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Essay on Consciousness As Determined Th

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Consciousness is understood in a variety of ways. In one belief, a person is conscious when awake, but unconscious when sleeping or comatose. Yet people also do things requiring perception and thought unconsciously even when they are awake. A person can be conscious of their physical surroundings, pain and even a wish or fantasy. In short a creature is conscious if it is aware of itself and that it is a physical and emotional being. Consciousness is a psychological condition defined by the English philosopher John Locke as "the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind".1      Consciousness is defined and perceived differently in many psychological view points. For instance the earlier views around …show more content…

They held that consciousness was involved with every working mental state. In this view the mind is transparent to itself that is, it can perceive it’s own activity. For three centuries self transparence was the defining feature of the mind. That conception was sprung through the theories of Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener who were advocates off a science of introspection.      Early in the 20th century the transparency doctrine came to a setback for three different reasons. The first reason was Sigmund Freud’s compelling evidence that some very important mental activity is not only subconscious but firmly resists conscious access through repression. At first Freud’s idea of unconscious was treated as self-contradictory, but it has since won acceptance as being useful and entirely possible.      the second difficulty for the transparency doctrine was that it made the mind impossible for objective science. What is known introspectively to a single person would be utterly private and therefore can not be viewed scientifically. Scientific method demands objectivity and reportable data. The behaviorists John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner and the philosopher Gilbert Ryle rebelled against the idea of an inner sense and denied the very existence of consciousness in the strong sense exhibited by Locke, Descartes and the introspective psychologists.3 Ryle insisted that mind is an illusory concept and that it is

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