【概念学习】什么是意识？

杠头儿 · 发表于 2011-1-22 18:42

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词目：意识
　　拼音：yì shi
　　定义：意识，是物质的一种高级有序组织形式，是指生物由其物理感知系统能够感知的特征总和以及相关的感知处理活动。关于意识的定义和概念，一定要将其与精神、理性、真理等概念区分清楚。
　　心理学中定义为人所特有的一种对客观现实的高级心理反映形式。
　　意识原意为精神活动。意，既是自我的意思。识，就是认知，认识。意识，代表我们作为个体的独立性。是主观存在的独特坐标。意识，代表了我们可以认识自己的存在，可以知道发生的事情。可以对立与不同于自己的存在进行对比。意识的定义非常简单，就是认识和知道事物的存在的那个。意识本来就是精神同一种用法。理性从意识而来，真理是观念等同，跟心理无关。
　　基本解释意识：是人脑的机能，是客观存在的主观映像

详细解释

　　1. 识见。
　　汉王充《论衡·实知》：“众人阔略，寡所意识，见贤圣之名物，则谓之神。”《北齐书·文宣帝纪》：“ 高祖尝试观诸子意识，各使治乱丝，帝独抽刀斩之，曰：‘乱者须斩。’ 高祖是之。” 清纪昀《阅微草堂笔记·滦阳消夏录一》：“此怪大佳，其意识在绮罗人上。”
　　2. 指先入之见。
　　宋王明清《挥麈后录》卷二：“子之所陈，心存意识，或欲周知，何从皆得？”
　　3. 人的头脑对于客观物质世界的反映，是各种心理过程的总和。
　　柳青《铜墙铁壁》第二章：“我那阵农民意识太重，总想回家安贴一下老娘。” 韩北屏《非洲夜会·酋长的故事》：“大多数的酋长总有一定的民族主义意识，特别是那些偏僻的边远的地方。”
　　4. 觉察；感觉。
　　阿英《夜》：“她意识着这一定又是敌人在扫射自己的同志。” 茅盾《喜剧》一：“连同乡会也是委员制了么？他这才更明晰地意识到世界确是换了一个样子了。”
　　5. 谓自觉抱有某种目的。
　　冰心《超人》：“随手拿起一本书来，无意识的看着。” 丁玲《一九三○年春上海（之一）》五：“不过他咽住了，他怕子彬多心，以为他是有意识讥讽他。”
　　6. 佛教语。佛教六识之一，即由意根所起之识，亦称法识。
　　南朝梁武帝《浄业赋序》：“除此二障，意识稍明，内外经书，读便解悟。” 章炳麟《国故论衡·辨性上》：“意根之动，谓之意识。”意识Consiousness

意识的概念、性质以及与之相关的事物

　　意识是思维主体对信息进行处理后的产物。没有思维主体及思维活动就不可能产生意识。思维主体是可对信息进行能动操作（如采集、传递、存储、提取、删除、对比、筛选、判别、排列、分类、变相、转形、整合、表达等等作业）的物质。思维主体既有自然进化而形成的动物（比如人类），也（会）有逐渐发展完善的人工智能产品。
　　信息是能被思维主体识别的事物现象及表象，是思维活动的操作对象。思维活动所产生的意识以信息的形式储存、表现和传递输出，意识传播的实质是信息传播。意识往往又会成为思维主体进行下一步思维的基础。
　　意识的产生需要能量，意识的存在和传播需要介质（物质），总之，意识的存在是依附于物质的。意识所表达的涵义与其物质载体本身的现象往往并不是一回事，撇去载体的因素，意识的内涵并不以占据空间的形式存在，而物质存在是占据空间的，这就是意识与物质的根本区别。
　　由于思维主体在获取及处理信息时，信息可能发生种种变异，因此意识的内容不一定就是客观事物的反映，意识可能超越客观事物。

心理学术语

　　意识是心理学上的用语。
　　意识，它是哲学、心理学以及其它有关学科共同的研究对象或研究课题。究竟什么是意识，不仅它本身是一个一时难于说清楚的复杂问题，而且从古至今人们对它的理解也很不一致，众说纷纭，让人莫衷一是。
　　在马克思主义经典著作中称的“意识”一词有两种用法：一个当动词用，即指“意识到”的活动，亦即认识活动；一是当名词用，即指与物质相对立的活动的结果，如知识、思想、观念等等。
　　心理学研究意识问题与哲学研究意识问题有一致之处，但又有所区别。从一致处来说：二者研究的都是意识问题，而且科学心理学对意识问题的研究，接受马克思主义哲学的指导。从区别来说：哲学研究的是作为名词使用的“意识”，即与“物质”相对立的意识，是总体研究人的意识，其基本问题是意识对存在的关系问题，即指个人意识，也指社会意识；心理学研究的是作为动词使用的“意识”，即指“意识到”的活动、认识活动，是较为具体地研究人的个体意识，研究它的实质、发生和发展、结构和功能等，虽然在心理学的一些学科（例如社会心理学）中也不免会较多地涉及社会意识问题，但心理学作为一门独立的科学，它所研究的毕竟是个体意识。
　　因此，在心理学中，意识是“人所特有的一种对客观现实的高级心理反映形式”。笔者曾撰文（《意识问题杂谈》，载《心理学探新》，1982年第4期）谈到：作为人所特有的心理现象的意识，是包括感觉、知觉、思维在内的一种具有复合结构的最高级的认识活动，思维在其中起着决定性的作用；它是人类以共同劳动等实践活动为基础结成的社会中同语言一起产生、又随着社会历史的发展而发展的；它是借助于第二信号系统而实现的脑对客观现实的反映；它具有自觉性、能动性、创造性等特点；在人的各种心理活动中，它发挥着调节、控制、指导的作用；它不仅是社会的产物，而且在阶级社会中还会带有阶级性色彩。这后一句话反映了个体意识与社会意识的必然联系性。1992年，笔者在《论消费者的意识》（该长篇论文提交湖北省心理学会学术年会交流，后经删节为《消费者的意识与消费类型》一文，载《中南财经大学学报》，1993年第3期）一文中再次写到意识：“从广义方面来理解，‘意识’是指与物质相对的活动的结果，用作名词，如知识、思想、观念等等，哲学中常说的‘物质决定意识’这‘意识’是精神的东西，所以，‘意识’与‘心理’是相通的，但二者内涵不完全相同”；从狭义方面来理解，‘意识’是指人的认识活动，用作动词，如‘意识到’，所谓‘意识到’也就是‘认识到’，心理学中所说的意识，就是指的‘意识到’，即人的心理活动，它是一种认识形式，是一种反映形式。……在医学上，意识是指‘神志清晰状态’或‘醒觉状态’；在精神医学上，意识是指病人整个精神活动的清晰程度和清晰范围”。因此，“‘意识’作为人的一种高级认识活动，包括对环境和人自身的识别能力以及其清晰的程度。
　　正常人在清醒的时候，意识是明晰的，神志清楚，能正确地识别和理解时间、地点、人物、事件以及自己的经济收入和消费状况，能对周围环境的作用（包括周围他人消费情况对自己的影响作用）作出相应的、合适的、有目的的、能动的反映和反应。 ”
　　人之所以为人的一个重要标志，就是人有意识。

