18 Answers

  1. Good question! In short, human consciousness is formed by the psyche as a result of the perception of information entering the brain through all channels of sensations. This is if you do not go deeper, because consciousness is still divided into different components, such as self-consciousness, subconsciousness, etc. There are various theories on this topic, from philosophical to biological. If you are interested, look on the Internet.

    Does anyone else have consciousness other than humans? Let's think about it. For example, a cat has a brain, receptors and sensation channels, but does it have a psyche, that is, is the cat a subject of perception of reality? If so, then there is probably consciousness (in the usual sense).

  2. Consciousness is a mental state in which a living being can fully perceive himself and the world around him.

    All mammals and birds, many insects and mollusks have consciousness…

  3. The question is purely boltological. What exactly to call “consciousness” – still can not agree. Especially when there is a question of a clear distinction between” consciousness “and”non-consciousness”. There is no particular point in discussing such, in fact, purely terminological issues.

    The question is not how to name the pot, but what is put in it, and what it can do.

  4. Consciousness is a feature only of a person. It emerged in the course of evolution as a means to analyze and compare one's own behavior with that of other individuals. As well as for the adaptation of the individual in the social environment. Chimpanzees have something similar to consciousness.

  5. Consciousness, as a sense of self, is present in almost all living things, the difference is in the amount of this feeling. A person can reflect, look at himself from the outside, and put the thoughts and feelings that arise in this case into words. Higher animals also seem to reflect, but they cannot speak and think differently. If you go lower and lower in the chain of cause and effect, you will find that the basis of consciousness is a programmed reaction to irritation. Only a living being can react not to the present, but to a future event due to the fact that the model of the event and its possible consequences are stored in memory. The feedback between the signal and the response to it is precisely the elementary atom of consciousness.

  6. Consciousness is an abstract Movement. The level of manifestation of Consciousness is determined by the plane of its being and the forms inherent in this plane of being.

    As far as I understand, you are interested in the question of the presence of consciousness on our, the earthly manifestation of the plane of being? Consciousness is present in all forms (even artificially created ones), but at different levels. Along with the primitive (elemental forms) and other higher levels of consciousness, man is the bearer of the highest evolutionary level of consciousness. However, the levels of consciousness are also divided into stages.

    I'll give you an example. Each cell has its own (cellular) consciousness, each molecule, as well as each atom, has a consciousness corresponding to their levels of consciousness manifestation, i.e., the levels of matter. Animals are complex forms of consciousness manifestation, conditionally: on the lower plane of being (cellular), as well as higher (molecular) and even higher (atomic). The same can be said about the person. However, a person is a carrier of consciousness at an even higher level than the conventionally atomic plane of its manifestation-at the level of the mental (subatomic) plane. At this level, the form of manifestation of consciousness is thought, which science has yet to fix and find patterns.

    Thus, Consciousness is a Movement, the qualities and properties of which determine the form of Consciousness, or matter.

  7. If you think about it, then no one has consciousness yet, except for a person. But this is only from the point of view of the person himself. He decided that his ability to think, reason, evaluate his actions in terms of time, “other beings and things, feeling the emotional impact of it, “should be called something and defined it as”consciousness”.
    Other creatures do not have the same developed nervous system, so this definition cannot be said to apply to anyone else. I think that the next” creature “with consciousness can be artificial intelligence,” created by man himself in his own image.

  8. A person discovers consciousness by its differences from the unconscious.

    In this regard, it is acceptable to have a variety of opinions about what is conscious and what is unconscious.

    From the constructive point of view of modeling consciousness, one of the ideas is to designate the principle of occurrence. Under what conditions is consciousness detected and without what conditions can it not be indicated?

    This approach allows us to isolate two functions: differentiation and generalization. Together, they provide distinct similarities and patterns of perception.

    As a result, consciousness is the ability to recognize, and its depth and diversity extend to self-awareness and even the nature of self-awareness.

  9. Self-awareness that draws information from the subconscious mind. You wake up and realize that this is you, and not another individual from another planet. Although there are “glitches” when a person doesn't recognize themselves, they think they are from 1450, in fact from the 21st century. And the most amazing thing is when a person speaks a different language, then you can't argue here. It's like putting another drive on your computer. This is difficult to explain, a philosophical topic where metaphor is the best tool. And whether there is death, or it is a continuation of development and knowledge. We don't remember anything like a dream.

