Misplaced Pages

#852147

76-413: Transient loss of consciousness ( TLOC ) is a brief period of un consciousness which resolves spontaneously. It may be traumatic—as in a concussion —or non-traumatic in origin. Common causes of non-traumatic TLOC include syncope and epileptic seizures . This medical symptom article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Consciousness Consciousness , at its simplest,

152-454: A concept of consciousness. He does not use any single word or terminology that is clearly similar to the phenomenon or concept defined by John Locke . Victor Caston contends that Aristotle did have a concept more clearly similar to perception . Modern dictionary definitions of the word consciousness evolved over several centuries and reflect a range of seemingly related meanings, with some differences that have been controversial, such as

228-400: A distinct type of substance not governed by the laws of physics), and property dualism (which holds that the laws of physics are universally valid but cannot be used to explain the mind). The three main types of monism are physicalism (which holds that the mind consists of matter organized in a particular way), idealism (which holds that only thought or experience truly exists, and matter

304-464: A given other piece of poetry, often in the Spanish Décima style. Glosses were originally notes made in the margin or between the lines of a text in a classical language ; the meaning of a word or passage is explained by the gloss. As such, glosses vary in thoroughness and complexity, from simple marginal notations of words one reader found difficult or obscure, to interlinear translations of

380-463: A gloss may be placed between a text and its translation when it is important to understand the structure of the language being glossed, and not just the overall meaning of the passage. Sign languages are typically transcribed word-for-word by means of a gloss written in the predominant oral language in all capitals; for example, American Sign Language and Auslan would be written in English. Prosody

456-436: A grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of equating consciousness with self-consciousness —to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it. Using 'awareness', however, as a definition or synonym of consciousness

532-452: A more specialized question is how to square the subjective notion that we are in control of our decisions (at least in some small measure) with the customary view of causality that subsequent events are caused by prior events. The topic of free will is the philosophical and scientific examination of this conundrum. Many philosophers consider experience to be the essence of consciousness, and believe that experience can only fully be known from

608-493: A strong intuition for the existence of what they refer to as consciousness, skeptics argue that this intuition is too narrow, either because the concept of consciousness is embedded in our intuitions, or because we all are illusions. Gilbert Ryle , for example, argued that traditional understanding of consciousness depends on a Cartesian dualist outlook that improperly distinguishes between mind and body, or between mind and world. He proposed that we speak not of minds, bodies, and

684-410: A text with cross references to similar passages. Today parenthetical explanations in scientific writing and technical writing are also often called glosses. Hyperlinks to a glossary sometimes supersede them. In East Asian languages, ruby characters are glosses that indicate the pronunciation of logographic Chinese characters . Starting in the 14th century, a gloze in the English language

760-406: Is awareness of internal and external existence . However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate by philosophers , scientists , and theologians . Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind , and at other times, an aspect of it. In the past, it was one's "inner life",

836-421: Is a common synonym for all forms of awareness, or simply ' experience ', without differentiating between inner and outer, or between higher and lower types. With advances in brain research, "the presence or absence of experienced phenomena " of any kind underlies the work of those neuroscientists who seek "to analyze the precise relation of conscious phenomenology to its associated information processing" in

SECTION 10

#1732869540853

912-450: Is access conscious; when we introspect , information about our thoughts is access conscious; when we remember , information about the past is access conscious, and so on. Although some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett , have disputed the validity of this distinction, others have broadly accepted it. David Chalmers has argued that A-consciousness can in principle be understood in mechanistic terms, but that understanding P-consciousness

988-616: Is also debate over whether or not A-consciousness and P-consciousness always coexist or if they can exist separately. Although P-consciousness without A-consciousness is more widely accepted, there have been some hypothetical examples of A without P. Block, for instance, suggests the case of a " zombie " that is computationally identical to a person but without any subjectivity. However, he remains somewhat skeptical concluding "I don't know whether there are any actual cases of A-consciousness without P-consciousness, but I hope I have illustrated their conceptual possibility". Sam Harris observes: "At

1064-681: Is central to the animal rights movement , because it includes the ability to experience pain and suffering. For many decades, consciousness as a research topic was avoided by the majority of mainstream scientists, because of a general feeling that a phenomenon defined in subjective terms could not properly be studied using objective experimental methods. In 1975 George Mandler published an influential psychological study which distinguished between slow, serial, and limited conscious processes and fast, parallel and extensive unconscious ones. The Science and Religion Forum 1984 annual conference, ' From Artificial Intelligence to Human Consciousness ' identified

