a set of circumstances checked against one's own set of values to be evaluated whether it's ok to go ahead with it or not!

a set of circumstances checked against one's own set of values to be evaluated whether it's ok to go ahead with it or not!

alert, aware of everything around you, "awake" means you can look at the big picture, and see where we are going as a species, and "feel" how big our universe actually is..

somebody better start looking for me

A mental, emotional, physical sensational state of perception or awareness of an object or concept with respect to one's self.

Wow, nice one.

What do you mean by a mental or emotional sensational state of perception though?

Mental means something involving the mind, but we cannot perceive without the mind, so perhaps your statement can be simplified to exclude "mental."

Can I be conscious without feeling an emotion such as happiness, fear, contempt, etc? Can I be conscious on a piece of dirt or a piece of paper without having an emotional reaction? Perhaps not, but it's debatable. Emotion...that's very interesting that you mentioned that, I think, because it makes things more complicated, and my example with the computer perhaps does not work. I suppose we'd have to delve deeper and define emotion to get a better handle on that...

I like that you wrote "perception or awareness of an object or concept with respect to one's self." However, my program above perceives, that is, receives input from the person typing "Blue." It checks this input with respect to itself, that is with respect to the different criteria and values it has. Again, is the program conscious on a very basic level?

One dramatic contrast is between the vast number of
unconscious neural processes happening in any given
moment, compared to the very narrow bottleneck of
conscious capacity. The narrow limits of consciousness
have a compensating advantage: consciousness seems to act
as a gateway, creating access to essentially any part of the
nervous system. Even single neurons can be controlled by
way of conscious feedback. Conscious experience creates
@ Bernard J. Baars, 1997, Theater of Consciousness. J Consciousness Studies. p. 3
access to the mental lexicon, to autobiographical memory,
and to voluntary control over automatic action routines.
Daniel C. Dennett has suggested that consciousness may
itself be viewed as that to which ‘we’ have access
(Dennett, 1978) All these facts may be summed up by
saying that consciousness creates global access.

How can we understand the evidence? The best
answer today is a ‘global workspace architecture’, first
developed by cognitive modelling groups led by Alan
Newell and Herbert A. Simon. This mental architecture
can be described informally as a working theatre. Working
theatres are not just ‘Cartesian’ daydreams — they do real
things, just like real theatres (Dennett & Kinsbourne, 1992;
Newell, 1990). They have a marked resemblance to other
current accounts (e.g. Damasio, 1989; Gazzaniga, 1993;
Shallice, 1988; Velmans, 1996). In the working theatre,
focal consciousness acts as a ‘bright spot’ on the stage,
directed there by the selective ‘spotlight’ of attention.
The bright spot is further surrounded by a ‘fringe,’ of vital but
vaguely conscious events (Mangan, 1993).

The entire stage
of the theatre corresponds to ‘working memory’, the
immediate memory system in which we talk to ourselves,
visualize places and people, and plan actions. Information
from the bright spot is globally distributed through the
theatre, to two classes of complex unconscious processors:
those in the darkened theatre ‘audience’ mainly receive
information from the bright spot; while ‘behind the scenes’,
unconscious contextual systems shape events in the bright
spot. One example of such a context is the unconscious
philosophical
assumptions with which we tend to approach
the topic of consciousness. Another is the right parietal map
that creates a spatial context for visual scenes (Kinsbourne,
1993).
Baars (1983;1988; 1997) has developed these
arguments in great detail, and aspects of this framework
have now been taken up by others, such as the philosopher
David Chalmers (1996). Some brain implications of the
theory have been explored. Global Workspace (GW) theory
provides the most useful framework to date for our rapidly
accumulating body of evidence. It is consistent with our
current knowledge, and can be enriched to include other
aspects of human experience.

Consciousness

Con - Against

Scious - Knowing, having knowledge

Ness - A large Scottish Loch, with a famous monster living in its depths.


Consciousness - The ability to eat haggis whilst knowing what it is made out of.