COGNITIVE SCIENCE
The success and failures of research programs within cognitive science can
thus be seen as informing our assessment of different answers to the question
of how minds like ours manage to exist in a world whose ultimate constituents
are physical.
Over the past few decades, a number of different research programs have
emerged from the cognitive sciences that explore divergent proposals about the
fundamental nature of the mind.
(1) An organism may be said to be conscious if it can sense and perceive its
environment and has the capacity to respond appropriately
(2) A second sense of creature consciousness requires not merely the capacity to
sense or perceive, but the current active use of those capacities
(3) Another notion of creature consciousness requires that organisms be not only
aware but also self-aware (self-awareness comes in degrees and varies along
multiple dimensions) the conscious creatures might be defined as those that
have an experiential life
(5) The representationalist theories claim that conscious states have no mental
properties other than their representational properties. Higher-order theories
analyse consciousness as a form of self-awareness. Higher-order theories come
in several forms. Some treat the requisite higher-order states as perception-like,
and thus the process of generating such states is a kind of inner perception or
perhaps inspection. The intermediate level representation model focuses on the
contents of conscious experience