意识的本质　　一般认为，意识是人脑对客观事物间接的和概括的主观反映，笔者认为，“反映”一词过于被动，无法显示意识主体的地位和主动性，更谈不到什么创造性了。更准确的说法应该是：意识是人脑对刺激的反应。
　　我们知道，锤子敲击到钢板时，钢板会变形。钢板变形而产生的力一部分通过弹性的方式以反作用力的形式作用于锤子，剩余部分因挠性而使本身产生永久性变形。这就是钢板对锤击的反应：有对外（锤子）的，也有对自身的。
　　意识也是人脑对刺激的反应。意识的结果一方面通过人体器官作用于外界，另一方面也通过改变人脑本身的结构而形成记忆。
　　同无机质的钢板相比，人脑的结构要复杂得多：人脑由100多亿个脑细胞构成，每个脑神经细胞都有许多神经树突，通过神经突触与其它脑神经相连。这些神经连接互相交织，形成一个庞大而繁杂的神经网络。人脑的这种结构决定了意识这种反应的对外形式和对内改变的复杂性。
　　我们知道，神经细胞的结构与一般动物细胞的没什么不同，到目前为止，人们还没有在脑细胞中找到思维和记忆组织。那么思维和记忆是在哪里发生的？在哪里储存的？
　　当感官接受刺激时，这些刺激转化为电或化学信号，通过神经纤维传导到大脑，在大脑中沿着相连的神经网络通道进行传导。直到对外界刺激形成有效反应时输出终止。传导的过程，即意识的过程。
　　在传导中，神经通道上受到信号刺激会处于活跃状态，使附着的血管扩张，接受更多的氧气的营养，促进通道上的神经细胞和神经树突生长，使通道中的神经树突更加粗壮。下次遇到相同或相类似的刺激时，信号通过这些通道会更迅速，使过去的意识再现：这就是记忆。
　　我们设想有个简单的大脑有A~Z26个脑细胞，A细胞有A1~A25共25条神经连接，其他细胞的连接与此类似，那么这个大脑共有325条连接通道。现在A到刺激，z可以输出正确反应，那么在所有的通道中，A25直接连接Z细胞，反应时间最短，则此次反应中，在其它通道信号未完成之前，A25通道己优先完成，被刺激生长。下次再受到这种刺激时，信号通过这条通道更加快捷。（当然这样的大脑是不存在的，任何生物的大脑都不可能有这么简单，这个假设只是为了说明记忆和意识形成的过程，事实上的记忆通道并不只通过一条神经通道，而是一套相关的神经网络。）
　　所以说，记忆不存在于脑神经细胞中，而是存在于神经网络中。记忆就是脑神经网络中生成的短路连接状态。我们平时所说的体育锻炼可以使人反应敏捷，反复朗读有利于加强记忆，其实就是在促进这类短路通道的生长。
　　仍以上面的大脑为例，现在A到刺激，X可以输出正确反应，那么现在在所有的通道中，A23或许不是连接Y细胞反应时间最短的通道：因为A25通道已经被短接，A信号优先到达Z，Z再通过Z24通道连接到Y。如果A23的连接时间或强度没有A26-Z24快捷、强大，则信号优先从后者中通过，除Z24被加强外，A25被进一步强化。所以说，意识是信号在原记忆网络基础上重构短路的过程。记忆通道的存在是意识形成的基础。
　　记忆通道的生长并非只有通过强化通道才能得到生长，也可以通过强化通道中的神经细胞而得到。现有一条记忆经过C、H、P、K，有另外3条记忆分别通过H、P、K，这时我们也可以回忆后三条记忆，在强化这些记忆本身的同，也刺激了这三个神经细胞所有相关通道的生长，第一条记忆通道也被分段强化，使得记忆加固。可以说，神经细胞是记忆通道中的交叉点。我们平时所说的理解可以加强记忆，论据可以加强论点的说服力都是这个道理。读过议论文后，论据可能记不清楚，而论点和论证的记忆却在阅读中逐步深化，就是这个道理。
　　引发意识和记忆的并不一定非得有外界的刺激，只需要大脑中有电或化学信号通过就可以。大脑中有一点细胞处于活跃状态，然后在意识过程中激活相关的记忆，信号就会被放大、加强，形成新的思维。人在没有外界刺激的时候也可以进行回忆、冥想等思维活动，也是这个原因。
　　大脑中的电或化学信号的大小并不是固定的。在平静的时候，大脑中的信号流也是平静的，自由联想、理性思考在这种情况下最有效。如果遇到紧急的或突发情况，接收的信号超出了原通道的输送力，则信号也会从其它通道溢出，使人感到六神无主。信号溢出并不一定是坏事，在例二中如果溢出信号从A24中到达X，就会形成新的意识通道，这也是人为什么会急中生智的原因。
　　记忆通道除了可生长，也可消退。脑神经细胞只有在不断地刺激中才能生长，如果己建立的记忆通道长时间未受到刺激，其组织的营养就会被输送转移到其它树突部位或其它细胞中，记忆通道就会消退到原始状态，这种过程的外在表现即遗忘过程。
　　人脑是自然界乃至整个宇宙中最复杂的系统。在人进化过程中，对自身最有利、对外界变化最有效的神经连接通过了外界的优胜劣汰，在人类世代遗传中被基因固定了下来。婴儿在出生时脑神经网络已经完善，与成人的没什么区别；特别是与其父母的神经结构有相同之处，这也是某些天赋可以遗传的原因。但同成人比较，除了吮吸反射神经和控制心跳、呼吸等的植物神经通道是通畅的以外，婴儿的神经网络连接的粗细基本上是相同的。所以婴儿大脑中的神经信号传导一般是全方位的，也是无效的。例如，婴儿的眼睛与成人并没有不同，但由于神经网络中有关颜色、形状、运动的相关通道尚未形成，所以单独看东西时很难形成有效意识。教育的过程，才能在条件反射中强化相关神经连接，使其生长。
　　一般认为意识中最重要的是自我意识。其实自我意识就是个人对外界刺激总体性的、独特的反应。自我意识并不是生来就有的，而是人在成长过程中从具体的反应事件中综合出来的，用于调控自我内部和与外界关系。
　　人脑和电脑不同。电脑的硬件是固定的，改变的只是信号；而人脑的信号则要简单得多。人脑的“硬件”虽说也是固定的，但却具有生长性，在成长中可以相互作用，这是任何电脑都不可比拟的。
　　说到这儿，我们可以知道：意识并不是与物质对立的概念，意识只是人脑对刺激的反应。意识不过是一种反应，大脑的运动而己。

意识与生命本质息息相关

　　生命的本质，在于它与非生物的区别。截至目前的科学研究，生命与非生物的区别是：生命体能够通过自身的物理感知系统感知自身的存在，并可以根据自身的感知做出对外界环境的种种反应和行为。也就是说生命体（生物）能够适应环境、甚至改造环境以适应自身生存。
　　同时，生命的另一显著特征还在于“繁衍”，几乎没有生命体不能进行繁衍的。
　　因此，生命的本质，在于它的“意识”。这种生命意识，简单来说就是“自我”意识。
　　拥有自我意识的生命体，才能与其它物质世界区分开来——不管是动物、植物还是真菌、病毒或者其它。
　　人的意识，因为其物理感知系统的特殊性，使其有能力掌握语言和文字。这就意味人们的经验和科学可以通过语言和文字得到传承，并积累到社会意识中去。在这样的积累之下，人类的科学进步日益发达，从而使人的意识极大程度地领先于地球上的其它生命体——我们通常把人类特有的意识称之为：思想。
　　从反面来说，意识的运作机制，与电脑的程序基本类似，但是电脑程序或者人工智能，却永不能达到人类思想的高度。唯一的原因，就是人工智能不具有生物的本质——自我意识，从而不可能真正替代人类的智慧。

心理学对意识的定义与研究

　　心理学界对意识(consciousness)的理解分为广义的意识概念和狭义的意识概念两种。广义的意识概念表现了心理学脱胎于哲学的一种特殊的学术现象，而心理学论述中对意识的论述则主要是指狭义的意识概念。
　　广义的意识概念认定意识是赋与现实的心理现象的总体，是作为直接经验的个人的主观现象，表现为知、情、意三者的统一。知：指人类对世界的知识性与理性的追求，它与认识的内涵是统一的；情：指情感，是指人类对客观事物的感受和评价；意：指意志，是指人类追求某种目的和理想时表现出来的自我克制、毅力、信心和顽强不屈等精神状态。
　　狭义的意识概念则是指人们对外界和自身的觉察与关注程度，或者说是指广义的意识概念中知、情、意相统一中的意志部分。按照狭义的意识在行为中的倾向可分为对外的外在意识和对内的内在意向两种。
　　外在意识是指人们在行为中大脑对外界事物觉察的清醒程度和反应灵敏程度，人们在睡眠时外在意识水平最低，在注意力高度凝聚时外在意识水平最高。
　　意向是指人们对待或处理客观事物的活动，表现为欲望、愿望、希望、意图等。意向是个体对态度对象的反应倾向，即行为的准备状态，准备对态度对象作出一定的反应，因而是一种行为倾向，或叫做意图、意动。
　　通过内省和外在表现，可以区别出意识的清晰性的程度。通常意识清晰度最高的状态称为注意，相当于意识的注视点或意识点。意识的注视点周围，被同时意识到的领域，称为意识野。注意力或说是意识点愈集中，则意识点周围意识野的清晰度将愈降低。

注视与忽视

意识障碍，可区别为意识野狭窄、意识混浊、朦胧状态。意识混浊又可根据清晰度障碍和轻度不同而区别为嗜眠（sopor）、昏睡（coma）。所谓朦胧状态是意识内容的变化。
　　从生物学角度看来，在机体生存的适应活动中，由发达的中枢神经系统产生的主观性这一侧面，可称为意识。脑生理学家认为，睡眠是中枢有节律的活动结果，而意识丧失是觉醒机制出现障碍所致。关于与保持意识有很大关系的脑部位的学说中，有的着重于大脑皮质，有的认为与丘脑的弥散性投射系统关系密切（H．H．Jasper），有的认为在间脑、中脑的中央部有以丘脑为中心的中央脑系（R．Penfield），有的认为与网状结构上行性激活系统有关（H．W．Magoun），有的认为与丘脑下部的激活系统有关（E．Gellhorn）等。

