consciousness
nounUK /ˈkɒnʃəsnəs/ · US /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/
Etymology From conscious + -ness.
1
The state of being conscious or aware; awareness.
- Of course it’s natural to think twice about whether your cell phone truly “knows” a favorite number, your GPS is really “figuring out” the best route home, and your Roomba is genuinely “trying” to clean the floor. But as information-processing systems become more sophisticated—as their representations of the world become richer, their goals are arranged into hierarchies of subgoals within subgoals, and their actions for attaining the goals become more diverse and less predictable—it starts to look like hominid chauvinism to insist that they don’t. (Whether information and computation explain consciousness, in addition to knowledge, intelligence, and purpose, is a question I’ll turn to in the final chapter.)2018, Steven Pinker, “Chapter 2: Entro, Evo, Info”, in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Penguin, →ISBN:
2
The state or trait of having cognition and sensation; cognition and sensation themselves.
- To lose consciousness after striking one's head
- Consciousness is universal and precedes even the formation of our solar system.1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 39:
1 more example
- Yet this is the level of organisation that does the actual thinking—and is, presumably, the seat of consciousness.2013 August 3, “The machine of a new soul”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847:
3
The fact of having knowledge of a particular fact or matter; cognizance.
- Although the Celebrity was almost impervious to sarcasm, he was now beginning to exhibit visible signs of uneasiness, the consciousness dawning upon him that his eccentricity was not receiving the ovation it merited.1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter V, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC:
- The solitude and the savage freedom filled his heart with life and buoyancy. Again he was Tarzan of the Apes—every sense alert against the chance of surprise by some jungle enemy—yet treading lightly and with head erect, in proud consciousness of his might.1913 June–December, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Through the Valley of the Shadow”, in The Return of Tarzan, New York, N.Y.: A[lbert] L[evi] Burt Company, […], published March 1915, →OCLC, page 127:
4
Government, Politics Acute awareness (of something) and belief in its communal relevance.
- the development of a feminist consciousness
- This new anti-military consciousness surfaced at the Gay Academic Union Conference held last month in New York, where two broadsides and a meeting were held to discuss the situation. And in San Francisco, after a stormy meeting of Bay Area Gay Liberation (BAGEL), the group refused to co-sponsor a fund-raising event for former T/Sgt. Leonard Matlovich.1975 December 27, Neil Miller, “Anti-Military Backlash Surfaces”, in Gay Community News, volume 3, number 26, page 3:
5
A being with cognition.
- The pantheistic mainstream asari religion is siari, which translates roughly as "All is one." The faithful agree on certain core truths: the universe is a consciousness, every life within it is an aspect of the greater whole, and death is a merging of one's spiritual energy back into the greater universal consciousness. Siarists don't specifically believe in reincarnation; they believe that spiritual energy returned to the universal consciousness upon death will eventually be used to fill new mortal vessels.2008, BioWare, Mass Effect, Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Asari: Religion Codex entry:
- Synonyms
- awareness, witfulness
- Antonyms
- unconsciousness
- Derived terms
- class consciousness, clouding of consciousness, consciousness-raising, dysconsciousness, mainstream consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, raise someone's consciousness, stream of consciousness, super-consciousness, supraconsciousness, time of useful consciousness, unself-consciousness, witness-consciousness
- Related terms
- conscious, conscience, being-for-itself
- Hyponyms
- coconsciousness, cyberconsciousness, double consciousness, ecoconsciousness, exoconsciousness, false consciousness, higher consciousness, hyperconsciousness, neuroconsciousness, nonconsciousness, preconsciousness, self-consciousness, selfconsciousness, semiconsciousness, stream of consciousness, subconsciousness, superconsciousness, teleconsciousness