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Ethical and Legal Issues in Neurology
Adam ZemanJan Adriaan Coebergh
其他書名
Chapter 31. The nature of consciousness
出版Elsevier Inc. Chapters, 2014-01-09
主題Medical / Neurology
ISBN01280809309780128080931
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=ANRzDAAAQBAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
EBookSAMPLE
註釋Consciousness is a fundamentally important neurological capacity which is also of great relevance to ethical thinking and decision-making. The scientific basis of consciousness, and the philosophical questions raised by scientific discoveries about consciousness, have both attracted intense interest over recent decades. This chapter provides a wide-ranging review of the topic. It first considers the principal senses of “consciousness” and “self-consciousness,” acknowledging that both terms are as much colloquial as scientific: “consciousness” is used to refer first, to the waking state and second, to the contents of current experience or awareness; “self-consciousness” can be used to refer to self-perception, self-monitoring, self-recognition, the awareness of one’s own and others’ minds, and the capacity for mental time travel. Next, we review the biological basis of conscious states and conscious contents. The third section presents a taxonomy of states of altered consciousness. The fourth section reviews the major current overarching theories of consciousness. Finally we examine the main philosophic accounts of the relationship between consciousness and neural activity, emphasizing three strong but sometimes conflicting intuitions about consciousness: that it is a robust phenomenon, has a physical basis in neuronal activity, and plays a role in the control of behavior.