consciousness

Definition

The state of being conscious or aware; awareness.

Etymology

From conscious + -ness.

Example Sentences

• "Of course it’s natural to think twice about whether your cell phone truly “knows” a favorite number, your GPS is really “figuring out” the best route home, and your Roomba is genuinely “trying” to clean the floor. But as information-processing systems become more sophisticated—as their representations of the world become richer, their goals are arranged into hierarchies of subgoals within subgoals, and their actions for attaining the goals become more diverse and less predictable—it starts to look like hominid chauvinism to insist that they don’t. (Whether information and computation explain consciousness, in addition to knowledge, intelligence, and purpose, is a question I’ll turn to in the final chapter.)"
• "To lose consciousness after striking one's head"
• "Consciousness is universal and precedes even the formation of our solar system."

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