Experience of Consciousness

A Experience of Consciousness is a subjective experience that enables a cognitive agent to perceive their own state of consciousness at a moment in time of consciousness.

• AKA: Self Sense, Self Awareness.
• Context:
  • It can typically involve the Conscious Self as the subject of one's own conscious experience.
  • It can typically include awareness of Conscious Content such as perceptions, emotions, and thoughts.
  • It can typically require Conscious Level sufficient for self-reflection and phenomenal awareness.
  • It can typically emerge from neural activity in brain regions associated with self-reference.
  • It can typically expand beyond individual consciousness to include social consciousness when engaging with collective experiences.
  • ...
  • It can often be described through first-person perspective rather than third-person observation.
  • It can often change during different mental states and physiological conditions.
  • It can often be analyzed by philosophical approaches such as phenomenology and philosophy of mind.
  • It can often be investigated through scientific methods in cognitive neuroscience and psychology.
  • It can often develop social consciousness through cultural exposure and social interaction.
  • ...
  • It can range from being a Simple Conscious State to being a Complex Conscious State, depending on its consciousness complexity index.
  • It can range from being a Past Self to being a Present Self to being a Future Self, depending on its temporal dimension.
  • It can range from being a Human Consciousness to being a Software-based Consciousness, depending on its substrate implementation.
  • It can range from being a Minimal Consciousness to being a Rich Consciousness, depending on its phenomenal content.
  • It can range from being an Individual-Focused Experience of Consciousness to being a Socially-Integrated Experience of Consciousness, depending on its social consciousness dimension.
  • ...
  • It can be supported by a consciousness skill through metacognitive processes.
  • It can be associated with conscious events through experiential binding.
  • It can be the focus of a problem of consciousness through philosophical inquiry.
  • It can be explained by a consciousness theory through theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence.
  • It can be composed of conscious level, conscious content, and conscious self through integrated information.
  • It can incorporate social consciousness through social perception and collective identity formation.
  • It can be transformed by artistic expression when experiencing cultural artifacts that evoke social awareness.
  • ...
• Examples:
  • Experience of Consciousness Types, such as:
    • Temporal Experience of Consciousnesses, such as:
      • Present Moment Experience of Consciousness for immediate awareness.
      • Autobiographical Experience of Consciousness for personal narrative construction.
    • Content-Based Experience of Consciousnesses, such as:
      • Perceptual Experience of Consciousness for sensory information processing.
      • Emotional Experience of Consciousness for affective state awareness.
    • Self-Referential Experience of Consciousnesses, such as:
      • Reflective Experience of Consciousness for self-evaluation processes.
      • Pre-reflective Experience of Consciousness for implicit self-awareness.
    • Social Experience of Consciousnesses, such as:
      • Collective Experience of Consciousness for shared social reality.
      • Cultural Experience of Consciousness for cultural value internalization.
  • Experience of Consciousness Instances, such as:
    • Meditative Experience of Consciousness for attentional focus.
    • Dream Experience of Consciousness for sleep-based awareness.
    • Writer's Experience of Consciousness after having written a sentence, with momentary self-reflection.
    • Social Movement Experience of Consciousness during collective action, with social change awareness.
  • ...
• Counter-Examples:
  • State of Flow, which involves absorption in activity rather than self-reflective awareness.
  • Unconscious Process, which operates below the threshold of awareness rather than within conscious experience.
  • Recorded Memory, which represents a stored experience rather than an active experience of consciousness.
  • Philosophical Zombie, which exhibits behavior without experience rather than subjective consciousness.
  • Living Being generally, which may possess biological functions without necessarily having reflective consciousness.
  • Pure Social Consciousness, which focuses exclusively on collective conditions rather than individual experience of consciousness.
• See: Experience of Future-Self-Vision, Experience, Perception, Object (Philosophy), Conscientiousness, Technoself, Hard Problem of Consciousness, Neural Correlates of Consciousness, Social Consciousness, Collective Consciousness.

