Relaxation House
Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external objects 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 mind.Depsite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: “Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making consciousnes experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious asoect of our lives.Philosophers since the time of Descartes and Locke have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and pin down its essential properties. Issue of concern in the philosophy of consciousness include whether theconcept is fundamentally valid; whether consciousness can ever be explained mechanistically; whether non-human consciousness exists andif so how it can be recognized; how consciousness relates to language whether consciuosness can beunderstood in a way that does not require a dualistic distinction between mental and physical state or properties; and whether it may ever be possible for computing machines like computers or robots to be consciuos.