Consciousness

Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."

Western philosophers, since the time of Descartes and Locke, have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and pin down its essential properties. Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness include whether the concept is fundamentally coherent; whether consciousness can ever be explained mechanistically; whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how can it be recognized; how consciousness relates to language; whether consciousness can be understood in a way that does not require a dualistic distinction between mental and physical states or properties; and whether it may ever be possible for computing machines like computers or robots to be conscious, a topic studied in the field of artificial intelligence.

Consciousness (disambiguation)

Consciousness may refer to:

Consciousness (Pat Martino album)

Consciousness is an album by guitarist Pat Martino which was recorded in 1974 and first released on the Muse label.

Reception

In his review on Allmusic, Michael G. Nastos notes that this is "Martino on the way up. Mostly quartet recordings for the brilliant guitarist... Guitar students should study this one."

Track listing

All compositions by Pat Martino except as indicated

Personnel

References