What is Consciousness?

What is consciousness?

We all know what is like to be conscious:

To be aware of ourselves and the world around us. And we also know how to recognize different kinds of unconsciousness, as:

- When someone is asleep.

- When someone is under anapaestic.

Even so, scientists have struggled to explain what consciousness is in a scientific way and terms.

Early psychologists like William James and William Wundet believed that the purpose of psychology is to describe and explain the human conscious behaviour.

Being conscious is a personal experience, and the only way which they could examine consciousness was through observing what is going on their own minds.

Through this process of observing, William James noticed that his conscious thoughts were constantly changing when he was thinking or doing one thing, something else sprang to his mind.

As if thoughts have been interrupted by another thought… and so on.

James also noticed that the way which these different experiences seemed all to come together from one thought, and he called that “Stream of Consciousness”.

Sigmund Freud was also fascinated by consciousness, but he didn’t try to explain the state of being conscious, he identified three levels of consciousness:

1. The conscious mind includes everything that we are aware of. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about rationally. A part of this includes our memory, which is not always part of consciousness but can be retrieved easily at any time and brought into our awareness. Freud called this the preconscious.

2. The preconscious mind is the part of the mind that represents ordinary memory. While we are not consciously aware of this information at any given time, we can retrieve it and pull it into consciousness when needed.

3. The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. According to Freud, the unconscious continues to influence our behaviour and experience, even though we are unaware of these underlying influences.

Freud linked these three levels of mind to an iceberg. The top of the iceberg that you can see above the water represents the conscious mind. The part of the iceberg that is submerged below the water but is still visible is the preconscious. The bulk of the iceberg lies unseen beneath the waterline and represents the unconscious.

Modern neuroscience suggests that the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness is not clear till now, even while person in a coma, the brain is still active.

The biologist Francis Crick compared the brain activity of healthy people and those in a persistent coma state, he found that in the consciousness brain there was more activity in the cortex area than in the unconsciousness brain. So, the conclusion was that this part of the brain cortex is associated more with consciousness, and the consciousness is a result of the connections and association in various parts of our brains, by linking the information from all our senses, memories and thoughts.

Another neuroscientist explained this by using a camera taking a picture of an apple, the image the camera receives is composed of many different pixels, but the camera treats each pixel separately and doesn’t see the apple as a whole.

In contrast, our brains can make the connections between the pixels to give us a picture of the apple in our minds, and to remind us of everything we associate with the idea of an apple.

So, it is not just the amount of activity in our brains, but the degree of its interconnectivity, that determine our level of consciousness.

Decision making and The Illogical Decisions!

Throughout our lives, we are facing a daily difficult choices. Sometimes we constantly have to solve problems and make decisions, and to do that we need to use our ability to reason and to think about problems then make sense of it. This process of rational thought gives us the information we need to make the right choice.

Mental maps to find solutions

Most psychologists are more interested in behaviour than mental processes. Behaviourist psychologists believed that we learned simply by stimulus and response. Edward Tolman, for example, explained that we do explore the world through a process of trial and error, learning which things we do give us a reward and which don’t, but we also think about these things and build up a “mental map” of the world around us. We can then use this map to help us solve problems and make decisions.

Illogical decisions

Rational thought—reasoning—is crucial in helping us understand problems and gain insights into solving them. It’s what allows us to make sensible decisions, choosing what to do based on the evidence of our experience. But the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky warned that our reasoning is not always reliable, and that we sometimes make decisions that seem to be rational, but are actually based on mistaken reasoning, or no reasoning at all.

From our experience, we build a set of general “rules of thumb” that we can refer to whenever we make a decision. However, these guidelines are mainly based on a small amount of personal experience and may not provide an accurate picture. They may also be influenced by our personal opinions and beliefs. And although they help us make decisions more quickly and easily, without having to examine the statistical evidence in detail, they often lead us to make irrational decisions—even though we believe they are rational.

Kahneman and Tversky identified several different types of faulty reasoning we use in making decisions, which they called “cognitive biases.”

Cognitive biases are based largely on our personal experiences, so the irrational decisions we make because of them may serve us well enough in our day-to-day lives. But when it comes to important decision making, especially in situations that are new to us, we should be aware of how such bias can mislead us. Understanding these common faults in reasoning can help us avoid making dangerous or costly mistakes.

How Big is Your Snowball? The Way We Gain Knowledge!

The way we gain knowledge is similar to the way a snowball grows as it rolls down a snow-covered hill. We search for meaning in the information we gather, which helps us remember it better. We learn best if we experience things firsthand, rather than just gathering facts.

Knowledge

Is all what we have learned about the world around us and how can we live in it. When we learn new information we store it in our memory, that information we have stored and can be remembered is what we can call KNOWLEDGE!

For a long time, it was thought that knowledge consisted of nothing but facts, and traditional teaching methods focused on getting students to memorize those facts, often through constant repetition. But as psychology emerged as a science in the 20th century, ideas of knowledge began to change. The way we learn, and the way we remember things, became major branches of study for psychologists, challenging the notion that knowledge is simply remembering facts, and giving a new perspective on the role of the learner and the teacher in acquiring knowledge. Psychologists realized that learning is not just a question of collecting and storing knowledge from the outside world, the learner also has a part to play, by actively exploring his environment and learning by experience.

We build up our knowledge step by step, going over ideas in more and more detail, making connections and associations with other ideas. This involves actively and continually experiencing things, rather than getting knowledge secondhand, so simply being told or shown something by a teacher may not always be the best way to learn. Knowledge is more likely to stick if we’re encouraged to participate in the learning process—for example, by making a cake, rather than just reading a recipe—and then to make sense of the information we discover.

Learning is not just what we do to gain knowledge; it is also a mental process, in which we find meaning in the information gathered and connect it to other knowledge. And because learning is a continuous process, our knowledge is continually changing.