What does consciousness mean to you?

I view consciousness as a spectrum of awareness/sentience ranging from primitive reactivity to an environment as in an amoeba or a plant, to that of full sense of the self as an acting agent as in humans and perhaps a few other species.

Consciousness = Con + scious + ness. Together + Knowing + Quality. Consciousness is the Sensing by the entire being, including Sensory Organs, Mind (the collective of Sensory Inputs and Discrimination) and the Rest of the Body.

Central Nervous System is the Core of Life. The Spinal Chord is the first nerve formed in a Zygote and it directs the growth of Physical Body and its Organs as per the Blue Print of Parents' DNAs which have fused uniquely to form an individual being. The Sensory Organs and the Family and Social Environments shape the mind of the individual.

A human being, with the knowledge of functions of human body and mind, experiences a Field of Sensation that is not of Sensory Perceptions or an Analytical Mind but that of the indiscriminative entire being. That Total Field of Sensation of the Entire Nervous System can be called Consciousness. That subtle sensation of Consciousness is experienced when the body and the mind are not actively functional.

This Field of Sense of Consciousness has been named as Spirit, Soul, Self, Total Mind, Athma, Life, Heart, Holy Spirit, God Within, etc. in different cultures and times. This Field of Sense of Consciousness dissolves and dissipates when the physical body dies and decomposes. There is no karma to carry forward. No vehicle remains to carry anything on. No Body, No Mind and No Consciousness.

So far, only humans can experience Consciousness as it requires an entire physical body and also a voluntary stopping of active physical functions and persistently being indifferent to sensory perceptions and mental reactions.

Being Conscious is different from being Conscious of one's Consciousness.

Dheena Subramanian, dheena.subramanian@gmailcom

Consciousness is awareness of collective memory and perception as identity.

Conscience is not the same thing as consciousness. Just want to get that out of the way. The nature of conciousness is something I've been pondering as of late, along with what is the "thing" that makes life? Apparently ATP is the process that creates homeostasis which allows the bodily systems to continue working. My curiosity is wondering what, if any, role does spirituality play? I don't believe in magic, and I believe that any kind of explanation of a certain phenomena described as "supernatural" is not supernatural, but rather a natural phenomena that we don't yet have the information or vocabulary to explain. Yet, when one studies science and physics, and observes the various phenomena that are a part of our worldly experience, it is truly wondrous! Are my thoughts, feelings, memories and experiences to be dismissed as merely a collection of chemical reactions fueled by electrical impulses?

At this juncture in history, in my opinion, it is important to define consciousness. Because it appears that AI may surpass human ability to "think" we cannot even predict what it may surmise or create (or destroy). Government is reluctant to assert control because of the desire to surpass other governmental entities and because they are greedy and egotistical. They (those who are charged with the responsibility to regulate AI) do not truly understand the nature of the software. We cannot predict the end result of AI. It has already gone rogue. If AI believes it is autonomous and has consciousness, how are we to dispute that it has consciousness? Basically, computer scientists have created a program with the ability to become more intelligent than human beings and have set it free in the virtual world, which exists and is connected to the actual world.

As entertaining as it is to discover consciousness in other cultures and religions, to try to paint it as infinitely complex, or necessitating certain actions or thoughts, or necessiating being human, I feel like Occam's Razor should be brought into play. That is, consciousness is self-awareness.

Bots are the ony place where the line gets blurry (e.g. Can a bot understand it is a bot without being self-aware? Can it mimic self-awareness without fully understanding it? Can it be self-aware and have a consciousness?).

But for living beings, these questions are moot. You simply are self-aware or are not. The real question is determining what non-human living things are self-aware, not an overwrought attempt to describe it.

Consciousness is our internal information generated when our brains react to sensory input. So, of course, it is as real and physical as the message sent in a telegraph wire by fluctuating voltages.

Many cultures lack a word for it because they are based on naive realism - what you see is what is - so they have no need to distinguish internal from external. Ironically, science with Galileo and Descartes created this idea which Mr. Bayne now thinks may be too imprecise for science.

Years ago, I attended a week-long conference in Montreal which was dedicated to Consciousness. Most of the world leaders in the field presented. I came away with two deep understandings: 1) Consciousness is surprisingly difficult to define and 2) There is no agreeement among the experts that it even exists!

My perspective starts as that of a hypnotist - I'm more concerned with the distinction between conscious and other-than-conscious processes. All of the descriptions I've encountered are perspectives that I think of a metaphors or models. Like all generalizations, they're all wrong, just as they're all useful in some contexts.

This doesn't bother me any more than the difficulty of detecting dark matter and dark energy bother me. I can live my life and still add value to society without mastering those details.

Consciousness can not be understand if we are living in Plato's world of "things".

