0.14 What consciousness is: a definition and framing of the problem  (Page 3/3)

How people respond to the world shows how they are aware of things, they don't have to intellectually understand everything in order to respond and act in certain ways that show a much deeper understanding. Many actions people do show that they understand various things deeply but they aren't necessarily fully aware of that understanding. If you stop to think about the things you've done you can become more aware of why you did those things and what those things meant to you. Would that make someone more conscious in general? Does thinking about your feelings make you a more conscious person? Someone could reflect on one event for a long period of time, then they could become highly aware of that one event and the place it had in their life. What is the difference between that and being aware of all the events in your life? Do you need to understand how each event changes your thinking and feeling in general? So is consciousness a deeper awareness about the world or a deeper experience of the world? Does showing a literal, intellectual understanding of the feelings you experience indicate that you are more conscious?

People sometimes aren't aware of small things in their life or even aware of larger things in thier life. If something important happens to someone emotionally but they aren't aware that it is important, does that mean they aren't a very conscious person? People obviously cannot be aware fully of everything that happens in thier life. They aren't aware of all the emotional things that happen or all of the other things that happen, like moving to a new house or moving to the other side of the room. Those physical things can have an emotional impact. What is the difference between understanding all the little things that happen to someone and their emotional impact and awareness of your life as a whole? There is a larger impact of any indidvidual event on your entire life, and that larger impact shows a greater awareness on your part because it shows you have a consciousness that interprets small events and changes your feelings toward other things because of those events. That processesing where one thing influences something else in a complicated way that you aren't aware should be described as being an unconscious process because it is incredibly complicated and you aren't aware of the many factors involved. So people must have a deep unconscious psychology whereby they experience deep emotions a lot, and they are deep because they impact their life and feelings in various ways, but they aren't going to be aware of all their unconscious feelings fully. If you think about it, every time you respond to something in the world you are doing so because an emotion or feeling was triggered that caused the reaction. Awareness of that emotion isn't going to make someone that much more conscious of what happened then. Awareness of all of someones emotions isn't necessarily going to make the person more conscious in general anyway.

So there are small and large life events that people are aware of both in terms of how they are feeling right then and how they will be feeling later on. There could be events that happen that people aren't aware of emotionally or physically, but they might impact their life in other ways that they might be aware of. Understanding some small aspects of a persons life might lead to a better understanding of their life as a whole. "Understanding" your life as a whole might change your feelings about life. However people don't need to necessarily understand their feelings about life or their feelings in general in order to have deep experiences of feeling. Consciousness could be shown in the fact that people act in responce to the deep feelings in their life becuase it shows that in some way they understand how important their feelings are and what they should do as a reaction to them. So small and large life events contribute to small and large types of experiences that people can feel, and since they can feel them and respond to them they are at least somewhat conscious of those events, and since people are aware of all those little events that make up their life they are therefore aware of their lives as a whole, or conscious of their life.

People are conscious of the little things in their lives to different degrees, when they say hi to someone they are conscious that they are doing that but they can also be conscious of the feelings that event causes them to different degrees. That event might make them happy or sad for the rest of the day, and they might or might not be conscious of that. Say it made them happy for the day, they could be considered a conscious intelligent being whether or not they are aware of that. It made them happy for a complicated reason, it was a simple event that had a profound influence on their feelings for the rest of the day, possibly how they felt about everything else that day. That shows a deep internal processing of seemingly simple events. How does that example show how a person is conscious in general? Consciousness is awareness of all the many things in someones life, and the total awareness of everything in your life is your total consciousness - but how you define awareness is important. Someone can experience something and because that event impacts that person later on it shows that they were aware of the event happening because they were unconsciously aware and that awareness impacted their life. So unconscoius awareness can contribute to how someone feels, and since unconscious awareness is very complicated humans could be considered to be very aware and conscious.

Potential research implications