1140-496: Is defined roughly like English "consciousness" in the 1753 volume of Diderot and d'Alembert 's Encyclopédie as "the opinion or internal feeling that we ourselves have from what we do". About forty meanings attributed to the term consciousness can be identified and categorized based on functions and experiences . The prospects for reaching any single, agreed-upon, theory-independent definition of consciousness appear remote. Scholars are divided as to whether Aristotle had

1216-481: Is generally taken to be the first philosopher to use conscientia in a way less like the traditional meaning and more like the way modern English speakers would use "conscience", his meaning is nowhere defined. In Search after Truth ( Regulæ ad directionem ingenii ut et inquisitio veritatis per lumen naturale , Amsterdam 1701) he wrote the word with a gloss : conscientiâ, vel interno testimonio (translatable as "conscience, or internal testimony"). It might mean

1292-613: Is intrinsically incapable of explaining the holistic aspects of consciousness, but that quantum theory may provide the missing ingredients. Several theorists have therefore proposed quantum mind (QM) theories of consciousness. Notable theories falling into this category include the holonomic brain theory of Karl Pribram and David Bohm , and the Orch-OR theory formulated by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose . Some of these QM theories offer descriptions of phenomenal consciousness, as well as QM interpretations of access consciousness. None of

1368-470: Is linked to some kind of "selfhood", for example to certain pragmatic issues such as the feeling of agency and the effects of regret and action on experience of one's own body or social identity. Similarly Daniel Kahneman , who focused on systematic errors in perception, memory and decision-making, has differentiated between two kinds of mental processes, or cognitive "systems": the "fast" activities that are primary, automatic and "cannot be turned off", and

1444-454: Is merely an illusion), and neutral monism (which holds that both mind and matter are aspects of a distinct essence that is itself identical to neither of them). There are also, however, a large number of idiosyncratic theories that cannot cleanly be assigned to any of these schools of thought. Since the dawn of Newtonian science with its vision of simple mechanical principles governing the entire universe, some philosophers have been tempted by

1520-585: Is much more challenging: he calls this the hard problem of consciousness . Some philosophers believe that Block's two types of consciousness are not the end of the story. William Lycan , for example, argued in his book Consciousness and Experience that at least eight clearly distinct types of consciousness can be identified (organism consciousness; control consciousness; consciousness of ; state/event consciousness; reportability; introspective consciousness; subjective consciousness; self-consciousness)—and that even this list omits several more obscure forms. There

1596-457: Is not a simple matter: If awareness of the environment . . . is the criterion of consciousness, then even the protozoans are conscious. If awareness of awareness is required, then it is doubtful whether the great apes and human infants are conscious. Many philosophers have argued that consciousness is a unitary concept that is understood by the majority of people despite the difficulty philosophers have had defining it. Max Velmans proposed that

SECTION 20

#1732869540853

1672-454: Is not necessary to explain what we observe. Some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett in a research paper titled "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies", argue that people who give this explanation do not really understand what they are saying. More broadly, philosophers who do not accept the possibility of zombies generally believe that consciousness is reflected in behavior (including verbal behavior), and that we attribute consciousness on

1748-444: Is now the dominant position among contemporary philosophers of mind. For an overview of the field, approaches often include both historical perspectives (e.g., Descartes, Locke, Kant ) and organization by key issues in contemporary debates. An alternative is to focus primarily on current philosophical stances and empirical Philosophers differ from non-philosophers in their intuitions about what consciousness is. While most people have

1824-433: Is often glossed as superscript words, with its scope indicated by brackets. [I LIKE] [WHAT?] , GARLIC. "I don't like garlic." Pure fingerspelling is usually indicated by hyphenation. Fingerspelled words that have been lexicalized (that is, fingerspelling sequences that have entered the sign language as linguistic units and that often have slight modifications) are indicated with a hash. For example, W-I-K-I indicates

1900-518: Is physically indistinguishable from a human being and behaves like a human being in every way but nevertheless lacks consciousness. Related issues have also been studied extensively by Greg Littmann of the University of Illinois, and by Colin Allen (a professor at the University of Pittsburgh) regarding the literature and research studying artificial intelligence in androids. The most commonly given answer