  11. The sum of signals from the sensory organs and the associative apparatus of the brain.

    140 characters. Now exactly 140 characters. Well OK, here's another 140 characters.
    Panpsychism is trash.

  12. Consciousness is a subjective internal state that exists in humans and, probably, in some other living beings. One of the classical definitions of consciousness is given by the American philosopher T. Nagel in the article “What is it like to be a bat?” (1974). Nagel believes that a creature can have consciousness if there is something “what does it mean to be this very creature”, when there is a special perspective on the world that is accessible to this creature and not accessible in the same way to anyone else. Nagel explained this property of consciousness with the example of a bat. The bat's echolocation experience of the world will never be available to humans. This is a special, unique condition for the bat. Similarly, each conscious being has a unique state of its own, accessible only to itself.

    Modern philosophers distinguish between the content of consciousness and consciousness itself. The content of consciousness is information that is available to the body about some external objects. Consciousness, on the other hand, is the way in which this object is presented to a conscious being. Some systems have “content” but are not capable of consciously presenting this information. For example, a thermometer contains information about the temperature of the surrounding world, but it is not able to “internally” experience heat or cold. Some systems can contain information about their own damage (such as the file system in a computer), but only for conscious beings this information is available as a “pain experience”.

    Consciousness is one of the philosophical mysteries, the core of the psychophysical problem. The solution to the psychophysical problem is to uncover the connection between the brain and consciousness. The brain is an object and is available for scientific research. But studying the brain alone and the processes that take place in it does not seem to provide a complete picture of how the brain processes information, that is, about the subjective aspect of experiences and perceptions. Another American philosopher D. Chalmers called this paradox a difficult problem. In the article “Towards the problem of consciousness”, he noted: “Why is it that when our cognitive systems start processing information through sight and hearing, we gain a visual or auditory experience – the quality of a rich blue color, the feeling of a C note in the first octave? How can we explain why there is something that we call “nurturing a mental image” or “experiencing emotions”? It is generally accepted that experience arises on a physical basis, but we do not have a good explanation of why it occurs and how. Why does the physical processing of the received information generally give rise to a rich inner life? From an objective point of view, this seems unfounded, but it is true. And if anything can be called a problem of consciousness, it is this problem.”

    The unavailability of internal states of consciousness for an external observer gives rise to another philosophical problem – the problem of”other consciousnesses”. First of all, it is relevant for animals. We can, by analogy, assume that other people (other than ourselves) have consciousness. But do animals that have a different brain and nervous system structure have it? The answer to this question is most easily obtained by studying the neural correlates of consciousness. That is, determining the neurophysiological basis on which people develop consciousness. At the moment, there are several theories that identify the necessary structures in neural networks that are necessary for consciousness. Based on these theories, the world's leading neuroscientists have concluded that some animals are conscious. They recorded this in the 2012 Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness. According to these statements, consciousness is possessed, in particular, by mammals, cephalopods, and most birds.

    This point of view is the most popular. However, there is also an exotic point of view in philosophy – panpsychism. According to this position, consciousness is possessed not only by ALL living beings, but even by non-living objects. That is, microconsciousness is the same property of matter as mass, charge, spin. Among modern philosophers, it is allowed by D. Chalmers and G. Strawson. But most consider this theory absurd. It is not at all clear how to check the presence of consciousness in an atom.

  13. Something that observes the process of conducting an internal dialogue can state its existence and can evaluate it in terms of logic.

    1. what is consciousness?
      if you close your eyes and pay attention to the “emptiness inside” , it will be an observation of consciousness. an empty but “alive” space of attention that precedes perception of any kind.

    2. who is the master of consciousness? (who has it?)
      someone who knows the difference between consciousness and non-consciousness. there is a third person who distinguishes them.
      not a person has consciousness, but consciousness has a person and nature and everything that is. because at first empty attention (consciousness), and only then the perception of a person.
      and who observes consciousness, and then information in its field? �
      you.

  15. Consciousness is only a substitute for the concept of the soul for the purpose of further pseudoscientific speculations. Unfortunately, science has not made any progress in studying this phenomenon. Consciousness is obvious to everyone, existing theories of consciousness are anti-scientific, experiments are wild and quackery. And all that has been shown with the help of scientific methods over the past hundred years is that there is no soul in a person. It would seem a funny heresy, but it led to a number of catastrophes of the twentieth century.

