Defining consciousness

Consider your surroundings for a moment. Are you aware of the people around you or the weather outside? You are currently reading this page, but what were you thinking about just a few moments ago? Maybe you were thinking about your weekend plans or where you'd want to have lunch later. All of these mental activities are manifestations of your consciousness.

• What is consciousness?
• What are different types of consciousness?
• What are the characteristics of consciousness in psychology?
• What are the four levels of consciousness?
• What is the hard problem of consciousness?

Definition of Consciousness in Psychology

Defining consciousness is challenging due to its subjective character. Despite decades of scientific studies, definitions, explanations, and debates, consciousness remains perplexing. Experts have made significant advances in their knowledge of brain activity and how it influences human behavior but have not explained how the information translates into sensations, emotions, and experiences. Consciousness, pexels.comConsciousness cannot be seen, touched, or measured but can be explained and understood through psychological constructs. The English philosopher and physician John Locke wrote a famous work on consciousness called "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690) which is generally credited for defining consciousness as the awareness of what passes in a man's mind.

The conscious definition comprises feelings and thoughts in a normal waking state. This awareness is personal and unique to an individual. Consciousness directs and governs our behavior, assists us in thinking clearly about issues, communicating with others, setting objectives, planning activities, and monitoring our life's progress. It is also essential to our sense of morality since we have free will to do virtuous acts while avoiding immoral behavior.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, popularized the concept of consciousness by theorizing the conscious and unconscious elements of behavior. The prevailing consciousness theory nowadays is known as the dual-processing theory. It is divided into two levels: implicit and explicit.

Different Types of Consciousness

Consciousness varies in terms of both stimulus and content. There are two different types of consciousness: phenomenal, or at the moment, and access, which recalls memories.

Phenomenal Consciousness

Phenomenal consciousness is a quality aspect of a mental state or a subjective experience. According to Ned Joel Block, a philosopher who made significant contributions to the study of consciousness and cognitive science, sensory experiences like hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling pain, perception, thoughts, and emotions lead to phenomenal consciousness. Quality of consciousness, pexels.com

The sensation of seeing a red wall differs from seeing a green wall. Similarly, hearing a musical note performed by a piano and hearing the same musical note played with a guitar is not the same thing. The qualia of these experiences give them their distinct "feel" and differentiate them from one another.

Access Consciousness

Access consciousness is characterized by logical, cognitive attitudes, belief, memory, and reasoning. Access awareness can be used to direct behaviors, speech, and thought. Ideas, views, and desires are examples of access consciousness.

Block believes that phenomenal and access consciousness generally interacts but that access consciousness can exist without phenomenal consciousness.

Levels of Consciousness in Psychology

The conscious level of your mind deals with facts regarding your present circumstances. What are you focused on right now? The conscious level includes everything you know, including information about yourself and your environment. Your ideas, sensations, and perceptions from the outside world, as well as the memories you bring into your mind, are all part of your conscious experience.

Conscious processing, pexels.com

The preconscious level is the part of your brain that we aren't aware of, is not being utilized, and is inactive. The subconscious mind retains information that the conscious mind may not process entirely, but it stores the knowledge for later retrieval when remembered by the aware mind. Preconscious activity is the retention of facts that are recalled to awareness.

The subconscious operates as a barrier, filtering information and storing it for later retrieval. Acting as a secondary brain unit allows a person to do things automatically without thinking about it.

This occurrence is also true for a person's gut instincts, fear, pain, and other emotions and thoughts. Even if a person wants to change or pursue something, his subconscious may tell him otherwise, preventing him from succeeding.

The unconscious level stores information that isn't readily available or accessible and involves a more complex cognitive process. This level is buried underneath a person's consciousness yet can impact behavior. The Freudian slip is one such case. A Freudian slip occurs when a person makes an error from memory or verbally reflects hidden thoughts and feelings. Theoretically, the more suppressed a person's thoughts and feelings are, the more likely he or she is to make speech inaccuracies. Conditioning is an essential component to consider when figuring out where our unconscious behaviors come from.

