====== Consciousness ======

“Consciousness can be seen as an emergent characteristic generated by the joint functioning of the enormous network of nerve cells”(Swaab, 2014, p. 150). In his Dutch bestseller We Are Our Brains, neurobiologist Dick Swaab (2014) presents a biography of the human brain. The title of the book already gives away Swaab's core argument: everything we do or think is determined by our brains, which are already formed in our mother's womb. Free will and consciousness are only illusions of our brains; the activation of certain brain areas makes us “aware” of what we see or what we think, but we ourselves do not have the power, nor the ability to structure our vision of our environment to our own will.

In their book Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience, Dale Purves and his colleagues (2013) argue that the term consciousness refers to at least three different aspects or meanings of the term:

1. A physiological meaning that describes consciousness in terms of the brain state we think of as wakefulness; this definition entails understanding the nature of brain activity that distinguishes wakefulness from sleep, and from unconscious states such as anesthesia or coma.

2. A more abstract meaning refers to a subjective awareness of the world, a brain state that must have a more subtle signature than wakefulness, since one can be awake and yet be unaware of some or even most aspects of the external and internal environments.

3. A meaning that refers to self-awareness, a term that defines consciousness in the sense of being aware of oneself as distinct from other selves in the world (Purves et al., 2013, p. 234).

Source of two above quotes:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02604027.2017.1319664