杠头儿 · 发表于 2011-1-22 18:45

回复 1# 杠头儿

     意识概念的其它版本　　

   一、意识是与物质相对应的哲学范畴，与物质既相对立又相统一的精神现象。人类对意识现象的认识经历了一个复杂的发展过程，在人类早期，人们曾把意识看作是一种独特的、寓于人的肉体之中并可以脱离肉体而存在的灵魂的活动。古代的唯心主义哲学家通过哲学论证巩固、发展了这一观念。柏拉图认为灵魂在进入肉体之前，曾居于理念世界，具有理念的知识。中世纪经院哲学认为，灵魂是一种单纯的精神实体，灵魂是不死的，可以脱离肉体而存在。古代的唯物主义者强调意识对物质的依赖，往往把意识或者灵魂说成是某种物质，如古希腊的德谟克利特认为灵魂是由精细的原子构成的，中国的荀子提出“形具而神生”，范缜主张“形质神用”。在近代，众多的哲学家从物质与意识的关系的角度，对意识作出定义，并探究意识的来源和属性，得出了不同结论，如笛卡尔提出意识与物质相互独立的二元论；巴克莱主张“存在就是被感知”，把意识作为世界的本原；霍布斯洛克等则认为意识是物质的产物；狄德罗、拉美特里等则明确指出意识是人脑的机能和属性；德国古典唯心主义哲学家提出并以思辨的形式阐发了意识的能动性问题；费尔巴哈则不仅提出人脑是意识的生理基础，而且还初步涉及到意识的社会根源问题。马克思和恩格斯在批判地继承前人认识成果的基础上对意识的起源、本质、作用作出了辩证唯物主义的阐释。辩证唯物主义认为，意识是人脑的机能和属性，是社会的人对客观存在的主观映象。这种主观映象具有感觉、知觉、表象等感性形式，也具有概念、判断、推理等理性形式。人类的意识活动具的社会性。意识是自然界长期发展的产物，由无机物的反应特性，到低等生物的刺激感应性，再到动物的感觉和心理这一生物进化过程是意识得以产生的自然条件。意识是社会的产物，人类社会的物质生产劳动在意识的产生过程中起决定的作用。辩证唯物主义在强调物质对意识起决定作用的前提下肯定意识对于物质具有能动的反作用，在意识活动中人们从感性经验抽象出事物的本质、规律形成理性认识，又运用这些认识指导自己有计划、有目的地改造客观世界。
　　二、意识：从意识的起源看，意识是物质世界发展到一定阶段的产物；从意识的本质来看，意识是客观存在在人脑中的反映。
　　意识是人脑对客观存在的反映：第一，正确的思想意识与错误的思想意识都是客观存在在人脑中的反映；第二，无论是人的具体感觉还是人的抽象思维，都是人脑对客观事物的反映；第三，无论是人们对现状的感受与认识，还是人们对过去的思考与总结，以至人们对未来的预测，都是人脑对客观事物的反映。
　　意识的能动作用首先表现在，意识不仅能够正确反映事物的外部现象，而且能够正确反映事物的本质和规律；意识的能动作用还突出表现在，意识能够反作用于客观事物。
　　三、丘脑是产生意识的核心器官，丘脑中先天遗传有一种十分特殊的结构丘觉，丘觉是自身蕴含意思并能发放意思，当丘觉发放意思时也就产生了意识。丘觉可以自由合成发放或被样本点亮，样本点亮丘觉，丘觉发放意思产生意识。样本是事物在脑中的符号，是在后天学习过程中形成的，广泛分布在大脑、下丘脑、纹状体、小脑及其他神经结构中。丘觉能够发放的意思无限广泛，样本的数量也非常庞大，样本与丘觉通过学习建立的意义对应关系就是联结，样本经由联结纤维点亮丘觉产生意识。丘觉、样本、联结是产生意识必需的三个条件，丘觉是意识的内核，样本是意识的外壳，联结是点亮的路径，点亮是产生意识的方式。丘觉不是随意发放的，必须由样本点亮。
　　丘觉是我们通过遗传获得的意思结构，这些意思是丘脑核团的神经元本身蕴含的，并能够被样本点亮发放出来。丘觉平时处于潜伏状态，当被点亮意思才能发放出来，形成意识。丘觉是不能通过学习获得的，丘觉具有遗传性和联结性，丘觉的性质也就决定了意识的性质。
　　⑴遗传性。丘觉只能通过遗传得到，我们能够意识的范围是丘觉决定的，凡是我们能够感知的客观事物，都能找到与之相符的丘觉。我们不能通过后天学习扩大感知范围，如果丘脑中没有遗传某一客观事物的丘觉，我们就不能意识这个客观事物。如我们不能看到紫外线、听到超声波。我们遗传有发放“冷、热”意思的丘觉，所以我们能够感觉到热能，没有遗传电磁能、暗物质这类丘觉，所以不能感觉到电磁能、暗物质等。⑵联结性。客观事物有什么意义是我们先天不知道的，必须通过学习才能知道。样本是客观事物在脑中的符号，丘觉是发放意思的结构，联结就是通过后天学习建立丘觉与客观事物的联系。当我们接触客观事物时，经过数次尝试，样本数次点亮丘觉，总会有一个样本点亮一个意义相符的丘觉，这个联系被固定下来也就产生了联结。丘觉虽然通过先天遗传得到，但并不先天就与外界事物相联系，需要通过后天学习建立与样本的联结，才能产生对事物的意识。客观事物非常庞杂，丘觉能够发放的意思非常广泛，都能通过后天的学习建立对应联结。当脑中出现一个事物时，丘觉发放一个对应的意思，产生对这个事物的意识。如，表示“好”这个意思的丘觉是先天就有的，不同的民族使用不同的语言来表达“好”的意思，初生婴儿并不知道外界社会用什么语言来表达“好”的意思，需要通过学习建立丘觉与语言的对应关系。我们处在什么样的语言环境中，就会相应建立丘觉与语言的联结，形成用不同的语言表达同一个意思。联结是建立丘觉与环境事物的对应关系，决定了人的环境适应性，即人的社会性。丘觉的宽度、广度、精度决定了我们后天可以意识到什么样的客观事物。如果某一个丘觉与某一事物的意义相符，表示事物的样本就会与丘觉建立联结，这是一个学习过程。在我们学习的过程中，丘觉与样本常常会发生错误联结，导致我们错误理解客观事物，只有认识到错误，才能进行矫正建立正确联结。如果在丘脑中没有与客观事物相符的丘觉，也就不能建立联结，我们也就无法意识到这个客观事物，客观世界的许多事物是我们不能意识的。我们有许多的丘觉在客观世界没有相符的客观事物，还有许多丘觉无法用语言表达，这些丘觉仍然能够形成意识，不过这些意识只能“想”，而无法表达。丘觉类似于物理学中的矢量，可以无数次的分解合成，在丘觉的遗传范围内，丘脑有足够能力合成一个丘觉与客观事物的意义相对应。我们能够意识到的内容也就是极其广泛的，在感知范围内可以发放的丘觉数量是庞大的。脑干向丘脑供应能量，丘觉被样本点亮即在能量的支持下通过联结路径扩散，形成意义发放。如果将丘脑简单比作彩灯，彩灯的颜色如同丘觉的意义，电力如同能量，彩灯通电发出彩色光线，丘觉在能量支持下发放意义，样本不但是意识的符号，而且还起到开关丘觉的作用。
　　四、人和人类社会的产生，也伴有意识的产生。意识是自然界和社会发展的产物，是人脑的机能和客观世界的主观映象。人一旦意识到意识自身并对意识进行模拟，便产生了“人工智能”，标志着人类的意识发展到了高级的阶段。
　　意识的起源：意识的产生既是一个自然历史过程，又是一个社会历史过程。
　　意识是物质世界发展到一定阶段的产物。物质从自身发展中产生能思维的生物，经历漫长历史过程。在这一过程中，有三个决定性环节：1.由一切物质所具有的反应特性到低等生物的刺激感应性；2.由刺激感应的反映形式到高级动物的感觉和心理；3.由一般动物的感觉和心理到人的意识的产生。纯粹的动物心理不会自发地产生意识。意识是同人类社会一起产生的。意识是社会性的劳动、语言和人脑的必然产物，在这个意义上，我们说意识是社会的产物。1.劳动为意识的产生和发展提供了客观的需要和可能；2.作为思维外壳的语言也是在劳动过程中产生和发展的；3.在劳动和语言的推动下，猿脑变成人脑，为意识的产生和发展提供了物质基础。
　　意识的本质：意识是物质的产物，但又不是意识本身；意识离不开物质，但又不同于物质而具有精神现象的特征。
　　意识是特殊的物质——人脑的机能。人脑是意识的物质器官。意识作为人脑的机能，是人脑在第一信号系统和第二信号系统基础上进行的精神活动。
　　人脑只是思维的器官，并不是思维的源泉。意识是对客观存在的主观映象，是人脑对客观世界的反映过程，是对外界输入的信息不断加工制作的过程。
　　意识活动中主观与客观的统一，可以从以下几个方面来分析：
　　1.从意识的主观形式和客观内容来看；2.从意识的主观差别和客观根源来看；
　　3.从意识的主观特征和客观基础来看（歪曲虚假的主观映象仍然是对于客观对象的反映）。
　　意识的结构和功能：意识本身是一个有结构的系统。
　　意识并不等于认识。意识包含知、情、意三者的统一。知：指人类对世界的知识性与理性的追求，它与认识的内涵是统一的；情：指情感，是指人类对客观事物的感受和评价；
　　意：指意志，是指人类追求某种目的和理想时表现出来的自我克制、毅力、信心和顽强不屈等精神状态。从意识活动的各个层次上看，从意识的活动主体看，可分为社会意识、群体意识、个人意识。从意识活动的现实过程来看，可分为对象意识和自我意识。
　　辩证唯物主义在肯定物质对意识的决定作用的前提下，又承认意识在认识世界和改造世界中具有巨大的能动作用。意识的能动作用具体表现1.意识活动的目的性和计划性；2.意识活动的能动创造性；3.意识活动对客观世界的改造作用。
　　意识概述 （来源: 意识南丰公益书院）
　　意识到目前为止还是一个不完整的、模糊的概念。一般认为是人对环境及自我的认知能力以及认知的清晰程度。研究者们还不能给予它一个确切的定义。约翰·希尔勒通俗地将其解释成：“从无梦的睡眠醒来之后，除非再次入睡或进入无意识状态，否则在白天持续进行的，知觉、感觉或觉察的状态”[1]，现在，意识概念中最容易进行科学研究的是在觉察方面。例如，某人觉察到了什么、某人觉察到了自我。有时候，“觉察”已经成为了“意识”的同义词，它们甚至可以相互替换。目前在意识本质的问题上还存有诸多疑问与不解，例如在自我意识方面。现在对意识这一概念的研究已经成为了多学科的研究对象。意识问题涉及到的学科有认知科学、神经科学、心理学、计算机科学、社会学、哲学等。这些领域在不同的角度对意识进行的研究对于澄清意识问题是非常有帮助的。
　　目录
　　1 学术界目前对这个问题所做的区分
　　1.1 容易的问题
　　1.2 困难的问题
　　2 研究意识问题的历史
　　3 参见参考文献：学术界目前对这个问题所做的区分
　　目前关于意识，在学术界的研究方向，主要把它分为两部分，一个容易（研究）的问题，一个是困难的问题。意识问题困难的一面也是目前困扰科学界的一大难题。
　　容易的问题：所谓容易的问题，其实就是好用科学实验来验证的问题，目前在意识问题里，容易的问题主要集中于以下几点。
　　：集中注意力方面
　　：清醒与睡眠区分的方面
　　：心理状态的可报告的方面
　　：对环境刺激做出反应的方面
　　：认知系统对信息整合的方面
　　：理解自身内在状态的方面
　　：对行为控制的方面
　　困难的问题：困难的问题其实就是不易进行科学研究的问题，这的确是一个相当困难的问题。目前在意识问题里，虽然已经可以肯定意识是脑的产物，但最困难的问题就是在经验方面，即自我经验是如何产生的（“自我”是如何感觉到“自我”的存在的，也可以说这种“自我感觉”是如何产生的），说这个问题困难，主要是因为这个问题目前很难用科学实验的方法加以验证。科学家们认为这个问题的属性太主观了，而导致很难用科学的方法加以验证，但多数科学家都相信，迟早有一天，会找到一种科学的方法来对这个问题加以研究的。目前学术界正试图从神经科学、心理认知科学、哲学、物理学等方面来解释这个问题。
　　研究意识问题的历史：由于最初的心理学仅仅是哲学的一个分支，那时意识问题完全是哲学讨论的问题，直到被公认为现代心理学的创立者，德国心理学家冯特，使心理学脱离了哲学，成为了一个独立的学科后，心理学也开始了对这个问题的研究。其实最初的心理学只是讨论这个问题的，最初冯特使用的是内省的方法来研究这个问题，但后来很多心理学家纷纷提出了对这种方法的质疑甚至是反对，他们的理由是这种方法并不是一种可靠的方法，他们认为这种方法不能准确的反映出人丰富的思想、情感与行为，也不能让人接触潜意识或无意识的心理状态。而且这种方法过于依赖复杂的语言，而导致客观性的丧失，于是人们很快就放弃了这种研究方法。但由于也找不到合适的研究方法，因此导致了在很多年里，心理学及相关学科完全放弃了对意识问题的研究。直至20世纪的五十年代，由于认知科学的飞速发展，为研究这个问题又开辟了许多新的途径，终于使这个问题又回到了科学的正轨上来，尤其是在DNA模型创立者，克里克等人的努力下，使这个问题在神经科学研究的范围内，也占据了相当大的位置。虽然目前还存在着一些困难，但是，现在，研究相关领域的大多数科学家对研究这个问题的前景均持乐观的观点。