1976-445: Is raw experience: it is moving, colored forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and feelings with our bodies and responses at the center. These experiences, considered independently of any impact on behavior, are called qualia . A-consciousness, on the other hand, is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior. So, when we perceive , information about what we perceive

2052-428: Is that we attribute consciousness to other people because we see that they resemble us in appearance and behavior; we reason that if they look like us and act like us, they must be like us in other ways, including having experiences of the sort that we do. There are, however, a variety of problems with that explanation. For one thing, it seems to violate the principle of parsimony , by postulating an invisible entity that

2128-409: Is the fact that consciousness of some sort goes on. 'States of mind' succeed each other in him . [...] But everyone knows what the terms mean [only] in a rough way; [...] When I say every 'state' or 'thought' is part of a personal consciousness , 'personal consciousness' is one of the terms in question. Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us to define it, but to give an accurate account of it

2204-438: Is the most difficult of philosophic tasks. [...] The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I's and you's. Prior to the 20th century, philosophers treated the phenomenon of consciousness as the "inner world [of] one's own mind", and introspection was the mind "attending to" itself, an activity seemingly distinct from that of perceiving

2280-486: The unconscious processes of cognition such as perception , reactive awareness and attention , and automatic forms of learning , problem-solving , and decision-making . The cognitive science point of view—with an inter-disciplinary perspective involving fields such as psychology , linguistics and anthropology —requires no agreed definition of "consciousness" but studies the interaction of many processes besides perception. For some researchers, consciousness

2356-619: The Journal of Consciousness Studies , along with regular conferences organized by groups such as the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and the Society for Consciousness Studies . Gloss (annotation) A collection of glosses is a glossary . A collection of medieval legal glosses, made by glossators , is called an apparatus . The compilation of glosses into glossaries

Transient loss of consciousness - Misplaced Pages Continue

2432-575: The Zhuangzi. This bird's name is Of a Flock ( peng 鵬 ), yet its back is countless thousands of miles across and its wings are like clouds arcing across the heavens. "Like Of a Flock, whose wings arc across the heavens, the wings of your consciousness span to the horizon. At the same time, the wings of every other being's consciousness span to the horizon. You are of a flock, one bird among kin." Mental processes (such as consciousness) and physical processes (such as brain events) seem to be correlated, however

2508-704: The Latin Vulgate Bible in an early form of one of the Romance languages , and as such give insight into late Vulgar Latin at a time when that language was not often written down. A series of glosses in the Old English language to Latin Bibles give us a running translation of Biblical texts in that language; see Old English Bible translations . Glosses of Christian religious texts are also important for our knowledge of Old Irish . Glosses frequently shed valuable light on

2584-424: The constitutionality of various provisions of law. A gloss, or glosa , is a verse in traditional Iberian literature and music which follows and comments on a refrain (the " mote "). See also villancico . Glosses are of some importance in philology , especially if one language—usually, the language of the author of the gloss—has left few texts of its own. The Reichenau Glosses , for example, gloss

2660-619: The "contents of conscious experience by introspection and experiment ". Another popular metaphor was James's doctrine of the stream of consciousness , with continuity, fringes, and transitions. James discussed the difficulties of describing and studying psychological phenomena, recognizing that commonly-used terminology was a necessary and acceptable starting point towards more precise, scientifically justified language. Prime examples were phrases like inner experience and personal consciousness : The first and foremost concrete fact which every one will affirm to belong to his inner experience

2736-439: The "everyday understanding of consciousness" uncontroversially "refers to experience itself rather than any particular thing that we observe or experience" and he added that consciousness "is [therefore] exemplified by all the things that we observe or experience", whether thoughts, feelings, or perceptions. Velmans noted however, as of 2009, that there was a deep level of "confusion and internal division" among experts about

2812-485: The "slow", deliberate, effortful activities of a secondary system "often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration". Kahneman's two systems have been described as "roughly corresponding to unconscious and conscious processes". The two systems can interact, for example in sharing the control of attention. While System 1 can be impulsive, "System 2 is in charge of self-control", and "When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2,

2888-464: The "structure" of the mind by analyzing its "elements". The abstract idea of states of consciousness mirrored the concept of states of matter . In 1892, William James noted that the "ambiguous word 'content' has been recently invented instead of 'object'" and that the metaphor of mind as a container seemed to minimize the dualistic problem of how "states of consciousness can know " things, or objects; by 1899 psychologists were busily studying

