Talk:Consciousness

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Because of their length, the previous discussions on this page have been archived. If further archiving is needed, see Wikipedia:How to archive a talk page.

• Archive 1 ( // to 21/10/05)
• Archive 2 (21/10/05 to 13/04/07)
• Archive 3 (13/04/07 to 29/11/09)

Any objections to re-structuring this page?

I think this page needs to be significantly re-organized. There are a lot of high quality sources and I think in general the page does a good job of covering lots of perspectives that researchers have put forward, but often not in a very systematic way. I'm planning to re-organize the page in a sandbox (without making any changes to the content) and then copy in my revised version here, but first I wanted to check if anyone objects to my overall plan. Here are the main problems I see and how I'm planning to fix them:

• The lead currently only addresses how to define consciousness rather than summarizing the whole article. The material in the lead belongs in the "Problem of definition" section with just a shorter summary in the lead along with summaries of other sections.
• The "Interdisciplinary perspectives" section is actually closer to a lead since it actually summarizes the sections for philosophy, science, and medicine below. A trimmed down version of that material and summaries of other sections can together form a new lead. The "Interdisciplinary perspectives" material doesn't need a section in the body, since it just covers what is said in later sections more briefly.
• Three of the sub-sections in the "Philosophy of mind" section should be moved out: "Consciousness in children", "Animal consciousness", and "Artifact consciousness". As the material in these sub-sections demonstrates, these topics are not necessarily only philosophical ones but rather span various disciplines. These three could be the sub-sections of a new section further down. Maybe it could be called "Consciousness outside human adults", though hopefully I can think of a better section title.
• Within the "Scientific study" section, there should be a sub-section for "Models of consciousness". Currently, there's already quite a bit about this crammed into the "Neural correlates" sub-section and for some reason "Entropic brain" has its own sub-section while no other model does.
• The "Stream of consciousness" section should be broken up. The part from William James can be worked into the "Scientific study" section, while the part about Buddhist psychology can be added to the "Spiritual approaches" section. The "Narrative form" sub-section is off-topic and I think the material should be moved to a more appropriate article, but for now I would just leave it as a separate section to avoid combining content changes with my organizational changes.
• The "Anasognosia" sub-section belongs within the "Disorders of consciousness" sub-section.

There may be a few other things to move around but that's basically my plan. Again, I won't bundle content changes together with my re-organization (though in the future a lot of these sources probably need updating). If anyone has objections/suggestions for this let me know. Otherwise I'll go ahead soon. Gazelle55 (talk) 19:59, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

I've been a bit slow to get to this and I think it's better I implement the above piece by piece rather than all at once. Just fixed the organization regarding anosognosia. Let me know if any objections as I re-organize. Gazelle55 ^{Let's talk!} 21:08, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Theories of consciousness

According to Roger Penrose in a recent interview with New Scientist, there are four theories of consciousness current in scientific circles. One is obviously his Orch OR, another is Integrated Information theory (IIT). What are the other two? And should this article include a brief summary of them? — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 09:25, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi Steelpillow, I'm glad you posted about this – the article definitely needs to give a better overview of current theories/models of consciousness. I consolidated all the ones that are covered into one section called "Models", but it doesn't do justice to the research that's been done on the topic. I don't know exactly which four Penrose was referring to, but I just added references that compare across theories, showing there are at least 22. From my reading, though, Orch-OR is largely not considered tenable except by its core proponents (Penrose & Hameroff). Gazelle55 ^{Let's talk!} 22:47, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, I much appreciate your efforts here. Personally I suspect that Orch OR is better described as a postulate or proposal rather than a theory. It proposes extensions to quantum theory which Penrose says do not at present exit. Does physics acknowledge "theories" with no mathematical foundation? I suppose the question for us here is, do its opponents describe it as a theory in reliable sources? — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 10:10, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

Steelpillow, that makes sense, we should follow reliable sources when choosing a term. This 2009 paper uses the terms "model" and "proposal" to describe Orch OR. This 2006 paper and this 2012 paper use "hypothesis". This 2006 paper uses both "model" and "theory". So it looks like various terms could apply whether Orch OR is correct or not - all four of those papers are critical of Orch OR. Gazelle55 ^{Let's talk!} 21:44, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Second paragraph of section 4.3

The phrasing from the second sentence onwards sounds unnatural. I find it difficult to understand. What do you guys think? Indochina2 (talk) 16:21, 19 July 2023 (UTC)