doc_id
int32
0
2.25M
text
stringlengths
101
8.13k
source
stringlengths
38
44
23,400
During the Restoration, Bacon was commonly invoked as a guiding spirit of the Royal Society founded under Charles II in 1660. During the 18th-century French Enlightenment, Bacon's non-metaphysical approach to science became more influential than the dualism of his French contemporary Descartes, and was associated with ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,401
He also wrote a long treatise on Medicine, "History of Life and Death", with natural and experimental observations for the prolongation of life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,402
One of his biographers, the historian William Hepworth Dixon, states: "Bacon's influence in the modern world is so great that every man who rides in a train, sends a telegram, follows a steam plough, sits in an easy chair, crosses the channel or the Atlantic, eats a good dinner, enjoys a beautiful garden, or undergoes ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,403
In 1902 Hugo von Hofmannsthal published a fictional letter, known as "The Lord Chandos Letter", addressed to Bacon and dated 1603, about a writer who is experiencing a crisis of language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,404
Bacon played a leading role in establishing the British colonies in North America, especially in Virginia, the Carolinas and Newfoundland in northeastern Canada. His government report on "The Virginia Colony" was submitted in 1609. In 1610 Bacon and his associates received a charter from the king to form "the Tresurer ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,405
In 1910, Newfoundland issued a postage stamp to commemorate Bacon's role in establishing the colony. The stamp describes Bacon as "the guiding spirit in Colonization Schemes in 1610". Moreover, some scholars believe he was largely responsible for the drafting, in 1609 and 1612, of two charters of government for the Vir...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,406
Although few of his proposals for law reform were adopted during his lifetime, Bacon's legal legacy was considered by the magazine "New Scientist" in 1961 as having influenced the drafting of the Napoleonic Code as well as the law reforms introduced by 19th-century British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. The historian ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,407
Harvey Wheeler attributed to Bacon, in "Francis Bacon's Verulamium—the Common Law Template of The Modern in English Science and Culture", the creation of these distinguishing features of the modern common law system:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,408
As late as the 18th century, some juries still declared the law rather than the facts, but already before the end of the 17th century Sir Matthew Hale explained modern common law adjudication procedure and acknowledged Bacon as the inventor of the process of discovering unwritten laws from the evidences of their applic...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,409
Bacon is commemorated with a statue in Gray's Inn, South Square in London where he received his legal training, and where he was elected Treasurer of the Inn in 1608.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,410
More recent scholarship on Bacon's jurisprudence has focused on his advocating torture as a legal recourse for the crown. Bacon himself was not a stranger to the torture chamber; in his various legal capacities in both Elizabeth I's and James I's reigns, Bacon was listed as a commissioner on five torture warrants. In 1...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,411
Francis Bacon developed the idea that a classification of knowledge must be universal while handling all possible resources. In his progressive view, humanity would be better if access to educational resources were provided to the public, hence the need to organise it. His approach to learning reshaped the Western view...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,412
The original classification proposed by Bacon organised all types of knowledge into three general groups: history, poetry, and philosophy. He did that based on his understanding of how information is processed: memory, imagination, and reason, respectively. His methodical approach to the categorization of knowledge goe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,413
The phrase "" (or ""), meaning "knowledge is power", is commonly attributed to Bacon: the expression "" ("knowledge itself is power") occurs in his "Meditationes Sacrae" (1597).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,414
The Baconian hypothesis of Shakespearean authorship, first proposed in the mid-19th century, contends that Francis Bacon wrote some or even all of the plays conventionally attributed to William Shakespeare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,415
Francis Bacon often gathered with the men at Gray's Inn to discuss politics and philosophy, and to try out various theatrical scenes that he admitted writing. Bacon's alleged connection to the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons has been widely discussed by authors and scholars in many books. However, others, including Dap...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,416
The link between Bacon's work and the Rosicrucians' ideals which Yates allegedly found was the conformity of the purposes expressed by the Rosicrucian Manifestos and Bacon's plan of a "Great Instauration", for the two were calling for a reformation of both "divine and human understanding", as well as both, had in view ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,417
Another major link is said to be the resemblance between Bacon's "New Atlantis" and the German Rosicrucian Johann Valentin Andreae's "Description of the Republic of Christianopolis" (1619). Andreae describes a utopic island in which Christian theosophy and applied science ruled, and in which the spiritual fulfilment an...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,418
While rejecting occult conspiracy theories surrounding Bacon and the claim Bacon personally identified as a Rosicrucian, intellectual historian Paolo Rossi has argued for an occult influence on Bacon's scientific and religious writing. He argues that Bacon was familiar with early modern alchemical texts and that Bacon'...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,419
Rossi's analysis and claims have been extended by Jason Josephson-Storm in his study, "The Myth of Disenchantment". Josephson-Storm also rejects conspiracy theories surrounding Bacon and does not make the claim that Bacon was an active Rosicrucian. However, he argues that Bacon's "rejection" of magic actually constitut...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,420
The Rosicrucian organization AMORC claims that Bacon was the "Imperator" (leader) of the Rosicrucian Order in both England and the European continent, and would have directed it during his lifetime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,421
