Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debate by philosophers, theologians, and all of science. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.
Stevan Robert Harnad is a Canadian cognitive scientist based in Montreal.
Artificial consciousness (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC), synthetic consciousness or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience. The same terminology can be used with the term "sentience" instead of "consciousness" when specifically designating phenomenal consciousness.
The Eight Consciousnesses is a classification developed in the tradition of the Yogācāra school of Mahayana Buddhism. They enumerate the five sense consciousnesses, supplemented by the mental consciousness (manovijñāna), the defiled mental consciousness (kliṣṭamanovijñāna), and finally the fundamental store-house consciousness (ālāyavijñāna), which is the basis of the other seven. This eighth consciousness is said to store the impressions (vāsanāḥ) of previous experiences, which form the seeds (bīja) of future karma in this life and in the next after rebirth.
The Journal of Consciousness Studies is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated entirely to the field of consciousness studies. It was previously edited by Joseph Goguen. It is currently edited by Professor Valerie Gray Hardcastle of the University of Cincinnati.
The electromagnetic theories of consciousness propose that consciousness can be understood as an electromagnetic phenomenon.
Bernard J. Baars is a former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, CA., and is currently an Affiliated Fellow there.
Stan Franklin was an American scientist. He was the W. Harry Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor at the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee, and co-director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems. He is the author of Artificial Minds, and the developer of IDA and its successor LIDA, both computational implementations of Global Workspace Theory. He is founder of the Cognitive Computing Research Group at the University of Memphis.
Global Workspace Theory (GWT) is a framework for thinking about consciousness proposed by cognitive scientists Bernard Baars and Stan Franklin in the late 1980s. It was developed to qualitatively account for a large set of matched pairs of conscious and unconscious processes. GWT has been influential in modeling consciousness and higher-order cognition as emerging from competition and integrated flows of information across widespread, parallel neural processes.
Patrick Wilken is an Australian consciousness researcher. He was active in the promotion of consciousness studies and one of the founders of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) is a non-profit organization for professional membership that aims to encourage research on consciousness in cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, and other relevant disciplines. The association aims to advance research about the nature, function, and underlying mechanisms of consciousness.
Stanislas Dehaene is a French author and cognitive neuroscientist whose research centers on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness. As of 2017, he is a professor at the Collège de France and, since 1989, the director of INSERM Unit 562, "Cognitive Neuroimaging".
The stream of consciousness is a metaphor describing how thoughts seem to flow through the conscious mind. Research studies have shown that we only experience one mental event at a time as a fast-moving mind stream. The term was coined by Alexander Bain in 1855 in the first edition of The Senses and the Intellect, when he wrote, "The concurrence of Sensations in one common stream of consciousness enables those of different senses to be associated as readily as the sensations of the same sense". But it is commonly credited to William James often considered to be the father of American psychology who used it in 1890 in his The Principles of Psychology. The full range of thoughts—that one can be aware of—can form the content of this stream.
The Annual Review of Anthropology is an academic journal that publishes review articles of significant developments in anthropology and its subfields. First published by Stanford University Press in 1959 under the name the Biennial Review of Anthropology, it became known as the current title in 1972 when its publication was assumed by Annual Reviews. Don Brenneis and Karen B. Strier have been the editors since 2013. As of 2023, according to Journal Citation Reports, the journal has an impact factor of 2.8 for the year 2022.
Modern Painters is a monthly art magazine. It was launched as a quarterly in the United Kingdom in 1987, and is now published in New York City by Louise Blouin Media.
Marc Jeannerod was a neurologist, a neurophysiologist and an internationally recognized expert in cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology. His research focuses on the cognitive and neurophysiological mechanisms underpinning motor control, motor cognition, the sense of agency, and more recently language and social cognition. Jeannerod's work bridges with elegance and rigor various levels of analysis, ranging from neuroscience to philosophy of mind, with clear implications for the understanding of a number of psychiatric and neurological disorders, especially schizophrenia.
James Baar was an author, international corporate communications consultant, corporate communications software developer, blogger, former business executive, journalist and sometime college lecturer.
Stephen Budiansky is an American writer, historian and biographer, best known for his books on animal behaviour and his criticism of animal rights. He is also the author of a number of scholarly publications about the history of cryptography, military and intelligence history, and music.
The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Psychological Association. It was established in 1975 as an independent section of the Journal of Experimental Psychology and covers research in experimental psychology. More specifically, the journal "publishes original experimental studies on basic processes of cognition, learning, memory, imagery, concept formation, problem solving, decision making, thinking, reading, and language processing". The current editor-in-chief is Aaron S. Benjamin.
Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal covering the study of laterality, and related behavioral and neurological factors, in human and non-human species. It was established in 1996, with Michael Corballis, Chris McManus, and Phil Bryden as founding editors-in-chief. Michael Peters served as editor after Bryden's death in 1996. Mike Nicholls and Giorgio Vallortigara replaced Corballis and Peters in 2007 after McManus retired and continued as editors-in-chief until 2018. The current editors-in-chief are Gina Grimshaw, Markus Hausman, and Lesley Rogers.