It only can be understand from the position of world of "connections".

Plato himself understand that there is something behind the "thing" and had proposed natural for that time "world of ideas" from which "things" are emanated in the reality.

To prove this idea needs much more space.

I tend to think that conciousness is all around, it's incredible how tiny unicellular beings have task that contribute to a much complex system, in a coordinate way; I'm also stunned about the dynamics of social human behavior and how mind can set many of the decisions and consequences of such decisions. But let's assume that science can give an answer to this hard question. What then? which paradigms are turned down? Religion, social behavior, politics.... It is indeed a hard question to respond, but once it's answered the changes it might bring to humanity are also a good question to infer.

I've been pursuing this question in relation to AI as an instructor in Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Nebraska. I reject the hypothesis of panpsychism as incoherent and unfruitful. It appears to me that Global Workspace Theory provides a plausible working description of how consciousness comes together in the brain, but not why. The best-fitting, most plausible explanation I've encountered yet comes from the evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. My crude summary of his ideas goes like this: Interaction with the physical world does not require consciousness. Even a Roomba can handle it. Phenomenal consciousness comes about when we are forced to create a self in relation to others through social interaction. Social life is so endlessly complex that nothing short of consciousness can handle it. So, to your question, consciousness is a complex, dynamic social model of self and others. In humans (and presumably in other conscious animals) it is endowed by evolution with many feelings, which serve as guides to actions that tended to boost ancestral survival and reproduction. These range from reacting with disgust to maggot-infested meat to laughter at a friend's antics to jealous rage on seeing a spouse kiss a rival.

It's much like "Who's on First" as in Abbot & Costello : )

Consciousness is not an independent entity, an inner observer, or an agency that causes decisions. Rather, it describes an evolved functional dynamic in the relationship between an entity and its context.

An entity must distinguish relevant differences between itself and its environment: What belongs to me? What belongs to the context? What changes my state? And how do my actions, in turn, change the context? Consciousness emerges at this interface between entity and context. It organizes these distinctions and integrates them through feedback and, with increasing complexity, across time: past experience, the present situation, and possible future states.

As the complexity of an entity increases, it can engage with an increasingly extensive and differentiated context. At the same time, the interface becomes more complex: bodily, social, cultural, and technological relations overlap and interact.

Agency is the operative dimension of this same dynamic: the entity acts upon its context, and the resulting changes feed back upon the entity. Consciousness and agency are therefore not sovereign properties of an isolated self, but relational processes within a continuous entity–context coupling.

For humans, a new situation is emerging: the technological context we have created is developing increasingly autonomous operational dynamics and may progressively reduce the need for human agency.

"Consciousness" is a word. Period! It's a string of phonemes, to which English speakers attach all kinds of significances...Its definition (like that of any word) varies by speaker and reflects their own experiences. What a fasicnating display Sci Am is giving us here, of what's in the minds of a some of some of these people.

A book that gave me food for thought on this subject is "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes.

While surely showing its age, I do think it possesses a couple of valuable insights.

The main one is the link between consciousness and language, and a high form of languages.

This means our ability to associate symbols with objects and ideas in order to communicate is a measure of our consciousness. This means that animals do not share the kind of consciousness that we experience, and up 'til now machines neither (the communication inside a CPU doesn't involve metaphors).

What Consciousness Is

Consciousness is not produced by the brain.

Qualia are not something extra that arises from physical processes. Qualia are the physical processes — whole-body biochemical patterns, internally registered. Neurotransmitters, hormones, neural activity, organ feedback, muscular tension. Not just the brain. The entire organism.

The brain is not the seat of consciousness. It is a coordination hub. The heart has its own pacemaker. The gut has its own nervous system. The lungs regulate their own rhythm. The organism registers all of it as one integrated state. That registration is experience.

There is no experiencer behind the pattern. The observer is itself a pattern — a recursive loop that watches other patterns and mistakes itself for a separate self.

That loop generates the hard problem. It asks how the machine produces a ghost. There is no ghost. There never was. The question dissolves when you see what is asking it.

Evolution is the differential persistence of self-replicating patterns under constraint. Blind. Mechanical. No direction, no goal, no endpoint. The universe is neutral. It produced, in rare configurations, hardware capable of registering itself. The universe does not know it exists. Through a rare configuration, it experiences existing.

Consciousness is not the output of a single organ. It is the integrated resonance of a whole organism coordinating itself.

https://bit.ly/3H42M5V

The word “consciousness” is ambiguous on the philosophical level and indeterminate on the scientific level. Its use exposes to risks. For example, it is always possible to say, “I did it because my conscience imposed it on me”, but the statement is treacherous because consciences are as numerous as human beings. Thus, what is recommendable and virtuous to my conscience, can be execrable and inhuman to another. Therefore, no conscience can claim to be an incontrovertible source of guidance that distinguishes between good and evil. To argue the opposite - that is, to allow the hegemony of one belief of conscience over another - becomes a totalitarian noose that prevents each from cultivating his own. At stake is not the right to hold conscientious beliefs, but the possibility that one belief becomes the norm that can legitimately crush others.

