I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
This has been debated for hours and years by scientists and philosophers. Mostly I think they are arguing about what conciousness means?!
I think consciousness is a state of being aware and this results from attention… what are we looking at, listening to, feeling and what are we processing in our thoughts. If you don’t attend to something, how do you know it’s there?
However, its not as black and white as attending or not attending. The brain selectively filters things out from our environment, as its almost impossible to attend to everything, your brain would overload. Still, all this information isn’t totally lost, our brain does take in some detail before we are actively aware of it. This allows us to respond quickly when we need to. We can actually test this by looking at the brain activity of people when they are reacting and responding to a task. The brain activity lights up before the subjects are aware that they saw the stimuli or know the answer. Does this pre-attentive process fit into the definition of consciousness?
Watch this….
0
OK. This is a tough one blackgreygold!
Consciousness, by definition, is subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. You would be asking about the “sense of self” aspect. It is therefore in line with the question: “what is a soul?”, which is your moral or emotional nature or sense of identity.
Looking at it from a religious point of view, it’s the part of you that is immortal and continues to exist even after death.
Looking at it from a scientific point of view, you could attribute it to the brain, being our world and center does not detect (doesn’t “see” or “know”) itself as part of the rest of our body.
The truth of the matter is, we have no idea! We don’t know what makes us “us”, and what gives us the ability to self-reflect etc. Ultimately our consciousness could just be a a way of us dealing with reality, and a way so that we can understand or accept that we are a part of something special.
Very deep stuff right there 😉
0
I agree with these guys that consciousness is a state of being aware, or yourself, of others and of the environment around you.
And, it’s also used as a medical term. For example “she failed to regain consciousness and died two days later.” It pretty much means the same thing here, in this case it means awake and alert.
0