We Are All Connected
Consciousness is often used colloquially to describe being awake and aware—responsive to the environment, in contrast to being asleep or in a coma. In philosophical and scientific discussion, however, the term is restricted to the specific way in which humans are mentally aware in such a way that they distinguish clearly between themselves (the thing being aware) and all other things and events. A characteristic of consciosuness is that it is reflective, an awareness of being aware. This self-awareness may involve thoughts, sensations, perceptions, moods, emotions, and dreams. Consciousness is the subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill or comatose people; whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how it can be measured; at what point in fetal development consciousness begins; and whether computers can achieve a conscious state. The word conscious is derived from Latin conscius meaning 1. having joint or common knowledge with another, privy to, cognizant of; 2. conscious to oneself; esp., conscious of guilt. A related word was conscientia which primarily means moral conscience. In the literal sense, conscientia means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridic texts by writers such as Cicero. Here, conscientia is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else. In Christian theology, conscience stands for the moral conscience in which our actions and intentions are registered and which is only fully known to God. Medieval writers such as Thomas Aquinas describe the conscientia as the act by which we apply practical and moral knowledge to our own actions. Some have conjectured that René Descartes (1596-1650) was the first philosopher to use conscientia in a way that does not seem to fit this traditional meaning, although this has recently been countered by Boris Hennig. In any event, John Locke had much influence on the 18th Century view of consciousness: in Samuel Johnson's celebrated Dictionary (1755), Johnson gives a definition of conscious as endowed with the power of knowing one's own thoughts and actions, and takes Locke's own definition of consciousness as the perception of what passes in a man's own mind. Locke offered a definition of consciousness in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that remained closely intertwined with moral conscience (I may be held morally responsible only for the act of which I am conscious of having achieved; and my personal identity—my self—goes as far as my consciousness extends itself). Twelve years earlier, Ralph Cudworth used the modern meaning of consciousness in his True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) and associated the concept with personal identity, which is assured by the repeated consciousness of oneself. Cudworth's use of the term also remained intertwined with moral agency. The word conscience was coined by Pierre Costes, French translator of Locke, but in the English language the modern sense first appeared in Cudworth's works. There are many philosophical stances on consciousness, including: behaviorism, dualism, idealism, functionalism, reflexive monism, phenomenalism, phenomenology and intentionality, physicalism, emergentism, mysticism, personal identity etc.
