Conscious and unconscious: the mind's eye, open and closed

Conscious and unconscious: the mind's eye, open and closed

• Consciousness is a mystery of psychology because other people's minds cannot be perceived directly and the relationship between mind and body is perplexing.

• Consciousness is intentional, unified, selective and transient, and can be viewed as having levels of minimal consciousness, full con- sciousness and self-consciousness. The contents of the stream of consciousness include current concerns, daydreams and unwanted thoughts.

• Unconscious processes are sometimes understood as expressions of the Freudian dynamic unconscious, but are more commonly seen as processes of the cognitive unconscious that create and influence conscious thoughts and behaviours.

Consciousness: persons subject exp of the world and the mind. Defining feature is experience= essential to what it means to be human

Cartesian theater ( Descartes): mental screen/stage on which things appear to be present for viewing by the mind's eye. Private and personal so cant share.

Nature of consciousness: difficulty of explaining how subjective experience can arise

Phenomenology: how things actually seem in the state of consciousness in terms of quality of experience.

Homunculus pb: diff of explaining exp of consciousness by advocating another internal self = pb if mini me is controlling me who is controlling it

Spinoza's free will: assumption we are in control

Opposite of behaviourism: free will illusion because behaviour and thought shaped by environment

Cognitive research shows unconscious mechanisms play role in decisions

Case of existence of free will weak personal experience of free will strong = we think we did it is a way of keeping track of decisions and actions

Pb of other minds : fundamental diff we have in perceiving the consciousness of others

Qualia: subjective exp we have as part of our mental life

Zombie: someone who does and says same things as a conscious person but is not

Not possible because a non material prop explains life

Materialism: philo position that mental states are a product of physical system alone

Anthropomorphism: tendency to attribute human qualities to nonhuman things

Exp: feel pain agency: self control memory thought

Mind-body pb: how mind is related to brain and body( pineal gland)

Brain activities precede conscious mind

Choice blindness: when pple are unaware of their decision making process and justify a choice as if it were already decided ( women two faces)

Consciousness gives us a sense of coherent self but can be deconstructed because of unconscious influence

Nature of consciousness

4 properties: intentionality ; unity ; selectivity ; transience

Intentionality: consciousness is about something , measures relationship between consciousness and its objects as a process of actively selecting something to attend to.

Change blindness: unawareness of significant events changing in full view= we “fill in” missing portion of experience by making assumptions.

To describe how this limitation works, psychologists refer to three other properties of consciousness: unity, selectivity and transience.

The unity of consciousness is its resistance to division. You may wishfully think that you can study and watch TV simultaneously,

DICHOTIC LISTENING A task in which people wearing headphones hear different messages presented to each ear. Filters out and tunes in info

COCKTAIL PARTY PHENOMENON People tune in to one message even while they filter out others nearby.

The selectivity of consciousness is its capacity to include some objects and not others.

transience of consciousness, or its tendency to change.

The stream of consciousness .

The basic properties of consciousness are reminiscent of the 'bouncing ball' that moves from word to word when the lyrics of a sing-along tune are shown on a karaoke machine. The ball always bounces on something (intentionality), there is only one ball (unity), the ball selects one target and not others (selectivity), and the ball keeps bounc- ing all the time (transience).

Levels of consciousness

levels, ranging from minimal consciousness to full consciousness to self-consciousness.

Such minimal consciousness is a low level of awareness that occurs when the mind inputs sensations and may output behaviour ( sun turn )

full consciousness is that you know and are able to report your mental state. That's a subtle distinction; being fully conscious means that you are aware of having a mental state while you are experiencing the mental state itself. W hen you have a hurt leg and mindlessly rub it, for instance, your pain may be minimally conscious.because you are indeed rubbing your leg. It is only when you realize that it hurts, though, that the pain becomes fully conscious. Full consciousness involves not only thinking about things but also thinking about the fact that you are thinking about things

self-consciousness is yet another distinct level of consciousness in which the person's attention is drawn to the self as an object. Most people report experiencing such self-consciousness when they are embarrassed, when they find themselves the focus of attention in a group, when someone focuses a camera on them, or when they are deeply introspective about their thoughts, feelings or personal qualities. ( mirror)

daydreaming - a state of consciousness in which a seemingly purposeless flow of thoughts comes to mind. Daydreams reflect the mind's attempts to deal with difficult projects and problems.The

...