Bacon's influence can also be seen on a variety of religious and spiritual authors, and on groups that have utilized his writings in their own belief systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11319
23,422
Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scientists. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even consider...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,423
Examples of the range of descriptions, definitions or explanations are: simple wakefulness, one's sense of selfhood or soul explored by "looking within"; being a metaphorical "stream" of contents, or being a mental state, mental event or mental process of the brain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,424
Western philosophers since the time of Descartes and Locke have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and how it fits into a larger picture of the world. These questions remain central to both continental and analytic philosophy, in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind, respectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,425
Consciousness has also become a significant topic of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, involving fields such as psychology, linguistics, anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroscience. The primary focus is on understanding what it means biologically and psychologically for information to be present in co...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,426
In medicine, consciousness is assessed by observing a patient's arousal and responsiveness, and can be seen as a continuum of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension, through disorientation, delirium, loss of meaningful communication, and finally loss of movement in response to painful stimuli. Issues of p...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,427
In the late 20th century, philosophers like Hamlyn, Rorty, and Wilkes have disagreed with Kahn, Hardie and Modrak as to whether Aristotle even had a concept of consciousness. Aristotle does not use any single word or terminology to name the phenomenon; it is used only much later, especially by John Locke. Caston conten...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,428
The origin of the modern concept of consciousness is often attributed to Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding", published in 1690. Locke defined consciousness as "the perception of what passes in a man's own mind". His essay influenced the 18th-century view of consciousness, and his definition appeared in Samu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,429
"Consciousness" (French: "conscience") is also defined in the 1753 volume of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, as "the opinion or internal feeling that we ourselves have from what we do".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,430
The earliest English language uses of "conscious" and "consciousness" date back, however, to the 1500s. The English word "conscious" originally derived from the Latin "conscius" ("con-" "together" and "scio" "to know"), but the Latin word did not have the same meaning as the English word—it meant "knowing with", in oth...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,431
A related word was "", which primarily means moral conscience. In the literal sense, "conscientia" means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridical texts by writers such as Cicero. Here, "conscientia" is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else. René Descart...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,432
The dictionary definitions of the word "consciousness" extend through several centuries and reflect a range of seemingly related meanings, with some differences that have been controversial, such as the distinction between 'inward awareness' and 'perception' of the physical world, or the distinction between 'conscious'...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,433
The common usage definitions of "consciousness" in "Webster's Third New International Dictionary" (1966 edition, Volume 1, page 482) are as follows:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,434
The Cambridge Dictionary defines consciousness as ""the state of understanding and realizing something.""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,435
The Oxford Living Dictionary defines consciousness as ""The state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings."", ""A person's awareness or perception of something."" and ""The fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,436
Philosophers have attempted to clarify technical distinctions by using a jargon of their own. The "Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy" in 1998 defines consciousness as follows:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,437
Many philosophers and scientists have been unhappy about the difficulty of producing a definition that does not involve circularity or fuzziness. In The "Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology" (1989 edition), Stuart Sutherland expressed a skeptical attitude more than a definition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,438
A partisan definition such as Sutherland's can hugely affect researchers' assumptions and the direction of their work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,439
Many philosophers have argued that consciousness is a unitary concept that is understood by the majority of people despite the difficulty philosophers have had defining it. Others, though, have argued that the level of disagreement about the meaning of the word indicates that it either means different things to differe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,440
Most writers on the philosophy of consciousness have been concerned with defending a particular point of view, and have organized their material accordingly. For surveys, the most common approach is to follow a historical path by associating stances with the philosophers who are most strongly associated with them, for ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,441
Philosophers differ from non-philosophers in their intuitions about what consciousness is. While most people have a strong intuition for the existence of what they refer to as consciousness, skeptics argue that this intuition is false, either because the concept of consciousness is intrinsically incoherent, or because ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,442
Ned Block argued that discussions on consciousness often failed to properly distinguish "phenomenal" (P-consciousness) from "access" (A-consciousness), though these terms had been used before Block. P-consciousness, according to Block, is raw experience: it is moving, colored forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and fee...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,443
