Consciousness
Consciousness is a characteristic 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.Some philosophers divide consciousness into phenomenal consciousness, which is subjective experience itself, and access consciousness, which refers to the global availability of information to processing systems in the brain. Phenomenal consciousness is a state with qualia. Phenomenal consciousness is being something and access consciousness is being conscious of something.
An understanding of necessary preconditions for consciousness in the human brain may allow us to address important ethical questions. For instance, how is the presence of consciousness to be assessed in severely ill or disabled individuals? To what extent are non-human animals conscious? At what point in fetal development does consciousness begin? Can machines achieve conscious states? Are today's 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.
Etymology
"Consciousness" derives from Latin conscientia which primarily means moral conscience. In the literal sense, "conscientia" means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridic texts by writers such as Cicero. Here, conscientia is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else. In Christian theology, conscience stands for the moral conscience in which our actions and intentions are registered and which is only fully known to God. Medieval writers such as Thomas Aquinas describe the conscientia as the act by which we apply practical and moral knowledge to our own actions. René Descartes has been said to be the first philosopher to use "conscientia" in a way that does not seem to fit this traditional meaning, and, as a consequence, the translators of his writings in other languages like French and English coined new words in order to denote merely psychological consciousness. These are, for instance, conscience, and Bewusstsein. However, it has also been argued that John Locke was in fact the first one to use the modern meaning of consciousness in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, although it remains closely intertwined with moral conscience (I may be held morally responsible only for the act of which I am conscious of having achieved; and my personal identity - my self - goes as far as my consciousness extends itself). The modern sense of "consciousness" was therefore first found not in Descartes' work - who sometimes used the word in a modern sense, but did not distinguish it as much as Locke would do -, but in Locke's text. The contemporary sense of the word (consciousness associated to the idea of personal identity, which is assured by the repeated consciousness of oneself) was therefore introduced by Locke; but the word "conscience" itself was coined by Pierre Costes, French translator of Locke. Henceforth, the modern sense first appeared in Locke's works, but the word itself first appeared in the French language. Locke's influence upon the concept can be found in Samuel Johnson's celebrated Dictionary, in which Johnson abstains from offering a definition of "consciousness," choosing instead to simply quote Locke.
Spiritual approaches
Spiritual approaches to consciousness involve the idea of altered states of
consciousness or religious experience. Changes in the state of consciousness
or a religious experience can occur spontaneously or as a result of
religious observance. It is also maintained by some religions, religious
factions and some scientists that the universe itself is consciousness.
In shamanic practices, changes in states of consciousness are induced by
activities that create trance states, such as drumming, dancing, fasting,
sensory deprivation, exposure to extremes of temperature, or the use of
psychoactive drugs. The experience that occurs is interpreted as entering a
real, but parallel, world. In many polytheistic religions a change in
emotional state is often attributed to the action of a god; for instance
love was ruled by Aphrodite and Eros in Ancient Greek polytheism. In
Hinduism the change in state is induced by the practice of yoga. Yoga means
"union" and is intended to produce a state of oneness between the
practitioner and the divine. In Islam and Christianity, the change of state
can occur as a result of prayer or as a religious experience.
The change in state of consciousness in Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and
Islam is reported to be quite similar. The pursuit of yoga and the Buddhist
Jhanas involve feelings of oneness with the world that give rise to a state
of rapture. This is also reported by those undergoing some forms of
Christian (or Islamic) religious experience; for instance, James (1902)
provides the following report:
I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did "lie down in the
stream of life and let it flow over me." I gave up all fear of any impending
disease; I was perfectly willing and obedient. There was no intellectual
effort, or train of thought. My dominant idea was: "Behold the handmaid of
the Lord: be it unto me even as thou wilt," and a perfect confidence that
all would be well, that all was well. The creative life was flowing into me
every instant, and I felt myself allied with the Infinite, in harmony, and
full of the peace that passeth understanding. There was no place in my mind
for a jarring body. I had no consciousness of time or space or persons, but
only of love and happiness and faith.
Meditation is used in some forms of yoga such as Raja Yoga, Hatha Yoga,
Transcendental meditation, the Buddhist Jhanas, the Buddhist Immaterial
Jhanas (there are several versions of the jhanas in different types of
Buddhism), in the practices of Christian monks and Islamic scholars such as
Sufis. Meditation can have a calming influence on practitioners, as well as
changing the state of consciousness. Theravada Buddhism views the Jhanas in
a similar way that some yogic practices view the early stages of meditation
- as a preliminary, in which it is demonstrated that states such as rapture
are delusions (see The Jhanas in Theravada Buddhist Meditation: "With the
fading away of rapture, he dwells in equanimity, mindful and discerning").
