed, conscious, and at what level

Consciousness is also the mind's awareness of itself and the world around it.
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Are you conscious? How do you know? What is consciousness — our thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams; the hidden voice of our private selves; our inner identity? What might consciousness consist of? All of us think we can understand consciousness, but none of us can explain it--therein lies its mystery.

Think about yourself, and at the same time, observe yourself thinking. This is self-awareness, the interior mental experience we call consciousness. But why should you be self-aware at all? Is there something special about consciousness — -something unique to humans beings, something not found in computers, something of the mind not in the brain?

Many scientists, taking the so-called reductionist approach, believe that the inner voice we all experience is simply the illusion of selfhood, manufactured by our brain functions. These people subscribe to materialism, the philosophy that only the physical is real and that nothing nonphysical can exist.

But there are a few scientists who wonder whether consciousness may be a fundamental part or property of existence, like matter, energy, space-time — and whether some obscure form of stuff may constitute our private selves.

Then there are many people who believe in the existence of an independent, metaphysical spirit or soul, which is somehow an attribute of all human beings and, in concert with the human brain, forms the human mind. These people — traditional theologians are an example — espouse dualism, the philosophy that two radically different forms of stuff exist in the world: 1) mind, the essence of which is thought; and 2) matter, the essence of which is extension in space and time.

Dualism traces its roots to the ancients but was famously expounded by the seventeenth-century mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes, who also said, "I think, therefore I am," thus asserting the primacy of consciousness.

Materialism and dualism have been the two principal combatants in the philosophical tug of war commonly known as the mind-body problem. But there are related (and somewhat less respectable) belief systems--such as idealism, which asserts that mind is the reality and matter the illusion, and solipsism, which holds that the self is the one and only true reality (modern variances of materialism, such as Eliminative Reductionism and Functionalism).
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To complicate matters even further, there is the matter of our sub-conscious and our un-consciousness, 2 popular topics in the field of Psychology.

The subconsciousness influences our feelings and actions without our even being aware of it. It can affect how we think, whether or not we have any prejudices, for example, without truly understanding why. Maybe when we were small children we were taught certain beliefs, which we have forgotten we were taught. But they are still in our subconscious mind, influencing us on a daily basis.

The unconscious is the part of the mind that is totally inaccessible to the conscious mind, yet which still affects our behavior and emotions. Unlike the subconscious, which lies just below the surface of our conscious mind, the unscious mind is deeply buried, leaving us completely oblivious to its effects on our behavior & emotions.
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Thank you, Angel, for your question; and if you don't mind, I will now retire to a state of complete unconsciousness. ;-)

Answer 2

That's a good question. I used to think consciousness was some emerging factor from the complexity of our brains. If that is so, a computer or even a computer program could have conscious too, and something like an ant-heap (in which the ants are very much interacting like the neurons in our brains), might have some very low level of conscious too.

Some thinkers state that there has to be some stuff in the brain that makes us conscious (like Penrose, the author of "The emperors new mind" for instance, who uses a lot of mathematics to confuse us). If that were so one would want to study this "mind-stuff", but so far, to my knowledge, nothing of the kind has been found.

The Hegel citation below is really very confusing to me. I think he says something like: "We (humans) can think about ourselves and are therefore conscious, animals can't". Fine, but this doesn't in the least say what conscious actually is. Hegel really was a poor writer not being able to state his notions in a more clear and simple way (but in that time that was quite common among philosophers I think, if nobody can understand what you are saying, nobody can disagree with it either).

I am currently reading "Consciousness explained" by Daniel Dennet (it's an oldie from 1991 but I don't think much progress has been made in the last 16 years on this subject). His theory is something like that consciousness comes from us talking to ourselves (albeit not aloud), it's a virtual and serial process (that can only do one thing at a time) in our (parallel) brains. For instance: our brain is doing a lot at the same time, but somehow a certain process is picked out at any moment and becomes the active "pondered upon" process. This pondering can actually alter the process (although how this is done I am not sure). I am stating Dennet's views in my own (somewhat clumsy) words.

It's really a very difficult question....

