State of Consciousness

A State of Consciousness is a wakeful state in a conscious agent who has a conscious experience at the time of a consciousness event.

• Context:
  • It can range from being a Human Consciousness State to being an Artificial Consciousness State.
  • …
• Example(s):
  • "X demonstrated several signs of being in a conscious state.” (recorded at 09:48).
  • a Self-Consciousness, such as meditative consciousness.
  • an Others-Consciousness.
  • a State of Awareness.
  • an Altered State of Consciousness.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • an Unconscious State.
  • a Disoriented Person (esp. in delirium).
• See: Experience of Consciousness, Conscious Decision, Possible Worlds Model.

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References

2014

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#Easy_problems
  • Chalmers contrasts the Hard Problem with a number of (relatively) Easy Problems that consciousness presents. (He emphasizes that what the easy problems have in common is that they all represent some ability, or the performance of some function or behavior).
    • the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
    • the integration of information by a cognitive system;
    • the reportability of mental states;
    • the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
    • the focus of attention;
    • the deliberate control of behavior;
    • the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

2013

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
  • Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, sentience, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."

     Philosophers since the time of Descartes and Locke have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and pin down its essential properties. Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness include whether the concept is fundamentally valid; whether consciousness can ever be explained mechanistically; whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how it can be recognized; how consciousness relates to language; whether consciousness can be understood in a way that does not require a dualistic distinction between mental and physical states or properties; and whether it may ever be possible for computers or robots to be conscious.

    In recent years, consciousness has become a significant topic of research in psychology and neuroscience. The primary focus is on understanding what it means biologically and psychologically for information to be present in consciousness — that is, on determining the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness. The majority of experimental studies assess consciousness by asking human subjects for a verbal report of their experiences (e.g., "tell me if you notice anything when I do this"). Issues of interest include phenomena such as subliminal perception, blindsight, denial of impairment, and altered states of consciousness produced by psychoactive drugs or spiritual or meditative techniques.

    In medicine, consciousness is assessed by observing a patient's arousal and responsiveness, and 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 the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill, comatose, or anesthetized people, and how to treat conditions in which consciousness is impaired or disrupted.

• http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/01/20-big-questions-in-science?CMP=twt_gu
  • What is consciousness? We're still not really sure. We do know that it's to do with different brain regions networked together rather than a single part of the brain. The thinking goes that if we figure out which bits of the brain are involved and how the neural circuitry works, we'll figure out how consciousness emerges, something that artificial intelligence and attempts to build a brain neuron by neuron may help with. The harder, more philosophical, question is why anything should be conscious in the first place. A good suggestion is that by integrating and processing lots of information, as well as focusing and blocking out rather than reacting to the sensory inputs bombarding us, we can distinguish between what's real and what's not and imagine multiple future scenarios that help us adapt and survive.

2012

• (Tonomi, 2012) ⇒ Giulio Tononi. (2012). “Consciousness and Information Theory." Tutorial at NIPS 2012 (NIPS 2012).
  • QUOTE: ... discovering the neuronal correlates of consciousness leaves the question of the exact relationship between excitable (brain) matter and consciousness open.

2008

• (Chrisley, 2008) ⇒ Ron Chrisley. (2008). “Philosophical Foundations of Artificial Consciousness.” In: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Journal, 44(2). doi:10.1016/j.artmed.2008.07.011

2006

• (Freund, 2006) ⇒ Yoav Freund. (2006). “My Interpretation of Nietzsche." Personal Note
  • What is "consciousness"? It is just a word that we assign to the type of thought processes that we think are unique to us and are not possessed by less developed creatures (not to mention computers). ... While this piece was written well before Turing and the notion of AI, I think it carries an important message for AI. That is: don't concern yourselves too much with consciousness, it is not that important. Better work on getting knowledge and making it instinctive, i.e. automatic and reactive, i.e. computer code, rather than putting it into a "universal" framework that will solve, with one fell swoop, optical character recognition (OCR), speech recognition, planning, game playing, and the creation of original music.

2000

• (Edelman & Tononi, 2000) ⇒ Gerald M. Edelman, and Giulio Tononi. (2000). “A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination." Basic books,
• (Damasio, 2000) ⇒ Antonio R. Damasio. (2000). “The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness." Random House,

1999

• (Anwar & Franklin, 1999) ⇒ Ashraf Anwar and Stan Franklin. (1999). “Sparse Distributed Memory as a tool for Conscious Software Agents." Unpublished.
  • QUOTE: A conscious agent is a cognitive one with the extra functionality of consciousness built in. We adopt the definition of consciousness from Baars (1995).

1995

• (Baars, 1995) ⇒ Bernard J. Baars. (1995). “A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness." Cambridge University Press.
• (Nardi, 1995) ⇒ Bonnie A. Nardi. (1995). “Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-computer Interaction.” In: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ISBN: 0-262-14058-6.

1966

• (Jellinek & Ball, 1966) ⇒ E. H . Jellinek, and Keith Ball. (1966). “Hashimoto's Disease and Encephalopathy.” The Lancet, 288(7462).
  • QUOTE: ... anesthesia in the right arm and leg for a few hours, In May, 1961, he became tired and irritable, and on July 10, he was found struck down with sudden aphasia and right hemiplegia. He was conscious on admission to hospital but ...

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2023

• (Wikipedia, 2023) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness Retrieved:2023-8-28.
  • Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguists, and scientists. 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 mind. In the past, it was one's "inner life", 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, 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 the range of descriptions, definitions or explanations are: 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.