Concept
Consciousness
Overview
Consciousness is being aware of something internal to one's self, or of states or objects in one's external environment. It has been the topic of extensive explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians for millennia. There is no consensus on what exactly needs to be studied, or whether consciousness can be considered a scientific concept. In some explanations it is synonymous with mind, while in others it is considered an aspect of it.
In the past, consciousness meant one's "inner life": the world of introspection, private thought, imagination, and volition. Today, it often includes various forms of cognition, experience, feeling, or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, metacognition, or self-awareness, either continuously changing or not. There is also a medical definition that helps, for example, to discern "coma" from other states. The disparate range of research, notions, and speculations raises some curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.
Examples of the range of descriptions, definitions and explanations are: ordered distinction between self and environment, simple wakefulness, one's sense of selfhood or soul explored by "looking within", being a metaphorical "stream" of contents, or being a mental state, mental event, or mental process of the brain.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Consciousness is discussed.
That function is _knowing_. 'Consciousness' is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known. Whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles must still provide in some way for that function's being carried on.
William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism
a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
As the possible actions which a state of consciousness indicates are at every instant beginning to be carried out in the nervous centres, the brain underlines at every instant the motor indications of the state of consciousness; but the interdependency of consciousness and brain is limited to this; the destiny of consciousness is not bound up on that account with the destiny of cerebral matter. Finally…
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
names the idea; states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.
William James, Psychology
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; author linked in the graph; opens on it
In these experiments a further remarkable quality of consciousness appears, which is closely connected to the rhythmical disposition of consciousness. The three degrees of emphasis, which the diagram of 4/4 time shows, form a maximum of differentiation which cannot be surpassed.
Wilhelm Max Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology Translated from the Second German Edition
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; author linked in the graph; opens on it
_Consciousness._—Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic, and consequently also the most unfinished and least powerful of these developments. Innumerable mistakes originate out of consciousness, which, "in spite of fate," as Homer says, cause an animal or a man to break down earlier than might be necessary.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed Consciousness
- Georg Simmel
- Bernard Lonergan
- Pierre Bourdieu
- Ned Block
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Karl Leonhard Reinhold
- Henri Bergson
- Heraclitus
- Hans-Georg Gadamer
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Samuel Clarke
- Johann Friedrich Herbart
- Eric Voegelin
- Thomas Nagel
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Marshall McLuhan
- T. H. Green
- Alcmaeon of Croton
- Tim Crane
- David Bentley Hart
- Sam Harris
- Jaegwon Kim
- René Descartes
Related ideas
- Gilbert Ryle
- What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
- Encyclopédie
- Christof Koch
- Cognition
- Subjective character of experience
- Ned Block
- Artificial intelligence
- Alan Turing
- Geology
- Philosophical realism
- The Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
- Immanuel Kant
- John Searle
- Metacognition
- Phylogenetic tree
- Idealism
- John Stuart Mill
- John Locke
- Feeling
- John Eccles (neurophysiologist)
- Karl Popper
- Sentience
Opposing perspectives
- Property dualism
- Sense data
- Feeling
- Direct and indirect realism
- Proposition
- French people
- Animal consciousness
- Neuroscience of free will
- Importance
Place in the tradition
Part of Outline of philosophy.
Narrower topics:
- A Dictionary of the English Language
- Adaptation
- Alan Turing
- Anterior cingulate cortex
- Antonio Damasio
- Attention
- Bat
- Binding problem
- Cerebral cortex
- Charles Babbage
- Christian List
- Christof Koch
- Cognitive architecture
- Computer scientist
- Daniel Kolak
- David Bohm
- Denis Diderot
- Denotation
- Edward B. Titchener
- Egocentric presentism
- English language
- Evolutionary biology
- Experimental philosophy
- Explanatory gap