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14 Transformational Leadership; Phases of Consciousness

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Uploaded by on Apr 18, 2008

Transformational Leadership; Phases of Consciousness

Consciousness is a state that defies definition, but which may involve thoughts, sensations, perceptions, moods, emotions, dreams, and an awareness of self, although not necessarily all of these.[1] Consciousness is a point of view, an I, or what Thomas Nagel called the existence of "something that it is like" to be something.[2] Julian Jaynes has emphasized that "Consciousness is not the same as cognition and should be sharply distinguished from it. ... The most common error ... is to confuse consciousness with perception." [3]

Ned Block divides consciousness into phenomenal consciousness, which is subjective experience itself (being something), and access consciousness, which refers to the availability of information to processing systems in the brain (being conscious of something).[4]

The issue of what consciousness is, and to what extent and in what sense it exists, is the subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill individuals;[5] to what extent non-humans are self conscious; at what point in fetal development consciousness begins; and whether computers can achieve conscious states.

In common parlance, consciousness denotes being awake and responsive to the environment, in contrast to being asleep or in a coma.

There are many philosophical stances on consciousness, including: behaviorism, dualism, idealism, functionalism, reflexive monism, phenomenalism, phenomenology and intentionality, physicalism, emergentism, mysticism, personal identity etc.


[edit] Phenomenal and access consciousness
Phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness) is simply experience; it is moving, coloured forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and feelings with our bodies and responses at the center. These experiences, considered independently of any impact on behavior, are called qualia. The hard problem of consciousness was formulated by Chalmers in 1996, dealing with the issue of "how to explain a state of phenomenal consciousness in terms of its neurological basis" (Block 2004).

Access consciousness (A-consciousness) is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior. So, when we perceive, information about what we perceive is often access conscious; when we introspect, information about our thoughts is access conscious; when we remember, information about the past (e.g., something that we learned) is often access conscious; and so on. Chalmers thinks that access consciousness is less mysterious than phenomenal consciousness, so that it is held to pose one of the easy problems of consciousness. Dennett denies that there is a "hard problem", asserting that the totality of consciousness can be understood in terms of impact on behavior, as studied through heterophenomenology. There have been numerous approaches to the processes that act on conscious experience from instant to instant. Philosophers who have explored this problem include Gerald Edelman, Edmund Husserl and Daniel Dennett. Daniel Dennett (1988) suggests that what people think of as phenomenal consciousness, such as qualia, are judgments and consequent behaviour. He extends this analysis (Dennett, 1996) by arguing that phenomenal consciousness can be explained in terms of access consciousness, denying the existence of qualia, hence denying the existence of a "hard problem." Eccles and others have pointed out the difficulty of explaining the evolution of qualia, or of 'minds' which experience them, given that all the processes governing evolution are physical and so have no direct access to them. There is no guarantee that all people have minds, nor any way to verify whether one does or does not possess one. The possibility has indeed been proposed that those denying the existence of qualia, hence denying the existence of a "hard problem, do so since they do not possess this faculty[12].

Events that occur in the mind or brain that are not within phenomenal or access consciousness are known as subconscious events.

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  • this is NOT gerald Jaynes

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