If we examine now what the prestigious Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says about the concept of "consciousness" we can build a first approximation to what the current academic world considers to be the domain of such a concept. First of all, it should be noted that we are talking about two interconnected terms, the noun "consciousness" and the adjective "conscious". Which shows us that we are going to find two ontological approaches to the question about the nature of consciousness. Consciousness as a noun, that is, it considers consciousness to be an entity, and consciousness as an adjective, which considers consciousness to be a property of an entity. The most common understanding is the adjectival: consciousness as a property of something else, particularly of mind, or of life in general.
As a property, we can then speak of conscious animals, conscious people, or any conscious physical or non-physical system, and this property can be approached from various points of view. The Standford Encyclopedia proposes 6.
1. Sentience. From this point of view we say that a creature (or system) is conscious when it responds or is capable of responding to stimuli in its environment (Armstrong 1981). If we speak in this sense, it would be necessary to clarify that the "conscious" property is given by degrees. The sentient capacity of a snail is not the same as that of a dolphin. Therefore, from this theoretical proposal, the property is applied to living beings capable of responding to environmental stimuli with physiological actions. Here it is implied that consciousness is a form of intelligence and adaptation that occurs by degrees, that is, it is an evolutionary proposal.
2. Wakefulness. From this point of view, we do not consider the ability to exercise consciousness but the fact that it is being exercised under certain parameters, in particular, the parameters of attention and wakefulness. From this narrow point of view, a complete study of consciousness is what anesthesiology performs.
3. Self-awareness. An even more restrictive way of considering the property of "conscious" is when we only consider an organism to be conscious when it is aware that it is conscious (Carruthers 2000). Here we are leaving out of the definition the entire animal kingdom except ourselves, and not even that, because we are leaving out children and mentally handicapped, since it is a very specific mental function that we use as a criterion.
4. What is like... It is the approximation to the property that Thomas Nagel made in a well-known essay from 1974. A creature is conscious just if there is "something that it is like to be that creature”. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbuNehVZ0mU&list=PLcX5IdGYTx51I5EGmTgOocAHEAxX5Ir31&index=5
This means that being conscious it is limited to being a particular consciousness, and that particular consciousness has ontological status: the consciousness of a creature is a specific experiential process, conditioned by physiology. In this sense consciousness is identical to experience. This points out to a question of no easy answer: why is experience (consciousness of it) needed to be a creature? This is known as the hard problem of consciousness. My answer to such a question would be: Consciousness is not Qualia but Substantia, it is not an adjective but an infinitive that operates both as verb (action) and as noun (Subject. As action is better expressed as Meaning-Intention-Will. As noun is better expressed as the continuum of intelligence that displays itself as "I".
5. Property of a state of an organism. This approach requires first defining what a conscious state is, that is, it requires defining the property. This point point, consciousness as a specific state, as a specific property, is at the same time the category that encompasses the other five. Sentient state, state of wakefulness and attention, state of experience of the constitution of an organism, etc. Nonetheless, the properties given above deal with more or less permanent, structural states of the organism, while the fifth of them deals with more conjunctural or temporary states in any case, however much they may be recurring.
6. Distinction between "conscious" as transitive or intransitive property. We can distinguish between being aware of objects, processes, or psychological states, that is, we can be talking about transitive consciousness, or intransitively we can talk in terms of simply being conscious.
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