What Is Consciousness?

Brothers & Sisters, here is a topic we are about to discuss: CONSCIOUSNESS. Please be patient and review all this information as it will build into a climax.

Consciousness: Explaining the nature of consciousness is one of the most important and perplexing areas of philosophy, but the concept is notoriously ambiguous. The abstract noun “consciousness” is not frequently used by itself in the contemporary literature, but is originally derived from the Latin con (with) and scire (to know). Perhaps the most commonly used contemporary notion of a conscious mental state is captured by Thomas Nagel’s famous “what it is like” sense (Nagel 1974). When I am in a conscious mental state, there is something it is like for me to be in that state from the subjective or first-person point of view. But how are we to understand this? For instance, how is the conscious mental state related to the body? Can consciousness be explained in terms of brain activity? What makes a mental state be a conscious mental state? The problem of consciousness is arguably the most central issue in current philosophy of mind and is also importantly related to major traditional topics in metaphysics, such as the possibility of immortality and the belief in free will. This article focuses on Western theories and conceptions of consciousness, especially as found in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind.

The two broad, traditional and competing theories of mind are dualism and materialism (or physicalism). While there are many versions of each, the former generally holds that the conscious mind or a conscious mental state is non-physical in some sense, whereas the latter holds that, to put it crudely, the mind is the brain, or is caused by neural activity. It is against this general backdrop that many answers to the above questions are formulated and developed. There are also many familiar objections to both materialism and dualism. For example, it is often said that materialism cannot truly explain just how or why some brain states are conscious, and that there is an important “explanatory gap” between mind and matter. On the other hand, dualism faces the problem of explaining how a non-physical substance or mental state can causally interact with the physical body.

Some philosophers attempt to explain consciousness directly in neurophysiological or physical terms, while others offer cognitive theories of consciousness whereby conscious mental states are reduced to some kind of representational relation between mental states and the world. There are a number of such representational theories of consciousness currently on the market, including higher-order theories which hold that what makes a mental state conscious is that the subject is aware of it in some sense. The relationship between consciousness and science is also central in much current theorizing on this topic: How does the brain “bind together” various sensory inputs to produce a unified subjective experience? What are the neural correlates of consciousness? What can be learned from abnormal psychology which might help us to understand normal consciousness? To what extent are animal minds different from human minds? Could an appropriately programmed machine be conscious?

Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.

WHAT PART DOES DUALISM PLAY IN CONSCIOUSNESS ?

Dualism and Mind: Dualists in the philosophy of mind emphasize the radical difference between mind and matter. They all deny that the mind is the same as the brain, and some deny that the mind is wholly a product of the brain. This article explores the various ways that dualists attempt to explain this radical difference between the mental and the physical world. A wide range of arguments for and against the various dualistic options are discussed.

Substance dualists typically argue that the mind and the body are composed of different substances and that the mind is a thinking thing that lacks the usual attributes of physical objects: size, shape, location, solidity, motion, adherence to the laws of physics, and so on. Substance dualists fall into several camps depending upon how they think mind and body are related. Interactionists believe that minds and bodies causally affect one another. Occasionalists and parallelists, generally motivated by a concern to preserve the integrity of physical science, deny this, ultimately attributing all apparent interaction to God. Epiphenomenalists offer a compromise theory, asserting that bodily events can have mental events as effects while denying that the reverse is true, avoiding any threat to the scientific law of conservation of energy at the expense of the common sense notion that we act for reasons.

Property dualists argue that mental states are irreducible attributes of brain states. For the property dualist, mental phenomena are non-physical properties of physical substances. Consciousness is perhaps the most widely recognized example of a non-physical property of physical substances. Still other dualists argue that mental states, dispositions and episodes are brain states, although the states cannot be conceptualized in exactly the same way without loss of meaning.

