Consciousness is a highly debated and controversial faculty of the mind. In science,
it has been referred to as, “at once, the most familiar and mysterious aspect of our lives.”
Perhaps the only fact about consciousness that is widely agreed upon is the fact that it exists.
Some say it is synonymous with the mind, while others say it is an aspect of it. Some say
there are different kinds of consciousness, while others say there is only one kind with different
features. Some say it is awareness, while others say it is the awareness of our awareness.
Consciousness is extremely difficult to define and there are various lenses we could look
through to define it. For example, the most commonly accepted perspective of the mind is
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, where he divided it into three levels: Conscious, Preconscious,
and subconscious. Although the Freudian model has passed out of favor, for the most part it
is still used to help us understand the faculty of consciousness. He used an iceberg analogy to
portray this theory. In Freud’s model, the Conscious mind is the part of the mind that
contains all thoughts, sensations, emotions, and experiences you are aware of in the present
moment. It is the objective lens through which you view your subjective experience of the world.
The conscious mind represents the top of the iceberg in Freud’s analogy, as it is the most
observable aspect of consciousness that lies above the surface. Freud described the preconscious as
all the memories you can easily recall. He states that you aren’t aware of these memories in the
present moment, but you can recall them whenever you choose to do so. Today, we have termed this
level of consciousness the “subconscious mind”, or a storehouse for your learned behaviors and
experiences. It is the part of the ice berg that lies just beneath the surface. Lastly,
Freud described the unconscious mind as the part of the mind that couldn’t be accessed directly. He
saw the unconscious mind as a place where urges, emotions, and ideas created conflicts and anxiety.
In his ice berg analogy the unconscious level of the mind is the largest, submerged part of
the ice berg that we can’t see but makes up most of the ice berg. It is the unconscious mind that
Freud believed influenced consciousness and behavior in the most dramatic ways.
But what is consciousness outside of Freud’s theory? While it does a great job putting in
place a foundation to understand the faculty of consciousness, it doesn’t paint the whole picture.
Along with the different levels of consciousness, there are different states of consciousness,
or what we call “Altered states of consciousness”. It is these altered
states of consciousness that allow us to take a new perspective on consciousness itself,
as we are no longer subjective to it. The two most common altered states of
consciousness are dreaming and sleep. One simple definition of consciousness
is simply, “Wakefulness”, so it makes sense then that “sleeping” is an altered state of it. We
can use this idea to better understand exactly what consciousness is, as it would imply it is
the part of our mind that is with us when we are awake, but veers off when we are asleep.
In last week’s video, we discussed the faculty of perception – our sensory experience of the
world we live in. Our perception is our internal processes, such as thinking,
feeling, sensing, hearing, or smelling. But consciousness is different – Consciousness
is not the awareness of our environment; consciousness is our awareness of that awareness.
It is not our perception; it is the awareness of our perception.
Consciousness is a mysterious faculty of the mind that we are just beginning to uncover.
In its simplest form and as we best understand now, it is sentience or awareness of internal
and external existence. Consciousness is not your perception of this video;