Some philosophers believe that Block's two types of consciousness are not the end of the story. William Lycan, for example, argued in his book "Consciousness and Experience" that at least eight clearly distinct types of consciousness can be identified (organism consciousness; control consciousness; consciousness "of"; ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,444
There is also debate over whether or not A-consciousness and P-consciousness always coexist or if they can exist separately. Although P-consciousness without A-consciousness is more widely accepted, there have been some hypothetical examples of A without P. Block, for instance, suggests the case of a "zombie" that is c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,445
Of the eight types of consciousness in the Lycan classification, some are detectable in utero and others develop years after birth. Psychologist and educator William Foulkes studied children's dreams and concluded that prior to the shift in cognitive maturation that humans experience during ages five to seven, children...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,446
Mental processes (such as consciousness) and physical processes (such as brain events) seem to be correlated, however the specific nature of the connection is unknown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,447
The first influential philosopher to discuss this question specifically was Descartes, and the answer he gave is known as Cartesian dualism. Descartes proposed that consciousness resides within an immaterial domain he called res cogitans (the realm of thought), in contrast to the domain of material things, which he cal...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,448
Although it is widely accepted that Descartes explained the problem cogently, few later philosophers have been happy with his solution, and his ideas about the pineal gland have especially been ridiculed. However, no alternative solution has gained general acceptance. Proposed solutions can be divided broadly into two ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,449
Since the dawn of Newtonian science with its vision of simple mechanical principles governing the entire universe, some philosophers have been tempted by the idea that consciousness could be explained in purely physical terms. The first influential writer to propose such an idea explicitly was Julien Offray de La Mettr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,450
A few theoretical physicists have argued that classical physics is intrinsically incapable of explaining the holistic aspects of consciousness, but that quantum theory may provide the missing ingredients. Several theorists have therefore proposed quantum mind (QM) theories of consciousness. Notable theories falling int...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,451
Apart from the general question of the "hard problem" of consciousness (which is, roughly speaking, the question of how mental experience can arise from a physical basis), a more specialized question is how to square the subjective notion that we are in control of our decisions (at least in some small measure) with the...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,452
Many philosophers consider experience to be the essence of consciousness, and believe that experience can only fully be known from the inside, subjectively. But if consciousness is subjective and not visible from the outside, why do the vast majority of people believe that other people are conscious, but rocks and tree...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,453
The most commonly given answer is that we attribute consciousness to other people because we see that they resemble us in appearance and behavior; we reason that if they look like us and act like us, they must be like us in other ways, including having experiences of the sort that we do. There are, however, a variety o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,454
The topic of animal consciousness is beset by a number of difficulties. It poses the problem of other minds in an especially severe form, because non-human animals, lacking the ability to express human language, cannot tell humans about their experiences. Also, it is difficult to reason objectively about the question, ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,455
Philosophers who consider subjective experience the essence of consciousness also generally believe, as a correlate, that the existence and nature of animal consciousness can never rigorously be known. Thomas Nagel spelled out this point of view in an influential essay titled "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?". He said tha...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,456
On July 7, 2012, eminent scientists from different branches of neuroscience gathered at the University of Cambridge to celebrate the Francis Crick Memorial Conference, which deals with consciousness in humans and pre-linguistic consciousness in nonhuman animals. After the conference, they signed in the presence of Step...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,457
"We decided to reach a consensus and make a statement directed to the public that is not scientific. It's obvious to everyone in this room that animals have consciousness, but it is not obvious to the rest of the world. It is not obvious to the rest of the Western world or the Far East. It is not obvious to the society...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,458
"Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals ..., including all mammals and birds, and other creatures, ... have the necessary neural substrates of consciousness and the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,459
The idea of an artifact made conscious is an ancient theme of mythology, appearing for example in the Greek myth of Pygmalion, who carved a statue that was magically brought to life, and in medieval Jewish stories of the Golem, a magically animated homunculus built of clay. However, the possibility of actually construc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,460
One of the most influential contributions to this question was an essay written in 1950 by pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". Turing disavowed any interest in terminology, saying that even "Can machines think?" is too loaded with spurious connotations to be meaning...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,461
In a lively exchange over what has come to be referred to as "the Chinese room argument", John Searle sought to refute the claim of proponents of what he calls "strong artificial intelligence (AI)" that a computer program can be conscious, though he does agree with advocates of "weak AI" that computer programs can be f...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,462
