Consciousness

Introduction

The word consciousness, alternatively expressed as conscious experience, refers to a variety of phenomena related to the activities of the mind, whose prominent aspects include:

• Qualia, or qualitative states of mind accompanied so-called raw feels of awareness, like the olfactory sensing of the odor of a rose, or the visual sensing of its red color, or the pain from receiving a prick from a thorn on the roses stem;

• Subjectivity, or the so-called first person knowledge of aspects of one’s own mind’s activity, how relaxed or anxious one feels, and other emotional states;

• Perspective, or point of view one has of oneself, others, and the world;

• Metacognition, or higher-order thoughts about what one’s thoughts or experiences at any given moment.

Those hardly exhaust all of the notable aspects of the conscious experience that each person has direct access to as components of the activity of their mind.