2964-456: The 'outer world' and its physical phenomena. In 1892 William James noted the distinction along with doubts about the inward character of the mind: 'Things' have been doubted, but thoughts and feelings have never been doubted. The outer world, but never the inner world, has been denied. Everyone assumes that we have direct introspective acquaintance with our thinking activity as such, with our consciousness as something inward and contrasted with

3040-547: The 17th century, and the first recorded use of "conscious" as a simple adjective was applied figuratively to inanimate objects ( "the conscious Groves" , 1643). It derived from the Latin conscius ( con- "together" and scio "to know") which meant "knowing with" or "having joint or common knowledge with another", especially as in sharing a secret. Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) wrote: "Where two, or more men, know of one and

3116-738: The Scriptural text itself, in the passage known as the "three heavenly witnesses" or the Comma Johanneum , which is present in the Vulgate Latin and the third and later editions of the Greek Textus Receptus collated by Erasmus (the first two editions excluded it for lack of manuscript evidence), but is absent from all modern critical reconstructions of the New Testament text, such as Westcott and Hort , Tischendorf , and Nestle-Aland . In

Transient loss of consciousness - Misplaced Pages Continue

3192-448: The basis of behavior. A more straightforward way of saying this is that we attribute experiences to people because of what they can do , including the fact that they can tell us about their experiences. The term " qualia " was introduced in philosophical literature by C. I. Lewis . The word is derived from Latin and means "of what sort". It is basically a quantity or property of something as perceived or experienced by an individual, like

3268-591: The body surface" invites another criticism, that most consciousness research since the 1990s, perhaps because of bias, has focused on processes of external perception . From a history of psychology perspective, Julian Jaynes rejected popular but "superficial views of consciousness" especially those which equate it with "that vaguest of terms, experience ". In 1976 he insisted that if not for introspection , which for decades had been ignored or taken for granted rather than explained, there could be no "conception of what consciousness is" and in 1990, he reaffirmed

3344-408: The brain. This neuroscientific goal is to find the "neural correlates of consciousness" (NCC). One criticism of this goal is that it begins with a theoretical commitment to the neurological origin of all "experienced phenomena" whether inner or outer. Also, the fact that the easiest 'content of consciousness' to be so analyzed is "the experienced three-dimensional world (the phenomenal world) beyond

3420-436: The brain. Many other neuroscientists, such as Christof Koch , have explored the neural basis of consciousness without attempting to frame all-encompassing global theories. At the same time, computer scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence have pursued the goal of creating digital computer programs that can simulate or embody consciousness . A few theoretical physicists have argued that classical physics

3496-637: The conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do". Some have argued that we should eliminate the concept from our understanding of the mind, a position known as consciousness semanticism. In medicine , a "level of consciousness" terminology is used to describe a patient's arousal and responsiveness, which can be seen as a continuum of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension , through disorientation, delirium , loss of meaningful communication, and finally loss of movement in response to painful stimuli . Issues of practical concern include how

3572-422: The difficulty of producing a definition that does not involve circularity or fuzziness. In The Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology (1989 edition), Stuart Sutherland emphasized external awareness, and expressed a skeptical attitude more than a definition: Consciousness —The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings ; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without

3648-724: The distinction between inward awareness and perception of the physical world, or the distinction between conscious and unconscious , or the notion of a mental entity or mental activity that is not physical. The common-usage definitions of consciousness in Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1966) are as follows: The Cambridge English Dictionary defines consciousness as "the state of understanding and realizing something". The Oxford Living Dictionary defines consciousness as "[t]he state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings", "[a] person's awareness or perception of something", and "[t]he fact of awareness by

3724-467: The following example: It is difficult for modern Western man to grasp that the Greeks really had no concept of consciousness in that they did not class together phenomena as varied as problem solving, remembering, imagining, perceiving, feeling pain, dreaming, and acting on the grounds that all these are manifestations of being aware or being conscious. Many philosophers and scientists have been unhappy about

3800-581: The idea that consciousness could be explained in purely physical terms. The first influential writer to propose such an idea explicitly was Julien Offray de La Mettrie , in his book Man a Machine ( L'homme machine ). His arguments, however, were very abstract. The most influential modern physical theories of consciousness are based on psychology and neuroscience . Theories proposed by neuroscientists such as Gerald Edelman and Antonio Damasio , and by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, seek to explain consciousness in terms of neural events occurring within

