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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consciousness | 3/18 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:40:02.432894+00:00 | kb-cron |
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. In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel used 'consciousness', 'conscious experience', 'subjective experience' and the 'subjective character of experience' as synonyms for something that "occurs at many levels of animal life ... [although] it is difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it." Nagel's terminology also included what has been described as "the standard 'what it's like' locution" in reference to the impenetrable subjectivity of any organism's experience which Nagel referred to as "inner life" without implying any kind of introspection. On Nagel's approach, Peter Hacker commented: "Consciousness, thus conceived, is extended to the whole domain of 'experience'—of 'Life' subjectively understood." He regarded this as a "novel analysis of consciousness" and has been particularly critical of Nagel's terminology and its philosophical consequences. In 2002 he attacked Nagel's 'what it's like' phrase as "malconstructed" and meaningless English—it sounds as if it asks for an analogy, but does not—and he called Nagel's approach logically "misconceived" as a definition of consciousness. In 2012 Hacker went further and asserted that Nagel had "laid the groundwork for ... forty years of fresh confusion about consciousness" and that "the contemporary philosophical conception of consciousness that is embraced by the 'consciousness studies community' is incoherent".
=== Influence on research === 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. The term 'subjective experience', following Nagel, is ambiguous, as philosophers seem to differ from non-philosophers in their intuitions about its meaning. Max Velmans proposed that 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 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' 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 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 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 the traditional idea of the phenomenon called 'consciousness', writing that "its denotative definition is, as it was for René Descartes, John Locke, and David 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 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 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 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, 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.