人脑产生意识的机理

　　丘脑、大脑、小脑、下丘脑、基底核都有哪些功能，意识又是怎样产生的，这里作一个简简单单的阐述。

意识的研究从大脑开始

所有的脑，包括丘脑、大脑、小脑、下丘脑、基底核等都是由一种物质——神经元构成，神经元中遗传有信息，脑所要完成的工作就是整理、组织遗传信息，使之有序化、条理化。脑的主要功能就是经过神经元一级一级的信息交换传递，获得一个有意义的信息集合，这个过程称为样本分析。神经元一级一级进行信息交换传递的过程称为分析，有意义的信息集合既为样本。样本分析是脑的主要功能，包括大脑、小脑、下丘脑、基底核等，这些脑的主要功能都是进行样本分析。丘脑是一个十分特殊的器官，丘脑神经元中的遗传信息具有觉知特性，丘脑能够将各个遗传信息合成为一个特殊的信息集合，这个具有特殊性质的信息集合是对事物觉知，称为丘觉。丘觉的合成发放活动，样本的分析产出活动，本质上就是反射活动。
　　丘脑是发放丘觉的器官，是“我”的本体器官，大脑联络区是丘觉的活动场所，意识在大脑联络区得以实现。丘脑的唯一功能就是合成发放丘觉。丘脑由神经元构成，每个神经元中都遗传有信息，丘脑的功能就是将数个神经元的信息合成为丘觉，并发放到大脑联络区，使大脑产生觉知，也就产生了意识。丘觉是想法、是念头，是意识的核心。脑包括的结构众多，不是所有的脑都能合成丘觉，丘觉只是丘脑的功能，只能是丘脑合成发放出来才能产生意识。
　　丘脑虽然能够合成发放丘觉产生意识，但丘脑不是意识活动的场所，意识也不在丘脑中存在。大脑联络区是丘觉的活动场所，丘觉能够使大脑产生对事物的觉知，产生对事物的“知道”、“明白”。丘脑通过联络纤维将丘觉发放到大脑联络区，在大脑联络区产生意识。在临床病例中，丘脑、大脑联络区、联络纤维发生了损伤或病变，产生的症状都是一样的，都将导致意识的缺损或丧失。
　　摄像头将摄取的景物（如一棵树）转换成信号，电脑的处理器经过处理，可以将这棵树显示在屏幕上，但电脑不能知道这是一棵树，也不能产生“树”的意识。眼睛如同摄像头，可以将“树”转换成信息传递到大脑，大脑如同电脑的处理器，可以对视觉信息进行分析，在大脑联络区显示这棵树，但还不能产生“树”的意识，对“树”的意识是丘脑发放的，是丘脑告诉大脑的。丘脑合成“树”的丘觉并发放到大脑联络区，“告诉”大脑这是一棵树，大脑产生对“树”的觉知，于是我们便产生了对“树”的意识。
　　我们一次用眼睛看到的事物有很多，但眼睛不能将看到的各种事物区分开来。视神经将所有看到的事物全部转化为信息，传递到大脑枕叶，大脑枕叶对这些信号进行分析，将各个事物分离出来，每个事物用一个样本来表示。大脑、小脑、下丘脑、基底核等主要功能都是进行样本的分析产出，不同的脑分析产出不同类型的样本，大脑分析产出的样本与觉察、认识有关，下丘脑产出的样本与情绪有关，小脑、基底核产出的样本与运动指令有关。耳朵也是如此，如同拾音器，能够接收各种音频的信号，但不能将区分一段音频信号中的各个词句，每个词句是由大脑颞叶进行分析产出形成样本。大量的临床病例发现，如果大脑枕叶发生病变，病人就不能知道看到的是什么，甚至什么都看不到，如果大脑颞叶发生损伤或病变，病人不能理解话语的含义。枕叶、颞叶的不同功能区发生损伤或病变，会导致不同的样本缺失或丧失，从而导致不同的失认、失读、失写、失听等症状，当然这些功能的缺失在一定程度上是可以弥补的。
　　丘觉一般不会随意合成发放，特别是关于客观事物的丘觉，需要样本激活才能由丘脑合成，样本的分析产出是大脑（还有基底核、小脑、下丘脑、杏仁核等）的功能，大脑有着极其强悍的样本分析功能，通过对视、听、触等信息的分析，产出需要的样本到丘脑，激活丘脑的功能，合成一个相应的丘觉发放到大脑联络区产生意识。
　　大脑分析产出样本的目的就是激活丘觉进入意识，如果杂乱无章的信息激活丘觉，只能引起意识的昏乱，样本是具有一定意义的条理化信息，大脑经过舍弃无用信息、填补有用信息、放大主要信息、简化次要信息等多种形式的分析，获得一个有意义的完整信息，这个信息与传入信息相匹配，激活丘觉产生清晰意识。
　　大脑联络区是意识活动的场所，有两个，一个是大脑额叶联络区，一个是大脑后部联络区，这两个联络区都能产生意识。正常状态下，两个联络区的意识活动可以同时存在，并以大脑额叶联络区的意识为主导。大脑额叶联络区是各种意识汇集的场合，在清醒状态下一直处于活动状态，如果大脑额叶联络区不活动，人也一定处于睡眠状态。人们通过自己逐步抑制大脑额叶联络区的活动，逐步进入梦乡，如果大脑额叶联络区突然活动，人也就突然清醒。在大脑额叶联络区休眠时，如果大脑后部联络区单独活动，这时就表现为做梦，也是一种正常的意识活动。
　　大脑分析产出的样本是表示事物的信息，但样本只是表示事物的信息，相当于一些符号，进入意识还必须有丘觉的支持。丘脑、大脑、小脑、下丘脑、基底核的神经元，通过遗传获得的信息是有限的，能够分析产出的样本以及合成发放的丘觉都是有限的，因此我们的意识范围也是有限的，如我们不能看到暗物质、红外线、紫外线，不能听到超声波、次声波。有少数的人遗传有常人没有的遗传信息，分析产出的样本以及合成发放的丘觉超出了常人，能够看到常人无法无法看到的事物，听到常人无法听到的声音，我们将这种能力称为特异功能。
　　由于能够进行样本分析产出的脑众多，大脑额叶、大脑后部、小脑、下丘脑、基底核等都是分析产出样本的结构，而且都是各自独立分析产出样本，常常会导致样本活动、丘觉活动失衡，严重者者会导致各种精神病症，如痴迷、偏执狂、精神分裂症、强迫症以及网瘾、毒瘾、赌瘾、烟瘾、酒瘾等，这些精神病症有的看似生理性病症，实质上都是心理活动失衡造成的，是可以通过心理手段治愈的，如果采用手术方法去治疗，是不会有理想的治疗效果的。

