Standard consciousness glossary

perception · intro

Figure-Ground Perception

The perceptual organisation of a visual scene into a foreground object of attention, the figure, and a background against which it is perceived, the ground. Classic ambiguous images, such as the vase that can also be seen as two facing profiles, demonstrate how the same sensory input can be organised into different figure-ground interpretations, with perception typically settling on only one at a time.

sleep-and-altered-states · intermediate

Flow State

A state of complete absorption in an activity, characterised by intense focus, a sense of effortless control, and a distorted sense of time, typically occurring when the challenge of a task closely matches a person's skill level. The concept was developed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi based on interviews with people describing peak experiences across a wide range of activities.

self-and-social-cognition · intermediate

Free Will (Philosophical)

Also called: free will

The capacity to make genuinely undetermined choices, in the sense of being able to have done otherwise given exactly the same prior circumstances, as opposed to actions being the fully determined outcome of prior physical causes. It remains a deeply contested philosophical question, engaged from angles including determinism, compatibilism, and, more recently, findings from neuroscience about the timing of decision-related brain activity.

philosophy-of-mind · intermediate

Functionalism

The view that mental states are defined by the functional or causal role they play, such as the inputs that produce them and the behaviour they produce, rather than by the specific physical material that realises them. On this view, a mental state like pain could in principle be realised in a biological brain, a silicon computer, or another substrate entirely, as long as the same functional role is played.