---

---

References

2021

• (Wikipedia, 2021) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self Retrieved:2021-3-31.
  • The self is an individual person as the object of its own reflective consciousness. Since the self is a reference by a subject to the same subject, this reference is necessarily subjective. The sense of having a self—or self-hood—should, however, not be confused with subjectivity itself. Ostensibly, this sense is directed outward from the subject to refer inward, back to its "self" (or itself). Examples of psychiatric conditions where such "sameness" may become broken include depersonalization, which sometimes occurs in schizophrenia: the self appears different from the subject. The first-person perspective distinguishes self-hood from personal identity. Whereas "identity" is (literally) sameness and may involve categorization and labeling, self-hood implies a first-person perspective and suggests potential uniqueness. Conversely, we use "person" as a third-person reference. Personal identity can be impaired in late-stage Alzheimer's disease and in other neurodegenerative diseases. Finally, the self is distinguishable from "others". Including the distinction between sameness and otherness, the self versus other is a research topic in contemporary philosophy and contemporary phenomenology (see also psychological phenomenology), psychology, psychiatry, neurology, and neuroscience.

    Although subjective experience is central to self-hood, the privacy of this experience is only one of many problems in the Philosophy of self and scientific study of consciousness.

2016

• (Wikipedia, 2016) ⇒ http://wikipedia.org/wiki/self Retrieved:2016-3-29.
  • The self is the subject of one's own experience of phenomena: perception, emotions, thoughts. In phenomenology, it is conceived as what experiences, and there isn't any experiencing without an experiencer, the self. The self is therefore an "immediate given", an intrinsic dimension of the fact of experiencing phenomena. In some other trends of philosophy, the self is instead seen as requiring a reflexive perception of oneself, the individual person, meaning the self in such a view is an object of consciousness.

    The self has been studied extensively by philosophers and psychologists and is central to many world religions. With the recent rise in technology, the self has been discussed under various new emerging fields, such as Technoself Studies.

2016

• (Seth, 2016) ⇒ Anil K. Seth. (2016). “The Real Problem." Blog post on Aeon.co
  • QUOTE: Let’s begin with David Chalmers’s influential distinction, inherited from Descartes, between the ‘easy problem’ and the ‘hard problem’. The ‘easy problem’ is to understand how the brain (and body) gives rise to perception, cognition, learning and behaviour. The ‘hard’ problem is to understand why and how any of this should be associated with consciousness at all: why aren’t we just robots, or philosophical zombies, without any inner universe? It’s tempting to think that solving the easy problem (whatever this might mean) would get us nowhere in solving the hard problem, leaving the brain basis of consciousness a total mystery.

    But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too]] much about explaining its existence in the first place (]]hard problem]]). (People familiar with ‘neurophenomenology’ will see some similarities with this way of putting things – but there are differences too, as we will see.)

    There are some historical parallels for this approach, for example in the study of life. Once, biochemists doubted that biological mechanisms could ever explain the property of being alive. Today, although our understanding remains incomplete, this initial sense of mystery has largely dissolved. Biologists have simply gotten on with the business of explaining the various properties of living systems in terms of underlying mechanisms: metabolism, homeostasis, reproduction and so on. An important lesson here is that life is not ‘one thing’ – rather, it has many potentially separable aspects.

    In the same way, tackling the real problem of consciousness depends on distinguishing different aspects of consciousness, and mapping their phenomenological properties (subjective first-person descriptions of what conscious experiences are like) onto underlying biological mechanisms (objective third-person descriptions). A good starting point is to distinguish between conscious level, conscious content, and conscious self. Conscious level has to do with being conscious at all – the difference between being in a dreamless sleep (or under general anaesthesia) and being vividly awake and aware. Conscious contents are what populate your conscious experiences when you are conscious – the sights, sounds, smells, emotions, thoughts and beliefs that make up your inner universe. And among these conscious contents is the specific experience of being you. This is conscious self, and is probably the aspect of consciousness that we cling to most tightly.

2016

• George Johnson. (2016). “Consciousness: The Mind Messing With the Mind.” In: The New York Times - Science, JULY 4, 2016
  • QUOTE: ... Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes. The result is an illusion. Instead of neurons and synapses, we sense a ghostly presence — a self — inside the head. But it’s all just data processing. “The machine mistakenly thinks it has magic inside it,” Dr. Graziano said. And it calls the magic consciousness. It’s not the existence of this inner voice he finds mysterious. “The phenomenon to explain,” he said, “is why the brain, as a machine, insists it has this property that is nonphysical.” …

2016

• Peter Bregman. (2016). “You Need to Practice Being Your Future Self.” In: Harvard Business Review, MARCH 28, 2016
  • QUOTE: Even though Sanjay is delighted at the idea of focusing on his future self, he resists it because it doesn’t feel as good as solving his current challenges. He isn’t as skilled at it yet. That’s why it’s his future. And that is exactly why he needs to focus on it.

---