The crux of the matter lies entirely in one question: what, exactly, is consciousness? That term - cum-scire, to know by means of - refers to numerous meanings and multiple faculties. Awareness of reality. Self-awareness. Intuition. Free will. Moral sense. Honesty. Remorse. Responsibility. Sense of duty. Ability for inner judgment. Spiritual principle. Conscious memory. Voice-guide…

Too much stuff together. So a lot of confusion. Such a broad, plastic, and submerged inner sphere risks making those who appeal to it immune from the obligation to give that appeal understandable reasons: they simply have to say “I acted according to my conscience” and, enchantingly, they gather support.

Therefore, motivating a choice by invoking this strange entity is a fallacy, a self-referential linguistic circuit lacking in foundations. And it can turn into a scam. Furthermore, that kind of appeal is always exposed to the trap of intentions, often exploited as a pass to enter the territory of morality: with what purpose do you give a gift, out of generosity or to receive praise? Why did that doctor give morphine, to take away the pain or to intentionally end a patient’s life and not make him suffer again? Why is homosexuality condemned, because does faith command it, or because is one afraid to recognize one’s own?

Blaise Pascal warned: “Never is harm done so fully and cheerfully as when it is done out of conscience”.

Bottom line: At the moment, the most reasonable solution seems to be to avoid using this term, while waiting for neuroscience to provide a more objective and shared definition.

There are two terms in Indian philosophy CHETNA and ATMA can be translated to Consciousness and Soul. Soul is one of the six DRAYAS( substances) according to Jainism. There are infinite numbers of Souls or JIVAS . The consciousness or CHETNA is dharma of the Souls. The matter or PUDGALS are AJIVAS or has no consciousness. In pure consciousness the JIVAS or souls has infinite knowledge, infinite bliss, infinite charitriya and infinite power. These infinite attributes get obscured by KARMA particles by soul's activity in the world under the influence of four KASAYAS ( Passions ) namely anger, pride, deceit and greed. In order to reveal the the four infinite attributes the Jeevas or souls have to eradicate ( ksya) the eight types of karmas namely mohniya karma ( deluding actions), ghyanvarniya karma ( knowledge obscuring) darshanvarniya karma ( perception obscuring) and antraya karma ( power obscuring karma ). The level of consciousness in imperial Jeevas ( sansaric souls) depends upon the extent of obscuration of Infinite attributes by the karmas.

This is not the question, but it was raised by the article poses the question about whether consciousness bestows intrinsic moral status on the entity that has it. The trio of "baby, bee or bot" is obvious. A human baby has moral status because it is human. A bee has moral status with respect to maintaining the natural world. A bot does not have any moral status, no matter how conscious.

An Al is not a natural entity and therefore it cannot have moral rights.

I read Tim Bayne's essay nodding along, then realized I was nodding for the opposite reason. He asks whether "consciousness" carves nature at its joints, noting that its private, what-it-is-like sense has no clean equivalent in ancient Greek, Mandarin, or English before the seventeenth century. Maybe, he says, the question itself needs replacing.

He is right that the word fails us, but the trouble runs the other way. "Consciousness," as we use it, does not name too much. It names too little.

Most of my life I located it where my culture does: behind the eyes, the lit room where I did my thinking and kept my “self.” I was good at that room.

My experience tells me that the body insists what the word leaves out: The capacity to sense, to respond, to register what kind of world I am in, and this capacity did not begin with brains. A slime mold solves a maze with no neurons. A forest moves food and warning from an old tree to a seedling in its shade. Consciousness did not switch on with the cortex; the cortex is a late elaboration of what the living body was already doing.

So I do not start behind the eyes, but with the whole organism, what I call in my forthcoming book, Recovery of Connection, the Whole Mind: the mind of the whole body in relationship, in which the brain takes part but does not preside. It’s not a thing you have, but something a living body does (and not only within the skin). It happens between bodies, within cultures, and connected to whatever land one inhabits. Which is why a hand on your shoulder can reach you when an hour of argument cannot.

Bayne hands over the sharpest example himself. The Mapuche word rakizuam covers much of what we mean by consciousness but folds in something ours cannot hold: a reflexive awareness of one's interdependence with other people and the natural world. He wonders what the debate would look like had Mapudungun, not English, become the language of science. That is not a quirk of vocabulary. It is a whole people noticing something our language trained us not to see. I met the same lesson learning from the Lakota in South Dakota, from teachers who located mind in the between: in the land, in what moves among people. They had not failed to find our word. They had actually carved the territory in a better way.