  16. Consciousness is a set of shared knowledge about the world around us, including the social environment of the subject. To date, it has been shown that animals can form and store in memory knowledge about the social environment of the subject. The presence of this form of consciousness is described in higher vertebrates – primates and dolphins.

    Almost every one of us brought his pet to the mirror with the words: “look, it's you!”. Surprisingly, it is this simple experiment that is fundamental in determining the self-consciousness of an animal: in 1970, “American zoologist Gordon Gallup” decided to follow how primates behave in front of a mirror.

    It turned out that the lower monkeys — macaques, baboons — react to their reflection as if there were another individual in front of them. They take aggressive poses, try to intimidate the “stranger”.

    Higher apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans), on the other hand, recognize themselves in the mirror. At first, they also mistake their reflection for another animal. But gradually — on the fourth or fifth day-they begin to search the wool, looking in the mirror.

    Currently, there are 5 species of animals that can recognize themselves: chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, elephants and dolphins. The latter like not only to look at themselves in front of a mirror, but also to have sex while watching their reflection (coitus is shown in the film below).

    Of the birds, magpies have this quality — in the Gallup test, they tried to remove the sticker with their paws and beak, thereby proving that they recognized themselves in the mirror image, and not another animal.

    By the way, experiments with reflection in the mirror were also conducted with people. It turned out that children begin to become aware of themselves at the age of 1.5-2 years (and great apes – at 4-5 years, that is, already in adulthood).

    A more detailed answer to this question can be found by watching the BBC documentary “animal intelligence: secrets of society” (I advise everyone, I really liked the film).

    rutube.ru/play/embed/af06e493b95f4ec7b8a2faae8daf0fba/

  17. An interesting, but not entirely clear phenomenon. When I think about consciousness as we imagine it, I can't help but think about memory. It seems to me that it is precisely because of our memory that we have a “human” consciousness. Immediately it is necessary to make a reservation, consciousness is inherent not only in people, it is present in all living beings, of course, of different content and quality. And now to the question of human consciousness and its connection with memory. In fact, it is not very clear what consciousness is. As a rule, this is the totality of all subjective (mental) processes occurring at a given, specific moment. But is it really consciousness? Maybe not… It is difficult, of course, but let's try to imagine that an individual's memory is completely “erased”, in general, all memory. All the hundred billion nerve cells in the brain, all the cells in the spinal cord, and in general, all the body's memory is completely erased in one moment. What will happen to this organism is difficult to imagine, but even without trying to understand it very much, it seems to me that this individual will have no consciousness. It takes a long time to explain why, but this is true, this organism will most likely live (?), but it will not have consciousness (for some time). Memory is an amazing thing. It is inherent in any living organism, the more complex the organism, the “richer” the memory, the “richer” the memory, the” more pronounced ” the consciousness. For some reason, this is exactly how I see this relationship. But this is just my unprofessional opinion.

  18. I have always liked the understanding of consciousness proposed by I. P. Pavlov. He used the term “second signal system”to refer to consciousness. The first signaling system is the animal brain and the animal psyche. In general, if a person is deprived of the corrupting influence of society from birth – then he will remain at this level of development. And the second signal system is speech (its sign function) and the ability to control your psyche and behavior using speech. The development mechanism is as follows. The child first learns to name things (i.e., use signs). Then he learns to speak more or less coherently. At some stage of development, he learns to give himself commands. At first, it looks like a parody of the parents, the child says out loud:” we need to go – remove the toys, ” or something like that. This external voice becomes an internal one (he learns to say it to himself). Then, apparently, this skill reaches automatism.

    The main question is where the information needs to go to become conscious. These are probably speech centers.�

    At least, without their participation, a person will not be able to answer the question of what he sees, what he hears, etc. As far as I understand, if a person has a speech center in the left hemisphere (like most people), and we feed information to the right hemisphere (we will use only one eye and cut the corpus callosum – so that the hemispheres do not exchange information with each other). Then such a person will not see anything (however, if you make a sharp movement, he will pull his head back).

    By the way, there is no “pure consciousness”, consciousness is inseparable from the individual. Also, consciousness is always emotional and subjective. People tend to use the same words, but put them in different meanings or different emotional meanings.

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