consciousness

What it means

1. uncountableThe state of being conscious or aware; awareness.

   1 more example

   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.)

   2018, Steven Pinker, “Chapter 2: Entro, Evo, Info”, in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Penguin, →ISBN

   1. countableuncountableThe state or trait of having cognition and sensation; cognition and sensation themselves.

      To lose consciousness after striking one's head

      2 more examples

      Consciousness is universal and precedes even the formation of our solar system.

      1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 39

      Yet this is the level of organisation that does the actual thinking—and is, presumably, the seat of consciousness.

      2013 August 3, “The machine of a new soul”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847

   2. countableuncountableThe fact of having knowledge of a particular fact or matter; cognizance.

      Although the Celebrity was almost impervious to sarcasm, he was now beginning to exhibit visible signs of uneasiness, the consciousness dawning upon him that his eccentricity was not receiving the ovation it merited.

      1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter V, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC

      1 more example

      The solitude and the savage freedom filled his heart with life and buoyancy. Again he was Tarzan of the Apes—every sense alert against the chance of surprise by some jungle enemy—yet treading lightly and with head erect, in proud consciousness of his might.

      1913 June–December, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Through the Valley of the Shadow”, in The Return of Tarzan, New York, N.Y.: A[lbert] L[evi] Burt Company, […], published March 1915, →OCLC, page 127

In a sentence

To lose consciousness after striking one's head

Where it comes from

From conscious + -ness.