Consciousness

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Consciousness can mean several things:

  • Being awake, as opposed to being asleep (unconscious)
  • Having something at the front of your mind. This means thinking about something and knowing you are thinking about it.
  • The experience of thinking, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, knowing, feeling an emotion (being happy, being sad, being angry) or anything else to do with the mind.

Consciousness is to do with knowing things about yourself that other people cannot know, for example what you are thinking. It is also to do with making choices. When I make a choice I think that I could do many things, but decide to do just one thing. This is called free will.

Sometimes things happen that are not to do with consciousness. For example I breathe automatically most of the time. I do not think about breathing; it just happens. Also if something taps my knee, my leg moves upwards, even though I do not think about it or decide that it should. We all do these unconscious actions or reflex actions.

Nobody knows what consciousness is. Some people say that consciousness is like sitting in a cinema (a movie theatre) that is playing a film of your life. However there are no cinemas inside your brain. Even if there were a cinema, or something like it, this would not help. We would still have to ask, what was watching it? and are they conscious?

Some people think that some animals have consciousness. Some people think all animals do, while other people think that only the most intelligent (smartest) animals do, like monkeys, whales or elephants. Other people think that only humans have consciousness.