In most types of Buddhism, serenity meditation is followed by a
philosophical "insight meditation" that focuses on the idea that the
universe is consciousness only, one that is perhaps indistinguishable from
Monism.
Functions of consciousness
We generally agree that our fellow human beings are conscious, and that much
simpler life forms, such as bacteria, are not. Many of us attribute
consciousness to higher-order animals such as dolphins and primates;
academic research is investigating the extent to which animals are
conscious. This suggests the hypothesis that consciousness has co-evolved
with life, which would require it to have some sort of added value,
especially survival value. People have therefore looked for specific
functions and benefits of consciousness. Bernard Baars (1997), for instance,
states that "consciousness is a supremely functional adaptation" and
suggests a variety of functions in which consciousness plays an important,
if not essential, role: prioritization of alternatives, problem solving,
decision making, brain processes recruiting, action control, error
detection, planning, learning, adaptation, context creation, and access to
information. Antonio Damasio (1999) regards consciousness as part of an
organism's survival kit, allowing planned rather than instinctual responses.
He also points out that awareness of self allows a concern for one's own
survival, which increases the drive to survive, although how far
consciousness is involved in behaviour is an actively debated issue. Many
psychologists, such as radical behaviorists, and many philosophers, such as
those that support Ryle's approach, would maintain that behavior can be
explained by non-conscious processes akin to artificial intelligence, and
might consider consciousness to be epiphenomenal or only weakly related to
function.
Regarding the primary function of conscious processing, a recurring idea
in recent theories is that phenomenal states somehow integrate neural
activities and information-processing that would otherwise be independent
(see review in Baars, 2002). This has been called the integration consensus.
However, it has remained unspecified which kinds of information are
integrated in a conscious manner and which kinds can be integrated without
consciousness. Obviously not all kinds of information are capable of being
disseminated consciously (e.g., neural activity related to vegetative
functions, reflexes, unconscious motor programs, low-level perceptual
analyses, etc.) and many kinds can be disseminated and combined with other
kinds without consciousness, as in intersensory interactions such as the
ventriloquism effect (cf., Morsella, 2005).
Ervin Laszlo argues that self-awareness, the ability to make observations of
oneself, evolved. Emile Durkheim formulated the concept of so called
collective consciousness, which is essential for organization of human,
social relations. The accelerating drive of human race to explorations,
cognition, understanding and technological progress can be explained by some
features of collective consciousness (collective self - concepts) and
collective intelligence
Unconscious, in
psychology, that aspect of mental life that is separate from immediate
consciousness and is not subject to recall at will. Sigmund
Freud
regarded the unconscious as a submerged but vast portion of the mind. In his
view, the unconscious was composed of the id, which accounts for
instinctual drives, acts as the motivating force in human behavior, and
contains desires and wishes that the individual hides—or represses—from
conscious recognition; and part of the superego, the system that acts
to restrain and control id impulses. Conscious cognitive processes, such as
thinking, are performed by the ego and part of the superego (see
psychoanalysis).
Conflict between conscious and unconscious impulses are said to give rise to
anxiety, then
to
defense
mechanisms, which counteract this anxiety. To tap the unconscious, Freud
used a variety of techniques, including hypnosis, free association, and
dream interpretation. C. G.
Jung
expanded on the Freudian concept, adding the idea of an inherited
unconscious, known as the collective unconscious. The idea of the
unconscious has been rejected by some psychological schools, although it is
still used by many psychoanalysts. The term unconscious is also used
to describe latent, or unretrieved, memories, or to describe stimuli too
weak to enter an individual's conscious awareness.
The term subconscious is defined
variously as an adjective or noun. In the strict psychological sense, the
adjective is defined as "operating or existing outside of
consciousness". The term also appears in
Sigmund Freud's very early work, to denote the
unconscious mind but was soon eliminated due its ambiguity. It may also
be used to describe the
preconscious, information contained in the mind, which although not
presently in the
conscious, maybe recalled by "directing attention to them", such as
memories not being recalled at present, but still available to be recalled
at will. Use of the term "subconscious" is avoided in academic settings
despite remaining popular in common use.
Collective unconscious in Jung's works
In his earlier writings, Jung called this aspect of the psyche the collective unconscious. He later changed the term to objective psyche. The objective psyche may be considered objective for two reasons: it is common to everyone; and it has a better sense of the self's ideal than the ego or conscious self does. It thus directs the self, via archetypes, dreams, and intuition, and drives the person to make mistakes on purpose. In this way, it moves the psyche toward individuation, or self-actualization.
In the "Definitions" chapter of Jung's seminal work Psychological Types, under the definition of "collective" Jung references representations collectives, a term coined by Levy-Bruhl in his 1910 book How Natives Think. Jung says this is what he describes as the collective unconscious.