Definitions of consciousness
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Consciousness is notoriously difficult to define, though as some have pointed out, we all know what it is from direct experience. Here is a selection of notable views.


"A mere echo, the faint rumour left behind by the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of philosophy ."

William James, 'Does Consciousness Exist?''  1904

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 "Consciousness: the having of perceptions, thoughts and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means... Nothing worth reading has been written about it."

Stuart Sutherland, 'Consciousness', International Dictionary of Psychology', 1995

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"...there is no question of there being a commonly accepted, exclusive sense of the term... I prefer to use it as synonymous with 'mental phenomenon' or 'mental act.' "

"...intentional in-existence, the reference to something as an object, is a distinguishing characteristic of all mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything similar." 

Franz Brentano, 'Psychology from an empirical standpoint', 1874

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" ...current values of parameters governing the high-level computations of the operating system."

P. Johnson-Laird, 'A computational analysis of consciousness', Cognition and Brain Theory, 1983

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"Consciousness is like the Trinity; if it is explained so that you understand it, it hasn't been explained correctly ."

R.J. Joynt, 'Are Two Heads better than One?', Behavioural Brain Sciences, 1981

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"'Consciousness' refers to those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die or otherwise become 'unconscious'."

John Searle , 'The Mystery of Consciousness', 1997

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"What is meant by consciousness we need not discuss - it is beyond all doubt."

Sigmund Freud, 'New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis', 1933

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"It is often held therefore (1) that a mind cannot help being constantly aware of all the supposed occupants of its own private stage, and (2)  that it can also deliberately scrutinize by a species of non-sensuous perception at least some of its own states and operations. Moreover both this constant awareness (generally called 'consciousness'), and this non-sensuous inner perception (generally called 'introspection') have been supposed to be exempt from error.

Gilbert Ryle, 'The Concept of Mind', 1949

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"...perhaps 'consciousness' is best seen as a sort of dummy term like 'thing'; useful for the flexibility that is assured by its lack of specific content."

Kathleen Wilkes, 'Is Consciousness Important?', British Journal of Philosophy of Science, 1984

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"We are conscious of something, on this model, when we have a thought about it. So a mental state will be conscious if it is accompanied by a thought about that state...The core of the theory, then is that a mental state is a conscious state when, and only when, it is accompanied by a suitable HOT [Higher Order Thought]"

David M. Rosenthal, 'A Theory of Consciousness', The Nature of Consciousness (ed Block, Flanagan and Güzeldere), 1997

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"Behaviourism claims that consciousness is neither a definite nor a usable concept. The behaviourist, who has been trained always as an experimentalist, holds, further, that belief in the existence of consciousness goes back to the ancient days of superstition and magic."

John Watson, 'Behaviourism', 1924

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"'Consciousness' is a word worn smooth by a million tongues. Depending upon the figure of speech chosen it is a state of being, a substance, a process, a place, an epiphenomenon, an emergent aspect of matter, or the only true reality."

George Miller, 'Psychology: the Science of Mental Life'', 1962

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"Consciousness, we shall find, is reducible to relations between objects, and objects we shall find to be reducible to relations between different states of consciousness; and neither point of view is more nearly ultimate than the other."

T.S.Eliot (Doctoral dissertation), 1916

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"The concept of consciousness is a hybrid or better, a mongrel concept: the word 'consciousness' connotes a number of different concepts and denotes a number of different phenomena... P-consciousness is experience...A is access-consciousness. A state is A-conscious if it is poised for free use in reasoning and for direct 'rational' control of action and speech...Conflation of  P-consciousness and A-consciousness is ubiquitous in the burgeoning literature on consciousness..."

Ned Block, 'On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness', Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 1995

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"... in the most interesting sense of the word 'consciousness', consciousness is the cream on the cake of mentality, a special and sophisticated development of mentality. It is not the cake itself."

David Armstrong, 'What is consciousness?' , The nature of Mind and Other Essays, 1980

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"The improvements we install in our brain when we learn our languages permit us to review, recall, rehearse, redesign our own activities, turning our brains into echo chambers of sorts, in which otherwise evanescent processes can hang around and become objects in their own right. Those that persist the longest, acquiring influence as they persist, we call our conscious thoughts."

Daniel Dennett , 'Kinds of Minds', 1996

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"The presence of mental images and their use by an animal to regulate its behavior, provides a pragmatic working definition of consciousness"

D.R.Griffin, 'The Question of Animal Awareness', 1976

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See also:  What Are We Even Talking About?

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