Are plants conscious? Most knowledgeable people say they aren't. A small minority say they are. Others say we don't know. Virtually all assume the predicate '– is conscious' is fully determinate; plants are or aren't in its extension. Appealing to Mark Wilson's work on predicates and concepts, I challenge that assumption, proposing that the predicate isn't determinate for plants. I offer the start of an explanation for why this is so. We tacitly rely on many empirical correlations when we correctly (...) characterize creatures as conscious, but we have limited knowledge of those facts, and plants differ significantly from animals, while also being substantively similar to them. We don't yet know what it would be for them to be conscious. (shrink)

Self-awareness represents the capacity of becoming the object of one’s own attention. In this state one actively identifies, processes, and stores information about the self. This paper surveys the self-awareness literature by emphasizing definition issues, measurement techniques, effects and functions of self-attention, and antecedents of self-awareness. Key self-related concepts (e.g., minimal, reflective consciousness) are distinguished from the central notion of self-awareness. Reviewed measures include questionnaires, implicit tasks, and self-recognition. Main effects and functions of self-attention consist in selfevaluation, escape from the (...) self, amplification of one's subjective experience, increased self-knowledge, self-regulation, and inferences about others' mental states (Theory-of-Mind). A neurocognitive and socioecological model of self-awareness is described in which the role of face-to-face interactions, reflected appraisals, mirrors, media, inner speech, imagery, autobiographical knowledge, and neurological structures is underlined. (shrink)

Quite a few recent models are rapidly introducing new concepts describing different levels of consciousness. This situ- ation is getting confusing because some theorists formulate their models without making reference to existing views, redun- dantly adding complexity to an already difficult problem. In this paper, I present and compare nine neurocognitive models to highlight points of convergence and divergence. Two aspects of consciousness seem especially important: perception of self in time and complexity of self-representations. To this I add frequency of (...) self-focus, amount of self-related informa- tion, and accuracy of self-knowledge. Overall, I conclude that many novel concepts (e.g., reflective, primary, core, extend- ed, recursive, and minimal consciousness) are useful in helping us distinguish between delicate variations in consciousness and in clarifying theoretical issues that have been intensely debated in the scientific literature—e.g., consciousness in rela- tion to mirror self-recognition and language. (shrink)

Quite a few recent models are rapidly introducing new concepts describing different levels of consciousness. This situation is getting confusing because some theorists formulate their models without making reference to existing views, redundantly adding complexity to an already difficult problem. In this paper, I present and compare nine neurocognitive models to highlight points of convergence and divergence. Two aspects of consciousness seem especially important: perception of self in time and complexity of self-representations. To this I add frequency of self-focus, amount (...) of self-related information, and accuracy of self-knowledge. Overall, I conclude that many novel concepts (e.g., reflective, primary, core, extended, recursive, and minimal consciousness) are useful in helping us distinguish between delicate variations in consciousness and in clarifying theoretical issues that have been intensely debated in the scientific literature—e.g., consciousness in relation to mirror self-recognition and language. Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Abstract: “Consciousness” seems to be a polysemic, ambiguous, term. Because of this, theorists have sought to distinguish the different kinds of phenomena that “consciousness” denotes, leading to a proliferation of terms for different kinds of consciousness. However, some philosophers—univocalists about consciousness—argue that “consciousness” is not polysemic or ambiguous. By drawing upon the history of philosophy and psychology, and some resources from semantic theory, univocalism about consciousness is shown to be implausible. This finding is important, for if we accept the univocalist (...) account then we are less likely to subject our thought and talk about the mind to the kind of critical analysis that it needs. The exploration of the semantics of “consciousness” offered here, by way of contrast, clarifies and fine-tunes our thought and talk about consciousness and conscious mentality and explains why “consciousness” means what it does, and why it means a number of different, but related, things. (shrink)