杠头儿 · 发表于 2011-1-22 18:47

回复 2# 杠头儿

个体人的意识　　

为了把通常所说的“意识”从浩瀚的哲学概念中抽离出来，拿到纯粹生理学和心理学上来研究意识，必须要提出“个体人的意识”子词条。
　　因为，意识，通常是特指人的意识，尤指人类个体的意识。与哲学上“意识”含义不同，这种通常意义上的“个体人的意识”是比较易于理解的。
　　个体人的意识，是指个体人由其物理感知系统能够感知的特征总和以及相关的感知处理活动。
　　人躯体的物理感知，基本分为“所感知的特征总和”即本体感知和外部感知，相关的感知特征“处理活动”则是“思维”。
　　由于人的进化和遗传特性，上述感知行为根据结果可以分为“原意识”和“显层意识”，“显层意识”即我们通常所称的“思想”。
　　“原意识”是人体由动物（特指猿群）进化而来的适合人类个体生存的基本感知。类似于弗洛伊德提出的“潜意识”。
　　“显层意识”即“思想”，则是个体人生活在人类群体（社会）所受到教育的结果。语言、文字、道德、伦理等范畴就是人的显层意识。显层意识是直接决定人的行为的意识。显层意识也是人区别于动物的显著的质的特征。
　　原意识基本可以归纳为四种：生存欲、繁殖欲、群体欲以及移植欲。生存欲是指食欲、安全、排泄等基本生理欲望；繁殖欲是指性欲以及与性欲相关的种种求偶意识特征总和；群体欲则是个体人为了强大自身的力量要求融入并支配群体的原动力（类似于尼采提出的“权力意志”）；移植欲则是支配人意识感知审美、怜悯、悲伤、舒适、愉悦等情感的深层欲望，之所以称其为“移植欲”是因为这些感知结果是个体人出于自身意识替代（意识移植）的目的。
　　原意识是动物性生存进化意识的总和，正常的个体人均拥有原意识，它是人与动物意识的共性。
　　而思想（显层意识）则是人意识的个性。只有受过群体环境教育的个体人，才拥有思想。拥有思想的人，我们可以称之为社会人。几乎所有的人都是社会人，因为没有人可以完全孤立于社会而存在。
　　只有思想才能主导人的行为，原意识必须要经过思想来影响人的行为。
　　思想通常分为经验、思想方法和行为意志。这三个内容构成了个体人的个性。
　　只有思想和原意识的协调与统一，才能产生完美而愉快的人生。
　　意识的分类：显意识和潜意识。
　　佛教中的意识：
　　意识是第六识，具有认识抽象概念的功能。前五识中有一识起作用，意识便同时俱起，
　　此外，意识对内外之境，不分有形无形，及过去现在未来三世，有比知、推测的作用。因此迷悟升沉之业，皆由意识而作。现在心理学上，研究到前六识为止。但是在佛法上的分析，还有第七、第八——末那识和阿赖耶识的存在。
　　是人类九感中势力最强，一切事情都靠第六感意识来分别取舌。假如意识不动，那么眼睛对境的时候，就和镜子照物一样，
　　是现量者。现量者就是这个东西是个长的，你看着就是个长的；那个东西是个短的，就是个短的，丝毫不加任何美丑、善恶、好坏、得失等种种事端。所以说，人类一切善恶都是第六感（意识）所造成的。
　　中国意识研究现状
　　中国学者对意识的看法

　　人是什么?

　　关键词:意识困难问题记忆自我死亡意义
　　摘要:本文主要针对意识的本质进行分析探讨，得出了意识是对记忆的感知这样的结论，将关于意识的问题转化为关于记忆问题。并由此引发对生与死的探讨，并提出将死亡看成是量变过程的观点。并简单地对人生意义进行了分析。
　　对于这个问题,我们如果仅从生物学或社会学的角度进行诠释,将会是很无趣的。而从哲学的角度来分析，则会更有意思却更有难度。因为我们要考虑的不仅仅是抽象的人，而且是抽象的意识。
　　“目前关于意识，在学术界的研究方向，主要把它分为两部分。一个是易于研究的问题，一个是难以研究的问题。所谓困难的问题其实就是不易进行科学研究的问题，这的确是一个相当困难的问题。目前在意识问题里，虽然已经可以肯定意识是脑的产物，但最困难的问题就是在经验方面，即自我经验是如何产生的（“自我”是如何感觉到“自我”的存在的，也可以说这种“自我感觉”是如何产生的），说这个问题困难，主要是因为这个问题目前很难用科学实验的方法加以验证。科学家们认为这个问题的属性太主观了，而导致很难用科学的方法加以验证，但多数科学家都相信，迟早有一天，会找到一种科学的方法来对这个问题加以研究的。”——————摘自《维基百科》
　　对于这个困难的问题，我们采取如下的讨论方式。
　　第一，对外界的感觉与对自我感觉的关系。我们谈及意识，如上述所说，往往称为“自我”是如何感觉到“自我”的存在。而值得注意的是，我们之所以使用“感觉”这个词语，很明显是将对外的感觉类比到揭示意识为何物上。如果没有对外界的感觉，自然无法做出这样的类比。（对外界的感觉先于意识的出现，因为动物时期已经有感觉了。）
　　而这也引出了下一个问题，那就是两个“自我”的问题。在“自我”是如何感觉到“自我”的存在这个问题上，如果两个自我是等价的，那么我们就可以同时嵌套无限个“自我”，而大脑的神经回路数量有限，自然无法做出对无限个“自我”的感觉。可见，两个“自我”是不等价的，由上述对外界类比可知，一个为主体，一个为客体。而客体既然与主体有时间差，则必先于主体，则可知客体的“自我”其实是一种记忆中的“自我”。而人对记忆的感觉则是意识。由于这个过程很短暂，我们平时难以察觉。如果一个人完全没有记忆，则它将没有意识。
　　而将意识问题归为记忆，则是将难解决的问题归为容易解决的问题了。

　　人为什么活着？

　　生理上的生与死是毫无趣味的。我们需要谈论的，是哲学意义上的生与死。
　　首先，我们可以将其分为活过和活着，但二者本质是相同的。所以我们将放在一起论述。
　　刚刚我们谈到了意识问题，而之所以能提出题目所说的问题，也是基于意识问题。如果不能感觉到自我的存在，自然也就无从思考存在的意义。
　　当然，这里将存在等同于活着是有问题的，比如睡眠。睡眠时可能感觉不到自我的存在，但人还是活着。但这是生理的活不是哲学的活。哲学的活应该是以存在感为基础的，而其必要条件刚刚已论述过，便是记忆。试想，如果有人告诉你你失忆了，而你以前是个大侠，你自然是不会觉得你曾经存在过的。（活过）而进一步来说，如果你没有任何记忆功能，你自然无法感觉自我的存在，也就是没有意识。（活着）
　　而由此而观之，记忆的丢失是对活过的抹杀，而我们自然在此之后便无法思考那丢失的记忆，如果一切记忆都丢失了，那意识就消亡了，而局部的丢失也可算作是这消亡中的一部分，即一部分死。而每个人都在不断的忘却，每个人都在不断的死亡。
　　可见，如果我们不把死亡看成是一个量变的过程，是很难解释自身对于生的疑问的。而生理的死，不过是一种剧变而已。当然，这可以说是因为大脑不工作了，但这与失去记忆无别，因为我们讨论的对记忆的思考其实也得基于记忆。
　　我们可以幻想，终会有一天，在宇宙的某处，某种物质的组合，构成了我们某些记忆和某种可反馈的体系，我们又活过来了！纵使那时觉得这是的你我是何等的聪明或愚昧或令人费解。
　　可见，所谓为什么活着，是指对拥有记忆和继续拥有记忆的思考。它的潜台词是为何不死去，即为何不不再拥有记忆。但仔细分析，意识的消亡是无法感知的，因为它包括了感知，所以我们在某种意义上永远将有意识。为对活着的追问，无非是假设了死亡的情景，如黑暗，然后作的发问。
　　摘自《人是什么》
　　作者：杨烨

杠头儿 · 发表于 2011-1-23 13:44

回复 3# 杠头儿

Consciousness is variously defined as subjective experience, awareness, the ability to experience "feeling", wakefulness, the understanding of the concept "self", or the executive control system of the mind.[1] It is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental phenomena.[2] Although humans realize what everyday experiences are, consciousness itself resists being defined, philosophers note (e.g. John Searle in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy):[3]

"Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."
, [: ^( K* @9 j' O4 _0 W—Schneider and Velmans, 2007[4] " I+ i4 @! t3 t- M

Consciousness in medicine (e.g., anesthesiology) is assessed by observing a patient's alertness and responsiveness, and can be seen as a continuum of states ranging from alert, oriented to time and place, and communicative, through disorientation, then delirium, then loss of any meaningful communication, and ending with loss of movement in response to painful stimulation.[5]
Consciousness in psychology and philosophy typically means something beyond what it means for anesthesiology, and may be said in many contexts to imply four characteristics: subjectivity, change, continuity, and selectivity.[1][6] Philosopher Franz Brentano has suggested intentionality or aboutness (that consciousness is about something). However, within the philosophy of mind there is no consensus on whether intentionality is a requirement for consciousness.[7]
Consciousness is the subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill or comatose people;[8] whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how it can be measured; at what point in fetal development consciousness begins; and whether computers can achieve a conscious state.[9][10][11]

