Domain

Contents

What is it, exactly?

• Under lots of debate & scrutiny
• Mainly, due to lack of consensus
• Different components & misleading to categorise all under one name

Dictionary

• Awareness
• Sensations
• Thoughts
• Surroundings

Distinctions

• Biological phenomena
• Elaborate rite of passage into everything that makes us humans

Roger Penrose

• Current state of physics limits our ability to explain the mind
• Consciousness=mind

Francis Crick

• You, your sorrows, memories, ambitions, personal identity & free will are simply the behaviour of an assembly of cells & their associated molecules
• Maybe some unknown aspects

Pythagoras

• 3 levels:
• Instincts
• Emotions
• Intelligence

Antonio R. Damasio

• 2 parts:
• Essential: "awareness" - present
• Extended: "consciousness" - duration of past, present & future
• Awareness gives rise to consciousness

Sigmund Freud

• Consciousness=conscious + unconscious mental states
• Pioneer of psychoanalysis
• Freud's theory of the unconscious is the first to apply deterministic principles systematically to the sphere of the mental
• The Interpretation of Dreams
• Dreams & Dream research

Richard Maurice Burke

• Consciousness=initial consciousness + self-consciousness + cosmic consciousness
• "Cosmic Consciousness in its more striking instances is not," Dr. Bucke says, "simply an expansion or extension of the self-conscious mind with which we are all familiar, but the superaddition of a function as distinct from any possessed by the average man as self-consciousness is distinct from any function possessed by one of the higher animals."
• "The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a consciousness of the cosmos...the life and or

Artificial Intelligence

• Knowledge: enculturation to system & environment
• Environmental consciousness: phenomenal sensing & response
• Inference: sense-process-synthesize-response through internal order
• Evolution: process-driven adaptation in response to stimulus