Consciousness

Being in use in the English language since at least the 1500s, the term consciousness has gone through various stages of interpretation and redefinition. At an intuitive level, consciousness refers to a subjective feeling of experiencing one’s surroundings, such as the perception of sounds and smells, as well as one’s own thoughts, generating a sense of self. Consciousness can be viewed both as an instantaneous, or core, phenomenon giving an organism its sense of self in the context of a specific experience, circumscribed in space and time, or as an extended phenomenon giving an organism its sense of self in the context of a continuum of experiences, which changes throughout the organism’s development and lifetime.

The study of consciousness can be divided into two general domains: ...