Consciousness


Consciousness is being aware of something internal to one's self or being conscious 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 even if 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 any kind 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.

Etymology

The words "conscious" and "consciousness" in the English language date to the 17th century, and the first recorded use of "conscious" as a simple adjective was applied figuratively to inanimate objects. It derived from the Latin conscius which meant "knowing with" or "having joint or common knowledge with another", especially as in sharing a secret. 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". There were also 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 has the figurative sense of "knowing that one knows", which is something like the modern English word "conscious", but it was rendered into 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".
The Latin conscientia, literally "knowledge-with", first appears in Roman juridical texts by writers such as Cicero. It means a kind of shared knowledge with moral value, specifically what a witness knows of someone else's deeds. Although René Descartes, writing in Latin, is generally taken to be the first philosopher to use conscientia in a way less like the traditional meaning and more like the way modern English speakers would use "conscience", his meaning is nowhere defined. In Search after Truth he wrote the word with a gloss: conscientiâ, vel interno testimonio. It might mean the knowledge of the value of one's own thoughts. One way that this shift during the seventeenth century from "conscience" to "consciousness" took place was through the poetry of John Milton, as the scholar Timothy M. Harrison has shown.
File:JohnLocke.png|thumb|upright|John Locke, a 17th-century British Age of Enlightenment philosopher
The origin of the modern concept of consciousness is often attributed to John Locke who defined the word in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690, as "the perception of what passes in a man's own mind". The essay strongly influenced 18th-century British philosophy, and Locke's definition appeared in Samuel Johnson's celebrated Dictionary.
The French term conscience is defined roughly like English "consciousness" 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".

Problem of definition

Scholars are divided as to whether Aristotle had a concept of consciousness. He does not use any single word or terminology that is clearly similar to the phenomenon or concept defined by John Locke. Victor Caston contends that Aristotle did have a concept more clearly similar to perception.
Modern dictionary definitions of the word consciousness evolved over several centuries and reflect a range of seemingly related meanings, with some differences that have been controversial, such as the distinction between inward awareness and perception of the physical world, or the distinction between conscious and unconscious, or the notion of a mental entity or mental activity that is not physical.
The common-usage definitions of consciousness in Webster's Third New International Dictionary are as follows:
  1. * awareness or perception of an inward psychological or spiritual fact; intuitively perceived knowledge of something in one's inner self
  2. * inward awareness of an external object, state, or fact
  3. * concerned awareness; INTEREST, CONCERN—often used with an attributive noun
  4. the state or activity that is characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, or thought; mind in the broadest possible sense; something in nature that is distinguished from the physical
  5. the totality in psychology of sensations, perceptions, ideas, attitudes, and feelings of which an individual or a group is aware at any given time or within a particular time span—
  6. waking life wherein all one's mental powers have returned...
  7. the part of mental life or psychic content in psychoanalysis that is immediately available to the ego—
The Cambridge English Dictionary defines consciousness as "the state of being awake, thinking, and knowing what is happening around you", as well as "the state of understanding and realizing something".
The Oxford Living Dictionary defines consciousness as "he state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings", " person's awareness or perception of something", and "he fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world".
Philosophers have attempted to clarify technical distinctions by using a jargon of their own. The corresponding entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy reads:
;Consciousness:Philosophers have used the term consciousness for four main topics: knowledge in general, intentionality, introspection and phenomenal experience... Something within one's mind is 'introspectively conscious' just in case one introspects it. Introspection is often thought to deliver one's primary knowledge of one's mental life. An experience or other mental entity is 'phenomenally conscious' just in case there is 'something it is like' for one to have it. The clearest examples are: perceptual experience, such as tastings and seeings; bodily-sensational experiences, such as those of pains, tickles and itches; imaginative experiences, such as those of one's own actions or perceptions; and streams of thought, as in the experience of thinking 'in words' or 'in images'. Introspection and phenomenality seem independent, or dissociable, although this is controversial.

Traditional metaphors for mind

During the early 19th century, the emerging field of geology inspired a popular metaphor that the mind likewise had hidden layers "which recorded the past of the individual". By 1875, most psychologists believed that "consciousness was but a small part of mental life", and this idea underlies the goal of Freudian therapy, to expose the of the mind.
Other metaphors from various sciences inspired other analyses of the mind, for example: Johann Friedrich Herbart described ideas as being attracted and repulsed like magnets; John Stuart Mill developed the idea of "mental chemistry" and "mental compounds", and Edward B. Titchener sought the "structure" of the mind by analyzing its "elements". The abstract idea of states of consciousness mirrored the concept of states of matter.
In 1892, William James noted that the "ambiguous word 'content' has been recently invented instead of 'object'" and that the metaphor of mind as a seemed to minimize the dualistic problem of how "states of consciousness can " things, or objects; by 1899 psychologists were busily studying the "contents of conscious experience by introspection and experiment". Another popular metaphor was James's doctrine of the stream of consciousness, with continuity, fringes, and transitions.
James discussed the difficulties of describing and studying psychological phenomena, recognizing that commonly used terminology was a necessary and acceptable starting point towards more precise, scientifically justified language. Prime examples were phrases like inner experience and personal consciousness:

From introspection to awareness and experience

Prior to the 20th century, philosophers treated the phenomenon of consciousness as the "inner world one's own mind", and introspection was the mind "attending to" itself, an activity seemingly distinct from that of perceiving the "outer world" and its physical phenomena. In 1892 William James noted the distinction along with doubts about the inward character of the mind:
By the 1960s, for many philosophers and psychologists who talked about consciousness, the word no longer meant the 'inner world' but an indefinite, large category called awareness, as in the following example:
Many philosophers and scientists have been unhappy about the difficulty of producing a definition that does not involve circularity or fuzziness. In The Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology, Stuart Sutherland emphasized external awareness, and expressed a skeptical attitude more than a definition:
Using 'awareness', however, as a definition or synonym of consciousness is not a simple matter:
In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel used 'consciousness', 'conscious experience', 'subjective experience' and the 'subjective character of experience' as synonyms for something that "occurs at many levels of animal life ... it is difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it." Nagel's terminology also included what has been described as "the standard 'what it's like' locution" in reference to the impenetrable subjectivity of any organism's experience which Nagel referred to as "inner life" without implying any kind of introspection. On Nagel's approach, Peter Hacker commented: "Consciousness, thus conceived, is extended to the whole domain of 'experience'—of 'Life'." He regarded this as a "novel analysis of consciousness" and has been particularly critical of Nagel's terminology and its philosophical consequences. In 2002 he attacked Nagel's 'what it's like' phrase as "malconstructed" and meaningless English—it sounds as if it asks for an analogy, but does not—and he called Nagel's approach logically "misconceived" as a definition of consciousness. In 2012 Hacker went further and asserted that Nagel had "laid the groundwork for ... forty years of fresh confusion about consciousness" and that "the contemporary philosophical conception of consciousness that is embraced by the 'consciousness studies community' is incoherent".