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

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Overall
Thalamus marked (MRI cross-section)

Thalamus

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Large mass of gray matter located in the dorsal part of the diencephalon (a division of the forebrain).

Large mass of gray matter located in the dorsal part of the diencephalon (a division of the forebrain).

Thalamus marked (MRI cross-section)
Thalamic nuclei. Metathalamus labelled MTh
Nuclei of the thalamus
Dorsal view
Coronal section of lateral and third ventricles
The thalamus is connected to the spinal cord via the spinothalamic tract
Human brain dissection, showing the thalamus.
Human thalamus along with other subcortical structures, in glass brain.
Lateral group of the thalamic nuclei.
Medial group of the thalamic nuclei.

It has several functions, such as the relaying of sensory signals, including motor signals to the cerebral cortex and the regulation of consciousness, sleep, and alertness.

Person jumping into water. This action may be considered the result of his free will.

Free will

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Capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.

Capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.

Person jumping into water. This action may be considered the result of his free will.
A domino's movement is determined completely by laws of physics.
A simplified taxonomy of philosophical positions regarding free will and determinism.
Various definitions of free will that have been proposed for Metaphysical Libertarianism (agent/substance causal, centered accounts, and efforts of will theory ), along with examples of other common free will positions (Compatibilism, Hard Determinism, and Hard Incompatibilism ). Red circles represent mental states; blue circles represent physical states; arrows describe causal interaction.
A simplified taxonomy of philosophical positions regarding free will and theological determinism.
René Descartes
Thomas Hobbes was a classical compatibilist.
Spinoza thought that there is no free will.
Arthur Schopenhauer claimed that phenomena do not have freedom of the will, but the will as noumenon is not subordinate to the laws of necessity (causality) and is thus free.
Augustine's view of free will and predestination would go on to have a profound impact on Christian theology
Bas relief of Maimonides in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Others however argue that "consciousness plays a far smaller role in human life than Western culture has tended to believe."

Focused attention

Attention

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Behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information.

Behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information.

Focused attention
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William James (1890) wrote that "Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence."

Society for Consciousness Studies

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Professional scholarly organization founded in San Francisco.

Professional scholarly organization founded in San Francisco.

The Society aims to promote a multidisciplinary approach to human and animal consciousness studies.

Objectivity (philosophy)

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Concept of truth independent from individual subjectivity .

Concept of truth independent from individual subjectivity .

If reality exists independently of consciousness, then it would logically include a plurality of indescribable forms.

Vincent van Gogh, 1890. Kröller-Müller Museum. The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix).

Conscience

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Cognitive process that elicits emotion and rational associations based on an individual's moral philosophy or value system.

Cognitive process that elicits emotion and rational associations based on an individual's moral philosophy or value system.

Vincent van Gogh, 1890. Kröller-Müller Museum. The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix).
Seated Buddha, Gandhara, 2nd century CE. The Buddha linked conscience with compassion for those who must endure cravings and suffering in the world until right conduct culminates in right mindfulness and right contemplation.
Marcus Aurelius bronze fragment, Louvre, Paris: "To move from one unselfish action to another with God in mind. Only there, delight and stillness."
Last page of Ghazali's autobiography in MS Istanbul, Shehid Ali Pasha 1712, dated A.H. 509 = 1115–1116. Ghazali's crisis of epistemological skepticism was resolved by "a light which God Most High cast into my breast ... the key to most knowledge."
The Awakening Conscience, Holman Hunt, 1853
Nikiforos Lytras, Antigone in front of the dead Polynices (1865), oil on canvas, National Gallery of Greece-Alexandros Soutzos Museum.
Illustration of François Chifflart (1825–1901) for La Conscience (by Victor Hugo)
Charles Darwin thought that any animal endowed with well-marked social instincts would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as its intellectual powers approximated man's.
Jeremy Bentham: "Fanaticism never sleeps ... it is never stopped by conscience; for it has pressed conscience into its service."
War criminal Adolf Eichmann in passport used to enter Argentina: his conscience spoke with the "respectable voice" of the indoctrinated wartime German society that surrounded him.
The Flemish mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck viewed a pure conscience as facilitating "an outflowing losing of oneself in the abyss of that eternal object which is the highest and chief blessedness"
The medieval Persian philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna) developed a sensory deprivation thought experiment to explore the relationship between conscience and God
Schopenhauer considered that the good conscience we experience after an unselfish act verifies that our true self exists outside our physical person
Benedict de Spinoza: moral problems and our emotional responses to them should be reasoned from the perspective of eternity.
Immanuel Kant: the moral law within us has true infinity.
John Locke viewed the widespread social fact of conscience as a justification for natural rights.
Adam Smith: conscience shows what relates to ourselves in its proper shape and dimensions
Samuel Johnson (1775) stated that "No man's conscience can tell him the right of another man."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1932)
Albert Einstein associated conscience with suprapersonal thoughts, feelings and aspirations.
Peter Singer: distinguished between immature "traditional" and highly reasoned "critical" conscience
John Ralston Saul: consumers risk turning over their conscience to technical experts and to the ideology of free markets
Lester Ott, conscientious objector during the First World War
Nonviolent protestors in Washington, D.C. in 2010 opposed to the Iraq War
Amnesty International protects prisoners of conscience. Stamp from Faroe Islands, 1986.
Henry David Thoreau: Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?
Gandhi in Noakhali, 1946: civil resistance or satyagraha
Global warming protestors in Chicago 2008
Chiune Sugihara practised conscientious noncompliance in issuing visas to fleeing Jews in Lithuania in 1939
NASA climate scientist James Hansen arrested in 2011 for civil disobedience against laws allowing a tar sands oil pipeline
Internet Map. Ninian Smart predicts global communication will facilitate world conscience.
Underwater American nuclear test in the Pacific. Worldwide expressions of 'conscience' against such explosions caused the French Government to cease atmospheric tests at Mururoa for political reasons.
Darfur refugee camp in Chad: a challenge to the world's conscience.
Sombrero Galaxy: A United Nations treaty declares Outer Space the common heritage of humanity. Garrett Hardin doubted the capacity of conscience to protect such commons areas
Graffiti portrait in Ramallah of murdered Arab cartoon artist Naji al-Ali
Gravesite of Anna Politkovskaya in Russia
Gao Zhisheng human rights lawyer abducted in China
Gravesite of Neda Agha-Soltan in Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in Iran
Protests in India against the 2012 Delhi gang rape case
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. Tretyakov Gallery.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of Crime and Punishment
Eugène Delacroix, Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard (1839, oil on canvas)
Hermann Hesse, author of Siddhartha.
Vincent van Gogh, 1890. Kröller-Müller Museum. On the Threshold of Eternity.
J.S. Bach. Original page from Credo (Symbolum Nicenum) section of Mass in B minor

