• Question: What is consciousness?

    Asked by 332xygg37 to Gavin, Karen, Mark, Michel, Roisin on 11 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Karen

      Karen answered on 11 Nov 2016:

      Consciousness is basically just being awake, lucid and aware of your surroundings.

    • Photo: Roisin Jones

      Roisin Jones answered on 13 Nov 2016:

      As Karen said, consciousness is generally defined as being awake and aware of your surroundings, although it can also be used to refer to the state of being aware that your mind is aware, like sentience.

    • Photo: Mark Kennedy

      Mark Kennedy answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      Hopefully, in the future, we’ll fully understand consciousness. And by fully understand it, I mean we’ll be able to make a computer that has consciousness.

      Such a computer, which would be a proper artificial intelligence, would both be very dangerous (what if it doesn’t like humans, and it’s smarter than us? 🙁 ) and awesome (because it would be able to solve so many problems much quicker than we could).

      On another note, if “consciousness is basically just being awake, lucid and aware of your surroundings”, which is absolutely a good definition of it, then how do you know that you are conscious, and that you aren’t dreaming right now?

    • Photo: Michel Destrade

      Michel Destrade answered on 16 Nov 2016:

      I too think it’s really hard to define consciousness. Most people think it’s due to brain activity, but then there are some people with almost no brain who seem to function normally!
      https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors/

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