Consciousness in a Nutshell

 What is Consciousness?

Although every human being experiences consciousness every single day, it is difficult to define. It is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental phenomena. Generally, it is defined as your subjective inner experience, executive control system of the mind, or individual awareness of your unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and environments.[1] It is part of what allows us to exist and understand ourselves in the world, and it permits us to know both that we exist and that the things around us exist. Certain mental phenomena, such as sleep, dreams, hypnosis and many more, are also considered aspects of consciousness.[2] In medical terms, consciousness is assessed by observing a patient’s alertness and responsiveness, and can be seen as a series of physical and mental states, ranging from a fully alert state to loss of movement in response to painful stimulation. Your conscious experience is constantly shifting and changing.[3] For example, in one moment you may be focused on reading this. Your consciousness may then shift to the memory of a joke your friend told you yesterday. Next, you might notice how uncomfortable your chair is, or you are deciding what to have for dinner. This always-changing stream of thoughts can change dramatically from one moment to the next, but your experience of it seems smooth and effortless. Some claim that the entire universe is composed of infinite consciousness, and that consciousness is a form of energy which created all matter; that the universe originates in subjectivity. However, very few people believe in this theory, because it can’t be proven or supported in any way, and there are many other theories of creation that are far more credible and fathomable.

On his website Spirit of Now, Peter Russell gives a useful analogy for understanding the nature of consciousness; that of a painting.[4] The picture on the canvas is the contents of consciousness, and the canvas on which it is painted is the faculty of consciousness. Every creature with the faculty of consciousness is different in that an endless amount of pictures could be painted on the canvas, but all of them share the fact that they are painted on a canvas; and without the canvas, there can be no painting. The picture is determined by a wide range of factors, including our perceptions of the world around us, our thoughts, our ideas, our beliefs, our values, our feelings, our emotions, our hopes, our fears, our intuitions, our dreams and fantasies, and more.

The Study of Consciousness

The conscious experience was one of the first topics studied by early psychologists. Structuralists, who believe in a theory of science reconstructing empirical theories, used a process known as introspection to analyse and report conscious sensations, thoughts, and experiences.[5] Although information was scarce during the first half of the 20^th century, research on human consciousness has grown tremendously since the 1950s.[6] Consciousness is now the subject of much research in psychology, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.[7] Practical issues include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill or unconscious people, whether non-human consciousness exists and, if so, how it can be measured, at what point in prenatal development consciousness begins, and whether computers can achieve a conscious state.