consciousness - Concepts

Explore concepts tagged with "consciousness"

Total concepts: 19

Concepts

Philosophical Zombies - Hypothetical beings physically and behaviorally identical to conscious humans but entirely lacking subjective experience, used to argue that consciousness is non-physical.
Hard Problem of Consciousness - The challenge of explaining why and how physical brain processes give rise to subjective conscious experience, as distinguished from the 'easy problems' of explaining cognitive functions.
Cogito Ergo Sum - Descartes' foundational philosophical proposition meaning 'I think, therefore I am,' establishing the certainty of one's own existence through the act of thinking.
Epiphenomenalism - The view that mental states are caused by physical brain processes but have no causal influence on the physical world, making consciousness a byproduct without function.
Mind-Body Problem - The philosophical question of how mental states, experiences, and consciousness relate to the physical states of the brain and body.
Panpsychism - The philosophical view that consciousness or mind-like qualities are a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality, present to some degree in all matter.
Laya - A meditative state of mental absorption, dissolution, or deep relaxation where thoughts temporarily cease.
Mary's Room - A thought experiment arguing that knowing all the physical facts about color vision would not prepare someone for the subjective experience of actually seeing color.
Physicalism - The philosophical position that everything that exists is physical or supervenes on the physical, and that all facts are ultimately physical facts.
Non-Duality - The philosophical teaching that subject and object, self and other, are ultimately not separate.
Intentionality - The property of mental states by which they are 'about' or 'directed toward' something, considered by some philosophers to be the defining mark of the mental.
Samadhi - A state of profound meditative concentration where the mind becomes completely absorbed in its object of focus.
Neurophilosophy - The interdisciplinary field that brings neuroscience to bear on traditional philosophical questions about mind, knowledge, and consciousness.
Qualia - The subjective, qualitative aspects of conscious experience - the 'what it is like' quality of sensations such as the redness of red or the painfulness of pain.
Philosophy of Mind - The branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, consciousness, and their relationship to the physical body.
Global Workspace Theory - A cognitive theory of consciousness proposing that conscious awareness arises when information is broadcast from a global workspace to multiple specialized brain systems simultaneously.
Dualism - The philosophical view that mind and body are fundamentally different kinds of substances or possess fundamentally different properties.
Functionalism - A philosophy of mind theory that defines mental states by their functional roles - what they do rather than what they are made of.
Phenomenology - The philosophical study of the structures of subjective experience and consciousness as lived from the first-person perspective.

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