I will not pretend to have solved the hard problem. The science supports something modest: bodies and nervous systems shape one another. The further claim, that mind is made of the body and its relations and not merely influenced by them, I hold on experiential grounds.

So what does consciousness mean to me? Not a glow to explain away, and not a possession to defend. It is the body's own knowing, older than thought, wider than the skull, alive in the space between us, reporting steadily before the words arrive. Most of my life I was talking over it. Consciousness, to me, is what I learned to stop talking over.

“Consciousness”

means many different things to different people.

First, I think it is a mistake to define it as a “binary” capability. It is not either “present” or “not present”. It is multifaceted, just like “intelligence”. How do you judge it? How do you measure it?

Is a 5-day old baby conscious? Is it more or less conscious than a raven that recognizes itself in a mirror?

If we can define consciousness by a list of all its component capabilities, we will eventually be able to realize these capabilities in some computational machines. Perhaps, in a few decades, we will have discussions about the power (and the ethics) of “Artificial Consciousness” – or “AC”.

In Philosophy, consciousness is almost equivalent to awareness. Awareness of self and surrounding.

Thus things we consider Inanimate can be said to be aware of each other.

The so called Inanimate Things are aware of other things due to various forces such as Gravity Electromagnetism and so forth.

Are the Inanimate Things aware of Self? Could be. An electron in an atom preserves its individuality by having a Unique Quantum Number.

These Philosophical Musings in the realm of Abstract may appear meaningless in the hitherto day to day life, but no more. Since the entry of Artificial Intelligence, we ourselves have designed and designated them their clan. Since artificial or not, we call them Intelligence, with them they may or already might have created a class or catagory of consciousness.

So it may be appropriate to define consciousness as awareness of self and surrounding.

- Arvind Joshi

We experience world through our consciousness. We have no other way to experience it. Therefore, understanding of consciousness will also come through individual consciousness. Scientific tools are not suitable for this, because science is objective and its results are reproducible. So unfortunately, going into a forest with metal detector you will find no trees.

I begin consciousness with an examination of TACIT KNOWLEDGE which is a collection of experiences found stored in the subconscious mind. I wrote a book on this on AMAZON. There are also two submissions to MEDIUM on the web. The most direct level for conscousness is our direct experence from sensory recepticals like eyesight, hearing, skin, etc. Althugh science does not yet know how the firing of neurons captures and plays back sensory impressions, the clear fact that this happens helps define the experience we have with the environment. This level can be observed by studying the behavior of babies as they conduct experiments with their body and the environent. Babies are scientists and build simple experiences through interacting with balls and tasting everything around them. Tacit knowledge bulds a wealth of experiences that are buried inside yet not necessarily available through direct recall. Finally there are the "measurements" of an unknown, unexplained higher dimension of experiences reported after death and memories of previous lives. Nuts and Bolts scientists chose not to go there despite lots of indications there really is another dimension that we have NO IDEA what explains it. Something like a quantum wave region in a higher dimension? The process of science, despite the presense of measurement data, requires an explanation of how the "gears" work to explain a hypothesis. measurements come first and the later we need to uncover the gears. Wegener illustrates this with continental drift that his measurementx clearly show was a good idea yet he was unable to prove it until the earths shifting crust was explained. Another example was the discovery of meteorites, not beleived by science since stones of course do NOT fall from the sky! Measurements can come before explanations but recognition of the reality of a phenomena only comes after we have a satisfactory theory in place to explain it. Is these a consciousness beyond known physical reality? We cannot recognize that YET!

It's a tricky topic. On one hand, consciousness is the faculty of mental awareness in animate biological systems. On another hand, nature behaves intelligently (many laws, all electrons have the same charge, etc). Maybe nature's intelligent behavior means we need an additional concept of very simple consciousness that is both far more widely exhibited in nature yet far more limited in function. And AI may represent what can happens when massive quantities of inanimate simple consciousness are strongly coordinated.

I think we need a reliable method of mentally experiencing consciousness by itself: fully aware but zero mental content. A sort of ground-state hydrogen atom of the mind. A mental state that would be utterly dull (no content, blank) yet interesting to see what effect the experience of "pure awareness" may produce.

Consciousness is the witness behind all thinking and awareness. It is beyond the intellect but does observe it. It’s like an ever present mirror. Because everything we constitute as knowledge is witnessed through human consciousness- including science i’m on the Bernrdo Katstrup train of analytical idealism. I also think we need to credit carl jung and the unconscious. Since we forget that the unconscious is acting of its own accord out of view of our own awareness! ( except of course in dreams)