Characteristics of Consciousness in Psychology

Experiences of consciousness are unique from one person to another, but there are four basic characteristics or principles of consciousness that are important to consider. They are unity, intentionality, selectivity, and transience.

Unity

Unity of consciousness refers to the idea that multiple conscious states of a person in any given situation are treated as a whole.

Conscious unity. pexels.com.

Conscious Unity of Objects

Unity of consciousness of objects means to consciously experience a group of items as a whole. This concept of the unity of items as a single conscious experience allows us to compare items of one group to another from a different group which is also fundamental to our cognition. When you're stuck in traffic, you are conscious of the car in front of you and the car next to it. These two consciousness experiences of both cars are unified, and you can compare the size, color, and shape of the two cars. However, there are instances where difficulties in comparison may appear due to disorders of consciousness, and those who are affected may suffer from cognitive deficits.

Conscious Unity of Representation

There is also unity in the consciousness of many representations of a single item across the five senses. It's one thing to see something and another to touch it. Visual consciousness of a balloon may tell you that it looks smooth, with no bumps or rough edges, but touching it gives you another conscious experience of how smooth the balloon feels. Combining visual and tactual representations of the balloon allows you to compare how it is to see one as to how it feels. The same is true for emotions. Feeling happy is different from doing things that make you happy.

Conscious Unity of Self

In unified consciousness of self, oneself is a subject of all conscious experiences taken together to form one conscious identity. This identity awareness reflects a unified representation of the self that is made up of various variables and mixtures that are influenced by what we've seen or experienced.

Conscious Unity of Focus

In a conscious experience of a single item, a unified focus indicates that a person can pay attention to all of the features of that item. This oneness entails understanding the various aspects of a thing concerning oneself.

This ability to focus demonstrates that a person is still in a single state of consciousness while being aware of various characteristics of an item. For example, when driving, you learn to focus and become aware of your driving, the condition of your automobile, the dangers of being on the road, and the fact that you must arrive at your destination. You pay attention to all of these factors and use your cognitive ability to figure out how to get to your goal safely.

Intentionality

The content or subject of your consciousness is referred to as intentionality of consciousness. This trait indicates that people want to concentrate on something external or internal. Their motivation influences the content of a person's awareness.

Selectivity

The term selectivity of consciousness refers to a person's ability to narrow their concentration. As impacted by internal and external factors, this selectivity displays a person's capacity to filter out extraneous information and focus on one area. Because a person's capacity to pay attention to all stimuli at once is limited, they choose what is important and focus on it.

Selective consciousness, pexels.com

A dichotic listening task, in which a person listens to dual messages at once, one in the left ear and the other in the right ear, and is asked to pay attention to either one, is another technique that exemplifies selectivity. If the individual chooses to concentrate on the left ear, he will repeat what was said and respond to inquiries about what he heard in the right ear. It turns out that the person may only have a poor understanding of the message in the right ear. This activity demonstrates how narrow our focus can become.

Transience

The transience of consciousness describes our awareness as fleeting or constantly moving. What appears to be significant one instant may no longer be relevant the next, and our attention is drawn to another stimulus or piece of information. The idea that our consciousness is always shifting happens in everyday situations.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Many specialists have examined consciousness, and they ran into a dilemma when they tried to define it. Defining consciousness involves the hard problem of consciousness, which is the attempt to explain how something physical becomes a subjective experience for a human.

Defining consciousness is hard, not only because of its subjective nature but also it cannot be observed and measured. There is no one specific objective evidence of consciousness. Science can try to explain the functional qualities or biological reactions resulting from a conscious state such as anxiety, which may signal a high cortisol level. Still, it can never fully explain why anxiety seems to a person in a way that is unique to his subjective conscious experience.