Dualists commonly argue for the distinction of mind and matter by employing Leibniz's Law of Identity, according to which two things are identical if, and only if, they simultaneously share exactly the same qualities. The dualist then attempts to identify attributes of mind that are lacked by matter (such as privacy or intentionality) or vice versa (such as having a certain temperature or electrical charge). Opponents typically argue that dualism is (a) inconsistent with known laws or truths of science (such as the aforementioned law of thermodynamics), (b) conceptually incoherent (because immaterial minds could not be individuated or because mind-body interaction is not humanly conceivable), or (c) reducible to absurdity (because it leads to solipsism, the epistemological belief that one's self is the only existence that can be verified and known).

WHAT IS MATERIALISM IN OUR SEARCH FOR WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS ?

materialism: noun 1. a tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values. "they hated the sinful materialism of the wicked city" 2. PHILOSOPHY - the theory or belief that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications. the theory or belief that consciousness and will are wholly due to material agency.

CONSCIOUSNESS: this word comes to us through many different philosophies in our lives (as most things that oppose truth do). We are speaking here of western societies` philosophies and their dominance within our culture. Most mindsets aimed at us come packaged in the form of a (and remember we said `form of'), religious priesthood, because we are used to being spoken to from a pulpit (priesthood-laity) formulation. This formulated approach towards us (western society) is a guaranteed success in its dominance, because the western mindset is accustomed to being laity and acceptable of someone dressed better than them in every respect, with the cars, boats, planes and real estate (funded to them for the purpose of gaining our mindset and contribution). Those approaching us through the pulpit vehicle are in actual fact their own religion, which is something we have to learn and it already puts us in a laity situation.

MOST OF US ARE LIVING A CONSCIOUSNESS OF WHAT HAS BEEN PREPARED FOR US BY OUR PULPIT OPERATORS WHICH ARE ALL OPERATING THIS RELIGIOUS AGENDA.

Western society has also been bombarded by myriads of eastern philosophical consciousness belief systems, breaking through and manifesting the western domain through this laity-pulpit vehicle, expressing this new liberating consciousness which makes them rich.

THE NEW DEMON ON THE BLOCK IS "TRUTH", WHICH MUST BE REJECTED AND RIDICULED BECAUSE IT LIBERATES THE VICTIMS, JUST AS MESSIAH DID. TRUTH HAS NO RELIGION AND DELIVERS THE CAPTIVES.

It is amazing to see the levels, extents and extremes the enemy has gone, to block out all reality of our awareness of the fact that we are living within the confinements of a supernatural environment or realm, some might prefer to call it a reign .Lies have thrown a global dark blanket (which has the heaviness of a wet blanket) over our captured consciousnesses.

We Feel the dreariness of the heavy laden wet blanket (sin), blocking our consciousness from receiving any supernatural experiences or activities from Messiah. We realise we are missing some sort of component of life that would be exuberating our lifestyles to a heightened familiarisation with our Maker, which is inexplicably and supernaturally abundantly clear by what is created. Trouble is, most people refuse their own, or any other actually supernatural existence as a reality.

INSTEAD MOST PEOPLE ARE DIRGED TO EXIST AS THE WALKING DEAD, UNAPPRECIATIVE OF LIFE UNDER COVENANTAL INSTRUCTIONAL PROTECTION, THEY WATCH KNOWINGLY, THEIR CONTROLLED, DISEASED CARCUSES MARCHING THEM TO IT'S DOOM. THEY ARE CAPTIVE TO A DECEIVED MINDSET, TOWERED IN IT'S LOWEST DUNGEON, ABLE TO SEE FROM THE INSIDE THROUGH THE EYE CAVITIES, BUT UNABLE TO CO-ORDINATE THE TONGUE AND LIMBS TO PRESENT AN ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOUR. THEY ARE LOST IN THEIR DELUSIONAL PRISON UNAWARES OF THEIR CONQUERING INHABITANT WHO DISTRIBUTES INJECTED EGO BOOSTS TO KEEP THE VESSELS OWNER UNCONSCIOUS OF IT'S PRESENCE.

This is the state of all humans globally who do not accept not only their supernatural componencies, but the presence of other supernatural identities.

By Chris Hilton . . .