Talk:Consciousness

Because of their length, the previous discussions on this page have been archived.

If further archiving is needed, see Wikipedia:How to archive a talk page.

• Archive 1 ( // to 21/10/05)
• Archive 2 (21/10/05 to 13/04/07)
• Archive 3 (13/04/07 to 29/11/09)

I am concerned that this article doesn't follow the good article criteria anymore. Some of my concerns are highlighted below:

• There is a lot of uncited text throughout the article.
• There are some sections that rely upon block quotes. This creates copyright concerns and increases the word count. This information might be better as summarised prose.
• The article, at over 11,000 words, is above the recommended length at WP:TOOBIG. I think this might be a sign that this is too detailed. I think removing most of the block quotes will resolve this, but the article should be edited for too much detail.
• The lead does not summarise all major aspects of the article.

Is anyone interested in fixing up this article or should this go to WP:GAR? Z1720 (talk) 18:52, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

:as the assessment showed, the topic is... very complex. ablockqyote in the page shows FORTY different definitions found by one researcher: medical-c is not distinguished from big-C, Chalmers describes big-C as "a hard problem", famous Western philosophers try to study the Upanishads and fail, the Wikipedia page on Advaita Vedanta gets chopped-and-changed by spiritually well-meaning individuals with no Wikipedia experience, I mean the whole ``thing`` is a mess basically :) the page ultimately reflects pretty accurately the confusion in Humanity's general Consciousness (ha ha) about what big-C actually is. regarding the suggestion to provide a better summary (made below) I have to say that that is a REALLY intimidating task on such a high-profile scientifictopic. it should be done with great care and a lot of review, no matter how simple the summary ends up being. Lkcl (talk) 08:43, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

{{Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Consciousness/1}}

In all other cases I know of, Wikipedia distinguishes different meanings of a word that defines an article, so that different meanings are covered in separate articles.

I strongly recommend that this be done with this article.

In particular, there really should be a separate article for the subject known to philosophers as "phenomenal consciousness": the phenomenon of experience. 2601:204:F181:9410:B5A7:6072:A62E:4507 (talk) 15:01, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

:I did an intensive study of this topic and found that there is a medical definition known as little-c (to help distinguish from e.g. a coma) and then there is big-C. mentioning this very early and prominently in the article and referring to a separate page for the ``medical`` definition would I feel be a much better idea than splitting up what I think you would find is a high-profile (high pagerank) page. the practice of linking to other pages is already established in this page by having a subheading, a "see article X", and a single summary paragraph. I feel that "phenomenal consciousness" is better treated in this fashion, alongside medical-little-c, rather than breaking up this page. let me do a quick check to see if phenom-c has an article already Lkcl (talk) 07:43, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

:ok a search on Wikipedia for "phenomenological consciousness" very interestingly gives the Qualiapage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia where a Google search "phenomenal consciousness wiki" search more usefully turns up ://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_theories_of_consciousness in which phenom-c is discussed. wikipedia's own search mechanism not so on-the-ball there. let's just check if the HOTC page is used in this one... Lkcl (talk) 07:49, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

:ok done, added HOTC to "see also" and then noticed on reading that page that there is a phenom-c page noted in the HOTC one! irony. the HOTC one I also observed has a "related articles" categorisation, will investigate that next Lkcl (talk) 08:03, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

:ok I am pretty happy with just adding the link to the HOTC page, however its description as "scientific theory" is pretty lame, resulting in See also getting an utterly useless summary. more crucially I spotted that there is a "medical-little-c" section in this page which has no clear distinction from big-C as is done in the Academic literature. that's really important to highlight Lkcl (talk) 08:12, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

as noted above Academic literature goes to some lengths to distinguish "not in a coma" as in "the patient is conscious" as a synonym for "awake and alert" or "the patient was not unconscious", from the study of the phenomenon of Consciousness which is termed "big-C". the article has a medical section which is fantastic but it is not made at all clear that there is a recognized distinction between consciousness and Consciousness. this really important! Lkcl (talk) 08:20, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

:as a very quick hack I have added a disambiguation link to the "Altered levels of consciousness" page. it's nowhere near clear enough but is along the right lines. Google searches discerning little-c from big-C are also a god-awful mess: lots of unhelpful links to YouTube videos involving philosophical discussion, and even googleAI is throwing its weight around (summarizing the state of human opinion on little-c *philosophy* instead of helping with the medical definition. sigh. Lkcl (talk) 09:25, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

:aiyaa! there is a page "Altered levels of consciousness" which is medical and there is a page "Altered state of consciousness" which is classified as *philosophy*! this entire topic is a rabbit-hole time-sucking mess! :) Lkcl (talk) 09:35, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

:on a re-read I decided to revert the disambiguation adding "Altered levels of consciousness" as it is different from the disambiguation of "Conscience" etc. not sure what is best, here. needs thought Lkcl (talk) 11:03, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

turns out Crick and Koch were wrong, the Claustrum is more a "router" than a seat of Consciousness itself. I added the URL but it needs work to put in the right format. "The new findings and hypothesis were published on Sept. 30, 2022, in Trends In Cognitive Sciences." Lkcl (talk) 08:35, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

partly for my own convenience so as to have easy access to the material including academic references I recently wrote two pre-print articles on consciousness. I am making other editors aware that I am aware (ha ha) of the state (implied pun intended) of Consciousness.

• http://lkcl.net/reports/consciousness_definition/
• http://lkcl.net/reports/consciousness_turing/

based on this I will create a separate quick section here for review on the collated Definitions of Consciousness that my research found. fascinatingly one of them, by Cleeremans and Jimenez, is actually a definition of learning. Lkcl (talk) 12:47, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Clear definitions of Consciousness in Academic literature are rare. David Chalmers declared the task the Hard problem of consciousness. However Academic definitions do exist, from Tononi Integrated information theory, Craig MacKenzie, and Cleeremans and Jimenez - the latter being a Definition of Learning with remarkable similarity to both Tononi and MacKenzie's definitions.

according to IIT, consciousness requires a grouping of elements within a system that have physical cause-effect power upon one another. This in turn implies that only reentrant architecture consisting of feedback loops, whether neural or computational, will realize consciousness.