Etymology
The word "conscious" is derived from Latin conscius meaning "1. having joint or common knowledge with another, privy to, cognizant of; 2. conscious to oneself; esp., conscious of guilt".[12] A related word was conscientia, which primarily means moral conscience. In the literal sense, "conscientia" means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridical texts by writers such as Cicero.[13] Here, conscientia is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else.[14]
René Descartes (1596–1650) is generally taken to be the first philosopher to use "conscientia" in a way that does not seem to fit this traditional meaning.[citation needed] Descartes used "conscientia" the way modern speakers would use "conscience." In Search after Truth he says "conscience or internal testimony" (conscientia vel interno testimonio).[15]
Shortly thereafter, in Britain, the neo-Platonist theologian Ralph Cudworth used the modern meaning of consciousness in his "True Intellectual System of the Universe" (1678) and associated the concept with personal identity, which is assured by the repeated consciousness of oneself. Cudworth's use of the term also remained intertwined with moral agency.[citation needed] While there were no elaborate theories of consciousness in the seventeenth century, there was an awareness of the idea of consciousness. Cudworth was the first English philosopher to make extensive use of the noun "consciousness" with a specific philosophical meaning.[16]
Twelve years later, Locke in Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) connected consciousness with personal identity.[17] Locke argued that being the same person from one time to another was not dependent upon having the same soul or same body, but instead the same consciousness.[18] Locke defined consciousness as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.”[19] Locke had much influence on the 18th Century view of consciousness: in Samuel Johnson's celebrated Dictionary (1755), Johnson uses this definition of "consciousness."[citation needed]
Events that occur in the mind or brain that are not within phenomenal or access consciousness are known as subconscious events.
Philosophical approaches
There are many philosophical stances on consciousness, including behaviorism, dualism, idealism, functionalism, reflexive monism, phenomenalism, phenomenology and intentionality, physicalism, emergentism, mysticism, personal identity, and externalism.
Phenomenal and access consciousness
Phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness) is simply experience;[20] it is moving, colored forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and feelings with our bodies and responses at the center. These experiences, considered independently of any impact on behavior, are called qualia. The hard problem of consciousness, formulated by David Chalmers in 1996, deals with the issue of "how to explain a state of phenomenal consciousness in terms of its neurological basis".[21]! f+ R/ b) E4 v) P$ R2 g
Access consciousness (A-consciousness) is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior. So, when we perceive, information about what we perceive is often access conscious; when we introspect, information about our thoughts is access conscious; when we remember, information about the past (e.g., something that we learned) is often access conscious, and so on. Chalmers thinks that access consciousness is less mysterious than phenomenal consciousness, so that it is held to pose one of the easy problems of consciousness. Daniel Dennett denies that there is a "hard problem", asserting that the totality of consciousness can be understood in terms of impact on behavior, as studied through heterophenomenology. There have been numerous approaches to the processes that act on conscious experience from instant to instant. Dennett suggests that what people think of as phenomenal consciousness, such as qualia, are judgments and consequent behavior.[22] He extends this analysis by arguing that phenomenal consciousness can be explained in terms of access consciousness, denying the existence of qualia, hence denying the existence of a "hard problem."[22] Chalmers, on the other hand, argues that Dennett's explanatory processes merely address aspects of the easy problem. Eccles and others have pointed out the difficulty of explaining the evolution of qualia, or of 'minds', which experience them, given that all the processes governing evolution are physical and so have no direct access to them. There is no guarantee that all people have minds, nor any way to verify whether one does or does not possess one.
The description and location of phenomenal consciousness
For centuries, philosophers have investigated phenomenal consciousness. René Descartes, who coined the famous dictum 'cogito ergo sum', wrote Meditations on First Philosophy in the seventeenth century.[23] According to Descartes, all thought is conscious.[24] Conscious experience, according to Descartes, included such ideas as imaginings and perceptions laid out in space and time that are viewed from a point, and appearing as a result of some quality such as color, smell, and so on. (Modern readers are often confused by this Descartes' notion of interchangeability between the terms 'idea' and 'imaginings.')[citation needed]
Descartes defines ideas as extended things, as in this excerpt from his Treatise on Man:

, s5 n" ]! W8 X1 eNow among these figures, it is not those imprinted on the external sense organs, or on the internal surface of the brain, which should be taken to be ideas - but only those that are traced in the spirits on the surface of gland H [where the seat of the imagination and the 'common sense' is located]. That is to say, it is only the latter figures which should be taken to be the forms or images which the rational soul united to this machine will consider directly when it imagines some object or perceives it by the senses.[25]

Thus Descartes does not identify mental ideas with activity within the sense organs, or even with brain activity, but rather with the "forms or images" that unite the body and the "rational soul," through the mediating 'gland H'. This organ is now known as the pineal gland. Descartes notes that, anatomically, while the human brain consists of two symmetrical hemispheres the pineal gland, which lies close to the brain's centre, appears to be singular. Thus he extrapolated from this that it was the mediator between body and soul.[25]
Philosophical responses, including those of Nicolas Malebranche, Thomas Reid, John Locke, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, were varied. Malebranche, for example, agreed with Descartes that the human being was composed of two elements, body and mind, and that conscious experience resided in the latter.
He did, however, disagree with Descartes as to the ease with which we might become aware of our mental constitution, stating 'I am not my own light unto myself'.[26] David Hume and Immanuel Kant also differ from Descartes, in that they avoid mentioning a place from which experience is viewed; certainly, few if any modern philosophers have identified the pineal gland as the seat of dualist interaction.
When we look around a room or have a dream, things are laid out in space and time and viewed as if from a point. However, when philosophers and scientists consider the location of the form and contents of this phenomenal consciousness, there are fierce disagreements. As an example, Descartes proposed that the contents are brain activity seen by a non-physical place without extension (the Res Cogitans), which, in Meditations on First Philosophy, he identified as the soul.[27] This idea is known as Cartesian Dualism. Another example is found in the work of Thomas Reid who thought the contents of consciousness are the world itself, which becomes conscious experience in some way. This concept is a type of Direct realism. The precise physical substrate of conscious experience in the world, such as photons, quantum fields, etc. is usually not specified.
Other philosophers, such as George Berkeley, have proposed that the contents of consciousness are an aspect of minds and do not necessarily involve matter at all. This is a type of Idealism. Yet others, such as Leibniz, have considered that each point in the universe is endowed with conscious content. This is a form of Panpsychism. Panpsychism is the belief that all matter, including rocks for example, is sentient or conscious. The concept of the things in conscious experience being impressions in the brain is a type of representationalism, and representationalism is a form of indirect realism.
It is sometimes held that consciousness emerges from the complexity of brain processing. The general label 'emergence' applies to new phenomena that emerge from a physical basis without the connection between the two explicitly specified.
Some theorists hold that phenomenal consciousness poses an explanatory gap. Colin McGinn takes the New Mysterianism position that it can't be solved, and Chalmers criticizes purely physical accounts of mental experiences based on the idea that philosophical zombies are logically possible and supports property dualism. But others have proposed speculative scientific theories to explain the explanatory gap, such as Quantum mind, space-time theories of consciousness,[28] reflexive monism, and Electromagnetic theories of consciousness to explain the correspondence between brain activity and experience.
Parapsychologists and some philosophers e.g. Stephen Braude sometimes appeal to the concepts of psychokinesis or telepathy to support the belief that consciousness is not confined to the brain.

杠头儿 · 发表于 2011-1-23 13:50

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Philosophical criticisms
Locke's "forensic" notion of personal identity founded on an individual conscious subject would be criticized in the 19th century by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud following different angles. Martin Heidegger's concept of the Dasein ("Being-there") would also be an attempt to think beyond the conscious subject.[citation needed]
Marx considered that social relations ontologically preceded individual consciousness, and criticized the conception of a conscious subject as an ideological conception on which liberal political thought was founded.[citation needed] Marx in particular criticized the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, considering that the so-called individual natural rights were ideological fictions camouflaging social inequality in the attribution of those rights. Later, Louis Althusser would criticize the "bourgeois ideology of the subject" through the concept of interpellation ("Hey, you!").[citation needed]
Nietzsche, for his part, once wrote that "they give you free will only to later blame yourself", thus reversing the classical liberal conception of free will in a critical account of the genealogy of consciousness as the effect of guilt and ressentiment, which he described in On the Genealogy of Morals. Hence, Nietzsche was the first one to make the claim that the modern notion of consciousness was indebted to the modern system of penalty, which judged a man according to his "responsibility", that is by the consciousness through which acts can be attributed to an individual subject: "I did this! This is me!". Consciousness is thus related by Nietzsche to the classic philosopheme of recognition which, according to him, defines knowledge.[29]
Michel Foucault's analysis of the creation of the individual subject through disciplines, in Discipline and Punish (1975), would extend Nietzsche's genealogy of consciousness and personal identity - i.e. individualism - to the change in the juridico-penal system: the emergence of penology and the disciplinization of the individual subject through the creation of a penal system that judged not the acts as it alleged to, but the personal identity of the wrong-doer. In other words, Foucault maintained that, by judging not the acts (the crime), but the person behind those acts (the criminal), the modern penal system was not only following the philosophical definition of consciousness, once again demonstrating the imbrications between ideas and social institutions ("material ideology" as Althusser would call it); it was by itself creating the individual person, categorizing and dividing the masses into a category of poor but honest and law-abiding citizens and another category of "professional criminals" or recidivists.[citation needed]
Gilbert Ryle has argued that traditional understandings of consciousness depend on a Cartesian outlook that divides into mind and body, mind and world. He proposed that we speak not of minds, bodies, and the world, but of individuals, or persons, acting in the world. Thus, by saying 'consciousness,' we end up misleading ourselves by thinking that there is any sort of thing as consciousness separated from behavioral and linguistic understandings.[citation needed]
The failure to produce a workable definition of consciousness also raises formidable philosophical questions. It has been argued that when Antonio Damasio [30] defines consciousness as "an organism's awareness of its own self and its surroundings", the definition has not escaped circularity, because awareness in that context can be considered a synonym for consciousness.
The notion of consciousness as passive awareness can be contrasted with the notion of the active construction of mental representations. Maturana and Varela[31] showed that the brain is massively involved with creating worlds of experience for us with meager input from the senses. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins [32] sums up the interactive view of experience: "In a way, what sense organs do is assist our brains to construct a useful model and it is this model that we move around in. It is a kind of virtual reality simulation of the world."