3876-437: The inside, subjectively. The problem of other minds is a philosophical problem traditionally stated as the following epistemological question: Given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds? The problem of other minds is particularly acute for people who believe in the possibility of philosophical zombies , that is, people who think it is possible in principle to have an entity that

SECTION 50

#1732869540853

3952-590: The interaction between these two domains occurs inside the brain, perhaps in a small midline structure called the pineal gland . Although it is widely accepted that Descartes explained the problem cogently, few later philosophers have been happy with his solution, and his ideas about the pineal gland have especially been ridiculed. However, no alternative solution has gained general acceptance. Proposed solutions can be divided broadly into two categories: dualist solutions that maintain Descartes's rigid distinction between

4028-525: The knowledge of the value of one's own thoughts. The origin of the modern concept of consciousness is often attributed to John Locke who defined the word in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding , published in 1690, as "the perception of what passes in a man's own mind". The essay strongly influenced 18th-century British philosophy , and Locke's definition appeared in Samuel Johnson 's celebrated Dictionary (1755). The French term conscience

4104-472: The level of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill, comatose, or anesthetized people, and how to treat conditions in which consciousness is impaired or disrupted. The degree or level of consciousness is measured by standardized behavior observation scales such as the Glasgow Coma Scale . While historically philosophers have defended various views on consciousness, surveys indicate that physicalism

4180-456: The level of your experience, you are not a body of cells, organelles, and atoms; you are consciousness and its ever-changing contents". Seen in this way, consciousness is a subjectively experienced, ever-present field in which things (the contents of consciousness) come and go. Christopher Tricker argues that this field of consciousness is symbolized by the mythical bird that opens the Daoist classic

4256-428: The medieval legal tradition, the glosses on Roman law and Canon law created standards of reference, so-called sedes materiae 'seat of the matter'. In common law countries, the term "judicial gloss" refers to what is considered an authoritative or "official" interpretation of a statute or regulation by a judge . Judicial glosses are often very important in avoiding contradictions between statutes, and determining

4332-522: The mind of itself and the world". Philosophers have attempted to clarify technical distinctions by using a jargon of their own. The corresponding entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998) reads: During the early 19th century, the emerging field of geology inspired a popular metaphor that the mind likewise had hidden layers "which recorded the past of the individual". By 1875, most psychologists believed that "consciousness

4408-488: The nature of consciousness as a matter for investigation; Donald Michie was a keynote speaker. Starting in the 1980s, an expanding community of neuroscientists and psychologists have associated themselves with a field called Consciousness Studies , giving rise to a stream of experimental work published in books, journals such as Consciousness and Cognition , Frontiers in Consciousness Research , Psyche , and

4484-409: The notion of quantum consciousness, an experiment about wave function collapse led by Catalina Curceanu in 2022 suggests that quantum consciousness, as suggested by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff , is highly implausible. Apart from the general question of the "hard problem" of consciousness (which is, roughly speaking, the question of how mental experience can arise from a physical basis ),

4560-468: The original Greek form more closely. Glosses and other marginal notes were a primary format used in medieval Biblical theology and were studied and memorized for their own merit. Many Biblical passages came to be associated with a particular gloss, whose truth was taken to be scriptural. Indeed, in one case, it is generally reckoned that an early gloss explicating the doctrine of the Trinity made its way into

4636-414: The outer objects which it knows. Yet I must confess that for my part I cannot feel sure of this conclusion. [...] It seems as if consciousness as an inner activity were rather a postulate than a sensibly given fact... By the 1960s, for many philosophers and psychologists who talked about consciousness, the word no longer meant the 'inner world' but an indefinite, large category called awareness , as in

SECTION 60

#1732869540853

4712-403: The phenomenon of consciousness, because researchers lacked "a sufficiently well-specified use of the term...to agree that they are investigating the same thing". He argued additionally that "pre-existing theoretical commitments" to competing explanations of consciousness might be a source of bias. Within the "modern consciousness studies" community the technical phrase 'phenomenal consciousness'

4788-409: The quantum mechanical theories have been confirmed by experiment. Recent publications by G. Guerreshi, J. Cia, S. Popescu, and H. Briegel could falsify proposals such as those of Hameroff, which rely on quantum entanglement in protein. At the present time many scientists and philosophers consider the arguments for an important role of quantum phenomena to be unconvincing. Empirical evidence is against

