A report on Consciousness

Representation of consciousness from the seventeenth century by Robert Fludd, an English Paracelsian physician
John Locke, British Enlightenment philosopher from the 17th century
Illustration of dualism by René Descartes. Inputs are passed by the sensory organs to the pineal gland and from there to the immaterial spirit.
Thomas Nagel argues that while a human might be able to imagine what it is like to be a bat by taking "the bat's point of view", it would still be impossible "to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat." (Townsend's big-eared bat pictured).
John Searle in December 2005
The Necker cube, an ambiguous image
A Buddhist monk meditating
Neon color spreading effect. The apparent bluish tinge of the white areas inside the circle is an illusion.
Square version of the neon spread illusion

Sentience or awareness of internal and external existence.

- Consciousness
Representation of consciousness from the seventeenth century by Robert Fludd, an English Paracelsian physician

98 related topics with Alpha

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A phrenological mapping of the brain – phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain although it is now widely discredited.

Philosophy of mind

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Branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body.

Branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body.

A phrenological mapping of the brain – phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain although it is now widely discredited.
René Descartes' illustration of mind/body dualism.
Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals (1648)
Four varieties of dualism. The arrows indicate the direction of the causal interactions. Occasionalism is not shown.
The classic Identity theory and Anomalous Monism in contrast. For the Identity theory, every token instantiation of a single mental type corresponds (as indicated by the arrows) to a physical token of a single physical type. For anomalous monism, the token–token correspondences can fall outside of the type–type correspondences. The result is token identity.
John Searle—one of the most influential philosophers of mind, proponent of biological naturalism (Berkeley 2002)
Since the 1980s, sophisticated neuroimaging procedures, such as fMRI (above), have furnished increasing knowledge about the workings of the human brain, shedding light on ancient philosophical problems.

Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body.

A phrenological mapping of the brain. Phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain

Mind

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Set of faculties responsible for mental phenomena.

Set of faculties responsible for mental phenomena.

A phrenological mapping of the brain. Phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain
René Descartes' illustration of mind–body dualism. Descartes believed inputs are passed on by the Sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit.
Simplified diagram of Spaun, a 2.5-million-neuron computational model of the brain. (A) The corresponding physical regions and connections of the human brain. (B) The mental architecture of Spaun.
Computer simulation of the branching architecture of the dendrites of pyramidal neurons.

One problem for all epistemic approaches to the mark of the mental is that they focus mainly on conscious states but exclude unconscious states.

René Descartes's illustration of dualism. Inputs are passed on by the sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Mind–body dualism

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In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable.

In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable.

René Descartes's illustration of dualism. Inputs are passed on by the sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit.
Four varieties of dualist causal interaction. The arrows indicate the direction of causations. Mental and physical states are shown in red and blue, respectively.
Another one of Descartes' illustrations. The fire displaces the skin, which pulls a tiny thread, which opens a pore in the ventricle (F) allowing the "animal spirit" to flow through a hollow tube, which inflates the muscle of the leg, causing the foot to withdraw.
Cartesian dualism compared to three forms of monism.

Descartes clearly identified the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and distinguished this from the brain as the seat of intelligence.

The "redness" of red is a commonly used example of a quale.

Qualia

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The "redness" of red is a commonly used example of a quale.
Inverted qualia
Daniel Dennett
Marvin Minsky
Michael Tye
David Chalmers
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

In philosophy of mind, qualia ( or ; singular form: quale) are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.

A cat in an affectionate frame of mind, by T. W. Wood (1872).

Sentience

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Capacity to experience feelings and sensations.

Capacity to experience feelings and sensations.

A cat in an affectionate frame of mind, by T. W. Wood (1872).
Chimps in a playful mood.

In science fiction, the word "sentience" is sometimes used interchangeably with "sapience", "self-awareness", or "consciousness".

The Thinker by Rodin (1840–1917), in the garden of the Musée Rodin

Thought

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The Thinker by Rodin (1840–1917), in the garden of the Musée Rodin
Man thinking on a train journey

In their most common sense, the terms thought and thinking refer to conscious cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation.

Experience

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Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these conscious processes.

Mental state

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State of mind of a person.

State of mind of a person.

Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states.

Wilhelm Wundt (seated) with colleagues in his psychological laboratory, the first of its kind.

Psychology

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Scientific study of mind and behavior.

Scientific study of mind and behavior.

Wilhelm Wundt (seated) with colleagues in his psychological laboratory, the first of its kind.
One of the dogs used in Pavlov's experiment with a surgically implanted cannula to measure salivation, preserved in the Pavlov Museum in Ryazan, Russia
False-color representations of cerebral fiber pathways affected, per Van Horn et al.
Skinner's teaching machine, a mechanical invention to automate the task of programmed instruction
Baddeley's model of working memory
The Müller–Lyer illusion. Psychologists make inferences about mental processes from shared phenomena such as optical illusions.
Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung; back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943 posited that humans have a hierarchy of needs, and it makes sense to fulfill the basic needs first (food, water etc.) before higher-order needs can be met.
Developmental psychologists would engage a child with a book and then make observations based on how the child interacts with the object.
An example of an item from a cognitive abilities test used in educational psychology.
Flowchart of four phases (enrollment, intervention allocation, follow-up, and data analysis) of a parallel randomized trial of two groups, modified from the CONSORT 2010 Statement
The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the latter believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subject believes that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual electric shocks, though in reality there were no such punishments. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level etc.
An EEG recording setup
Artificial neural network with two layers, an interconnected group of nodes, akin to the vast network of neurons in the human brain.
A rat undergoing a Morris water navigation test used in behavioral neuroscience to study the role of the hippocampus in spatial learning and memory.
Phineas P. Gage survived an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe, and is remembered for that injury's reported effects on his personality and behavior.

Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts.

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Hard problem of consciousness

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The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how humans have qualia or phenomenal experiences.