Consciousness

Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness or of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined variously in terms of sentience, awareness, qualia, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood or soul, the fact that there is something 'that it is like' to 'have' or 'be' it, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: '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.' You become aware that your actions have an effect on other people. Western philosophers since the time of Descartes and Locke has struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and how it fits into a larger picture of the world. These issues remain central to both Continental and Analytic philosophy, in Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Mind respectively. Some basic questions include: whether consciousness is the same kind of thing as matter; whether it may ever be possible for computing machines like computers or robots to be conscious; how consciousness relates to language; how consciousness as Being relates to the world of experience; the role of the Self in experience; whether individual thought is possible at all; and whether the concept is fundamentally coherent; Recently, consciousness has also become a significant topic of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, involving fields such as psychology, linguistics, anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroscience. The primary focus is on understanding what it means biologically and psychologically for information to be present in consciousness — that is, on determining the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness. The majority of experimental studies assess consciousness in humans by asking subjects for a verbal report of their experiences (e.g., 'tell me if you notice anything when I do this'). Issues of interest include phenomena such as subliminal perception, blindsight, denial of impairment, and altered states of consciousness produced by alcohol and other drugs, or spiritual or meditative techniques. In medicine, consciousness is assessed by observing a patient's arousal and responsiveness, and can be seen as a continuum of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension, through disorientation, delirium, loss of meaningful communication, and finally loss of movement in response to painful stimuli. Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill, comatose, or anesthetized people, and how to treat conditions in which consciousness is impaired or disrupted. The degree of consciousness is measured by standardized behavior observation scales such as the Glasgow Coma Scale. The origin of the modern concept of consciousness is often attributed to John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690. Locke defined consciousness as 'the perception of what passes in a man's own mind'. His essay influenced the 18th-century view of consciousness, and his definition appeared in Samuel Johnson's celebrated Dictionary (1755).'Consciousness' (French: conscience) is also defined in the 1753 volume of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, as 'the opinion or internal feeling that we ourselves have from what we do'. The earliest English language uses of 'conscious' and 'consciousness' date back, however, to the 1500s. The English word 'conscious' originally derived from the Latin conscius (con- 'together' and scio 'to know'), but the Latin word did not have the same meaning as our word—it meant 'knowing with', in other words 'having joint or common knowledge with another'. There were, however, many occurrences in Latin writings of the phrase conscius sibi, which translates literally as 'knowing with oneself', or in other words 'sharing knowledge with oneself about something'. This phrase had the figurative meaning of 'knowing that one knows', as the modern English word 'conscious' does. In its earliest uses in the 1500s, the English word 'conscious' retained the meaning of the Latin conscius. For example, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan wrote: 'Where two, or more men, know of one and the same fact, they are said to be Conscious of it one to another.' The Latin phrase conscius sibi, whose meaning was more closely related to the current concept of consciousness, was rendered in English as 'conscious to oneself' or 'conscious unto oneself'. For example, Archbishop Ussher wrote in 1613 of 'being so conscious unto myself of my great weakness'. Locke's definition from 1690 illustrates that a gradual shift in meaning had taken place. A related word was conscientia, which primarily means moral conscience. In the literal sense, 'conscientia' means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridical texts by writers such as Cicero. Here, conscientia is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else. René Descartes (1596–1650) is generally taken to be the first philosopher to use conscientia in a way that does not fit this traditional meaning. Descartes used conscientia the way modern speakers would use 'conscience'. In Search after Truth (Regulæ ad directionem ingenii ut et inquisitio veritatis per lumen naturale, Amsterdam 1701) he says 'conscience or internal testimony' (conscientiâ, vel interno testimonio). The dictionary meanings of the word consciousness extend through several centuries and several associated related meanings. These have ranged from formal definitions to definitions attempting to capture the less easily captured and more debated meanings and usage of the word.