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Blessed day to everyone! I welcome you to the 2 nd unit of our subject. Let us develop a habit of
praying before doing anything. Here is again the prayer of St. Thomas before study.
Let us now begin the lesson. I suggest that you should read comprehensively all the
lessons. Almost all of the activities and discussions are taken from the book of Cencini A. &
Manenti A. (2000). Psychology and Formation.
DESCRIBING CONSCIOUSNESS
- Consciousness is an individual’s state of awareness of their environment, thoughts,
feelings, or sensations; in order to experience consciousness, one must be both awake and
aware.
MEANING OF CONSCIOUSNESS
- Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something
within oneself, such as thoughts, feelings, memories, or sensations.
- It has also been defined in the following ways: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the
ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the
executive-control system of the mind.
- At one time, consciousness was viewed with skepticism by many scientists, but in recent
years, it has become a significant topic of research in psychology and neuroscience.
PHILOSOPHY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
- Despite the difficulty in coming to a definition, many philosophers believe that there is a
broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
- Philosophers since the time of Descartes and Locke have struggled to comprehend the
nature of consciousness and pin down its essential properties.
- Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness include the following:
o whether consciousness can ever be explained mechanistically;
o whether non-human consciousness exists, and if so, how it can be recognized;
o how consciousness relates to language; whether consciousness can be understood
in a way that does not require a dualistic distinction between mental and physical
states or properties; and
o whether it may ever be possible for computers or robots to be conscious.
as previously mentioned, is noted for his dualist theory of consciousness, in which the
physical body is separate from the immaterial mind. He also gave us the most famous
summary of human consciousness: “I think, therefore I am.”
- The historical materialism of Karl Marx rejects the mind-body dichotomy, and holds that
consciousness is engendered by the material contingencies of one’s environment. John
Locke, another early philosopher, claimed that consciousness, and therefore personal
identity, are independent of all substances. He pointed out that there is no reason to
assume that consciousness is tied to any particular body or mind, or that consciousness
cannot be transferred from one body or mind to another.
- The Ancient Mayans were among the first to propose an organized sense of each level of
consciousness, its purpose, and its temporal connection to humankind. Because
consciousness incorporates stimuli from the environment as well as internal stimuli, the
Mayans believed it to be the most basic form of existence, capable of evolution. The
Incas, however, considered consciousness a progression not only of awareness but of
concern for others as well.
- According to Freud the id, ego, and superego all operate across three levels of awareness
in the human mind. They are the conscious, unconscious, and preconscious.
o The conscious: The conscious consists of what someone is aware of at any
particular point in time. It includes what you are thinking about right now,
whether it is in the front of you mind or the back. If you are aware of it then it is
in the conscious mind.
Example: Right now as you are reading about Freud you could be thinking
about what is being said in the text and that your eyes are tired from
staring at this screen. In the back of your mind, however, you might be
thinking "wow this website is really cool, if I was a psychology teacher I
would give whoever made it an A". Both of these thoughts occur in the
conscious mind.
o The Preconscious: The preconscious contains information that is just below the
surface of awareness. It can be retrieved with relative ease and usually can be
thought of as memory or recollection.
o The Unconscious: The unconscious contains thoughts, memories, and desires that
are buried deep in ourselves, well below our conscious awareness. Even though
we are not aware of their existence, they exert great influence on our behavior.
Example: Things in your unconscious would be forgotten negative
experiences in your past, extreme dislike for a parent, or a terrible event
that you pushed out of your preconscious.
3. Neuropsychology on Consciousness
Neuropsychologists view consciousness as ingrained in neural systems and organic
brain structures. A major part of the modern scientific literature on consciousness
consists of studies that examine the relationship between the experiences reported by
subjects and the activity that simultaneously takes place in their brains—that is,
studies of the neural correlates of consciousness. The hope is to find activity in a
particular part of the brain, or a particular pattern of global brain activity, that will be
strongly predictive of conscious awareness. Several brain-imaging techniques, such
as EEG and fMRI, have been used for physical measures of brain activity in these
studies.
Activities
Psycho-spiritual’s Activity # 2
Reflective Focus Action Learning
My question about the To find out about it, I will: What I learned from this topic:
topic:
How our mental thinking I will research some studies, What I learned from this topic is
related to our physical coz’ I need more knowledge that every ideas on consciousness
states, bodily functions, regarding on this mental helps us to negotiate complex
and external events, states relations to our social relationships in our
given that the body is physical states. Yes, there’s environment which measures our
physical and the mind is an explanation in our social awareness and evolves
non-physical? learning module/ learning social beliefs and attitudes.
material but it is not strong
explanation. I want deep
and more answers about
this.