Answer 3

There is consciousness. And there is self-consciousness. The first is merely being awake. The second is the ability, that only a few animals have, to recognize themselves in a mirror.

Answer 4

it is a characteristic of one's mind mainly regarded to compromise, responsibility, awareness and wisdom.
it works combining subjective self experience factors plus global factors (such as information etc) from the environment. When these two things work together they allow you to have a conscience of responsibility for your actions, for your desitions, to know what would be right and what would be wrong, and act with maturity in life and how to act with other ppl. The more you live the more conscious you are about you and the world you live in.

"Only when your consciousness is totally focused on the moment you are in can you receive whatever gift, lesson, or delight that moment has to offer. " /Barbara Deangelis

Answer 5

Consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the earth, we do not know the inside but only the crust. Under the conscious intellect is the conscious or unconscious will, a striving persistent vital force, a spontaneous activity, a will of impression desire.

Thanks for the question and take care.

Answer 6

This question is unanswerable, although you can still try...

You need to experience pure consciousness to really know what it is. It is an understanding that still eludes me.

Answer 7

Hi Angel!

Answer 8

Hopefully is great awareness for Man kind and me hahehe the world we shape and live in for all Universal connected to my dreams and yours...............

Highest self awareness with God in the Heavens leading us to the Divine :)))

Answer 9

What you are demanding is an answer of logic as that is our mode of communication at this moment and in it you ask for a description for our word 'consciousness'. Here is one:

'Outline of Hegel's Phenomenology
INTRODUCTION
1. Our ordinary Knowing has before itself only the object which it knows, but does not at first make an object of itself, i.e., of the Knowing. But the whole which is extant in the act of knowing is not the object alone, but also the Ego that knows, and the relation of the Ego and the object to each other, i.e. Consciousness. '

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ol/ol_phen.htm

Knowing self as 'I', ego:
'The readiest instance of Being-for-self is found in the ‘I’. We know ourselves as existents, distinguished in the first place from other existents, and with certain relations thereto. But we also come to know this expansion of existence (in these relations) reduced, as it were, to a point in the simple form of being-for-self. When we say ‘I’, we express this reference-to-self which is infinite, and at the same time negative. Man, it may be said, is distinguished from the animal world, and in that way from our nature altogether, by knowing himself as ‘I’: which amounts to saying that natural things never attain free Being-for-self, but as limited to Being-there-and-then, are always and only Being for another.

Again, Being-for-self may be described as ideality, just as Being-there-and-then was described as reality. It is said that besides reality there is also an ideality. Thus the two categories are made equal and parallel. Properly speaking, ideality is not somewhat outside of and beside reality: the notion of ideality just lies in its being the truth of reality. That is to say, when reality is explicitly put as what it implicitly is, it is at once seen to be ideality. Hence ideality has not received its proper estimation, when you allow that reality is not all in all, but that an ideality must be recognised outside of it. Such an ideality, external to or it may even be beyond reality, would be no better than an empty name. Ideality only has a meaning when it is the ideality of something: but this something is not a mere indefinite this or that, but existence characterised as reality, which, if retained in isolation, possesses no truth. The distinction between Nature and Mind is not improperly conceived, when the former is traced back to reality, and the latter so fixed and complete as to subsist even without Mind: in Mind it first, as it were, attains its goal and its truth. And similarly, Mind on its part is not merely a world beyond Nature and nothing more: it is really, and with full proof, seen to be mind, only when it involves Nature as absorbed in itself. Apropos of this, we should note the double meaning of the German word aufheben (to put by or set aside). We mean by it (1) to clear away, or annul: thus, we say, a law or regulation is set aside; (2) to keep, or preserve: in which sense we use it when we say: something is well put by. This double usage of language, which gives to the same word a positive and negative meaning, is not an accident, and gives no ground for reproaching language as a cause of confusion. We should rather recognise in it the speculative spirit of our language rising above the me ‘either-or’ of understanding.



http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slbeing.htm#SL96n

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/li_terms.htm

Answer 10

to be aware of what actually you are doing and what will be its results is CONSCIOUSNESS