User:Mariela Szirko/Consciousness

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Instances of consciousnesses, also called psyches, existentialities, experiencers, souls, or, in certain improper sense, even minds (this name being used when taking a part -the acquired set of experiences, or mental contents- as if this acquired part were the psyche's whole, which rather comprises, besides such developmentally obtained contents, also non-acquired basic elements, such as sensibility and others) are realities that observers objectively find in nature in two observable dynamical systems. One of these is the extension of trophic or alimentary chains into biological niches that Turing machines could not colonize. The other is the physical stability shown by the brain organs despite this stability being mathematically forbidden by the numbers of physiological elements, connectionships, and independent variables at play in them. The first finding occurred in the 1960s, in a long comparative research about the biological devices performing some microorganisms' functions of relation before the origin of the nervous systems; the second, that depended on the preexistence of the first one, took place in 1970. Consciousnesses, existentialities, or psyches are the realities that transform themselves only on a selection of their respective antecedents, not necessarily on all of them (definition by Mario Crocco, 1971).

Because, consequently, the concept of consciousness or psyche includes a reference to what human beings are, powerful nonscientific interests have been attracted into that scientific area. This during millennia kept it highly controversial, grounding even religious wars waged over centuries. The modern concept was achieved in an academic neurobiological tradition, born in the 1760s in a region -South America- that, perhaps not altogether unexpectedly, had remained quite marginal to the centers of those wars, but also external to the scientific communications carried out in English.

Besides that objective definition of consciousnesses, and also besides the objective observation of psyches in the physics of dynamical systems such as biological evolution and the stabilizing of large cybernetic systems such as the vertebrates' brain organ, observers also observe one psyche subjectively, namely at their own experiencing in each case. The collection and comparison of these subjective knowledges about psyche makes the academic field of phenomenology of consciousness, a segment of psychology that, historically, has not yet become completely separated from its mother scholarly discipline, philosophy.

South America's political instability, then the regional academic rise of mind's descriptions not stemmed from natural science but from a psychotherapeutical technique, undermined the physical resources of the tradition that made those contributions and dampened their diffusion. Even more, and after that, when cheap communications became global in the mid-1990s, on Internet a number of new interests evolved around asserting the objective indefinability of existentialities, psyches, consciousnesses, or experiencers, as they came to be termed. In spite of this doctrine's untenableness (because by then that definition, overrepeatedly pretended unachievable, had in fact long been objectively found), the doctrine of the objective undefinableness of "consciousness" worked during almost two additional decades, too, for keeping natural scientists from funding the study of these realities, stagnating the field while securing its economic resources to some circles. This situation of late seems having been changing. As about the impossibility of an objective definition, charged against psyches by both South American psychoterapists and those circles, it meant that only ostension (namely, pointing to the reader's subjectivity, or intimate experience) could be used in such a substandard "definition". It was contended that, for example, no machine would objectively recognize those realities. This doctrine is no longer tenable: even on imaginary extraterrestrial scenarios, a machine finding colonized niches that a Turing machine could not colonize, or finding that large cybernetic hypercomplex organs like our brains attained stability there, ought to conclude that conscious living creatures participate in that dynamical system.

This short article and general overview is to serve as a disambiguation page in the field; for references, see the especial articles.

• For what consciousness is, go to Consciousness: definition and concept.

• For psyches' ability to retain a representation of past experiences in terms of the psyche's developmentally obtained set of available operations, see Memory.

• For a systematization of experiences, see Phenomenology.

• For the views of consciousness or psyches in history of ideas and culturology, see Consciousness in history of ideas.

• For brain-psyche (or mind-brain) relationships, see Cadacualtez and for the history of the philosophical, anthropological, and religious views of this relationships, see Psychophysical nexus.

• For the causal-efficient relationships between a psyche and the particular brain that this psyche finds herself circumstanced to, see Intellectual development.

• For the evolutionary selection of brains species-specifically befitting to generate an intellectual development particularly adapted to a certain species needs, see Nervous system evolution.

• For psyches' causal-efficient involvements in nature, see Semovience.

• For what a person is, see Philosophical anthropology and Person.