In the literature concerning artificial intelligence, Searle's essay has been second only to Turing's in the volume of debate it has generated. Searle himself was vague about what extra ingredients it would take to make a machine conscious: all he proposed was that what was needed was "causal powers" of the sort that t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,463
In 2014, Victor Argonov has suggested a non-Turing test for machine consciousness based on machine's ability to produce philosophical judgments. He argues that a deterministic machine must be regarded as conscious if it is able to produce judgments on all problematic properties of consciousness (such as qualia or bindi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,464
For many decades, consciousness as a research topic was avoided by the majority of mainstream scientists, because of a general feeling that a phenomenon defined in subjective terms could not properly be studied using objective experimental methods. In 1975 George Mandler published an influential psychological study whi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,465
Modern medical and psychological investigations into consciousness are based on psychological experiments (including, for example, the investigation of priming effects using subliminal stimuli), and on case studies of alterations in consciousness produced by trauma, illness, or drugs. Broadly viewed, scientific approac...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,466
A study in 2016 looked at lesions in specific areas of the brainstem that were associated with coma and vegetative states. A small region of the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum in the brainstem was suggested to drive consciousness through functional connectivity with two cortical regions, the left ventral anteri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,467
Experimental research on consciousness presents special difficulties, due to the lack of a universally accepted operational definition. In the majority of experiments that are specifically about consciousness, the subjects are human, and the criterion used is verbal report: in other words, subjects are asked to describ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,468
Verbal report is widely considered to be the most reliable indicator of consciousness, but it raises a number of issues. For one thing, if verbal reports are treated as observations, akin to observations in other branches of science, then the possibility arises that they may contain errors—but it is difficult to make s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,469
Although verbal report is in practice the "gold standard" for ascribing consciousness, it is not the only possible criterion. In medicine, consciousness is assessed as a combination of verbal behavior, arousal, brain activity and purposeful movement. The last three of these can be used as indicators of consciousness wh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,470
Another approach applies specifically to the study of self-awareness, that is, the ability to distinguish oneself from others. In the 1970s Gordon Gallup developed an operational test for self-awareness, known as the mirror test. The test examines whether animals are able to differentiate between seeing themselves in a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,471
A major part of the scientific literature on consciousness consists of studies that examine the relationship between the experiences reported by subjects and the activity that simultaneously takes place in their brains—that is, studies of the neural correlates of consciousness. The hope is to find that activity in a pa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,472
Another idea that has drawn attention for several decades is that consciousness is associated with high-frequency (gamma band) oscillations in brain activity. This idea arose from proposals in the 1980s, by Christof von der Malsburg and Wolf Singer, that gamma oscillations could solve the so-called binding problem, by ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,473
A number of studies have shown that activity in primary sensory areas of the brain is not sufficient to produce consciousness: it is possible for subjects to report a lack of awareness even when areas such as the primary visual cortex (V1) show clear electrical responses to a stimulus. Higher brain areas are seen as mo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,474
Modulation of neural responses may correlate with phenomenal experiences. In contrast to the raw electrical responses that do not correlate with consciousness, the modulation of these responses by other stimuli correlates surprisingly well with an important aspect of consciousness: namely with the phenomenal experience...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,475
In 2011, Graziano and Kastner proposed the "attention schema" theory of awareness. In that theory, specific cortical areas, notably in the superior temporal sulcus and the temporo-parietal junction, are used to build the construct of awareness and attribute it to other people. The same cortical machinery is also used t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,476
In 2013, the perturbational complexity index (PCI) was proposed, a measure of the algorithmic complexity of the electrophysiological response of the cortex to transcranial magnetic stimulation. This measure was shown to be higher in individuals that are awake, in REM sleep or in a locked-in state than in those who are ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,477
In 2017, work by David Rudrauf and colleagues, including Karl Friston, applied the active inference paradigm to consciousness, a model of how sensory data is integrated with priors in a process of projective transformation. The authors argue that, while their model identifies a key relationship between computation and ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,478
Assuming that not only humans but even some non-mammalian species are conscious, a number of evolutionary approaches to the problem of neural correlates of consciousness open up. For example, assuming that birds are conscious—a common assumption among neuroscientists and ethologists due to the extensive cognitive reper...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,479
Joaquin Fuster of UCLA has advocated the position of the importance of the prefrontal cortex in humans, along with the areas of Wernicke and Broca, as being of particular importance to the development of human language capacities neuro-anatomically necessary for the emergence of higher-order consciousness in humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,480
Opinions are divided as to where in biological evolution consciousness emerged and about whether or not consciousness has any survival value. Some argue that consciousness is a byproduct of evolution. It has been argued that consciousness emerged (i) exclusively with the first humans, (ii) exclusively with the first ma...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,481
