CONSCIOUSNESS

Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. Sentience refers to the capacity to be aware of feelings and sensations. Having the power to perceive, reason and think. Despite millennia of analysis, definitions, explanations and debates by philosophers and scientists, consciousness remains puzzling and controversial, being at once the most familiar and also the most mysterious aspect of our lives. Perhaps the only widely agreed notion about the topic is the intuition that it exists. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied and explained as consciousness. Sometimes, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of it. In the past, it was one's inner life, the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition. Today, it often includes some kind of experience, cognition, feeling or perception. It may come in the form of awareness or even self-awareness. These might be different levels or orders of consciousness, or different kinds of consciousness, or just one kind with different features. Other examples include one's sense of selfhood or soul explored by looking within.