consciousness

Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to  feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."

Consciousness may refer to:

• The process of cognition, i.e. the focus of cognitive science.
• The opposite of unconsciousness, i.e. the opposite of a comatose state or coma.
• The process of awareness as in "I was not conscious of the wind blowing."
• Consciousness! (Eric Kloss album), 1970
• Consciousness (Pat Martino album), 1974