• Question: What is consciousness/unconsciousness?

    Asked by vpearson to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 17 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by Nami.
    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      That’s a very deep question! No one really knows what consciousness is. Usually the term ‘unconscious’ just refers to when someone is asleep or otherwise passed out, meaning when the conscious mind switches off for a while. But consciousness itself it a tricky one and lots of people are studying brains to try to figure that out.

      I’m no specialist in that area of research, but I work on so-called ’emergent phenomena’ where objects can become greater than the sum of their parts. From my point of view, I think consciousness is just what happens if you put a sufficiently large number of neurons (essentially brain cells) together and connect them up – they combine in some unknown way to create this thing we call consciousness.

      But as I said at the start, it’s a deep question and that’s just my guess! If you get a chance to ask a neuroscientist, they’ll know a lot more about it than I do.

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