Arendt also wrote eloquently on the problem of languages distinguishing the word consciousness from conscience.

Husserl c. 1910s

Edmund Husserl

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German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of phenomenology.

German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of phenomenology.

Husserl c. 1910s
Edmund Husserl c. 1900
The Kiepenheuer Institute for Solar Physics in Freiburg, Husserl's home 1937-1938
Husserl's gravestone at Freiburg Günterstal
Plaque commemorating Husserl in his home town of Prostějov, Czech Republic

Arguing that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all possible knowledge, Husserl redefined phenomenology as a transcendental-idealist philosophy.

According to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, "near human-like levels of consciousness" have been observed in the grey parrot.

Animal consciousness

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Quality or state of self-awareness within a non-human animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself.

Quality or state of self-awareness within a non-human animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself.

According to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, "near human-like levels of consciousness" have been observed in the grey parrot.
René Descartes argued that only humans are conscious, and not other animals
Is the glass half empty or half full?
Drawing by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1899) of neurons in the pigeon cerebellum
Previously researchers had thought that patterns of neural sleep exhibited by zebra finches needed a mammalian neocortex
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The Eurasian magpie passes the mirror test
Octopus travelling with shells collected for protection

In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.

Embodied cognition

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Theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of an organism's entire body.

Theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of an organism's entire body.

The classical Cartesian model of the mind under which body, world, perception and action are understood as independent.
The embodied cognitive model of the mind under which body, world, perception and action are dynamically related with each other.
A timeline graph reconstructing historically relevant developments and key contributions that influenced the growth of embodied cognition. To the left are the years in descending order. The legend on the top-right corner indicates how to interpret the connections made.
The scope of embodied cognition and the intertwined relationship that arise between the sciences.
The applications of embodied cognition and artificial intelligence.
Example of the "change blindness" illusion. These two alternating images contain several differences that most people struggle to find right away. It emphasizes the fact that perception is active and demands attention.
Demonstration of dynamic depictive gestures for the Triangle conjecture
Response times for the positive, negative, and neutral valence conditions in the approach and avoidance experiment. Participants were significantly faster for the "positive toward" condition regardless of the central word's valence.
The approach and avoidance task. The top image depicts the zooming-out effect for avoidance and the bottom image the zooming-in effect for approach (as indicated by the arrows on the computer screen). The smaller images exemplify the approach and avoidance task performed by participants when using either the response pad or the joystick.
Results from a social embodied cognition study that illustrate the relationship between positive emotions, observed behavioral synchrony, and embodied rapport.
Visual Perspective Taking. VDP1: From his perspective, the ball is not visible. VDP2: The woodpile is on the left of the tree.
The Mathematics Imagery Trainer for Proportion. A tool to help students learn proportion.
An Atlas robot connecting a hose to a pipe in a Gazebo computer simulation
An Atlas robot climbing into a vehicle. The image was recreated in a Gazebo computer simulation
The experience of the phantom limb illusion, which occurs after a limb has been amputated.

Neuroscientists Gerald Edelman, António Damásio and others have outlined the connection between the body, individual structures in the brain and aspects of the mind such as consciousness, emotion, self-awareness and will.

Psyche (consciousness journal)

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Psyche was an online peer-reviewed academic journal covering studies on consciousness and its relation to the brain from perspectives provided by the disciplines of cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, physics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and anthropology.