Consciousness

Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience or awareness of internal together with external existence. Despite millennia of analyses, definitions, explanations together with debates by philosophers and scientists, consciousness maintain puzzling and controversial, being "at one time the nearly familiar and [also the] nearly mysterious aspect of our lives". Perhaps the only widely agreed conception about the topic is the intuition that consciousness exists. Opinions differ approximately what exactly needs to be studied and explained as consciousness. Sometimes, it is for synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition. Today, it often includes any species of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not. There might be different levels or orders of consciousness, or different kinds of consciousness, or just one bracket with different features. Other questions put whether only humans are conscious, all animals, or even the whole universe. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises doubts about whether the modification questions are being asked.

Examples of the range of descriptions, definitions or explanations are: 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; having phanera or qualia and subjectivity; being the 'something that this is the like' to 'have' or 'be' it; being the "inner theatre" or the executive rule system of the mind.

Inter-disciplinary perspectives

Western philosophers since the time of Descartes and Locke earn struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and how it fits into a larger opinion of the world. These issues carry on 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; if 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 apprehension what it means biologically and psychologically for information to be provided in consciousness—that is, on established the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness. The majority of experimental studies assess consciousness in humans by asking subjects for a verbal description of their experiences e.g., "tell me if you notice anything when I form believe this". Issues of interest include phenomena such(a) as subliminal perception, blindsight, denial of impairment, and altered states of consciousness reported 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, harm of meaningful communication, and finally damage 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 measure of consciousness is measured by standardized behavior observation scales such(a) as the Glasgow Coma Scale.