Consciousness

Psy391h - Classes 25-27

(This page last updated 16 May 2006.)
 

The word "consciousness" is used to refer to a number of different things.

• Awareness, or Access to Information
• Thinking, or High Level Cognition
• Self-knowledge, or Self-consciousness
• Experience, or Sentience

Awareness

• Mental events within awareness
  • Perceptions
  • Drives
  • Emotional responses
  • Plans
  • Inner speech
  • Explicit memory
  • …
• Mental events outside of awareness
  • Early perceptual processing
  • Late motor control
  • Many aspects of language
  • Repressed memories
  • Some motivations
  • Implicit memory
  • …

Experience and The Mind/Body Problem

We will look closely at the different explanations that have been proposed for the relationship between mind and body. The explanations fall into two different types: dualist and materialist. As you will see on the two pages linked below, there are many specific varieties of each.

Dualism

Materialism

The End.

Psych 391h: Cognitive Neuroscience Kyle Cave Psychology Dept. U. Mass.