Consciousness is a great mystery. Its definition isn't.
You wake up to a stream of consciousness, which is your perception of the world and its content, with you at the subjective center of the experience. Throughout the day this stream is the reason for everything you do. You get water because you’re thirsty, take turns while driving because you have a destination in mind, talk because you’re feeling... See more
Neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic. Consciousness is why
there is an essential meaning of the word “consciousness,” one that contemporary neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, or philosophers can recognize, even though they approach the phenomenon with varied methods and explain it in different ways. For all of them, more often than not, “consciousness” is a synonym of mental experience. And what
... See moreAntonio Damasio • Feeling & Knowing
I want to reemphasize the miraculous existence of any form of consciousness by paraphrasing Ludwig Wittgenstein: Not how consciousness is, is mystical, but that it is.
That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation.
Christof Koch • Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It
Consciousness is a gathering of knowledge sufficient to generate, in the midst of flowing images, automatically, the notion that the images are mine, are happening in my living organism, and that the mind is…well, mine too! The secret of consciousness is gathering knowledge and exhibiting that knowledge as a certificate of identity for the mind.
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