Section 4: Consciousness
Pages 114-117
I. Defining Consciousness
a. Consciousness is commonly defined as being aware of the immediate environment.
i. For example, knowing when to go to class or work.
b. Consciousness also deals with awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and memories.
i. Examples
1. Making plans for dates.
2. Getting annoyed at your performance in school.
3. Thinking back about good times with your friends.
c. Early psychologists and their studies
i. When early psychologists studied the mind, they studied consciousness.
1. William Wundt (late 1880’s) had subjects report contents of consciousness while working, falling asleep, and sitting still.
2. Sigmund Freud (1900’s) wrote that needs, desires, and influences are part of the conscious and people have different levels of consciousness.
d. Dualism
i. Started by French philosopher Rene Descartes stated that mind and body are separate, but interacting. ii. Dualism says that one thing cannot exist without it’s opposite.
1. Light cannot exist without darkness.
2. Good cannot exist without the presence of evil.
3. The body cannot function without the mind, and so forth.
e. Materialism
i. Psychologists say that our mental activity is rooted in the brain. ii. Dominant perspective with modern psychologists. iii. Tends to take a less black and white view of “consciousness” versus “unconsciousness.” iv. Psychologists say that you are more aware of certain mental processes over others.
1. For example, doing the same routine at work and time seems to go by faster.
v. Cognitive psychologists ignore the unconscious. They call it the deliberate versus the automatic.
f. Different levels of Consciousness
i. Freud and other cognitive psychologists came up with this theory.
1. Consciousness is a continuum.
a. Alert attention
b. Dreaming
c. Hypnosis
d. Drug-induced states
2. Someone who isn’t paying attention is still conscious, just not “as conscious” as someone that is alert.
3. Believes that drinking will bring you into a lower level of consciousness.
4. If you are in a state of consciousness that is different from what you normally are, you are in an altered state of consciousness.
5. When you are asleep, however, you are in a state of “turned off” consciousness. (Hobson, 1994) ii. Metacognition
1. Being able to think about their own thinking.
2. May allow them to access levels of consciousness that are not available to other people.
a. For example, people’s natural sleep timers.
3. Researched by asking people to track their consciousness, alertness, and moods over a length of time.
a. Found out that there is a natural rhythm to consciousness. iii. Functions of Consciousness
1. Allows us to monitor our mental and physical states.
2. Allows us to control our mental and physical states, to an extant. iv. What is consciousness?
1. General state of being aware of and responsive to events in the environment, as well as one’s own mental processes.
II. Theories of Consciousness
a. Several researchers suggested biological theories of consciousness.
i. Used evolution of the brain as the key to consciousness.
1. Jaynes (1976) believed that consciousness came from the different functions of the hemispheres of the brain.
I will commence by defining what makes a mental state conscious. This will be done aiming to distinguish what type of state we are addressing when we speak of a mental phenomenon and how is it, that can have a plausible explanation. By taking this first approach, we are able to build a base for our main argument to be clear enough and so that we can remain committed to.
Phantom pain is only one example of how the brain is linked to the consciousness. Every perception in the environment and every physical action causes changes in t...
Varela, Francisco J., “Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem”, Journal of consciousness studies 3(4) (1996): pp. 330–49.
Consciousness is the state or condition of being conscious. A sense of one's personal or collective identity, especially the complex of attitudes, beliefs, and sensitivities held by or considered characteristic of an individual or a group. There are several different stages of consciousness. Waking consciousness, altered states of consciousness, and sleep. Waking consciousness is the mental state that includes moving and thinking, along with anything else done while we are awake and alert.
Renner, T., Feldman, R., Majors, M., Morrissey, J., & Mae, L. (2011). States of Consciousness. Psychsmart (pp. 99-107). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Descartes argued in his AMeditations on First Philosophy@ that the mind is a thinking, non-divisible, non-extended thing and that the body is a non-thinking, divisible, extended thing. In his sixth Meditation, Descartes states A...I have a body with which I am very closely united, nevert...
The Mind-Body problem forms the basis of the philosophy of the mind argument. Descartes, the rationalist philosopher and scientist, was the first to propose a coherent, in depth theory, known as Cartesian dualism which supposes that “the mental and the physical – or mind and body or mind and brain... are radically different kinds of thing” or in other words, humans have a “non-physical soul existing independently from our bodies”. Descartes believed that the soul (or spirit) contains all our mental states. In this way he used the words ‘soul’ and ‘mind’ as synonyms. This might latter cause confusion with the idea of materialism so in order to avoid contradiction, the soul will be defined as “the non-physical aspect of a person” while the mind will be defined as “a collection of your mental states”. Whereas the brain, will be defined “as the organ that controls mental states and the nervous system” in accordance with the definition of the body (that material...
Weiskrantz, L. (1997). Consciousness lost and found: A neuropsychological exploration. Oxford University Press, p. 294
Cartwright, R.D. (1978) A primer on Sleep and Dreaming. Massachusetts : Addison - Wesley, Publishing, Company
Koch, C., & Tononi, G. (2011). A Test for Consciousness . Scientific American, 304, 44-47.
Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist, who was considered to be the father of human psychology. Abraham Maslow said that basic physical needs must be met before people can realize their full potential in life. He developed the theory of human motivation now known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, some human needs were more powerful than others. Hierarchy of needs that he argued provides a model for understanding the need for human relations in the classroom. Needs lower on the pyramid, such as physical and safety needs, must be met before an individual will consider higher-level needs. This five-stage model can be divided into deficiency needs and growth needs. The first four levels are often referred to as deficiency needs, D-needs.
Ramachandran, V. S., and Sandra Blakeslee. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind. New York: Quill, 1999. Print.
Human beings believe that they live their life in a conscious manner; that they are aware of their surroundings and know what is going on around them at all times. Yet deeper analysis of the word conscious leads to a more confusing thought process than a human being may be able to grasp. The Personal and Collective Unconscious by Carl Jung believes that “the unconscious contains only those parts of the personality which could just as well be conscious and are in fact suppressed only through upbringing”(344). In a more simplistic form, he says that the human brain is actually a more unconscious thought process and that what the brain produces to be conscious can actually be described as unconscious. Francis Crick’s The General Nature of Consciousness agrees in the same way that “people are not conscious of all the processes going on in their heads”(405). Both of these scientists argue on the same side of the psychological debate that the average human belief of consciousness is not what it is thought to be.
Sleeping and Dreaming Despite the large amount of time we spend asleep, surprisingly little is actually known about sleeping and dreaming. Much has been imagined, however. Over history, sleep has been conceived as the space of the soul, as a state of absence akin to death, as a virtual or alternate reality, and more recently, as a form of (sub)consciousness in which memories are built and erased. The significance attributed to dreams has varied widely as well.
“There are in each of us, as we have said, two forms of consciousness: one which is common to our group as a whole, which consequently, is not ourself, but society living and acting within us; the other, on the other hand, represents that in us which is person...