Consciousness
truly remains to be a mystery, there doesn’t seem to be any agreement among
highly reputed scientists/researchers, in fact the title of this post is the
way Deepak Chopra uses to define it.
Anyway I
put here below I list few definitions of it:
1. Consciousness is the state or
quality of awareness or of being aware of an external object or something
within oneself
2. Freud divided human consciousness
into three levels of awareness: the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious.
Each of these levels corresponds and overlaps with Freud's ideas of the id,
ego, and superego.
3. Human consciousness has been defined
as awareness, sentience, a person's ability to experience and feel, but despite
the important role it plays in our lives and making us who we are, we actually
know very little about how consciousness works.
Levels of consciousness:
·
Somnolent Sleepy
·
Obtunded Decreased alertness; slowed psycho motor
responses
·
Stuporous Sleep-like state (conscious); little/no
spontaneous activity
·
Comatose Cannot be aroused; no response to stimuli
Consciousness
could be one form of energy too, along with kinetic energy or electrical
energy. ... Matter/energy is the underlying substance of the universe, and it
may ultimately be unitary, but it can take widely different forms—with
consciousness as just one of them.
Dreams are
just another form of consciousness, the kind you have when you are in the
strange state called sleep. You are indeed not conscious of your surroundings
while you are asleep and dreaming, but your mind still plays host to the same
kinds of conscious goings-on as when you are awake.
Measuring
consciousness—assigning a number to your current state of awareness—might sound
impossible. ... And he's designed a series of experiments to measure how much
phi a brain has in different states—awake, asleep, under anesthesia, or in coma.
A coma is a
prolonged state of unconsciousness. During a coma, a person is unresponsive to
his or her environment. The person is alive and looks like he or she is
sleeping. However, unlike in a deep sleep, the person cannot be awakened by any
stimulation, including pain.
When
feeling self-conscious, one becomes aware of even the smallest of one's own
actions. Such awareness can impair one's ability to perform complex actions.
Adolescence is believed to be a time of heightened self-consciousness. A person
with a chronic tendency toward self-consciousness may be shy or introverted.
In
philosophy, eternal oblivion (also referred to as non-existence (or nothingness) is the permanent cessation of
one's consciousness upon death. ... According to contemporary theories on
consciousness, the brain is the basis of subjective
experience, self-awareness and awareness of the surrounding natural world.
Eugene
Wigner developed the idea that quantum mechanics has something to do with the
workings of the mind. He proposed that the wave function collapses due to its
interaction with consciousness.
The amount
of information the brain can store in its many trillions of synapses is not
infinite, but it is large enough that the amount we can learn is not limited by
the brain's storage capacity. However, there are other factors that do limit
how much we can learn. The first is our limited attention.
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201812/10-problems-consciousness
- https://www.sciencenews.org/article/brain-scans-decode-elusive-signature-consciousness
- https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/steen/cogweb/Abstracts/McGinn_99.html
- https://www.quantamagazine.org/neuroscience-readies-for-a-showdown-over-consciousness-ideas-20190306/
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-no-such-thing-as-conscious-thought/
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness/
- https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-soul-And-what-is-the-difference-between-soul-mind-and-brain
- https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relation-between-soul-and-consciousness-What-is-an-individual-soul
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
I really love Michio Kaku