What are the varieties of consciousness?

Varieties of consciousness, courtesy of ChatGPT

What are the varieties of consciousness. Not the objects of consciousness such as thoughts or sensations, nor the states of consciousness, such as sleeping or waking, but the different ways in which humans experience & engage with consciousness. Perhaps this will help to illuminate what consciousness is or is not.

Phenomenal consciousness - subjective experience, qualia

Example: seeing the color red, the sense that it is like something

Access consciousness - information available for reasoning, reporting, memory, or action

Example: hearing a sound and identifying it

Meta-consciousness - awareness of your own awareness

Example: realizing that your mind has wandered

Minimal self-consciousness - the sense that an experience is happening to you or that you are acting

Example: the sense of ownership over your thoughts & feelings

Reflective self-consciousness - holding yourself as an object of attention

Example: considering how you feel and why

Narrative consciousness - experiencing your self as a unified entity over time

Example: connecting a present decision with your memories

Social consciousness - awareness of others and the awareness they may have of you

Example: empathy, shame

Moral consciousness - assigning normative value or quality to an experience

Example: a sense of fairness, justice, or what is deserved

Creature consciousness - whether an entity as a whole is consciousness or not

Example: a human is conscious

• Sentience - the capacity for felt experience

  • For example, a dog is presumed to be sentient, in that it can feel and experience

• Sapience - the capacity for meta-awareness, cognition, self-reflection

  • For example, homo sapiens are thinking beings with reflective thoughts and cognitions about their feelings and experiences

REFERENCES

Block, N. (1995). On a confusion about a function of consciousness⁠. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18(2), 227–247.

Schooler, J. W. (2002). Re-representing consciousness: Dissociations between experience and meta-consciousness⁠. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(8), 339–344.

Gallagher, S. (2000). Philosophical conceptions of the self: Implications for cognitive science⁠. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(1), 14–21.

Morin, A. (2011). Self-awareness Part 1: Definition, measures, effects, functions, and antecedents⁠. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5, 807–823.

McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories⁠. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122.

Reddy, V. (2003). On being the object of attention: Implications for self–other consciousness⁠. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(9), 397–402.

Kriegel, U. (2008). Moral phenomenology: Foundational issues⁠. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7(1), 1–19.