[ACT-R-users] What is Consciousness?

[Hiran Ekanayake]

Dear All,

I was trying to understand the human consciousness. In fact, I wanted to
associate it with the mind body relationship. However, I got the following
idea.

The consciousness may be an emotional condition one could gain as a result
of smooth and fine functioning of one's cognition.

Smooth means you are not damaging, wasting or overusing your cognitive
resources to do some task. E.g. smoothly moving car. However, this smooth
state is dependent on factors like experience, proper/accurate functioning
of components, efficient availability of knowledge at the short-term memory,
emotional state, patience and cognitive capacity. Even if one of these
parameters is not satisfactory (e.g. stressful situations), you could adjust
other parameters to overcome the bad effects to achieve the smoothness.
Sometimes external sources can provide some support in doing so (e.g. calm
songs). In general we can say that any system that can function smoothly is
conscious about that period.

Humans are the most magnificent creation of the nature. The functioning of
the humans is well tuned and the components involved are built using most
appropriate materials. So it is natural to have consciousness on humans!

I welcome your comments.

Best Regards,

--------------------------------------------------
Hiran Ekanayake
Department of  Computation and Intelligent Systems
University of Colombo School of Computing
Colombo, Sri Lanka.

http://www.geocities.com/hekanayake/
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