Consciousness Essay

Consciousness is the subjective experience of an individual on the world and the mind, that is utterly private to oneself. The defining feature of this subject is the experience that comes along with it. Although some people might explain it as just being awake that is not necessarily true. The story of Belle Riskin being conscious while going through surgery has also occurred to me. Whenever they were removing my wisdom teeth I was conscious in the middle of it but not for long it was only a few seconds. I was able to hear them talking and the pulling of my mouth to the side where I believe they were trying to get to my teeth. Psychology has the difficulty of studying the mind and the unconscious, therefore they would hope to understand

However this brings up a great mystery, the problem of other minds, which is the difficulty of perceiving the consciousness of others. Problems such as not knowing if another person’s experience is similar to yours or knowing if another person is conscious or not. The other mystery of the consciousness is the mind body problem, the issue of how the mind is related to the brain and body. Today we know that the brain and mind are connected everywhere to each other that the mind is what the brain does. Psychologists have also learned that the brain starts before the thinking or the action occurs. The consciousness has four properties intentionality, unity, selectivity, and transience. Intentionality is the quality of awareness of something or the experience. Researchers have found that conscious attention is limited and it’s only a small part of the consciousness. The second property is unity which is the ability to integrate everything from the body’s senses into one cohesive experience. The body is constantly sensing an enormous amount of

These levels are the different amount of awareness the consciousness has on the world and the self. Minimal consciousness is when sensory input receives information and directs behavior without the individual knowing, it usually occurs during sleep. This occurs to me almost every night and I forget the dreams I had so I have no idea what I was attempting to do. Full consciousness is when the individual is aware of everything and you are able to report the state you are in. Self-consciousness is the hyper aware sense of yourself such as the moment realized you are an object in space. This awareness typically occurs in adolescents, which also an interesting fact is that animals also go through self-consciousness. In order to find out what people are thinking, psychologists use the experience sampling technique which shows that the consciousness is dominated by the immediate environment which is followed by person’s current concerns. Daydreaming is the state of consciousness when an endless flow of thoughts comes to mind, it may seem that you are wasting time but the brain is active. Wouldn’t people daydream all day considering they are constantly flowing new and old thoughts when they are not focusing on something? Such as whenever they are constantly reminding themselves of future events or looking at the environment. People usually get thoughts that worry them repeatedly