Thomas Henry Huxley defends in an essay titled "On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History" an epiphenomenalist theory of consciousness according to which consciousness is a causally inert effect of neural activity—"as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without infl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,482
Regarding the primary function of conscious processing, a recurring idea in recent theories is that phenomenal states somehow integrate neural activities and information-processing that would otherwise be independent. This has been called the "integration consensus". Another example has been proposed by Gerald Edelman ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,483
As noted earlier, even among writers who consider consciousness to be a well-defined thing, there is widespread dispute about which animals other than humans can be said to possess it. Edelman has described this distinction as that of humans possessing higher-order consciousness while sharing the trait of primary consc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,484
Other philosophers, however, have suggested that consciousness would not be necessary for any functional advantage in evolutionary processes. No one has given a causal explanation, they argue, of why it would not be possible for a functionally equivalent non-conscious organism (i.e., a philosophical zombie) to achieve ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,485
There are some brain states in which consciousness seems to be absent, including dreamless sleep or coma. There are also a variety of circumstances that can change the relationship between the mind and the world in less drastic ways, producing what are known as altered states of consciousness. Some altered states occur...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,486
The two most widely accepted altered states are sleep and dreaming. Although dream sleep and non-dream sleep appear very similar to an outside observer, each is associated with a distinct pattern of brain activity, metabolic activity, and eye movement; each is also associated with a distinct pattern of experience and c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,487
Research conducted on the effects of partial epileptic seizures on consciousness found that patients who have partial epileptic seizures experience altered states of consciousness. In partial epileptic seizures, consciousness is impaired or lost while some aspects of consciousness, often automated behaviors, remain int...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,488
A variety of psychoactive drugs, including alcohol, have notable effects on consciousness. These range from a simple dulling of awareness produced by sedatives, to increases in the intensity of sensory qualities produced by stimulants, cannabis, empathogens–entactogens such as MDMA ("Ecstasy"), or most notably by the c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,489
There has been some research into physiological changes in yogis and people who practise various techniques of meditation. Some research with brain waves during meditation has reported differences between those corresponding to ordinary relaxation and those corresponding to meditation. It has been disputed, however, wh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,490
The most extensive study of the characteristics of altered states of consciousness was made by psychologist Charles Tart in the 1960s and 1970s. Tart analyzed a state of consciousness as made up of a number of component processes, including exteroception (sensing the external world); interoception (sensing the body); i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,491
The entropic brain is a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs. The theory suggests that the brain in primary states such as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, early psychosis and under the influence of psychedelic drugs, is in a disordered state; normal waking consciousness co...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,492
The origin and mechanism of subjective experience within the brain remains unknown, although several scientific theories have been proposed. Roger Penrose has said that there are four such current theories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,493
Integrated information theory (IIT) postulates that consciousness resides in the information being processed and arises once the information reaches a certain level of complexity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,494
Orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR) postulates that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons. The mechanism is held to be a quantum process called objective reduction that is orchestrated by cellular structures called microtubules. However the details of the mechanism would go beyond current ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,495
The medical approach to consciousness is scientifically oriented. It derives from a need to treat people whose brain function has been impaired as a result of disease, brain damage, toxins, or drugs. In medicine, conceptual distinctions are considered useful to the degree that they can help to guide treatments. The med...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,496
Consciousness is of concern to patients and physicians, especially neurologists and anesthesiologists. Patients may have disorders of consciousness or may need to be anesthetized for a surgical procedure. Physicians may perform consciousness-related interventions such as instructing the patient to sleep, administering ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,497
In medicine, consciousness is examined using a set of procedures known as neuropsychological assessment. There are two commonly used methods for assessing the level of consciousness of a patient: a simple procedure that requires minimal training, and a more complex procedure that requires substantial expertise. The sim...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,498
The more complex procedure is known as a neurological examination, and is usually carried out by a neurologist in a hospital setting. A formal neurological examination runs through a precisely delineated series of tests, beginning with tests for basic sensorimotor reflexes, and culminating with tests for sophisticated ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664
23,499
In 2013, an experimental procedure was developed to measure degrees of consciousness, the procedure involving stimulating the brain with a magnetic pulse, measuring resulting waves of electrical activity, and developing a consciousness score based on the complexity of the brain activity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5664