4864-448: The range of descriptions, definitions or explanations are: ordered distinction between self and environment, simple wakefulness , one's sense of selfhood or soul explored by " looking within "; being a metaphorical " stream " of contents, or being a mental state , mental event , or mental process of the brain. The words "conscious" and "consciousness" in the English language date to

4940-411: The realm of consciousness and the realm of matter but give different answers for how the two realms relate to each other; and monist solutions that maintain that there is really only one realm of being, of which consciousness and matter are both aspects. Each of these categories itself contains numerous variants. The two main types of dualism are substance dualism (which holds that the mind is formed of

5016-454: The same fact, they are said to be Conscious of it one to another". There were also many occurrences in Latin writings of the phrase conscius sibi , which translates literally as "knowing with oneself", or in other words "sharing knowledge with oneself about something". This phrase has the figurative sense of "knowing that one knows", which is something like the modern English word "conscious", but it

5092-663: The scent of rose, the taste of wine, or the pain of a headache. They are difficult to articulate or describe. The philosopher and scientist Daniel Dennett describes them as "the way things seem to us", while philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers expanded on qualia as the " hard problem of consciousness " in the 1990s. When qualia is experienced, activity is simulated in the brain, and these processes are called neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs). Many scientific studies have been done to attempt to link particular brain regions with emotions or experiences. Species which experience qualia are said to have sentience , which

5168-444: The specific nature of the connection is unknown. The first influential philosopher to discuss this question specifically was Descartes , and the answer he gave is known as mind–body dualism . Descartes proposed that consciousness resides within an immaterial domain he called res cogitans (the realm of thought), in contrast to the domain of material things, which he called res extensa (the realm of extension). He suggested that

5244-407: The traditional idea of the phenomenon called 'consciousness', writing that "its denotative definition is, as it was for Descartes , Locke , and Hume , what is introspectable". Jaynes saw consciousness as an important but small part of human mentality, and he asserted: "there can be no progress in the science of consciousness until ... what is introspectable [is] sharply distinguished" from

5320-482: The vocabulary of otherwise little attested languages; they are less reliable for syntax , because many times the glosses follow the word order of the original text, and translate its idioms literally. In linguistics , a simple gloss in running text may be marked by quotation marks and follow the transcription of a foreign word. Single quotes are a widely used convention. For example: A longer or more complex transcription may rely upon an interlinear gloss . Such

5396-440: The world of introspection , of private thought , imagination , and volition . Today, it often includes any kind of cognition , experience , feeling , or perception . It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, metacognition , or self-awareness , either continuously changing or not. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked. Examples of

5472-488: The world, but of entities, or identities, acting in the world. Thus, by speaking of "consciousness" we end up leading ourselves by thinking that there is any sort of thing as consciousness separated from behavioral and linguistic understandings. Ned Block argued that discussions on consciousness often failed to properly distinguish phenomenal (P-consciousness) from access (A-consciousness), though these terms had been used before Block. P-consciousness, according to Block,

5548-405: Was a marginal note or explanation, borrowed from French glose , which comes from medieval Latin glōsa , classical glōssa , meaning an obsolete or foreign word that needs explanation. Later, it came to mean the explanation itself. The Latin word comes from Greek γλῶσσα 'tongue, language, obsolete or foreign word'. In the 16th century, the spelling was refashioned as gloss to reflect

5624-440: Was but a small part of mental life", and this idea underlies the goal of Freudian therapy , to expose the unconscious layer of the mind. Other metaphors from various sciences inspired other analyses of the mind, for example: Johann Friedrich Herbart described ideas as being attracted and repulsed like magnets; John Stuart Mill developed the idea of "mental chemistry" and "mental compounds", and Edward B. Titchener sought

5700-533: Was rendered into English as "conscious to oneself" or "conscious unto oneself". For example, Archbishop Ussher wrote in 1613 of "being so conscious unto myself of my great weakness". The Latin conscientia , literally 'knowledge-with', first appears in Roman juridical texts by writers such as Cicero . It means a kind of shared knowledge with moral value, specifically what a witness knows of someone else's deeds. Although René Descartes (1596–1650), writing in Latin,

5776-425: Was the beginning of lexicography , and the glossaries so compiled were in fact the first dictionaries . In modern times a glossary, as opposed to a dictionary, is typically found in a text as an appendix of specialized terms that the typical reader may find unfamiliar. Also, satirical explanations of words and events are called glosses. The German Romantic movement used the expression of gloss for poems commenting on

#852147