Consciousness and language
Because humans express their conscious states using language, it is tempting to equate language abilities and consciousness. There are, however, speechless humans (infants, feral children, aphasics, severe forms of autism), to whom consciousness is attributed despite language lost or not yet acquired. Moreover, the study of brain states of non-linguistic primates, in particular the macaques, has been used extensively by scientists and philosophers in their quest for the neural correlates of the contents of consciousness.
Julian Jaynes argued to the contrary, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, that for consciousness to arise in a person, language needs to have reached a fairly high level of complexity. According to Jaynes, human consciousness emerged as recently as 1300 BCE or thereabouts. He defines consciousness in such a way as to show how he conceives of it as a type of thinking that builds upon non human ways of perceiving, for example (p. 55)...Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up like a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision.
...and page 65...It operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog "I" that can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it.
...and perhaps most tellingly, page 66...there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.
Some philosophers, including W.V. Quine, and some neuroscientists, including Christof Koch, contest this hypothesis, arguing that it suggests that prior to this "discovery" of consciousness, experience simply did not exist.[33] Ned Block argued that Jaynes had confused consciousness with the concept of consciousness, the latter being what was discovered between the Iliad and the Odyssey.[34] Daniel Dennett states that these approaches misconceive Jaynes's definition of consciousness as more than mere perception or awareness of an object. He notes that consciousness is like money in that having the thing requires having the concept of it, so it is a revolutionary proposal and not a ridiculous error to suppose that consciousness only emerges when its concept does.
More recently, Merlin Donald, seeing a similar connection between language and consciousness, and a similar link to cultural, and not purely genetic, evolution, has put a similar proposal to Jaynes' forward - though relying on less specific speculation about the more recent pre-history of consciousness. He writes...To understand consciousness fully, the generation of culture must be explained. Enculturation has been neglected as a possible formative process in its own right, but we have no alternative other than to give it pride of place in any evolutionary theory.[35]
He argues that an earlier "symbol using culture" must have preceded both the personal symbol using of individual consciousness, as well as language itself.
The idea that language and consciousness are not innate to humans, a characteristic of human nature, but rather the result of cultural evolution, beginning with something similar to the culture of chimpanzees, goes back before Darwin to Rousseau's Second Discourse.

Vedanta
According to Vedanta, awareness is not a product of physical processes and can be considered under four aspects. The first is waking consciousness (jagaritasthana), the identification with “I” or “me” in relationship with phenomenal experiences with external objects. The second aspect is dream consciousness (svapna-sthana), which embodies the same subject/object duality as the waking state. The third aspect of consciousness is deep sleep (susupti), which is non-dual as a result of holding in abeyance all feelings, thoughts, and sensations. The final aspect is the consciousness that underlies and transcends the first three aspects (turiya) also referred to as a trans-cognitive state (anubhava) or a state of self-realization or freedom from body-mind identification (moksha).[36] Gaudiya Vedanta recognizes a fifth aspect of consciousness in which God becomes subordinate to bhakti.[37]

Vijñāna
In Buddhism, consciousness (viññāṇa) is included in the five classically defined experiential "aggregates". The aggregates are seen as empty of self-nature; that is, they arise dependent on causes and conditions. The cause for consciousness arising (viññāṇa) is the arising of another aggregate (physical or mental); and, consciousness arising in turn gives rise to one or more of the mental (nāma) aggregates. The causation chain identified in the aggregate (khandha) model overlaps the conditioning chain in Dependent Origination (paticcasamuppāda) model. [38] Consciousness is the third link, between mind body mental formations and name & form in the traditional Twelve Causes (nidāna) of Dependent Origination.[39] The six classes of consciousness are: eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, nose-consciousness, tongue-consciousness, body-consciousness, intellect-consciousness. [40] The following aspects are traditionally highlighted within Dependent Origination:

consciousness is conditioned by mental fabrications (saṅkhāra);
consciousness and the mind-body (nāmarūpa) are interdependent; and,
consciousness acts as a "life force" by which there is a continuity across rebirths.

杠头儿 · 发表于 2011-1-23 13:52

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Cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience
For a long time in scientific psychology, consciousness as a research topic or explanatory concept was strongly discouraged by mainstream scholars, because of concerns about the validation of primary data .[41] Research on topics associated with consciousness were conducted under the banner of attention. Modern investigations into consciousness are based on psychological statistical studies and case studies of consciousness states and the deficits caused by lesions, stroke, injury, or surgery that disrupt the normal functioning of human senses and cognition. These discoveries suggest that the mind is a complex structure derived from various localized functions that are bound together with a unitary awareness.[citation needed]
Several studies point to common mechanisms in different clinical conditions that lead to loss of consciousness. Persistent vegetative state (PVS) is a condition in which an individual loses the higher cerebral powers of the brain, but maintains sleep-wake cycles with full or partial autonomic functions. Studies comparing PVS with healthy, awake subjects consistently demonstrate an impaired connectivity between the deeper (brainstem and thalamic) and the upper (cortical) areas of the brain. In addition, it is agreed that the general brain activity in the cortex is lower in the PVS state. Some electroneurobiological interpretations of consciousness characterize this loss of consciousness as a loss of the ability to resolve time (similar to playing an old phonographic record at very slow or very rapid speed), along a continuum that starts with inattention, continues on sleep, and arrives to coma and death .[42] It is likely that different components of consciousness can be teased apart with anesthetics, sedatives and hypnotics. These drugs appear to differentially act on several brain areas to disrupt, to varying degrees, different components of consciousness. The ability to recall information, for example, may be disrupted by anesthetics acting on the hippocampal cortex. Neurons in this region are particularly sensitive to anesthetics at the time loss of recall occurs. Direct anesthetic actions on hippocampal neurons have been shown to underlie EEG effects that occur in humans and animals during loss of recall.[43]
Brain chemistry affects human consciousness. Sleeping drugs (such as Midazolam = Dormicum) can bring the brain from the awake condition (conscious) to the sleep (unconscious). Wake-up drugs such as flumazenil reverse this process. Many other drugs (such as alcohol, nicotine, Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), heroin, cocaine, LSD, MDMA, caffeine), have a consciousness-changing effect.[citation needed]
The bilateral removal of the centromedian nucleus (part of the Intra-laminar nucleus of the Thalamus) appears to abolish consciousness, causing coma, PVS, severe mutism and other features that mimic brain death. The centromedian nucleus is also one of the principal sites of action of general anaesthetics and anti-psychotic drugs. This evidence suggests that a functioning thalamus is necessary, but not sufficient, for human consciousness.[citation needed]
Neurophysiological studies in awake, behaving monkeys point to advanced cortical areas in prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes as carriers of neuronal correlates of consciousness. Christof Koch and Francis Crick argue that neuronal mechanisms of consciousness are intricately related to prefrontal cortex — cortical areas involved in higher cognitive function, affect, behavioral control, and planning. Rodolfo Llinas proposes that consciousness results from recurrent thalamo-cortical resonance where the specific thalamocortical systems (content) and the non-specific (centromedial thalamus) thalamocortical systems (context) interact in the gamma band frequency via time coincidence. According to this view the "I" represents a global predictive function required for intentionality.[44][45] Experimental work of Steven Wise, Mikhail Lebedev and their colleagues supports this view. They demonstrated that activity of prefrontal cortex neurons reflects illusory perceptions of movements of visual stimuli. Nikos Logothetis and colleagues made similar observations on visually responsive neurons in the temporal lobe. These neurons reflect the visual perception in the situation when conflicting visual images are presented to different eyes (i.e., bistable percepts during binocular rivalry). The studies of blindsight — vision without awareness after lesions to parts of the visual system such as the primary visual cortex — performed by Lawrence Weiskrantz and David P. Carey provided important insights on how conscious perception arises in the brain.[citation needed]
An alternative and more global approach to analyzing neurophysiological (electromagnetic) correlates of consciousness is referred to by Andrew and Alexander Fingelkurts as Operational Architectonics. This still-untested theory postulates that phenomenal patterns/objects/thoughts are matched with and generated by underlying neurophysiological activity's spatial-temporal patterns (indexed as Operational Modules of different complexity) that can be revealed directly from EEG.[46][47][48]
The Neuroscience of free will also seems to provide relevant insights to the understanding of consciousness.
Experimental philosophy
A new approach has attempted to combine the methodologies of cognitive psychology and traditional philosophy to understand consciousness. This research has taken place in the new field called experimental philosophy, which seeks to use empirical methods (like conducting experiments to test how ordinary non-experts think) to inform the philosophical discussion.[49] The aim of this type of philosophical research on consciousness has been to try to get a better grasp on how exactly people ordinarily understand consciousness. For instance, work by Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz suggests that people may have two different ways of understanding minds generally.[50] Another suggestion has been that there is actually no such phenomenon as consciousness, based on a criticized study by Justin Sytsma and Edouard Machery.[51] Further, Justin Sytsma and Edouard Machery have written about the proper methodology for studying folk intuitions about consciousness.[52]

Evolutionary psychology
Consciousness can be viewed from the standpoints of evolutionary psychology or evolutionary biology approach as an adaptation because it is a trait that increases fitness.[53] Consciousness also adheres to John Alcock's theory of animal behavioral adaptations because it possesses both proximate and ultimate causes.[54]
The proximate causes for consciousness, i.e. how consciousness evolved in animals, is a subject considered by Sir John C. Eccles in his paper "Evolution of consciousness." He argues that special anatomical and physical properties of the mammalian cerebral cortex gave rise to consciousness.[55] Budiansky, by contrast, limits consciousness to humans, proposing that human consciousness may have evolved as an adaptation to anticipate and counter social strategems of other humans, predators, and prey.[56] Alternatively, it has been argued that the recursive circuitry underwriting consciousness is much more primitive, having evolved initially in premammalian species because it improves the capacity for interaction with both social and natural environments by providing an energy-saving "neutral" gear in an otherwise energy-expensive motor output machine.[57] Another theory, proposed by Shaun Nichols and Todd Grantham, proposes that it is unnecessary to trace the exact evolutionary or causal role of phenomenal consciousness because the complexity of phenomenal consciousness alone implies that it is an adaptation.[58] Once in place, this recursive circuitry may well have provided a basis for the subsequent development of many of the functions that consciousness facilitates in higher organisms, as outlined by Bernard J. Baars.[59] Konrad Lorenz sees the roots of consciousness in the process of self-exploration of an organism that sees itself acting and learns a lifetime. Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge

Functions of Consciousness

Function	Purpose
Definition and context-setting	Relating global input to its contexts, thereby defining input and removing ambiguities
Adaptation and learning	Representing and adapting to novel and significant events
Editing, flagging, and debugging	Monitoring conscious content, editing it, and trying to change it if it is consciously "flagged" as an error
Recruiting and control function	Recruiting subgoals and motor systems to organize and carry out mental and physical actions
Prioritizing and access control	Control over what will become conscious
Decision-making or executive function	Recruiting unconscious knowledge sources to make proper decisions, and making goals conscious to allow widespread recruitment of conscious and unconscious "votes" for or against them
Analogy-forming function	Searching for a partial match between contents of unconscious systems and a globally displayed (conscious) message
Metacognitive or self-forming function	Reflection upon and control of our own conscious and unconscious functioning
Auto-programming and self-maintenance function	Maintenance of maximum stability in the face of changing inner and outer conditions

杠头儿 · 发表于 2011-1-23 14:01

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Physical
Since the dawn of Newtonian science with its vision of simple mechanical principles governing the entire universe, some philosophers have been tempted by the idea that even consciousness could be explained in purely physical terms. The first influential writer to propose such an idea explicitly was Julien Offray de La Mettrie, in his book Man a Machine (L'homme machine).[60]
The most influential modern physical theories of consciousness are based on psychology and neuroscience. Theories proposed by neuroscientists such as Gerald Edelman [61] and António Damásio,[62] and by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett,[63] seek to explain access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness in terms of neural events occurring within the brain. Many other neuroscientists, such as Christof Koch,[64] have explored the neural basis of consciousness without attempting to frame all-encompassing global theories. At the same time, computer scientists working in the field of Artificial Intelligence have pursued the goal of creating digital computer programs that can simulate or embody consciousness.
Some theorists—most of whom are physicists—have argued that classical physics is intrinsically incapable of explaining the holistic aspects of consciousness, but that quantum theory provides the missing ingredients. The most notable theories falling into this category include the Holonomic brain theory of Karl H. Pribram and David Bohm, and the Orch-OR theory formulated by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. Some of these QM theories offer descriptions of phenomenal consciousness, as well as QM interpretations of access consciousness. None of the quantum mechanical theories has been confirmed by experiment, and many scientists and philosophers consider the arguments for an important role of quantum phenomena to be unconvincing.[citation needed]

Functions
Regarding the primary function of conscious processing, a recurring idea in recent theories is that phenomenal states somehow integrate neural activities and information-processing that would otherwise be independent (see review in Baars, 2002). This has been called the integration consensus. However, it remained unspecified which kinds of information are integrated in a conscious manner and which kinds can be integrated without consciousness. Obviously not all kinds of information are capable of being disseminated consciously (e.g., neural activity related to vegetative functions, reflexes, unconscious motor programs, low-level perceptual analyses, etc.) and many kinds can be disseminated and combined with other kinds without consciousness, as in intersensory interactions such as the ventriloquism effect (cf., Morsella, 2005).
Ervin László argues that self-awareness, the ability to make observations of oneself, evolved. Émile Durkheim formulated the concept of so called collective consciousness, which is essential for organization of human, social relations. The accelerating drive of human race to explorations, cognition, understanding and technological progress can be explained by some features of collective consciousness (collective self - concepts) and collective intelligence[citation needed]

Tests
As there is no clear definition of consciousness and no empirical measure exists to test for its presence, it has been argued that due to the nature of the problem of consciousness, empirical tests are intrinsically impossible. However, several tests have been developed that attempt an operational definition of consciousness and try to determine whether computers and non-human animals can demonstrate through behavior, by passing these tests, that they are conscious.
In medicine, several neurological and brain imaging techniques, like EEG and fMRI, have proven useful for physical measures of brain activity associated with consciousness. This is particularly true for EEG measures during anesthesia that can provide an indication of anesthetic depth, although with still limited accuracies of ~ 70 % and a high degree of patient and drug variability seen.

TuringSee also: Turing test and philosophy of artificial intelligence

Though often thought of as a test for consciousness, the Turing test (named after computer scientist Alan Turing, who first proposed it) is actually a test to determine whether or not a computer satisfied his operational definition of "intelligent" (which is not synonymous with consciousness and self-awareness). This test is commonly cited in discussion of artificial intelligence. The essence of the test is based on "the Imitation Game", in which a human experimenter attempts to converse, via computer keyboards, with two others. One of the others is a human (who, it is assumed, is conscious) while the other is a computer. Because all of the conversation is via keyboards (teletypes, in Turing's original conception) no cues such as voice, prosody, or appearance will be available to indicate which is human and which is the computer. If the human is unable to determine which of the conversants is human, and which is a computer, the computer is said to have "passed" the Turing test (satisfied Turing's operational definition of "intelligent").[citation needed]
The Turing test has generated a great deal of research and philosophical debate. For example, Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter argue that anything capable of passing the Turing test is necessarily conscious,[65] while David Chalmers, argues that a philosophical zombie could pass the test, yet fail to be conscious.[66]
It has been argued that the question itself is excessively anthropomorphic. Edsger Dijkstra commented that "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim", expressing the view that different words are appropriate for the workings of a machine to those of animals even if they produce similar results, just as submarines are not normally said to swim.
Philosopher John Searle developed a thought experiment, the Chinese room argument, which is intended to show problems with the Turing Test.[67] Searle asks the reader to imagine a non-Chinese speaker in a room in which there are stored a very large number of Chinese symbols and rule books. Questions are passed to the person in the form of written Chinese symbols via a slot, and the person responds by looking up the symbols and the correct replies in the rule books. Based on the purely input-output operations, the "Chinese room" gives the appearance of understanding Chinese. However, the person in the room understands no Chinese at all. This argument has been the subject of intense philosophical debate since it was introduced in 1980, even leading to edited volumes on this topic alone.
The application of the Turing test to human consciousness has even led to an annual competition, the Loebner Prize[citation needed], with "Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's."

MirrorMain article: Mirror test

See also the concept of the Mirror stage by Jacques Lacan
With the mirror test, devised by Gordon Gallup in the 1970s, one is interested in whether animals are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. The classic example of the test involves placing a spot of coloring on the skin or fur near the individual's forehead and seeing if they attempt to remove it or at least touch the spot, thus indicating that they recognize that the individual they are seeing in the mirror is themselves. Humans (older than 18 months) and other great apes, bottlenose dolphins, pigeons, elephants [68] and magpies [69] have all been observed to pass this test. The test is usually carried out with an identical 'spot' being placed elsewhere on the head with a non-visible material as a control, to assure the subject is not responding to the touch stimuli of the spot's presence.

Delay
One problem researchers face is distinguishing nonconscious reflexes and instinctual responses from conscious responses. Neuroscientists Francis Crick and Christof Koch have proposed that by placing a delay between stimulus and execution of action, one may determine the extent of involvement of consciousness in an action of a biological organism.[citation needed]
For example, when psychologists Larry Squire and Robert Clark combined a tone of a specific pitch with a puff of air to the eye, test subjects came to blink their eyes in anticipation of the puff of air when the appropriate tone was played. When the puff of air followed a half of a second later, no such conditioning occurred. When subjects were asked about the experiment, only those who were asked to pay attention could consciously distinguish which tone preceded the puff of air.[citation needed]
Ability to delay the response to an action implies that the information must be stored in short-term memory, which is conjectured to be a closely associated prerequisite for consciousness. However, this test is only valid for biological organisms. While it is simple to create a computer program that passes, such success does not suggest anything beyond a clever programmer.[33][page needed]

Merkwelt
The merkwelt (German; English: "way of viewing the world", "peculiar individual consciousness") is a concept in robotics, psychology and biology that describes a creature or android's capacity to view things, manipulate information and synthesize to make meaning out of the universe.[citation needed]
In biology, a shark's merkwelt for instance is dominated by smell due to its enlarged olfactory lobes whilst a bat's is dominated by its hearing, especially at ultrasonic frequencies. In literature, a character's merkwelt can be defined by their particular consciousness. For the collective, the plural is merkwelten. It is related to the original German meaning of zeitgeist and indeed a merkwelt can be thought of as a more general, individual zeitgeist.[url=][70][71][72][/url]
To have a merkwelt, the individual must be self-aware. This "self-awareness" may involve thoughts, sensations, perceptions, moods, emotions, and dreams. This term was particularly developed by the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll who framed it as part of his theory of umwelt. This basically stated that any living 'observer' of the broader environment or umwelt through their particular werkwelt or 'mechanical viewing' (that is to say, the organs through which they view the world- their eyes, ears, mouth etc. in humans and electrical sensors in sharks for instance) could have a merkwelt or 'perceptual universe'. In essence, his theory posits that the way each human or certain type of aware animal perceives of their environment both through their experiences, the particular way their organs perceive their environment and the way in which their consciousness processes this information (how their brain works).[clarification needed][73]

杠头儿 · 发表于 2011-1-23 14:05

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Cognitive science

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Vijñāna (viññāṇa) — consciousness as a concept in Buddhism
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