Thomas Nagel's Theory Of Consciousness

Consciousness, in psychology, is a term commonly used to indicate a state of awareness of ones self and environment. In Freudian psychology, conscious behaviour largely includes cognitive processes of the ego, such as thinking, perception, and planning, as well as some aspects of the superego, such as moral conscience. Some psychologists deny the distinction between conscious and unconscious behaviour; others use the term consciousness to indicate all the activities of an individual that constitute the personality. Consciousness has been defined in a number of ways, according to Thomas Nagel (1974) consciousness is ‘what it is like to be something.’ Without it, it would be like nothing exists. The term means many different things to many different

He explains that the easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereas, the hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods. Some of the easy problems of consciousness include the following phenomena: the ability to discriminate, categorise and react to environmental stimuli; the report ability of mental states; the focus of attention; the deliberate control of behaviour and the difference between wakefulness and sleep. All of these phenomena are associated with the notion of consciousness. Often, I think about the meaning of consciousness, and like other people I would consider that a mental state is conscious when one can verbally report the situation or if one can react on the basis of that information and so on. However then, for the idea of sleep and dream state there has to be a reason to explain the basis for the organisms’ contrasting behaviours in those

Information entering the nervous system is under continuous. For instance, since your head moves a bit and your eyes move a lot, the images in your retinas swim about constantly, rather like the images of home movies taken by people who can't keep the camera from jiggling. But that is not how is seems to us. These editorial processes occur over large fractions of seconds, during which various additions, incorporations, emendations and over writings of content can occur in different order. Virtually all theories of perception recognise this, but the Multiple Drafts Model makes a startling prediction: Feature detections or discriminations only have to be made once. Once a particular "observation" has been made by a specialised, localised portion of the brain, the information does not have to be re discriminated by some "master" discriminator. There is no Cartesian