Conscious For Now
Consciousness is a concept that is socially constructed to define a real, yet abstract phenomenon. The point of defining consciousness, in Combs words, is to take an metaphysical idea, something that can not be understood directly in itself, and turn it into an object for humans to understand from a concrete perspective. For the purpose of this paper, the type of consciousness that will mostly be discussed can be described as having consciousness, an adverb that is understood as an experience, not solely the state of being alive (Walden. Lecture. 8/24/16). To define consciousness in words does not do it justice, as it is comprised of the intangible and feelings. Yet, consciousness directly effects the physical world. According to *** , the meaning of consciousness arises in
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Going off of Zeman’s three institutions, components of consciousness include being alive. A living biological organism. Zeman specifically states “Consciousness is bound up with our physical being”. For one to have consciousness, they must have bodily neural networks that allow for potentialities (Kak. 17. 1994). My personal definition of consciousness changes depending on context and particular periods in time because consciousness is always changing. As of now, consciousness is defined as a societal, psychological, biological, and ever-changing state of being. The one aspect of consciousness that I can continue to cling to is that consciousness is always fluctuating and shifting. In Leslie Irvine’s course, The Self in Society, she discusses how the self is fleeting. The self you are right now becomes a self of the past because by the time you think of your self, who you are, or your consciousness, that self is gone. This is very similar to the concept of the self as a reflexive process, having a “new” self every social interaction that does not carry from interaction to interaction. (Kent L. Sandstrom, Daniel D. Martin, Gary A. Fine. Symbols, Selves and
theorists attempt to develop a mode of consciousness and cognition that breaks the identity of
U.T. Place and J.J.C. Smart defend the view that a sensation state is a type of brain process. The ‘Sensation-Brain Process Identity Theory’ states: For any type of sensation state S, there is a type of brain state B such that: S = B. For Place, conscious experience is nothing but a brain process. Place and Smart argue against the view that acceptance of inner processes entails dualism (Place 44). Instead they hold conscious qualities can effectively be reduced to physical processes which are conscious states. A sensation state is an inner process. Inner processes according to Place and Smart are nothing ‘over and above’ brain processes. Under their view, the experience one has when tasting vanilla is the same thing as the object undergoing the corresponding type of brain process. The ‘Brain Process Identity Theory’ argues the ‘feel’ we associate with exposure of vanilla to the tongue is identical to a type of brain process cause by said exposure. To postulate non-physical properties to explain conscious states would bear the burden of proof.
To conclude this essay, I like to emphazise that Rosenthal's HOT is more of an empirical hypothesis, rather than an analysis of the term ‘consciousness.’ His aim is precisely to explain the phenomena of consciousness in relation to other mental states, such as thought and perception, and while achieving this, he has elaborated a theoretical structure for comprehending the functions of our mind.
Chapter 4 discusses the several states of consciousness: the nature of consciousness, sleep and dreams, psychoactive drugs, hypnosis, and meditation. Consciousness is a crucial part of human experience, it represents that private inner mind where we think, feel, plan, wish, pray, omagine, and quietly relive experiences. William James described the mind as a stream of consciousness, a continuous flow of changing sensations, images thoughts, and feelings. Consciousness has two major parts: awareness and arousal. Awareness includes the awareness of the self and thoughts about one's experiences. Arousal is the physiological state of being engaged with the environment. Theory of mind refers to individuals understanding that they and others think,
We observe, in their writings (Walcott and Roy) the apparently rational surface of consciousness hides a mass of tangled and conflicting desires, impulses and needs. The outer person is a mere papering-over of the cracks of a split and waring complex of selves driven by life and death instincts.
. Its most famous defender is Descartes, who argues that as a subject of conscious thought and experience, he cannot consist simply of spatially extended matter. His essential nature must be non-m...
Problem-posing education, responding to the essence of consciousness-intentionality-rejects communiqués and embodies communication. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian “split”—consciousness as consciousness of consciousness.
As there are many different schools of Buddhism, each with different principles, there are also many different views on consciousness. First, we'll turn to the "Consciousness-Only School" also known as Yogacara Buddhism. According to the Consciousness-Only school there are eight parts of the consciousness. The five sense-consciousnesses, those related to the senses. There is the sixth consciousness, called the sense-center consciousness, that which forms our conceptions. The seventh is called the thought-center, the consciousness related to will and reasoning. And the eighth consciousness, called the storehouse consciousness. The storehouse consciousness basically "stores" our past experiences. The consciousness are in a constant state of change, the seed is constantly being influenced by the inward flow of perceptions, and the seed itself influences the perceptions (Chan 371). This train of thought is most similar to the existing model of cognition and memory encoding.
An experience’s colours, smells and sounds are impossible to isolate from one another. Each conscious experience is a unique, never-to-be-repeated event.”(Barras, 2013). In other words; to be able to replicate the conscious mind one needs to somehow implant different sounds, colours, scents and perhaps even artificially created experiences and memories for it to “become” conscious. But how would one program the ever-learning memory of a human? For it to be considered “conscious” it would also have to be able to constantly learn new things and use the newfound knowledge in a human-like manner for example it should able to explain certain phenomena or remember certain events as well as being able to describe
It attends to operations and to their centre and source which is the self. It discerns the different levels of consciousness, the consciousness of the dream, of the waking subject, of the intelligently inquiring subject, of the rationally reflecting subject, of the responsibly deliberating subject. It examines the different operations on the different levels and their relations to one another.
Within this experience we may understand individualities of love, death, beauty and spiritual essence. Consciousness is the awareness of one's surroundings and identity; the awareness of universal concepts and the relation this plays upon the individual. Yeats believed that throughout an individuals life there were certain icons and memories which remained constant, turning in what he classified as a gyre, an ever increasing spiral of life veering towards a state of anarchy. This form of consciousness is classified within Western cosmologies as knowledge or wisdom.
Materialist theory believes that matter is the only thing that can be proven to exist. Materialists argue that matter precedes consciousness. Marx theory of materialism stems from the idea that the basis of reality is matter and through matter, the mind is created. The main purpose of this essay is to identify and describe how consciousness is created from the previous Hegelian ideas of materialism that are further developed by Marx. Marx emphasizes that “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” (p. 112) When referring to consciousness, Marx explains that through the matter in the society we live in and its surrounding social structures,
"Soul" has, historically, always been tied up with morality and religious dogma, and I believe modern neuropsychology and psychobiology has effectively refuted any scientific basis for a "Soul." To state as fact, "The soul exists," one must first socratically define Soul. More on this later:
There are three main perspectives of metaphysics in philosophy, which “examine the nature of reality”, defined in Friedenberg and Silverman (2015). This studies the issue of mind-body, asking questions, such as, “What is the mind? Is it physical? Does the body necessarily need a mind?” As well as “What is consciousness? Does it exist in everything? “The mind-body problem addresses how physiological or mental properties are related to physical properties”.
The mind is an intriguing element of the human life not only because of its complexity and capability but mostly because of its opacity. How does psychology begin to understand something so obscure and complex? Evidently, by observing and measuring the product of the cognitive processes that occurs through an interaction between the external and internal world.