Standard consciousness glossary

philosophy-of-mind · intermediate

Idealism

The philosophical view that reality is fundamentally mental or experiential in nature, and that the physical world as commonly understood is either constituted by, or dependent on, mind or consciousness, rather than the reverse. It stands in direct contrast to physicalism, which treats the physical as fundamental and the mental as dependent on or reducible to it.

cognitive-science · intro

Implicit Memory

Also called: procedural memory

A form of long-term memory that influences thought and behaviour without conscious, deliberate recollection, including skills, habits, and conditioned responses. A person can improve at a motor skill like riding a bicycle through implicit memory even without being able to explicitly describe what has changed.

cognitive-science · intermediate

Inattentional Blindness

The failure to notice a fully visible but unexpected object or event because attention is engaged elsewhere. It was famously demonstrated in the 'invisible gorilla' experiment, in which many observers focused on counting basketball passes failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene, illustrating that focused attention, not just open eyes, is necessary for conscious perception.

consciousness-theories · intermediate

Integrated Information Theory

Also called: IIT

A theory of consciousness, developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, that proposes consciousness corresponds to a physical system's capacity to integrate information in a way that could not be replicated by its parts operating independently, formally quantified by a measure often denoted phi. On this view, the degree of consciousness a system has is, in principle, a mathematically computable property of its causal structure, not tied specifically to biological brains.

philosophy-of-mind · intermediate

Intentionality

The property of mental states, such as beliefs and desires, of being directed at or about something, whether real or imagined. A belief is always a belief about something; a fear is always a fear of something. Philosophers treat intentionality as a distinctive mark of the mental, distinguishing thoughts from purely physical events that are not, in this sense, about anything.

perception · intermediate

Interoception

The sense of the internal physiological state of the body, including signals such as heartbeat, hunger, and breathing. It plays a significant role in emotional experience, since many theories of emotion hold that the felt quality of an emotion depends partly on how internal bodily signals are perceived and interpreted.

self-and-social-cognition · intro

Introspection

The deliberate examination and reporting of one's own conscious mental states, such as thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. It was the primary experimental method of early psychology, but fell out of favour for much of the twentieth century due to concerns about its reliability, before being partly rehabilitated as one useful source of evidence, among others, in contemporary consciousness research.